I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Fallen Legacies Read online

  My father’s large hand comes to rest on my shoulder. I look up, surprised to find him staring at me with something approaching concern.

  “Are you well?” he asks.

  I nod and try to steel myself for the lies that come next.

  “I haven’t eaten,” I say.

  My father shakes his head. “Ivanick,” he growls. “He was supposed to make sure you were ready before bringing you to me.”

  The General lifts his hand from my shoulder, the brief moment of affection forgotten. I can tell by the return of rigidity to his spine that, just like that, he’s back to business. Mogadorian progress. First and foremost. No matter the cost.

  “What did you learn from One’s memories?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I reply, meeting his hard eyes. “It didn’t work. I remember being strapped down, then darkness, and now this. Sir,” I quickly add.

  My father mulls this over, appraising me. Then he nods.

  “As I feared,” he says.

  I realize that he never thought Dr. Anu’s machine would work. My father will believe my lie because he expected failure. Clearly he didn’t care what happened to me in the process.

  I remember Dr. Anu’s gamble with my father, wagering his life that his untested technology would succeed. It did work, and Anu was still killed.

  The Mogadorian way.

  “Three years wasted,” broods my father. “Three years of you getting weaker, falling behind your peers. For what?”

  My cheeks burn with humiliation. With frustration. With anger. But what would my father do if I told him Anu’s machine worked, that it gave me One’s memories and, with them, doubts.

  Obviously, I hold my tongue.

  “This folly reflects poorly on our bloodline. On me,” continues my father. “But it is not too late to remedy that.”

  “How, sir?” I ask, knowing he expects me to respond eagerly to any opportunity to increase my honor.

  “You will come with us to London,” he says. “And hunt this Garde.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The next twelve hours are a blur. My father has me fitted for a new uniform; my mother feeds me mammoth meals, like the kind athletes eat before big games—if those athletes had the appetite of full-grown piken. I am allowed a few hours sleep in my own bed, and later on the flight across the Atlantic. I’m almost thankful for this blur of activity; it leaves me no time to think of the Loric stowaway in my brain, or about what my father expects me to do.

  We arrive in London the next morning. The General has brought Ivan along, as well as two dozen handpicked warriors, most of them trueborn.

  As a Prime Urban Target, London is already home to a Mogadorian presence. The London-based Mogadorians have commandeered five floors in a downtown skyscraper to serve as their base of operations. They run a tight ship, but they’ve never been visited by a trueborn as high ranking as my father. They snap to attention when the General passes through the halls, even eyeing Ivan and me respectfully as we follow on his heels.

  None of these loyal warriors detects the uncertainty I’m feeling inside. To them, I appear as one of their own.

  My father assumes command of the London nerve center. A wall of monitors manned by a pair of scouts provides a constant real-time feed of London’s camera network. Another set of terminals crawls the internet in search of suspicious activity and certain Loric-related keywords. Before heading out to track Conrad Hoyle, my father wants to get the lay of the land. He orders the scouts to flip through various video feeds, the General quietly appraising several locations around the city for strategic advantages.

  “Our unit trailing Hoyle reports he’s on a bus nearing the city center, sir,” declares one of the scouts, relaying this information from his earpiece.

  “Good,” intones my father. “Then it’s time for us to go.”

  While my father was studying video and plotting bloodshed, I was collapsing into a nearby chair, still feeling light-headed. Ivan stands next to me, his arms folded sternly across his chest, looking more like a young version of the General than ever. When my father turns to face us, Ivan shoots me a sidelong glance.

  “Forgive me for speaking out of turn, sir,” begins Ivan, “but I’m not sure your son is up to this.”

  My father’s fist coils into a ball. His first instinct is to strike Ivan for his impudence. But then he looks at me, one eyebrow arched.

  “Is that true?” he asks.

