The Fallen Legacies (15 page)

The sight of it makes my stomach churn. “What is it?”

“Barbecued rabbit. Nature’s finest.”

I don’t dare open my mouth to respond, afraid that I might get sick. Instead, I stumble back towards the bedroom, ignoring the laughter that follows me. The bedroom door is so warped it’s nearly impossible to close, but I wedge it into the doorframe as tightly as I can. I lie down on the floor, using my sweatshirt as a pillow, and think about how I ended up here, ended up like this. Without Henri. Without Sam. Sam is my best friend, and I can’t believe we left him behind. As thoughtful and loyal and supportive as Sam is—traveling and fighting alongside me for the last several months—Nine is so very not. He’s reckless, arrogant, selfish and just flat-out rude. I picture Sam, back in the Mog cave, a gun rocking against his shoulder as a dozen Mogadorian soldiers swarmed him. I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t save him. I should have fought harder, run faster. I should have ignored Nine and gone back to Sam. He would have done that for me. The immense amount of guilt I feel paralyzes me, until I finally fall asleep.

It’s dark. I’m no longer in a house in the mountains with Nine. I no longer feel the painful effects of the blue force field. My head is finally clear, although I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. When I shout for help, I can’t hear my voice even though I feel my lips moving. I shuffle ahead, hands out in front of me. My palms suddenly start to glow with my Lumen. The light is dim at first but quickly grows into two powerful beams.

“John.” A hoarse whisper says my name.

I whip my hands around to see where I am, but the light reveals only empty darkness. I’m entering a vision. I angle my palms towards the ground so my Lumen will light my way, and start towards the voice. The hoarse whisper keeps repeating my name over and over. It sounds young and full of fear. Then comes another voice, gruff and staccato, barking orders.

The voices become clearer. It’s Sam, my lost friend, and Setrákus Ra, my worst enemy. I can tell I’m nearing the Mogadorian base. I can see the blue force field, the source of so much pain. For some reason, I know it won’t hurt me now, and I don’t hesitate to pass through it. When I do, it’s not my screams I hear, but Sam’s. His tortured voice fills my head as I enter the mountain and move through its mazelike tunnels. I see the charred remains of our recent battle, from when I tossed a ball of green lava at the gas tanks at the mountain’s bottom, sending a sea of fire raging upwards. I move through the main cavernous hall and its spiraling ledges. I step onto the arched stone bridge Sam and I so recently crossed under the cloak of invisibility. I keep going, passing through tributaries and corridors, all while being forced to listen to my best friend’s crippling howls.

I know where I’m going before I get there. The steady incline of the floor lands me in the wide room lined with prison cells.

There they are. Setrákus Ra is standing in the middle of the room. He is
huge
and truly revolting looking. And there’s Sam. He’s suspended inside a small spherical cage next to him. His own private torture bubble. Sam’s arms are stretched high above his head and his legs are splayed, held in place with chains. A series of pipes are dripping steaming liquid onto various parts of Sam’s body. Blood has pooled and dried under the cage.

I stop ten feet away from them. Setrákus Ra senses my presence and turns around, the three Loric pendants from other Garde children he has killed dangling from his massive neck. The scar circling his throat pulses with a dark energy.

“We missed each other,” Setrákus Ra growls.

I open my mouth but nothing comes out. Sam’s blue eyes turn in my direction, but I can’t tell if he sees me.

More hot liquid drips from the pipes, hitting Sam in the wrists, chest, knees and feet. A thick stream flows onto his cheek and rolls down his neck. Seeing Sam tortured finally gives me a voice.

“Let him go!” I shout.

Setrákus Ra’s eyes harden. The pendants around his neck glow and mine responds, lighting up as well. The blue Loralite gem is hot against my skin, and then it suddenly bursts into flames, my Legacy taking over. I allow the fire to crawl along my shoulders.

“I’ll let him go,” he says, “if you come back to the mountain and fight me.”

