“Don’t know,” I say.
“How about that?” he asks, this time pointing to a small dagger that looks to have a blade made of diamond.
I lift it from the Chest. The handle fits snug in my hand as though it was made for it, and I suppose it was. The blade isn’t more than four inches long, and just by seeing the way the light glints along its edge, I can tell it’s far sharper than any razor one might find on Earth.
“What about that thing?” Sam asks again, pointing to something else, and I have no doubt he’ll ask the same question over and over until he’s inquired about every object inside.
“Here,” I say, setting the dagger down and removing the seven orbs in an effort to keep him occupied. “Check this out.”
I blow on them, and tiny lights flicker across their surfaces. Then I toss them up in the air, and they instantly spring to life, spinning in orbit around the orange-sized sun in the center.
“It’s Lorien’s solar system,” I say. “Six planets, one sun. And this one here,” I add, pointing to the fourth orb, which remains the same various shades of ashen gray as the last time I’d seen it, “is Lorien as it looks today, at this very moment. The glow at its center is what’s left.”
“Wow,” Sam says. “NASA dudes would be crapping themselves right now looking at this.”
“And watch this,” I say, illuminating my right hand. I sweep the light over the orb, and all at once the surface changes from its depressing gray tones to vibrant blues and greens of the forests and oceans. “This is the planet as it was the day before the attack.”
“Wow,” Sam says again, staring in awe with his mouth hanging open; and while the rotating planets have him transfixed, I look back in the Chest.
“Do you know what any of this is? Or what it does?” I ask Six, who doesn’t respond. I turn and see she’s just as amazed as Sam by the solar system spinning two feet above the floor. Since Henri had told me they weren’t part of my Legacy, which means they weren’t locked in the Chest, I had wrongly assumed she’d seen them before. But it makes sense she hasn’t; they can only be activated after the first Legacy develops.
“Six,” I say again. She comes back to reality, turns to me and I find myself looking away once we make eye contact. “Do you know what any of this stuff is?”
“Not really,” she murmurs, running her hands over the stones’ surfaces. “This is the healing stone Henri and I used at the school,” she says, pointing out a flat, black rock I’ve seen before. Then she freezes, a faint gasp escaping her lips. Sam and I exchange confused expressions. She lifts a pale yellow stone, its surface waxy and smooth, from the Chest and holds it up to the light. “Oh my God,” she marvels, flipping it over.
“Tell me,” I prod. She looks me right in the eyes.
“Xitharis,” she says. “It comes from our first moon.”
She brings the small stone to her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. The faint yellow shade of the stone darkens slightly. She opens her eyes and hands the stone to me. I frown and take it from her, my fingertips grazing the palm of her hand. Sam inhales sharply.
“What the . . .” He looks terrified, groping for me like he’s blind.
“What’s going on?” I ask, slapping Sam’s hands away from my face.
“You’re invisible,” Six says quietly. I look down at my lap, and it’s true: I’ve completely vanished. I drop the Xitharis on the floor like a hot potato, and instantly become visible.
“The Xitharis,” Six explains, “allows one Garde to transfer a Legacy to another, but only for a short period of time. An hour, I think, maybe two. I can’t say for sure. All you have to do is charge it by focusing your energy on the stone. Put it to your forehead, and bam, it’s ready to go.”
“Charge it, like a battery?” Sam asks.
“Exactly, and it won’t start using the Legacy until it’s touched again.”
I look at the stone. “Sweet. Looks like somebody other than you is taking a trip into town.”
“And somebody other than you is going to be resistant to fire,” she says playfully.
“If you’re nice to me, then it’s definitely a possibility,” I say.
Sam picks the stone up and clenches his entire body in deep concentration. Nothing happens. “Oh come on,” he says to the stone. “I promise to use it for the power of good. No girls’ locker rooms, I swear.”
“Sorry, Sam,” Six says. “I’m pretty sure this stuff only works on us.”
