He is not at all the man I remember. They’ve destroyed him. My eyes fill with tears, but I fight them back.
Sandor sucks in a breath when he sees me. I wonder how different I must look to him after these months of captivity. It’s hard to say with his face so swollen and covered in bruises, but Sandor looks almost happy.
I’m ashamed of myself—both because it’s my fault we’ve been captured, and because I’m so powerless.
“My young ward,” he whispers.
The Mog turns to me. He’s holding a wicked-looking dagger.
“Your little vow of silence routine has been fun,” the Mog says to me. “But it ends today.”
He walks over to Sandor and lightly drags the dagger down his sternum.
“I don’t think you know anything,” muses my captor. “Nothing that we don’t know already, at least.” He shrugs. “But I’m going to torture your Cêpan anyway. Until you ask me to stop.”
He wants to break me. I say nothing. I remember Sandor’s lectures on what to do if the unthinkable should happen and I’m captured. Don’t give them anything, he told me. Even the slightest bit of information could hurt the other Garde who are still in hiding. Don’t let them make you weak.
I hope it’s not too late to make Sandor proud.
I stare into Sandor’s eyes. He stares back until the Mog begins making his cuts; precise, surgical slices that must hurt like hell but aren’t deep enough to kill. My Cêpan clenches his eyes shut, screaming into his gag.
When the Mog is finished, Sandor has passed out from the pain and a pool of blood has collected on the cell floor beneath him.
I keep my silence.
The next day, it starts over.
I keep my body rigid and my mouth shut. When Sandor can manage to focus on me, I think that I see pride in his eyes.
This continues for days. After every session, the Mogs return me to my cell, where I shake uncontrollably until the routine starts over again.
When they take Sandor’s fingers off, I have to turn away.
At the next session, the Mog hums tunelessly while he cuts away at Sandor. My Cêpan flits in and out of consciousness. I wait for him to make eye contact with me before I finally speak.
“I’m sorry for everything,” I croak, my voice like gravel after months of disuse.
The Mog spins to face me, stunned. “What did you say?”
Barely able to move, Sandor can manage only a subtle shake of his head, as if to absolve me of all the mistakes that led us here. I don’t find any peace in forgiveness, but maybe Sandor does in the forgiving.
Sandor closes his eyes.
And something in me snaps. Mustering every bit of strength I have, I hurl myself against the force field, ignoring the pain. There’s a buzz and a crackle and then the sound of a small explosion and I find myself sprawled on the floor of the room, looking up at the Mogadorians, whose monstrous faces betray their shock at what I’ve managed to do. I’ve disabled the force field. I’m through.
I know I only have a second to act before the element of surprise wears off. I push through overwhelming dizziness and nausea and try to use my telekinesis to wrest the dagger from the Mog’s hand, but nothing happens. The field must have somehow zapped my Legacies. For now, I’ll have to rely on the part of me that’s human. Normal.
The Mogs lunge for me, but I’m ready for them. I kick the first one in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him and sending him flying, and yank the other one’s ankles, pulling his legs out from under him. His head makes a loud crack against the floor and I jump to my feet. They’re both knocked out, but not for long.
I grab the dagger from the floor where the Mogadorian from the van dropped it, and I’m contemplating which one to kill first when I hear a grunt from behind me. It’s Sandor.
“No,” he mutters. I spin around to face him. His eyes are open again, and it seems like he’s using every bit of energy he has to speak.
“Not them,” he says. “It won’t do any good. There will just be more.”
“Then what?” I ask. My voice catches in my throat. This isn’t fair. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be. “What should I do?”
“You know what you have to do,” he says.
“I can’t. I won’t.”
“You’ve always known I would die for you. That I would die for Lorien.”
I almost argue with him, but there’s not time. The Mogs behind me are beginning to come to. I know he’s right. And I know what I must do.
I take the dagger and plunge it deep into Sandor’s heart.
My Cêpan is dead.
I barely know what’s happening as they pull me off him and drag me back to my cell. They’re yelling at me—screaming really, madder than I’ve ever seen them—but it’s like they’re speaking another language. I have no idea what they’re saying, and I don’t care.
