I Am Number Four ll-1

by Pittacus Lore

  “And you didn’t bring one of them back for us?”

  “Now Henri, you know I would have happily brought you one if you had told me,” Sarah says, her arms folded across her chest with her hip cocked to the side.

  He smiles at her. “I know you would’ve.”

  Henri puts the groceries away and Sarah and I head out into the frigid air to go for a walk before her mom arrives to take her home. Bernie Kosar comes with us. He takes the lead and runs ahead. Sarah and I hold hands, walking through the yard, the temperature slightly above freezing. The snow melting, the ground wet and muddy. Bernie Kosar disappears for a time into the woods and then comes running back out. His bottom half is filthy.

  “What time is your mom coming?” I ask.

  She looks at her watch. “Twenty minutes.”

  I nod. “I’m so happy you’re back.”

  “Me too.”

  We go to the edge of the woods but it is too dark for us to enter. We instead walk along the perimeter of the yard, hand in hand, occasionally stopping to kiss with the moon and stars as witnesses. Neither of us talks about what just happened, but it’s obvious that it is on both of our minds. When we make the first lap Sarah’s mother pulls into the drive. She’s ten minutes early. Sarah runs up and hugs her. I walk inside and grab Sarah’s bag. After we say good-bye, I walk to the road and watch their taillights recede in the distance. I stand outside for a while and then Bernie Kosar and I go back into the house. Henri is halfway through making dinner. I give the dog a bath. When I’m finished dinner is ready.

  We sit at the table and eat, not a word passing between us. I can’t stop thinking of her. I stare blankly into my plate. I’m not hungry but I try to force the food down anyhow. I manage a few bites, and then I push the plate out in front of me and I sit there in silence.

  “So are you going to tell me?” Henri asks.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What’s on your mind.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  He nods, goes back to eating. I close my eyes. I can still smell Sarah on the collar of my shirt, can still feel her hand on my cheek. Her lips to mine, the texture of her hair when I ran my hand through it. All I can think about is what she must be doing, and how I wish she were still here.

  “Do you think it’s possible for us to be loved?” I ask.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “By humans. Do you think we can be loved, like, truly be loved by them?”

  “I think they can love us the way they love each other, especially if they don’t know what we are, but I don’t think it’s possible to love a human the way you would love a Loric,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Because deep down we’re different from them. And we love differently. One of the gifts our planet gave us is to love completely. Without jealousy or insecurity or fear. Without pettiness. Without anger. You may have strong feelings for Sarah, but they aren’t what you would feel for a Loric girl.”

  “There aren’t many Loric girls available for me.”

  “Even more reason to be careful with Sarah. At some point, if we last long enough, we will need to regenerate our race and repopulate our planet. Obviously you’re a long way from having to worry about that, but I wouldn’t count on Sarah being your partner.”

  “What happens if we try to have children with humans?”

  “It’s happened many times before. Usually it results in an exceptional and gifted human. Some of the greatest figures in Earth’s history were actually the product of humans and the Loric, including Buddha, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Many of the ancient Greek gods, who most people believe were mythological, were actually the children of the humans and Loric, mainly because it was much more common then for us to be on this planet and we were helping them develop civilizations. Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, and Zeus were all real, and had one Loric parent.”

  “So it is possible.”

  “It was possible. In our current situation it’s reckless and impractical. In fact, though I don’t know her number, or have any idea where she is, one of the children who came to Earth with us was the daughter of your parents’ best friends. They used to joke that it was fate that the two of you would end up together. They may well have been right.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Enjoy your time with Sarah, but don’t get too attached to her, and don’t let her get too attached to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Trust me, John. If you never believe another word I say, then believe that.”

  “I believe all the words you say even if I don’t want to.”

  Henri winks at me. “Good,” he says.

  Afterwards I go into my room and call Sarah. I think about what Henri said to me before I do it, but I can’t help myself. I am attached to her. I think I’m in love with her. We talk for two hours. It is midnight when the call ends. Then I lie in bed smiling through the darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE DAY HAS GROWN DARK. THE WARM NIGHT carries a soft wind and the sky is scattered with intermittent flashes of light, clouds turning to brilliant colors of blue and red and green. Fireworks at first. Fireworks that segue to something else, louder, more menacing, the oohs and aahs turning to shrieks and screams. A chaos erupts. People running, children crying. Me, standing in the middle of it all, watching without the benefit of being able to do anything to help. The soldiers and the beasts pour onto the scene from all directions as I have seen before, the continuous fall of bombs so loud that it hurts the ears, the reverberations felt in the pit of my stomach. So deafening it makes my teeth ache. Then the Loric charge back with such intensity, with such courage, that it makes me proud to be among them, to be one of them.

  Then I am gone, sweeping through the air at a rate that causes the world beneath to pass in a blur so that I can’t focus on any one thing. When I stop I am standing on the tarmac of an airfield. A silver airship is fifteen feet away and forty or so people stand at the ramp leading up to its entrance. Two people have already entered, standing in the doorway with their eyes on the sky, a very young girl and a woman Henri’s age. And then I see myself, four years old, crying, shoulders slumped. A much younger version of Henri just behind me. He, too, is watching the sky. On bended knee in front of me is my grandmother, gripping me by the shoulders. My grandfather stands behind her, his face set hard, distracted, the lenses of his glasses gathering the light from the sky.

