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.
My first scar. It meant that the Mogadorians had killed Number One, the first of the Garde. And for all of Katarina’s web scouring, it had caught us both completely unaware.
We waited on pins and needles for weeks after, expecting a second death and a second scar to follow in short order. But it didn’t come. I think Katarina is still coiled, anxious, ready to spring. But three years have passed—almost a quarter of my whole life—and it’s just not something I think about much.
I step between her and the monitor. “It’s Sunday. Game time.”
“Please, Kelly.” She says my most recent alias with a certain stiffness. I know I will always be Six to her. In my heart, too. These aliases I use are just shells, they’re not who I really am. I’m sure back on Lorien I had a name, a real name, not just a number. But that’s so far back, and I’ve had so many names since then, that I can’t remember what it was.
Six is my true name. Six is who I am.
Katarina bats me aside, eager to read more details.
We’ve lost so many game days to news alerts like this. And they never turn out to be anything.
They’re just ordinary tragedies.
Earth, I’ve come to discover, has no shortage of tragedies.
“Nope. It’s just a bus crash. We’re playing a game.” I pull at her arms, eager for her to relax. She looks so tired and worried, I know she could use the break.
She holds firm. “It’s a bus explosion. And apparently,” she says, pulling away to read from the screen, “the conflict is ongoing.”
“The conflict always is,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Come on.”
She shakes her head, giving one of her frazzled laughs. “Okay,” she says. “Fine.”
Katarina pulls herself away from the monitors, sitting on the floor by the game. It takes all my strength not to lick my chops at her upcoming defeat: I always win at Risk.
I get down beside her, on my knees.
“You’re right, Kelly,” she says, allowing herself to grin. “I needn’t panic over every little thing—”
One of the monitors on Katarina’s desk lets out a sudden ding! One of her alerts. Her computers are programmed to scan for unusual news reports, blog posts, even notable shifts in global weather—all sifting for possible news of the Garde.
“Oh come on,” I say.
But Katarina is already off the floor and back at the desk, scrolling and clicking from link to link once again.
“Fine,” I say, annoyed. “But I’m showing no mercy when the game begins.”
Suddenly Katarina is silent, stopped cold by something she’s found.
I get up off the floor and step over the board, making my way to the monitor.
I look at the screen.
It is not, as I’d imagined, a news report from England. It is a simple, anonymous blog post. Just a few haunting, tantalizing words:
“Nine, now eight. Are the rest of you out there?”
CHAPTER TWO
There is a cry in the wilderness, from a member of the Garde. Some girl or boy, the same age as me, looking for us. In an instant I’ve seized the keyboard from Katarina and I hammer out a response in the comments section. “We are here.”
Katarina bats my hand away before I can hit Enter. “Six!”
I pull back, ashamed of my imprudence, my haste.
“We have to be careful. The Mogadorians are on the hunt. They’ve killed One, for all we know they have a path to Two, to Three—”
“But they’re alone!” I say. The words come out before I have a chance to think what I’m saying.
I don’t know how I know this. It’s just a hunch I have. If this member of the Garde has been desperate enough to reach out on the internet, looking for others, his or her Cêpan must have been killed. I imagine my fellow Garde’s panic, her fear. I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my Katarina, to be alone. To consider all I deal with … without Katarina? It’s unimaginable.
“What if it’s Two? What if she’s in England, and the Mogs are after her, and she’s reaching out for help?”
A second ago I was scoffing at Katarina’s absorption in the news. But this is different. This is a link to someone like me. Now I am desperate to help them, to answer their call.
“Maybe it’s time,” I say, balling my fist.
“Time?” Katarina is scared, wearing a baffled expression.
“Time to fight!”
Katarina’s head falls into her hands and she laughs into her palms.
In moments of high stress, Katarina sometimes reacts this way: she laughs when she should be stern, gets serious when she should laugh.
Katarina looks up and I realize she is not laughing at me. She is just nervous, and confused.
“Your Legacies haven’t even developed!” she cries. “How could we possibly start the war now?”
She gets up from the desk, shaking her head.
“No. We are not ready to fight. Until your powers are manifest, we will not start this battle. Until the Garde is ready, we must hide.”
“Then we have to send her a message.”
“Her? You don’t know it’s a she! For all we know, it’s no one. Just some random person using language that accidentally tripped my alert.”
“I know it’s one of us,” I say, fixing Katarina with my eyes. “And you do too.”
Katarina nods, admitting defeat.
“Just one message. To let them know they’re not alone. To give her hope.”
“‘Her’ again,” laughs Katarina, almost sadly.
I think it’s a girl because I imagine whoever wrote the message to be like me. A more scared and more alone version of me—one who’s been deprived of her Cêpan.