I glance quickly over at Sam and see that he has lost his battle with the pain and has blacked out, chin resting on his chest.

Setrákus Ra points to Sam’s withered body and says, “You must decide. If you don’t come, I’ll kill him and then I’ll kill the rest of them. If you do, I’ll let them all live.”

I hear a voice yelling my name, telling me I have to move. Nine. I sit up with a gasp and my eyes snap open. I’m covered in a thin layer of sweat. I stare through the jagged hole of broken drywall and it takes me a few seconds to get my bearings.

“Dude! Get up!” Nine yells from the other side of the door. “There’s a ton of stuff we need to do!”

I get to my knees and fumble around my neck for my pendant. I squeeze it as hard as I can, trying to get Sam’s screams out of my head. The bedroom door swings open. Nine stands in the doorway, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “Seriously, bro. Get your shit together. We need to get out of here.”

Want to know more about Number Six?

CHAPTER ONE

Katarina says there is more than one way to hide.

Before we came down here to Mexico, we lived in a suburb of Denver. My name then was Sheila, a name I hate even more than my current name, Kelly. We lived there for two years, and I wore barrettes in my hair and pink rubber bracelets on my wrists, like all the other girls at my school. I had sleepovers with some of them, the girls I called “my friends.” I went to school during the school year, and in the summer I went to a swimmers’ camp at the YMCA. I liked my friends and the life we had there okay, but I had already been moved around by my Cêpan Katarina enough to know that it wasn’t going to be permanent. I knew it wasn’t my
real
life.

My real life took place in our basement, where Katarina and I did combat training. By day, it was an ordinary suburban rec room, with a big comfy couch and a TV in one corner and a Ping-Pong table in the other. By night, it was a well-stocked combat training gym, with hanging bags, floor mats, weapons, and even a makeshift pommel horse.

In public, Katarina played the part of my mother, claiming that her “husband” and my “father” had been killed in a car accident when I was an infant. Our names, our lives, our stories were all fictions, identities for me and Katarina to hide behind. But those identities allowed us to live out in the open. Acting normal.

Blending in: that was one way of hiding.

But we slipped up. To this day I can remember our conversation as we drove away from Denver, headed to Mexico for no other reason than we’d never been there, both of us trying to figure out how exactly we’d blown our cover. Something I said to my friend Eliza had contradicted something Katarina had said to Eliza’s mother. Before Denver we’d lived in Nova Scotia for a cold, cold winter, but as I remembered it, our story, the lie we’d agreed to tell, was that we’d lived in Boston before Denver. Katarina remembered differently, and claimed Tallahassee as our previous home. Then Eliza told her mother and that’s when people started to get suspicious.

It was hardly a calamitous exposure. We had no immediate reason to believe our slip would raise the kind of suspicion that could attract the Mogadorians to our location. But our life had gone sour there, and Katarina figured we’d been there long enough as it was.

So we moved yet again.

The sun is bright and hard in Puerto Blanco, the air impossibly dry. Katarina and I make no attempt to blend in with the other residents, Mexican farmers and their children. Our only regular contact with the locals is our once-a-week trip into town to buy essentials at the small store. We are the only whites for many miles, and though we both speak good Spanish, there’s no confusing us for natives of the place. To our neighbors, we are the gringas, strange white recluses.

“Sometimes you can hide just as effectively by sticking out,” Katarina says.

She appears to be right. We have been here almost a year and we haven’t been bothered once. We lead a lonely but ordered life in a sprawling, single-level shack tucked between two big patches of farmland. We wake up with the sun, and before eating or showering Katarina has me run drills in the backyard: running up and down a small hill, doing calisthenics, and practicing tai chi. We take advantage of the two relatively cool hours of morning.