He sets the Xitharis down and we dig through the rest of the Chest to see if anything else is activated by touch; but after an hour of studying and holding all seventeen artifacts, blowing hot air on them, squeezing them tightly, nothing else engages aside from the glowing crystal wrapped in the towel, the larger oblong crystal with the smoky center, and the solar system still rotating above us. The healing stone, however, does cure the cuts and bruises Six has been stamping my body with.
“Man, I’ve waited most of my life to open this thing; and now that I have, a lot of it seems useless to me,” I say.
“I’m sure their uses will reveal themselves in time,” Six assures me. “Things like this need to be slept on. It’s usually when they’ve left your mind completely that answers finally come.”
I nod, looking back at everything lying around the Chest. Six is right; forcing an answer only guarantees that no answer will come.
“Yeah, maybe some of it only activates with further Legacies. Who knows,” I say with a shrug. I put everything back inside, feeling compelled to keep the glowing crystal covered with the towel. I leave the solar system out, which continues its circular march. I close and lock the Chest and carry it down the hall.
“Don’t be discouraged, John,” Six says behind me. “As Henri said, you’re probably not ready to see it all yet.”
Chapter Fourteen
I CAN’T SLEEP. PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE CHEST. For all I know, one of the gems inside could give me power to morph into different creatures like Bernie Kosar, or one could create an iron barrier around me impossible to penetrate by enemy attack. But how will I know without Henri? I feel sad. Defeated.
But mostly I can’t stop thinking about Six, can’t stop picturing her face hovering inches above mine, or the sugary scent of her breath, or the way the setting sun had made her eyes glow. In that moment I had an irrepressible desire to stop training and to simply wrap my arms around her and squeeze her down onto me. A pang of longing to do that even now, hours later, has anchored itself in my heart, and that’s what’s really keeping me up. That, and the overwhelming guilt I feel about my attraction to her. The person I’m supposed to be longing for is Sarah.
There’s too much on my mind to expect sleep, too many emotions: pain, desire, confusion, guilt. I lie another twenty minutes before giving up on sleep. I whip aside my blanket and pull on a pair of pants and a gray tee. Bernie Kosar follows me from the room and down the hallway. I poke my head into the living room to see if Sam’s asleep. He is, wrapped up in a blanket on the floor like a worm in a cocoon, and I turn and walk back. Six’s room is directly across the hall from mine, and her door’s ajar. I stand looking at it, and I hear Six rustle on the floor.
“John?” she whispers.
I cringe, and my heart immediately races.
“Yeah?” I reply, still standing outside.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I whisper. “I can’t sleep.”
“Come in,” she says. I push open the door. Her room is pitch-black, and I can’t see anything. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I say. I barely turn on my Lumen, and the faint glow is like a night-light. I keep my eyes off her and on the carpet. “Just too much on my mind, you know. I was maybe thinking of going for a walk or a run or something.”
“Well, that’s kind of dangerous, don’t you think? Don’t forget you’re on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List with a fat reward on your head,” she says.
“I know, but . . .
it’s still dark out, and you could make us invisible, couldn’t you? I mean, that’s if you wanted to come along.”
I increase the lights on my hands and I can see Six sitting on the floor with a couple blankets over her legs and her hair’s pulled back with loose strands falling around her face. She shrugs, then tosses the blankets aside and stands. She’s wearing black yoga pants and a white tank. I can’t stop myself from staring at her bare shoulders. I look away when I’m hit with the absurd suspicion that she can feel my eyes on her.
“Sure,” she says, pulling the band from her hair and rewrapping her ponytail. “I always have a hard time sleeping. Especially on the floor.”
“I hear that,” I say.
“Do you think we’ll wake up Sam, though?”
I shake my head. She responds with a shoulder shrug and lifts her hand. I take it immediately. Six disappears, but my hand still glows and I can see her foot imprints in the carpet. Then I extinguish my hand and we tiptoe from the room and down the hallway. Bernie Kosar follows, and when we reach the living room, Sam lifts his head from the floor and stares right at us. Six and I stop, and I hold my breath to remain silent. I think about Sam’s obvious crush on Six and how he’d be devastated if he saw us holding hands.
