“Pretty much, yeah,” replies Eight.
Eight shape shifts into his ten-armed lion form, towering over Five. But before Eight can go on the attack, Five blows into his flute. The mutant gator, which had been waiting patiently, suddenly leaps into the air and slams into Eight. It’s all thrashing wings and snapping jaws, Eight’s clawed hands slashing in response, the two mammoth beasts crashing into the mud and rolling over each other. With a mildly entertained look on his face, Five turns to watch Eight scrapping with his pet monster.
“Don’t hurt each other,” Five calls to them. “We can all still be friends.”
I’m not sure if Five is joking or if he’s really that insane. The important part is that he’s distracted. Nine moans from the base of the tree. He’s trying to push himself upright, but his legs don’t seem to be working. Meanwhile, Six still isn’t moving. I’m not sure which one needs my care more urgently. Six is closer to me, so I scramble over and fall to my knees next to her, pressing my hands to her injured skull.
Suddenly, I’m lifted off the ground. My feet dangle in the air. It’s Five. He’s holding me up using his telekinesis.
“Stop!” I yell at him. “Just let me heal her!”
Five shakes his head, disappointed. “I don’t want her healed. She’s like Nine—she’ll never understand. Don’t fight me, Marina.”
A branch strikes Five in the back of his head. He loses his concentration and I drop back to the ground. Five whips around just in time to see Nine tearing loose another branch with his telekinesis.
“Cute,” Five says, easily deflecting Nine’s next volley.
“Come on,” growls Nine, who has managed to struggle into a sitting position against the tree. “I don’t need my legs to kick your fat ass.”
“Talking shit until the very end,” sighs Five. “You know what’s happening in Chicago right now? Your fancy suite is getting raided by Mogadorians. I want you to die knowing your bullshit palace is burning to the ground, Nine.”
“You told them about Chicago?” I shout. My shock is real, but when Five glances back at me, I see an opportunity. He likes the sound of his own voice—well, I can use that to distract him. Nine is in no condition to fight. I need to buy him some time. “How could you do that? What about Ella and the others?”
“Ella will be fine,” Five says. “The Beloved Leader wants her alive.”
“He wants her alive? For what? I thought he wanted us all dead.”
Five merely smiles. He turns back to Nine.
“What’s he want with her, Five?!” I scream, feeling a fresh rush of panic. He ignores me and stalks towards Nine. I hope Nine can withstand him long enough for me to heal Six. I scramble back over to her and hold her head in my lap. Her skull is cracked, her nose and jaw broken. I try to concentrate and channel the icy energy of my Legacy.
I’m distracted by a feral shriek. Over in the mud, Eight has managed to pin down the monster. Two of its heads are already hanging limp. The middle head is still working, though, and it snaps violently at Eight. He manages to catch the jaws with six of his paws and wrenches its jaws open until they snap apart. The beast’s head is practically torn in half; its monstrous wings thrash once more and then it finally goes completely still and slowly begins to disintegrate.
Five has turned to watch. “Well done!” he yells to Eight. “But believe me, there’s more where that came from.”
Eight is left kneeling in the mud. He’s back to his normal shape, unable to hold on to the avatar form for any longer. I can tell he’s wounded, bloody teeth marks up and down his chest and arms and even on the palms of his hands. He pushed himself hard to defeat that beast, but he still shakily picks himself back up.
Five looms over Nine, his steel skin glinting in the fading sunlight. Nine sneers up at him defiantly. “You going to hit an unarmed man, you traitorous shit?”
Before Five can reply, Nine reaches out with his telekinesis. His pipe-staff, which he must have dropped when Five first grabbed him, lifts out of the muck and comes zipping towards him.
Five snatches the staff out of the air. I make a mental note that he catches the staff with his right hand, which means the stones he’s using to power his Legacy must be clutched in his left.
Five raises the staff and brings it down across his metallic knee, snapping it in half like a piece of kindling. “Yeah. I am.”
Before Five can move, Eight teleports between them. He’s hunched over, breathing heavily, and bleeding from multiple wounds. Even so, he stands his ground. “Stop this madness, Five.”