It was mercy, what I did. The last bit of mercy left in me. There will be none left when I get my chance again.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Mogs leave me to rot in my cell; the only contact comes in the form of the occasional tray of slop under my door. I try to bust through the force field again and again, but it doesn’t work this time. They must have increased its strength. They’re afraid of me.
I don’t blame them. Sometimes I’m a little afraid of me too.
I cling to the memories of Sandor and Maddy, reliving their last moments. I feel the rage bubble up inside me and my mind shuts off. When I return to myself, I’m sweating, my knuckles bloodied, chips of stone hacked out of the walls of my cell. I’ve forgiven Maddy but I haven’t forgiven myself.
There is nothing else to do but wait, remember, and get stronger.
And then one day it happens.
I can tell something is going wrong. There’s a rumbling from below that causes dust to fall from the ceiling. I can hear large groups of Mogs running by my door, voices raised in panic. Wrong for the Mogs could mean right for me.
I feel a rush of energy like I haven’t felt since the first time Sandor let me loose in the Lecture Hall. I can’t keep my fists from clenching and unclenching.
I walk as close to the door as I can without triggering the bubbling force field. I feel like those bulls at the rodeos right before they’re let free from their pens.
When the force field flickers and disappears, I almost can’t believe it. The sickly blue light has been a fixture of my world for so long that it takes my mind a moment to adjust to its absence.
There is a voice on the other side of my door. It’s not a Mogadorian voice; it’s a teenage one. I don’t know what he’s asking and I don’t care.
“Shut up and stand back, kid.”
I tear the door loose and throw it into the hall. I’m stronger than I remember being. Part of the ceiling collapses with its impact and I can see the larger of the two boys in the hall focus, using his own telekinesis to shield himself and his friend from the rubble.
A Garde. It’s about time.
A dorky-looking runt is pointing a gun at me. His hands are shaking badly. The Garde gets a good look at me and drops the two Chests that he’s carrying. One of them is mine.
“What number are you?” he asks. “I’m Four.”
I study him. For some reason, I expected the other Garde to be bigger. Four has to be about my age, yet he seems so much younger. Younger and softer.
I shake his hand. “I’m Nine. Good job staying alive, Number Four.”
Four and the other boy, a human named Sam, explain to me what they’re doing here while I rummage through my Chest. I’m not really listening until they get to Sam’s story—his father missing, possibly taken by Mogs. I wish I could save him. I wish I could save everyone. But I can’t. And who was there to save Maddy? Who was there to save Sandor?
I fish a stone out of my Chest that I remember Sandor using when he was deconstructing a particularly complicated machine. It let him see through parts, into their inner workings. It should allow Sam to se
e through walls, maybe find his father. All he needs is a little juice.
I press my thumb to Sam’s forehead, sharing my power with him. “You’ve got about ten minutes. Get to it.” He takes off down the hall.
And that’s when the Mogs finally come.
They stream down the corridor. I pluck my pipe-staff out of the Chest and rush to meet them. I spring up the wall, along the ceiling, moving faster than I can remember moving before. They don’t even see me coming until I’ve dropped among them, impaling two of them on the end of the staff.
I’ve waited so long for this.
I feel giddy as I tear my way through the Mogs—caving in a skull here, crushing a sternum there. I whirl through their ranks, spinning my pipe-staff as I go. Was the Mog that captured me and tortured Sandor in that first group? It doesn’t matter; they all die the same. I’ll get him now or I’ll get him later.
I don’t realize that I’m laughing until the bitter taste of Mogadorian ash fills my mouth.
I savor it.
The skirmish is over too soon. I’m sprinting along the wall back to Four and Sam in seconds, trailing a cloud of ash. I want more.
“We have to go,” says Four.
I don’t want to go. I want to tear this place apart. Yet something tells me that I should listen to this boy, that we should stick together. It’s what Sandor would want.
We have to fight our way out. My mind shuts off as the fighting grows more intense. At some point I realize that Four and I have become separated from Sam. I feel bad for the kid—another piece of human collateral damage.
My sympathy is quickly drowned out by the urge to tear this entire place down.
I drive my pipe-staff into the neck of a piken. I’m straddling its neck as it collapses, its blood spraying me, blending with my coat of Mogadorian ash. I can taste it mixing with the coppery tang of my own blood.