“Hey, Bernie,” he says groggily, then drops his head and rolls over with his back facing us. We remain silent for a few seconds, and then Six leads us across the living room and into the kitchen to leave through the back door.
The night is warm, and filled with the sounds of crickets and swaying palm fronds. I inhale deeply as Six and I walk hand in hand. I find it odd that Six’s hand seems so small and delicate in mine, despite her amazing physical strength. I love the way it feels. Bernie Kosar races through the heavy brush lining the gravel drive while Six and I stroll silently down its center. It dead-ends into a narrow road and we turn left.
“I can’t stop thinking about what you went through,” I finally say, but what I would rather tell her is that I can’t stop thinking about her. “Being held prisoner for half a year, having to witness Katarina being-well, you know what I mean.”
“Sometimes I forget it happened. And other times it’s all I can think about for days,” she replies.
“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “I don’t know; I guess it goes without saying that I miss Henri, and it kills me that he’s gone. But after hearing your story I realize how lucky I really am. I mean, I got to say good-bye to him and everything. Plus, he was there while I went through my first Legacies. I can’t imagine going through that alone like you did.”
“It was really, really hard, that’s for sure. I could have used her the day I started to gain my invisibility Legacy. I could have used her even more for girl talks when I was growing up. They were pretty much our parents on Earth, right?”
“Right,” I say. “What I find funny is that now that Henri’s gone, the things I remember most about him are the things I usually hated. Like when we would leave some place behind and we’d drive for hours and hours and hours down the highway headed someplace I’d never even heard of when all I wanted to do was just get out of the car. Now, the conversations we had on those trips are the ones I remember most. Or when we started training in Ohio, and he made me do the same thing over and over and over again . . . I hated it so much, you know? But now I can’t look back on any of it without smiling.
“Like one time after my telekinesis finally came, we were training in the snow and he was throwing all these objects so I could learn to deflect them. I had to redirect them back at the source, and he heaved a meat tenderizer really hard at me, and I used its own velocity to whip it back at him; and at the very last second he had to jump headfirst into the snow to keep from being hit,” I say, smiling to myself. “The pile of snow was actually a snow-covered rosebush with all these thorns. You would not believe the noise he made. Stuff like that I won’t ever forget.”
A car approaches on the side of the road and we scoot off into the ditch until it passes. It whips into a stone driveway of a nearby house, and a man in a black leather jacket jumps out. He pounds on the front door, yelling for whoever is inside to open up.
“Jesus. What time is it?” I ask Six.
Six moves towards the man and the house, my hand still in hers. “Does it matter?”
As we creep within ten feet of him, the smell of alcohol hits me. He stops pounding his fist against the door to yell, “You better goddamn open this door, Charlene, or you don’t wanna know what I’m gonna do!”
Six sees the revolver in his waistband the same time I do and she squeezes my hand. “Screw this guy,” Six whispers.
He pounds again and again until the lights in the front window turn on. Then, through the door, a woman shouts, “Get out of here! Just get out of here, Tim!”
“Open the door right now!” he yells back. “Or else, Charlene! Or else, you hear me?”
We’re within touching distance of him. I can see the faded tattoo below his left ear is a bald eagle holding a snake in its talons.
She yells back, her voice shakier than before: “Just leave me alone, Tim! Why are you here? Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
He pounds and yells even harder. I’m about to put him in a choke hold, squeeze that bald eagle and snake right off his neck, when I see the gun slowly crawl up his lower back until it floats away from him in Six’s invisible hand. She puts the barrel of the gun up against the back of the man’s head and buries it in his brown hair. She cocks the hammer with a loud click.