  “Come back to us, you hear? Come back to us,” my grandmother says, finishing speaking. I wish I could have heard the words that came before them. Up until now I have never remembered anything that was spoken to me that night. But now I have something. My four-year-old self doesn’t respond. My four-year-old self is too scared. He doesn’t understand what is happening, why there is urgency and fear in the eyes of everyone around him. My grandmother pulls me to her and then she lets go. She stands and turns her back to keep me from seeing her cry. My four-year-old self knows that she is crying, but he doesn’t know why.

  Next is my grandfather, who is covered in sweat, grime, and blood. He has clearly been fighting, and his face is twisted as though he is straining, ready to fight more, ready to go and do all he can in the struggle to survive. His, and the planet’s. He drops to a knee as my grandmother did before him. For the first time I look around. Twisted heaps of metal, chunks of concrete, large holes in the ground where the bombs have fallen. Scattered fires, shattered glass, dirt, splintered trees. And in the middle of it all a single airship, unharmed, the one that we are boarding.

  “We gotta go!” somebody yells out. A man, dark hair and eyes. I don’t know who he is. Henri looks at him and nods. The children walk up the ramp. My grandfather fixes me with a hard stare. He opens his mouth to speak. But before the words come I am again swept away, hurled up through the air, the world below again passing in a blur. I try to make it out
, but I am moving too fast. The only discernible sights are the bombs, continually falling, large displays of fire of all colors that sweep through the night sky and the perpetual explosions that follow.

  Then I stop again.

  I am inside of a large, open building that I have never seen before. It is silent. The ceiling is domed. The floor is one great slab of concrete the size of a football field. There are no windows, but the sounds of the bombs still penetrate, echoing off the walls around me. Standing in the very middle of the building, tall and proud, alone, is a white rocket that extends all the way to the apex of the ceiling.

  Then a door slams open in the far corner. My head snaps around to it. Two men enter, frantic, talking quickly and loudly. All at once a herd of animals rush in behind the men. Fifteen, give or take, continually changing shape. Some flying, some running, on two legs, then on four. Bringing up the rear, a third man follows and the door is shut. The first man reaches the spacecraft, opens a sort of hatch on the ship’s bottom, and begins ushering the animals in.

  “Go! Go! Up and in, up and in,” he yells.

  The animals go, all of them changing their shapes in order to do so. Then the last animal enters and one of the men pulls himself in. The other two begin throwing bags and boxes up to him. It takes them a good ten minutes to get everything on board. Then all three scatter around the rocket, preparing it. The men are sweating, moving frantically until everything is ready. Just before the three of them climb inside the rocket, someone runs up with a bundle that looks like a swaddled child, though I can’t see well enough to tell. They take whatever it is and go inside. Then the door snaps shut behind them and is sealed. Minutes pass. The bombs must be just outside the walls now. And then from nowhere an explosion occurs inside the building and I see the beginnings of fire shoot from the bottom of the rocket, a fire that quickly grows, a fire that consumes everything inside the building. A fire that consumes even me.

  My eyes snap open. I am back home, in Ohio, lying in bed. The room is dark, but I can sense that I am not alone. A figure moves, a shadow thrown across the bed. I tense myself to it, ready to snap my lights on, ready to hurl it against the wall.

  “You were talking,” Henri says. “In your sleep just now, you were talking.”

  I turn on my lights. He is standing beside the bed, wearing pajamas pants and a white T-shirt. His hair is tousled; his eyes are red with sleep.

  “What was I saying?”

  “You said ‘Up and in, up and in.’ What was happening?”

  “I was just on Lorien.”

  “In a dream?”

  “I don’t think so. I was there, just like before.”

  “What did you see?”

  I scoot up the bed so my back rests against the wall.

  “The animals,” I say.

  “What animals?”

  “In the spaceship I saw take off. The old one, at the museum. In the rocket that left after ours. I watched animals being loaded into it. Not many. Fifteen, maybe. With three other Loric. I don’t think they were Garde. And something else. A bundle. It looked like a baby, but I couldn’t tell.”

  “Why don’t you think they were Garde?”

  “They loaded the rocket with supplies, fifty or so boxes and duffel bags. They didn’t use telekinesis.”

  “Into the rocket inside the museum?”

  “I think it was the museum. I was inside a large, domed building with nothing inside of it but a rocket. I can only assume it was the museum.”

  Henri nods. “If they worked at the museum then they would have been Cêpan.”

  “Loading animals,” I say. “Animals that could change their shape.”

  “Chimæra,” Henri says.

  “What?”

  “Chimæra. Animals on Lorien that could change their shape. They were called Chimæra.”

  “Is that what Hadley was?” I ask, remembering back to the vision I had a few weeks ago, the vision of playing in the yard of my elders’ home when I was lifted in the air by the man wearing a silver and blue suit.