  I know what Ivan’s doing. He’s spent the last three years worming his way into the General’s good graces, calling him “Father,” assuming my rightful place as his son. Figuring I was gone, Ivan’s only concern has been his own advancement. Before, I never would have given him an opportunity to make me look bad. Before, I’m not sure he would have tried. The thing is, I don’t know how much I care about fighting back. During all that time spent in One’s memories, and even now that I’ve woken up, I haven’t once fantasized about my promised inheritance of Washington DC. How could I, now that I know the price that would be paid?

  Ivan can have it.

  “Perhaps he’s right,” I say, meeting my father’s steely glare. “In my weakened state, I could be a liability to Mogadorian victory.”

  Liability. Mogadorian victory. I know all the buzzwords to use on my father. Those haven’t changed. He takes one last look at me, a hint of disgust in his face, before turning to Ivan.

  “Come, Ivanick,” he says, sweeping from the room.

  I’m left alone with the two techs. They ignore me, glued to their bank of monitors, watching as the bus containing Conrad Hoyle trundles through the city. I realize this is the first moment of peace I’ve had since waking up from my coma. I close my eyes and lower my head into my hands, trying to keep my mind blank, pushing away the conflicting feelings I’ve been having about my people. I’m relieved that I don’t have to go on this operation. I don’t know what I’d do if faced with the task of actually killing a Garde. But then, who am I? I was raised as a ruthless hunter.

  “So that’s your plan?” asks a familiar voice. “To just sit here and do nothing?”

  I look up to find One sitting next to me. I jerk back in my chair, nearly toppling over, eyes wide.

  “Booga booga,” she says, wiggling her fingers at me. “Seriously, dude. Get off your ass and do something.”

  “Do what?” I snap. “You think they’d hesitate to kill me too?”

  One of the techs glances over his shoulder, frowning at me.

  “Did you say something?” he asks.

  I give him a blank look, then slowly shake my head. He turns back to his monitors. When I look over to where One was sitting, the chair is empty.

  Great. Now I’m crazy.

  “Look,” says one of the techs, “something is happening.”

  I turn my attention to the screen, where Hoyle’s bus has jerked to a sudden stop. The doors fly open, and panicked passengers begin streaming off.

  One of the rear windows explodes outward, a man flying through it. Before he can hit the ground, his body disintegrates into ash.

  “He’s onto us,” observes the other tech, both of them leaning forward to watch the action.

  Bright flashes of gunfire pop across the screen, and then the back of the bus goes up in flames. As it does, I watch Conrad Hoyle emerge from the front doors. He’s much larger than his picture indicated.

  Hoyle holds a submachine gun in each hand.

  “By Ra,” says the tech, sounding almost giddy, “he’s going to be a tough one.”

  “We should be out there!” grumbles the other.

  Most of the pedestrians are fleeing the scene of the flaming bus, like any sane person would. Except there are others that move towards the wreck: men in dark trench coats, shoving their way through the frightened crowd. The Mogadorian strike team has arrived. They’re greeted by a hail of gunfire from Hoyle, and they quickly take cover before shooting back.

  If my father and Ivan aren’t out there yet, enduring Hoyle’s fir
e, they will be soon. I should take pleasure in this noble combat, like the techs are, but I don’t. I don’t want to see Hoyle, a Loric enemy whom I’ve never even met, be murdered. Yet despite my conflicted feelings about the mission, I also don’t want to see my father turned into a pile of ash.

  My only choice is to turn away.

  The techs are so absorbed by the action, they don’t hear when the station monitoring internet activity chimes. I inch my chair over to the screen, squinting at a red-flagged blog posting.

  It reads: Nine, now eight. Are the rest of you out there?

  CHAPTER 16

  It takes only a few keystrokes to isolate the blog posting’s IP address—it’s here in London. The techs aren’t paying any attention to me, especially now that calls for tactical support are coming in. Hoyle is proving to be one hell of a distraction.

  A few keystrokes more and I’ve pinpointed the location to an address only a few blocks from the Mogadorian base.