“Okay,” she says. I step between her and the monitor, my fingers hovering over the keys. I decide the message I’ve already typed—“We are here”—will suffice.
I hit Enter.
Katarina shakes her head, ashamed to have indulged me so recklessly. Within moments she is at the computer, scrubbing any trace of our location from the transmission.
“Feel better?” she asks, turning off the monitor.
I do, a little. To think I’ve given a bit of solace and comfort to one of the Garde makes me feel good, connected to the larger struggle.
Before I can respond I’m electrified by a pain, the likes of which I’ve only known once before; a lava-hot lancet digging through the flesh of my right ankle. My leg shoots out from beneath me, and I scream, attempting to distance myself from the pain by holding my ankle as far from the rest of me as I can. Then I see it: the flesh on my ankle sizzling, popping with smoke. A new scar, my second, snakes its way across my skin.
“Katarina!” I scream, punching the floor with my fists, desperate with pain.
Katarina is frozen in horror, unable to help.
“The second,” she says. “Number Two is dead.”
Read more about Nine’s explosive story!
CHAPTER ONE
There are rules for hiding in plain sight. The first rule, or at least the one that Sandor repeats most often, is “Don’t be stupid.”
I’m about to break that rule by taking off my pants.
Spring in Chicago is my favorite season. The winters are cold and windy, the summers hot and loud, the springs perfect. This morning is sunny, but there’s still a forbidding chill in the air, a reminder of winter. Ice-cold spray blows in off Lake Michigan, stinging my cheeks and dampening the pavement under my sneakers.
I jog all eighteen miles of the lakefront path every morning, taking breaks whenever I can, not because I need them, but to admire the choppy gray-blue water of Lake Michigan. Even when it’s cold, I always think about diving in, of swimming to the other side.
I fight the urge just like I fight the urge to keep pace with the neon spandex cyclists that zip past. I have to go slow. There are more than two million people in this city and I’m faster than all of them.
Still, I have to jog.
Sometimes, I make the run twice to really work up a sweat. That’s another one of Sandor’s rules for hiding in plain sight: always appear to be weaker than I actually am. Never push it.
It’s dumb to complain. We’ve been in Chicago for five years thanks to Sandor’s rules. Five years of peace and quiet. Five years since the Mogadorians last had a real bead on us.
Five years of steadily increasing boredom.
So when a sudden vibration stirs the iPod strapped to my upper arm, my stomach drops. The device isn’t supposed to react unless trouble is near.
I take just a moment to decide on what I do next. I know it’s a risk. I know it flies against everything I’ve been told to do. But I also know that risks are worth it; I know that sometimes you have to ignore your training. So I jog to the side of the runner’s path, pretending that I need to work out a cramp. When I’m finished stretching, I unsnap the tear-away track pants I’ve been rocking every jog since we moved to Chicago and stuff them into my pack. Underneath I’m wearing a pair of mesh shorts, red and white like the St. Louis Cardinals, enemy colors here in Chicago.
But Cards colors in Cubs territory
are nothing to worry about compared to the three scars ringing my ankle. Baseball rivalries and bloody interplanetary vendettas just don’t compare.
My low socks and running shoes do little to hide the scars. Anyone nearby could see them, although I doubt my fellow runners are in the habit of checking out each other’s ankles. Only the particular runner I’m trying to attract today will really notice.
When I start jogging again, my heart is beating way harder than normal. Excitement. It’s been a while since I felt anything like this. I’m breaking Sandor’s rule and it’s exhilarating. I just hope he isn’t watching me through the city’s police cameras that he’s hacked into. That would be bad.
My iPod rumbles again. It’s not actually an iPod. It doesn’t play any music and the earbuds are just for show. It’s a gadget that Sandor put together in his lab.
It’s my Mogadorian detector. I call it my iMog.
The iMog has its limitations. It picks out Mogadorian genetic patterns in the immediate area, but only has a radius of a few blocks and is prone to interference. It’s fueled by Mogadorian genetic material, which has a habit of rapidly decaying; so it’s no surprise that the iMog can get a little hinky. As Sandor explains it, the device is something we received when we first arrived from Lorien, from a human Loric friend. Sandor has spent considerable time trying to modify it. It was his idea to encase it in an iPod shell as a way to avoid attention. There’s no track list or album art on my iMog’s screen—just a solitary white dot against a field of black. That’s me. I’m the white dot. The last time we tuned it up was after the most recent time we were attacked, scraping Mogadorian ash off our clothes so Sandor could synthesize it or stabilize it or some scientific stuff I only half paid attention to. Our rule is that if the iMog sounds off, we get moving. It’s been so long since it’s activated itself that I’d started to worry that the thing had gone dead.
I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Fallen Legacies Page 12