I’m trying to keep an eye on the scene playing out next to the tree while also concentrating on Six. I can feel her skull starting to mend, the swelling on her face decreasing. I hope that I’m working fast enough. We need her badly.
“Come on, Six . . . ,” I whisper. “Wake up.”
Five has hesitated with Eight in front of him, some of the anger directed at Nine going out of him. “Get out of the way, Eight. My offer to you still stands, but only if you let me finish this loudmouth moron off.”
“Let him take a shot, dude!” Nine shouts from the ground.
“Shut up,” Eight snaps over his shoulder. He holds his hands up to Five. “You’re not thinking straight, Five. They’ve done something to you. In your heart, you know this isn’t right.”
Five scoffs. “You want to talk about right? What’s right about sending a bunch of children to a strange planet so they can fight a war they don’t even understand? What’s right about giving those children numbers instead of names? It’s sick.”
“So is invading another planet,” counters Eight. “Wiping out an entire people.”
“No! You understand so little,” Five replies, laughing. “The Great Expansion had to happen.”
“Genocide had to happen? That’s insane.”
Six stirs in my lap. She’s not awake yet, but it seems like the healing has worked. I set her down gently and stand up, creeping closer to the others. Five doesn’t notice me; he’s ranting now, sounding almost frantic.
“You fight because your Cêpans told you that’s what your Elders want! Have you ever questioned why? Or who your Elders really are? No, of course not! You just take orders from dead old men and never even question them! And I’m insane?”
“Yeah,” growls Nine. “Are you even listening to yourself, bro?”
“You’re confused. You’ve been their prisoner for years without even realizing it. Just calm down and we can discuss this,” says Eight. “We shouldn’t be fighting.”
But Five isn’t listening to Eight anymore. I thought he might have a chance of getting through to Five, but that last comment by Nine was enough to set him off again. Five drops his shoulder and attempts to barrel right through Eight.
I grab Five’s left hand with my telekinesis, focusing on prying open his fingers so he’ll drop those balls. He jerks away from Eight, surprised, struggling against me.
“His left hand!” I yell. “Help me get it open!”
I can tell by the looks on their faces that Eight and Nine have gotten the idea. Five screams in pain and frustration. I almost feel bad for a moment; we’re just ganging up on him again. This must be what he’s felt like since he joined us—an outsider. He’s lost and confused and angry. But we can worry about mending fences and fixing his screwed-up worldview later. Right now, he needs to be stopped.
“Please don’t fight us,” I cry. “You’re just making it worse.”
Five screams again as his knuckles crack loudly. The small bones in his hand are probably shattered from our combined telekinetic assault. The two balls he was holding drop to the ground and roll beneath the roots of the tree. Five clutches his hand and drops down to his knees. He’s looking at me, like he knows I was the first one to attack his hand and it makes this defeat all the more bitter.
“It’s going to be all right,” I tell him, but my words sound hollow. I’m trying to talk him down but, when I look at him, I get the same feeling of revulsi
on that I do with the Mogs. He was going to kill Nine—one of his own people, one of us. How can we bring him back from that?
Eight steps forward and puts a hand on Five’s shoulder. It seems like the fight has gone out of him.
Five sobs, shaking his head. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this . . . ,” he says, quietly.
“Crying like a girl,” Nine says.
Immediately, Five’s expression darkens. Before we can stop him, he shoves Eight away from him. Eight stumbles, falls, and Five takes flight.
“Don’t!” I scream, but Five is already shooting towards Nine. The wrist-mounted blade he grabbed from his Chest extends with a harsh screech of metal; it’s a foot long and needle shaped, deadly and precise.
Nine tries to roll aside, but he’s badly hurt and can’t move. The grass around Nine is flattened to the ground and I realize that Five is holding him in place with telekinesis.
I try to use my telekinesis to pull Nine towards me, but he doesn’t budge. Five’s telekinetic grip is too powerful.
It all happens so fast.
