The Fallen Legacies (16 page)

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.

And then, during my run a couple days ago, it went off. One solitary red dot trolling the lakefront. I hustled home that day, but I didn’t tell Sandor what had happened. At best, there’d be no more runs on the lakefront. At worst, we’d be packing up boxes. And I didn’t want either of those things to happen.

Maybe that’s when I first broke the “don’t be stupid” rule. When I started keeping things from my Cêpan.

The device is now vibrating and beeping because of the red dot that’s fallen into step a few yards behind me. Vibrating and beeping in tune with my accelerated heartbeat.

A Mogadorian.

I hazard a glance over my shoulder and have no trouble picking out which jogger is the Mog. He’s tall, with black hair shaved close to the scalp, and is wearing a thrift-store Bears sweatshirt and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He could pass for human if he wasn’t so pale, his face not showing any color even in this brisk air.

I pick up my pace but don’t bother trying to get away. Why make it easy on him? I want to see whether this Mog can keep up.

By the time I exit the lakefront and head for home, I realize I might have been a little cocky. He’s good—better than I expect him to be. But I’m better. Still, as I pick up speed, I feel my heart racing from exertion for the first time in as long as I can remember.

He’s gaining on me, and my breaths are getting shorter. I’m okay for now, but I won’t be able to keep this up forever. I double-check the iMog. Luckily my stalker hasn’t called in backup. It’s still just the one red dot. Just us.

Tuning out the noise of the city around us—yuppie couples headed to brunch, happy tourist families cracking jokes about the wind—I focus on the Mog, using my naturally enhanced hearing to listen to his breathing. He’s getting winded too; his breathing is ragged now. But his footsteps are still in sync with my own. I listen for anything that sounds like him going for a communicator, ready to break into a sprint if he sends out an alert.

He doesn’t. I can feel his eyes boring into my back. He thinks that I haven’t noticed him.

Smug, exhausted, and dumb. He’s just what I’d been hoping for.

The John Hancock Center rises above us. The sun blinks off the skyscraper’s thousand windows. One hundred stories and, at the top, my home.