I’m grinning. Four stares at me aghast, like I’m only a little better than the monsters we’re killing.
“Are you crazy?” he asks. “You’re enjoying this?”
“I’ve been locked up for over a year,” I tell him. “This is the best day of my life!”
It’s true. I haven’t felt this good in forever. Still, I try to downplay just how much I’m loving this. I don’t want to freak Four out.
For all his judgment, Four doesn’t hesitate to take my hand when we need to use my antigravity Legacy to escape. It’s a long and brutal fight. When we finally catch a glimpse of daylight, I feel disappointed. I wish they’d never stop coming. I glance at Four. He’s pretty beaten up, but he’s killed his fair share of Mogs and piken on the way out, even if he lacks my enthusiasm.
Perhaps we’ll make a warrior out of him yet.
We escape from the Mogadorian base and I greedily suck in my first breath of free air in more than a year. Immediately, I gag. The smell of dead animals is overwhelming.
Four and I jog for the tree line. He barely makes it there, collapsing against a tree almost immediately. He’s in rough shape physically and, if the tears are any indication, equally bad shape mentally. He’s beating himself up over leaving Sam behind.
I know a thing or two about guilt, but I don’t know what the hell to say to this kid. Buck up, champ, we’ll kill them next time? Everything I think of seems hollow, so I keep my mouth shut.
He’ll learn to shut off his emotions eventually. Emotions will get you killed. They’ll get someone else killed too.
As I press a healing stone to Four’s back, the sky overhead begins to writhe with an ominous- looking storm. At first Four thinks it’s Number Six coming to help us.
It’s not. It’s Setrakus Ra.
Despite seeing him in nightly visions, I’m not prepared for his true size. He is bigger than any Mogadorian I’ve ever seen, utterly repulsive even from this distance. The sight of the three Lorien pendants glowing around his thick neck causes me to clench my fists, fingernails digging into my palms.
Suddenly I understand exactly what Sandor was training me for. This is the battle I was meant to fight. Killing Setrakus Ra is the destiny I’ve been chasing.
Together with Four, I charge.
Chapter Twenty-four
“Is he okay?” I ask.
He needs rest, the Chimæra’s kind voice says inside my mind. Talking to animals, that’s new. It’s been a day of surprises. So much has happened, I don’t even have time to consider my newly discovered Legacy. I’ll figure it out later, when things have settled down.
If they ever settle down.
Four stretches across the backseat of his SUV, nearly doubled over. His Chimæra, named for some weak human athlete, lies next to him, gently licking his face. I’m reminded of my dream, of playing with my own Chimæra on Lorien, but I push that memory back down with all the other things I want to forget.
The war has begun. I have only one purpose.
The coward Setrakus Ra fled into the Mogadorian base before we could get to him. With Four getting wrecked by the force field and no way back into the base, I decided to make a strategic retreat.
Ra’s day will come. When I told Four that I’d stab him once for every day his people had Sandor tortured, I meant it.
I start the engine. It’s the first time I’ve driven since that fateful night with Maddy. I think about the way she clutched my arm as we screamed through red lights, then discard that memory as well.
“So what’s our next move?” I ask Four.
“Head north,” he says. “I think north would be good.”
“You got it, boss.”
I already knew where we were heading, but it’s easier not to have to convince Four.
It will be good to see Chicago again. I’m pretty sure the Mogadorians never found our safe house—they would have bragged about it if they had, used it to demoralize me even more. It should still be there, on the top floor of the John Hancock Center, a safe place for me to plan our next move.
A place filled with painful memories I’ll have to ignore.
I drive north, my foot heavy on the gas. It’s ironic. At last I have my freedom. But at a price. Now my destiny is mine to choose.
And I’ve already chosen.
Today will go down as a dark day in the Mogadorian history books. It is the day that they allowed me to get loose. In whatever dismal corner of the universe the Mogadorians that manage to escape me gather, this day will be discussed in hushed tones as when the annihilation of their race became a certainty.
I’m going to kill them all.
Want to know more?
Don’t miss
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.
I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Nine’s Legacy Page 8