Five plummets down with blade extended. Nine, teeth gritted, unable to move, watches the fatal blow descend.
Suddenly Eight appears in front of Nine—he’s teleported. “NO!” Nine screams.
Five’s blade drives right into Eight’s heart.
Five lurches backwards, shocked, as he realizes what he’s done. Eight’s eyes are wide, a spot of blood forming on his chest. He staggers away from Five, towards me, his hands outstretched. He tries to say something, but no words come out. He collapses.
I scream as the fresh scar burns across my ankle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I WALK THROUGH A DECIMATED CITY. I’M RIGHT in the middle of the road, but there isn’t any traffic. Totaled cars are piled up on the sidewalks, many of them just burned-out shells. The buildings nearby—the ones still standing, anyway—are crumbling and covered in scorch marks. My sneakers crunch across a blanket of broken glass.
The city isn’t familiar to me. It isn’t Chicago. I’m somewhere else. How did I get here?
The last thing I remember is Ella grabbing my arm and then . . . this place. An acrid burning smell fills the air, inescapable. My eyes burn from the clouds of ash blown through the empty streets. I can hear crackling in the distance; somewhere, a fire is still burning.
I keep moving forward through the deserted war zone. At first, I don’t think there are any people. Then, I notice a handful of filthy men and women huddled inside the gutted remains of an apartment complex. They stand around a burning trash barrel, warming themselves. I raise my hand in greeting and shout.
“Hey! What happened here?”
Seeing me, the humans shrink back. They’re frightened, one by one disappearing into the shadows of the building. I guess I’d be wary of strangers too if I lived through whatever happened here. I keep moving.
The wind howls through the broken windows and sagging doorways. My ears perk up; if I strain to listen, I can almost hear a voice carried on the wind.
John . . . Help me, John. . . .
The voice is thin and distant, but I still recognize it. Ella.
I realize where I am—well, not where I am geographically, but where my mind is. Somehow, I’ve been pulled into Ella’s nightmare. It feels so real, but then so did those horrible taunting visions that Setrákus Ra used to inflict on me. I close my eyes, focus, and try to force myself awake. It doesn’t work. When I open my eyes, I’m still standing in this broken city.
“Ella?” I say, feeling a little silly speaking to the thin air. “Where are you? How do we get out of here?”
There’s no response.
A torn piece of newspaper blows across my path and I reach down to snatch it. It’s the front page of the Washington Post, so that must be where I am. The paper is dated a few years from now. This is a vision of the future and it’s one that I hope never comes to pass. I remind myself that this is how Setrákus Ra toys with us. Everything here is his creation.
Even knowing that, the picture on the front page causes my breath to catch. An armada of Mogadorian ships emerges from a cloudy Washington sky, hovering right over the White House. The headline is just one word, in bold capital letters.
INVASION.
I hear a rumbling sound from ahead of me, toss the newspaper away, and start jogging towards it. A dark military truck crosses through the intersection, moving slowly, flanked on all sides by Mogadorians. I quickly come to a stop and consider ducking into one of the nearby alleys for safety, but the Mogs don’t seem to notice me.
A crowd of people shuffles along behind the truck. They’re humans; gaunt and pale, their clothes torn rags, all of them looking dirty and hungry, many of them wounded. They walk along with their heads down, their faces grim, marching sullenly. Mogadorian warriors armed with cannons walk alongside them, the dark tattoos that cover their scalps displayed proudly. Unlike the humans, the Mogs are all smiling. Something is happening—an event of some kind, one that the Mogadorians want the humans to witness.
The wind picks up again. John . . . this way . . .
I slip into the crowd and walk along with the humans, keeping my head bowed. I steal an occasional glance around. The Washington Monument protrudes jaggedly on the horizon, the top half of it sheared off. A feeling of dread fills my stomach. This is what the future will look like if we fail.
The crowd is led to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. There are other people already there, waiting for this sick Mogadorian sideshow to begin. The American flags that would normally hang above the Memorial have been taken down, replaced by black flags bearing a red Mogadorian symbol. Even worse are the chunks of stone piled along the sides of the road—well, I think they’re stones at first. On closer inspection I make out the chiseled face of Lincoln, a huge crack running down the center of his forehead. The Mogadorians have broken down the statue and tossed it out of the Memorial.