  Henri smiles. “You remember Hadley?”

  I nod. “I’ve seen him the way that I’ve seen everything else.”

  “You’re having the visions even when we’re not training?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often?”

  “Henri, who cares about the visions? Why were they loading animals into a rocket? What was a baby doing with them, or was it even a baby? Where did they go? What purpose could they possibly have had?”

  Henri thinks about it a moment. He shifts the weight of his body to his right leg. “Probably the same purpose we had. Think about it, John. How else could animals repopulate Lorien? They too would have to go to some sort of sanctuary. Everything was wiped out. Not just the people, but also the animals, and all plant life. Maybe the bundle was just another animal. A fragile one, or maybe a young one.”

  “Well, where would they go? What other sanctuary exists besides Earth?”

  “I think they went to one of the space stations. A rocket with Loric fuel would have been able to make it that far. Maybe they thought the invasion would be short-lived, and they thought they could wait it out. I mean, they would have been able to live on the space station for as long as their supplies lasted.”

  “There are space stations close to Lorien?”

  “Yes, two of them. Well, there were two of them. I know for sure the larger of the two was destroyed at the same time as the invasion. We lost contact with it less than two minutes after the first bomb fell.”

  “Why didn’t you mention that before, when I first told you about the rocket?”

  “I had assumed that it was empty, that it went up in the air as a decoy. And I think that if one space station was destroyed, then the other was as well. Their trip, unfortunately, was probably done in vain, whatever their goal was.”

  “But what if they came back when their supplies ran out? Do you think they could survive on Lorien?” I ask in desperation. I already know the answer, already know what Henri will say, but I ask anyway in order to hold on to some sort of hope that we aren’t alone in all this. That maybe, somewhere far away, there are others like us, waiting, monitoring the planet so that they, too, might one day return and we won’t be alone when we go back.

  “No. There is no water there now. You saw that for yourself. Nothing but a barren wasteland. And nothing can survive without water.”

  I sigh and scoot back down into the bed. I drop my head onto the pillow. What’s the point in arguing? Henri is right and I know it. I saw it for myself. If the globes that he pulled from the Chest are to be trusted, then Lorien is nothing more than wasteland, a dump. The planet still lives but on the surface there is nothing. No water. No plants. No life. Nothing but dirt and rocks and the rubble of the civilization that once existed.

  “Did you see anything else?” Henri asks.

  “I saw us on the day we left. All of us at the airship right before we took off.”

  “It was a sad day.”

  I nod. Henri crosses his arms and gazes out the window, lost in thought. I take a deep breath. “Where was your family during it all?” I ask.

  My lights have been off for a good two or three minutes, but I can see the whites of Henri’s eyes staring back at me.

  “Not with me, not on that day,” he says.

  We are both silent for a time and then Henri shifts his weight.

  “Well, I better get back to bed,” he says, bringing an end to the conversation. “Get some sleep.”

  After he leaves I lie there thinking of the animals, of the rocket, of Henri’s family and how I’m sure he never got the chance to say good-bye to them. I know I won’t be able to go back to sleep. I never can when the images visit me, when I feel Henri’s sadness. It must be a thought constantly on his mind, as it would be for anyone who left under the same circumstances, leaving the only home you’ve ever known, all the while knowing you will never see the people you love again.

&nbs
p; I grab my cell phone and text Sarah. I always text her when I can’t sleep, or she texts me if it’s the other way around. Then we’ll talk for as long as it takes to become tired. She calls me twenty seconds after I hit the send button.

  “Hey, you,” I answer.

  “You can’t sleep?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter?” she asks. She yawns on the other end of the line.

  “Was just missing you is all. Been lying in bed staring at the ceiling for like an hour now.”

  “You’re silly. You saw me like six hours ago.”

  “I wish you were still here,” I say. She moans. I can hear her smile through the darkness. I roll to my side and hold the phone between my ear and the pillow.

  “Well, I wish I was still there, too.”

  We talk for twenty minutes. The last half of the call is both of us just lying there listening to the other breathe. I feel better after having talked to Sarah, but I find it even harder to fall back asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  FOR ONCE, SINCE WE ARRIVED IN OHIO, THINGS seem to slow for a time. School ends quietly and for winter break we have eleven days off. Sam and his mother spend most of it visiting his aunt in Illinois. Sarah stays home. We spend Christmas together. We kiss when the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Despite the snow and the cold, or maybe even in retaliation against it, we go for long walks through the woods behind my house, holding hands, kissing, breathing in the chilly air beneath the low gray skies of winter. We spend more and more time together. Not a day passes during that whole break that we don’t see each other at least once.

  We walk hand in hand beneath an umbrella of white from the snow piled atop the tree branches overhead. She has her camera with her and occasionally stops to take pictures. Most of the snow on the ground lies undisturbed aside from the tracks we have made on the walk out. We follow them back now, Bernie Kosar in the lead, darting in and out of the brambles, chasing rabbits into small groves and thickets of thorny bush, chasing squirrels up trees. Sarah wears a pair of black earmuffs. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are red with the cold, making her eyes look bluer. I stare at her.