  I’ve discovered the location of a fugitive Garde. Not the General, not Ivan. Me. For a moment, I feel a swelling of pride. Take that, Ivan. I guess growing big and strong doesn’t count for everything after all.

  Now, what do I do with this information?

  I should turn the Garde’s location over to the techs, have them call my father back from battle. It would mean major glory for myself and my family, and another step for Mogadorian progress.

  It’s what I was raised to do. And I almost do it. But as soon as the thrill of discovery passes, I realize I don’t want that at all.

  I want to help this Garde. Maybe I can prevent another scene like Malaysia.

  Wait. Is that what I want, or is that one of One’s suggestions, a thought left over from traveling through her memories? If I’m hallucinating her, is there even a difference between One’s thoughts and my own anymore?

  “Deep stuff,” says One, peering at the computer screen over my shoulder. “Maybe sort out your philosophical questions after we’ve saved this one’s life, hmm?”

  That settles it. I minimize the report before the techs have a chance to see it and slip out of the room. I run down hallways now empty of personnel, all of them having joined the ambush on Hoyle. The way I figure it, I’ve got only as long as Hoyle can keep fighting. After that, the techs will most certainly discover the blog post and relay the details to the strike team.

  I’m already winded when I reach the street. I have to push myself. My leg muscles feel about ready to snap after years of disuse; my lungs are on fire, gray spots floating in and out of my vision.

  Still, I strip off my coat, which marks me as a Mogadorian, and begin to run. Sirens sound in the distance, the local authorities on their way to the site of the battle.

  It takes me ten minutes to get to the quiet backstreet where the building is. I can’t believe the Garde safe house was right under our noses. If we had waited, Conrad Hoyle would have come to us, and all the mayhem on the streets could have been avoided. Of course, it’s lucky for me that things played out like they did.

  I’m gasping for breath as I stand at the doorway to the building. It’s an old redbrick town house, now home to three apartments, according to the buzzers outside. Luckily, an old woman is just leaving to walk her white, puffy dog, and I’m able to catch the front door before it closes. I race to the second-floor apartment, the only one not to have a name stickered to the buzzer downstairs.

  I pound on the apartment door, probably too hard. If I was a fugitive Garde, that kind of loud knocking would send me running for the fire escape. I hear startled movement inside the apartment, a TV being muted, and then silence.

  I knock again, gentler this time, and press my ear to the door.

  Muffled footsteps pad closer to the other side of the door, but the girl says nothing.

  “Open the door,” I whisper, trying to keep my voice gentle and urgent. “You’re in danger.”

  No response.

  “Your Cêpan sent me,” I try. “You need to get out of here.”

  There’s a lengthy pause, and then a small voice answers. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  Good question, but I don’t have time for this. By now Conrad Hoyle has probably been overcome by the Mogadorian strike team. I could tell this girl that her Cêpan is as good as dead, that my people will be here soon. I could try breaking down the door, but I doubt I have the strength.

  Just like that, One is standing next to me in the hallway. Her face is somber and distant.

  “Tell her about the night they came,” says One. “The night your people came.”

  I think back to One’s memory of the airstrip, the frightened faces around her, the mad dash towards the ship.

  “I remember the night they came,” I begin, uncertainly at first but gaining confidence as I go. “There were nine of us and our Cêpans, all running panicked. We saw a Garde fight off a piken. I don’t think he survived. Then they pushed us onto the ship and …”

  I trail off, recounting the last night of Lorien making me feel strangely sad. I glance to where One was standing, but she’s disappeared back into my head.

  A half dozen deadbolt locks are unlatched, and the apartment door swings open.

  CHAPTER 17

  Her alias is Maggie Hoyle.

  From what little I saw of Conrad Hoyle, I’m expecting Maggie to be a minimilitant in training. Instead, she is the polar opposite of her Cêpan. Maggie can’t be more than twelve years old; and she’s small for her age, mousey, with a mane of reddish-brown curls hanging on either side of a pair of thick glasses. The only sign of Hoyle’s influence is the small handgun she’s holding when I walk in, the kind of polite-looking weapon a rich lady might carry with her in a bad neighborhood. Maggie looks relieved to set the gun down as soon as the door is locked behind me.