I push my way to the front of the crowd. None of the humans seem all that eager to be at the front, so they let me through without a problem. A line of Mog warriors stands at the base of the steps, keeping watch on these dispirited people, their cannons pointed into the crowd.
Setrákus Ra lounges in a throne at the top of the Lincoln Memorial. His massive frame is clad in a black uniform, covered in epaulets and medals. A huge Mogadorian sword protected by an ornamental scabbard is laid across his lap. Seven Loric pendants hang from around his neck, their cobalt surfaces shimmering in the afternoon light. His black eyes idly scan the crowd. They pass right over me and I flinch, ready to run, but he doesn’t seem to notice me.
John . . . do you see me . . . ?
I have to stifle a gasp. Ella is seated in a smaller throne next to Setrákus Ra. She looks older and paler. Her hair is dyed jet black and bound in a tight braid worn down her shoulder. She’s wearing a dress so elegant that it almost seems meant to taunt the tattered humans that stare at her in awe. Her face is stony, like she’s long become immune to grim scenes like this one.
Setrákus Ra holds her hand.
I fight back the urge to rush up the steps and try to kill him, reminding myself that none of this is real. And anyway, even if it was, I wouldn’t stand a chance. An entire army of Mogadorians stands between me and Setrákus Ra.
The crowd parts to let the military truck I saw before pull up to the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. The back of the truck is open and I can see two prisoners huddled inside, their heads down and hands shackled. There’s something familiar about them.
Setrákus Ra stands up when the truck parks. A hush falls across the crowd.
“Bring them forward,” he shouts.
A stout Mogadorian warrior steps out of the ranks. He’s not like the others; he’s not so pale and the dark tattoos across his scalp seem almost new. He wears a patch over one eye and his working eye isn’t the soulless black of a Mogadorian. I take an involuntary step backwards as I realize that I’m not looking at a Mogadorian at all.
Five leads the first prisoner down from the back of the truck. He’s a little older and there’s a long scar running horizontal across his nose and cheeks, but I still immediately recognize Sam. He keeps his head down, not making eye contact with Five, looking haunted and defeated. I notice Sam has a bad limp that becomes all the more apparent when he’s forced to climb the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He stumbles, almost falls, and some of the Mogadorian onlookers chuckle at the humiliating display. I feel rage bubbling up inside me and have to take a deep breath as I feel my Lumen starting to activate.
The second prisoner doesn’t go as meekly as Sam. Even with her hands and feet shackled, Six stands tall. Her blond hair has been shorn into boyish spikes and her face is contorted into a perpetual mask of anger, yet she’s still strikingly beautiful. She sweeps her eyes across the crowd of humans and many of them look down in response, ashamed. Five says something to her that I can’t hear, but his soft features are almost apologetic. In response, Six spits in his face. As Five wipes the spit off his cheek, a group of Mogadorian guards grab Six and drag her up the steps. She’s a fighter until the very end.
Six and Sam are made to kneel before Setrákus Ra. He glowers at them for a moment, then turns to address the crowd.
“Behold,” he shouts, his voice carrying above the silent masses. “The last of the Loric resistance! Today our society celebrates a great victory over those who would stand in the way of Mogadorian progress.”
The Mogs all cheer. The humans stay quiet.
My mind is racing. If Six and Sam are the last remaining, then that means, in this future, I’m already dead and so are all the others. Those pendants dangling from Setrákus Ra’s neck—one of those is mine. I remind myself again that none of this is real, but I feel terrified all the same.
Five walks up the steps and stands beside Setrákus Ra. He holds the ornamental sheath as Setrákus pulls free his glowing broadsword. Setrákus brandishes the sword for all to see, then takes a practice swing just above Sam’s head. Someone in the crowd screams and is quickly silenced.
The Fall of Five (I Am Number Four) Page 23