Morning drills are followed by a light breakfast, then three hours of studies: languages, world history, and whatever other subjects Katarina can dig up from the internet. She says her teaching method and subject matter are “eclectic.” I don’t know what that word means, but I’m just grateful for the variety. Katarina is a quiet, thoughtful woman, and though she’s the closest thing I have to a mother, she’s very different from me.

Studies are probably the highlight of her day. I prefer drills.

After studies it’s back out into the blazing sun, where the heat makes me dizzy enough that I can almost hallucinate my imagined enemies. I do battle with straw men: shooting them with arrows, stabbing them with knives, or simply pummeling them with my bare fists. But half-blind from the sun, I see them as Mogadorians, and I relish the chance to tear them to pieces. Katarina says even though I am only thirteen years old, I’m so agile and so strong I could easily take down even a well-trained adult.

One of the nice things about living in Puerto Blanco is that I don’t have to hide my skills. Back in Denver, whether swimming at the Y or just playing on the street, I always had to hold back, to keep myself from revealing the superior speed and strength that Katarina’s training regimen has resulted in. We keep to ourselves out here, away from the eyes of others, so I don’t have to hide.

Today is Sunday, so our afternoon drills are short, only an hour. I am shadowboxing with Katarina in the backyard, and I can feel her eagerness to quit: her moves are halfhearted, she’s squinting against the sun, and she looks tired. I love training and could go all day, but out of deference to her I suggest we call it a day.

“Oh, I suppose we could finish early,” she says. I grin privately, allowing her to think I’m the tired one. We go inside and Katarina pours us two tall glasses of
agua fresca
, our customary Sunday treat. The fan is blowing full force in our humble shack’s living room. Katarina boots up her various computers while I kick off my dirty, sweat-filled fighting boots and collapse to the floor. I stretch my arms to keep them from knotting up, then swing them to the bookshelf in the corner and pull out a tall stack of the board games we keep there. Risk, Stratego, Othello. Katarina has tried to interest me in games like Life and Monopoly, saying it wouldn’t hurt to be “well-rounded.” But those games never held my interest. Katarina got the hint, and now we only play combat and strategy games.

Risk is my favorite, and since we finished early today I think Katarina will agree to playing it even though it’s a longer game than the others.

“Risk?”

Katarina is at her desk chair, pivoting from one screen to the next.

“Risk of what?” she asks absently.

I laugh, then shake the box near her head. She doesn’t look up from the screens, but the sound of all those pieces rattling around inside the box is enough for her to get it.

“Oh,” she says. “Sure.”

I set up the board. Without asking, I divvy up the armies into hers and mine, and begin placing them all across the game’s map. We’ve played this game so much I don’t need to ask her which countries she’d like to claim, or which territories she’d like to fortify. She always chooses the U.S. and Asia. I happily place her pieces on those territories, knowing that from my more easily defended territories I will quickly grow armies strong enough to crush hers.

I’m so absorbed in setting up the game I don’t even notice Katarina’s silence,
her
absorption. It is only when I crack my neck loudly and she neglects to scold me for it—“Please don’t,” she usually says, squeamish about the sound it makes—that I look up and see her, staring openmouthed at one of her monitors.

“Kat?” I ask.

She’s silent.

I get up from the floor, stepping across the game board to join her at her desk. It is only then that I see what has so completely captured her attention. A breaking news item about some kind of explosion on a bus in England.

I groan.

Katarina is always checking the internet and the news for mysterious deaths. Deaths that could be the work of the Mogadorians. Deaths that could mean the second member of the Garde has been defeated. She’s been doing it since we came to Earth, and I’ve grown frustrated with the doom-and-gloom of it.

Besides, it’s not like it did us any good the first time.

I was nine years old, living in Nova Scotia with Katarina. Our training room there was in the attic. Katarina had retired from training for the day, but I still had energy to burn, and was doing moores and spindles on the pommel horse alone when I suddenly felt a blast of scorching pain on my ankle. I lost my balance and came crashing down to the mat, clutching my ankle and screaming in pain.