The man stops pounding on the door. He stops breathing, too. Six pushes the gun even harder into his skull and then she pushes it stiffly to the right, spinning the man around. The sight of the floating gun in front of his face makes him go white. He blinks and shakes his head violently, expecting to wake up in his bed or in the back alley of whatever bar he came from. Six moves the gun side to side and I wait for her to say something, to really spook the hell out of him, but instead she suddenly turns the gun towards his car. She shoots, and a radius of broken glass appears on the windshield. He screams, shrilly, and burst into tears.
Six aims the gun at his face again and he quiets down, letting a stream of snot hit his upper lip. “Please, please, please,” he says. “I’m sorry, God. I, I, I’m gonna leave right now. I swear. I’m leaving.” Six cocks the hammer again. I see the curtain of the front window move to the right, and expose the face of a large blond woman. I squeeze Six’s hand and she squeezes back. “I’m leaving right now. I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” the man sputters to the gun. Six aims at his car again and empties the chamber with a loud bang; the rear driver’s side window explodes into a thousand pieces.
“No! Okay, okay!” the man shouts. There’s suddenly a wet spot on the inner thigh of his jeans. Six motions the gun at the front window, and he makes eye contact with the blond woman inside. “And I’ll never come back. I’ll never, ever, ever come back.” The gun bobs to the left twice, indicating he can leave. The man rips his car door open and dives in. Stones spit out from under his tires as he reverses out of the driveway and then barrels down the road. The woman in the window continues to stare at the handgun that’s floating next to her front door, and that’s when Six flings it over the house with such force that it’s sure to land in the next county.
We run back to the road and then we continue to run until there isn’t a house in sight. I wish I could see Six’s face.
“I could do that kind of stuff all day,” she finally says. “It’s like being a superhero.”
“Humans do love their superheroes,” I say. “Do you think she’ll call the police?”
“Nah. She’s probably going to think it was all a bad dream.”
“Or the best dream she’s ever had,” I say. Our talk turns to all the good things we could do for Earth with our Legacies if we weren’t busy being hunted or hated.
“How did you train yourself, anyway?” I ask. “I can’t imagine learning the things I did if it hadn’t been for Henri
pushing me so much.”
“What other choice did I have? Either we adapt or we perish. So I adapted. Katarina and I trained for years before we were captured, but obviously never once after my Legacies developed. When I finally got out of that cave I promised myself that her death wasn’t going to be in vain, and the only way to do that was to seek revenge. So I picked up where we had left off. It was hard at first, especially on my own, but little by little I began to learn and grow stronger. Besides, I’ve had more time than you. My Legacies came sooner than yours, and I’m older than you.”
“You know,” I say, “my sixteenth birthday-or at least the day I celebrated as my birthday with Henri-was two days ago.”
“John! Why didn’t you tell us?” she asks, then lets go of my hand and playfully shoves me away, making me instantly visible. “We could have celebrated.”
I smile and reach for her, feeling blindly in the dark. She takes my hand and interlocks her fingers in mine, allowing my thumb to rest over hers. The thought of Sarah comes into my head, and I find myself instantly pushing it out.
“So what was she like?” I ask. “Katarina?”
A moment of silence passes. “Compassionate. She was always helping others. And she was funny. We used to joke and laugh a lot, which probably seems hard to believe, seeing how serious I usually am.”
I chuckle. “I didn’t say it, you did.”
“But hey, no changing the subject. Why didn’t you say anything about your birthday?”
“I don’t know. I actually forgot about it until yesterday, and then it just seemed pointless with everything else going on.”
“It’s your birthday, John; it’s not pointless. Every birthday any of us are lucky to have is cause for celebration, considering what’s hunting us. And anyway, had I known I might have even taken it easy on you in training.”
“Yeah, you must feel terrible beating up a guy like that on his birthday,” I say, and then nudge her. She nudges me back. Bernie Kosar leaps from the brambles and trots beside us. Several burrs are stuck to his fur like Velcro, and I let go of Six’s hand to pluck them all off.
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