  “Is Conrad all right?” she asks me.

  The muted TV in the corner of the small flat is tuned to a news report, a helicopter filming the burning wreckage of Hoyle’s bus. It looks like the fight is over. We have to move quickly.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her, not wanting to say that I doubt her Cêpan survived. We need to get moving, and I don’t want to upset her. There’s no time for grieving right now.

  Not only is she way younger than I expected, Maggie doesn’t possess any of the bravado I thought came prepackaged with the Garde after spending years in One’s memories. She’s fidgety and nervous, not cool and confident, and not at all ready to fight.

  So that makes two of us.

  I take in the rest of the apartment. It doesn’t look lived in. Maggie probably moved in within the last week. A layer of dust still covers the empty mantel and countertops. There’s a small suitcase open next to a half-deflated air mattress, with piles of clothes spilling out onto the floor around it, and a desk with a bowl of cereal on it, a couple of marshmallows still floating in the pink-tinted milk. I scan around the room, looking for the Chest that we’ve been taught all the Garde have, but I don’t see it anywhere. Either she doesn’t have it or she’s found a good place to hide it.

  Next to the cereal bowl is the laptop that brought me here. The computer is still open to the blog post, scrolled down to the bottom of the page where comments would go. The poor kid has just been sitting here waiting for someone to reply, and I’m the one who showed up.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say, nodding to the laptop.

  Maggie looks guilty, rushing over to the laptop to shut it.

  “I know. Conrad would be mad,” she says, glancing over at the scene on TV. “I was just worried he wouldn’t come back and …”

  Maggie stops herself, looking embarrassed. She doesn’t have to finish; I know what she was going to say. That she was afraid she’d be alone.

  Fear. Loneliness. It was a similar blend of feelings that caused One to take up with brain-dead surfers and start shoplifting. I don’t really want to admit it, but they’re the same feelings I’ve been having since waking up.

  “W
hat number are you?” she says.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I say. I think back to my course on Legacy preparedness. Our instructors warned us about so many different powers the Garde might possess, and I try to think of one that might be helpful now. “Is it too much to hope that you can teleport?”

  “What?” she asks, not understanding.

  “Your Legacies,” I explain.

  “Oh.” She shakes her head. “No. Conrad says I’m a couple years from developing those.”

  Maggie studies me as I walk across the room, kneeling down in front of her suitcase. “Why?” she asks. “What can you do?”

  I don’t answer. Next to her suitcase is a small backpack that I unzip to find filled with books, novels by human authors who I’ve never heard of. I dump out the books and begin stuffing handfuls of Maggie’s clothing into the backpack. We’ll need to travel light. I don’t pay attention to what I’m packing, only that it won’t be enough to slow her down if we need to run.

  “What’re you doing?” she asks, still rooted to the spot next to the laptop.

  “Packing,” I reply. “Grab only what you need. Definitely leave the computer.”

  Maggie doesn’t make any move to help. I can feel her watching me, trying to figure out what’s happening.

  “I want to wait for Conrad,” she says, her voice small but firm.

  “He won’t be coming,” I reply, trying not to snap at her. She needs to start moving—now. I zip the backpack shut and stand. “You have to trust me.”

  “Winston trusted Julia and look how that turned out.”

  Winston? Julia? I try to remember what little I can of Loric culture, thinking that this is some kind of Loric saying I’m unfamiliar with, or maybe they’re some other members of the Garde I should know; but I come up with nothing. I decide to guess.

  “I haven’t seen them since we landed on Earth,” I say.

  “Um, they’re from Earth,” says Maggie. “Also, they’re not real.”

  I stare at her, confused.

  “1984,” says Maggie, seeing my confusion. “George Orwell?”