I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Forgotten Ones
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When I don’t hear anything for a minute or so, I peek out quickly from behind the cab and see another soldier coming toward me. He’s alone—too easy. He’s a goner before he even knows I’ve zapped him with my stolen blaster.
Five down, one left—not counting Rex.
Of course, that’s assuming that there aren’t more I don’t know about yet.
I should be so lucky. I hear more footsteps approaching—and getting louder. They’re coming fast.
I suppose it was too much to hope the High Command had only sent two scouts and four soldiers after me. But when I poke my head over the cab again and see dozens of Mogs pouring through the parking lot from every possible direction, blasters and cannons at the ready, I have to say it seems like overkill. I guess I should be flattered, not just that they think I’m worth the trouble, but that whoever sent them here considers me such a formidable adversary.
Ducking down, I peer below the truck and spot a Mog marching toward me, shooting at my shelter to keep me pinned down while he advances. Too bad he wasn’t watching the tires. I shoot him in the leg and, when he drops, put another blast in his head, finishing him off. Then I pull myself to my feet and scan the area. “Dust!” I scream. Where the hell is he?
For that matter, where’s Rex? Not that I really want to know.
More soldiers round the corner of the building, and my stomach clenches. They’re spreading out in front of me, so I won’t be able to take them all down at once. I crouch behind the truck again, but I know I won’t be able to hold out like this much longer.
How is this at all worth it?
I’ve never hated my own race more than I do right now. Mostly, though, I hate Rex. Not because he betrayed me. No. I hate him because, before he could betray me, he made me trust him.
At least my anger’s good for something. I focus in on it and stomp a foot on the ground. This tremor is the strongest one yet. I can feel it flowing out through my body like a giant ocean wave originating in my rib cage.
Some of the soldiers topple. Others wobble but stay standing. One or two drop their weapons.
I grit my teeth. Using my Legacy is exhausting me and I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep it up. But I have to. I stomp again.
A few more go down, but now the rest are shooting at me.
I’m trying to figure out what to do next when I hear a ferocious roar. Glancing over my vehicular shield I see a large, tawny shape leap from the trees and grab one soldier by the shoulder, yanking him to the ground. Dust roars and lunges again, his massive jaw snapping shut like a trap around his quarry’s neck. The soldier’s scream dies mid-shriek, his body convulsing as it turns to ash.
But the lion has already moved on. He’s ripping through the soldiers easily, their fire barely slowing him down. Dust claws and bites, not stopping to consider any individual enemy for more than a split second before moving on.
The Mogs still left standing are confused—they didn’t plan for this, and now they’re not sure whether they’re supposed to be shooting me or Dust, or whether it’s time to retreat altogether.
I take advantage of the confusion. Two soldiers are backed up almost to me, and I shoot them both before they remember that I’m still a threat too. Dust’s finished off another soldier, and several more have taken shelter around the side of the main structure—collapsing something is one trick I got pretty good at with Malcolm, and though it causes spikes of pain to shoot through my forehead I shake the roof loose and drop it on those soldiers, easily crushing them. That leaves only two, and they move away from Dust and me both, shooting at him to keep him back and edging away toward the trees where they must have a ship waiting.
If they reach it I’m toast.
I’m using my Legacy far beyond anything I’ve ever tried in the past, and every time I cause a new quake I’m more and more exhausted. My vision’s starting to go dark around the edges, but I know I don’t have any choice except to fight through it. I concentrate and send a tremor under a nice thick tree, the same way I did to the guard station back at Dulce Base. It topples with a loud groan and crushes one of the soldiers beneath its trunk. The last Mog simply turns and runs, but Dust is on him in an instant in a blur of teeth and claws. A few seconds later he’s trotting back toward me, his mouth coated in ash. He doesn’t seem fazed by this. That makes one of us.
“Thanks,” I manage to mumble weakly when he reaches me. Then everything goes black.
When I wake up, I’m in the passenger seat of a car flying along the highway. My head’s still pounding and my vision’s still blurry. The New York City skyline is barely recognizable over the dashboard as an abstract haze of lights. I have no idea how I got here or where I’m headed. The events of the past few hours bounce around in my skull like a million Ping-Pong balls. Everything’s jumbled and hard to make sense of.
Groaning, I look over to the driver’s seat. Behind the wheel is Rex. Even in my messed-up state, I fumble with the door handle. I’ll jump out right here, I think. I’d rather be instant roadkill than spend another second letting him think I trust him.
“Hey!” he says when he sees me fumbling to escape. Before I can get the door open, he reaches to the console on the dashboard and locks all the doors. I’m trapped.
“Calm down,” he says. “I don’t know what you did in that parking lot, but whatever it was it took a lot out of you.”
I don’t want to hear it. “Where the hell were you?” I demand. “What the hell happened back there?”
Rex barely glances up from the road. “Same thing that happened to you,” he says calmly, as if I’d just asked him to remind me of tomorrow’s weather forecast. “The Mogs got to me too. They must think I’m on your side now. I fought them off, but by the time I got rid of them and made it to you, this guy was already on it.” He points to a lump on the dashboard, which I only then realize is Dust, in his lizard form. “When I found you, you were passed out on the pavement, and Dust’s just sitting there, practically on top of you, watching over you like he’s your mom or something. He barely even let me come near you. Anyway, what’s done is done. We got away. What do you think of the car? I stole it.”
If he expects me to believe any of that story, he’s an idiot. I want to tell him so, but with my head still swimming I only manage to spit out one short sentence. “Screw you, Rex,” I say just as everything fades to black again.
CHAPTER TEN
I COME TO IN ANOTHER PARKING LOT, FINALLY feeling myself again. Sort of, at least.
Based on the light streaming into the car, it must be morning. Rex has the windows rolled down and the air smells vaguely of the ocean.
“Finally,” he says when he sees me stirring. “I was beginning to think you were gone for good.”
I sit up. I look at him. I can’t believe how stupid I feel. I knew exactly what he was up to all along and I let him get away with it anyway.
“You betrayed me,” I say.
He just laughs. “I knew you were going to say that. Kind of funny, right? You’re a traitor to your entire race, and you’re mad at me?”
I get ready to hit him with every bit of tectonic force I have left at my disposal, but as soon as I so much as think about it I start to feel faint again.
“You seriously expect me to believe you weren’t the one who called in the Mogadorian mafia? You go mysteriously missing just as they show up and then you somehow don’t reappear until I’ve fought them all off?”
“I told you,” he said. “They attacked me too.”
“Sure. Right.” I know he’s full of shit, but I honestly don’t know what to do about it. What I don’t understand is why he’s toying with me like this. If he wanted to kill me, he could have killed me by now. He could have called in more Mogs.
Instead, I’m still alive, still uncaptured, sitting unscathed in the passenger seat of a carjacked sedan with Dust on my lap, whining at me.
I look out the window and I see where we are. Sort of, at least. We’re som
ewhere on the water. A foghorn blares and I squint out the window to see a ferry crawling across the water and into view.
“You wanted to go to Plum Island, right?” Rex says, seeing the confused look on my face. “How else are we going to get there except by boat?”
I still don’t believe he didn’t give the Mogs our location. But then that doesn’t explain why he came to get me, why he helped me escape. He could have just left me at the rest stop, left me to get caught by the Mogs, by the cops, whoever. I need some air. I need to get out of this car. Rex doesn’t try to stop me when I open the car door. Dust jumps out onto the pavement and I’m right behind him.
Rex finds me on a bench half an hour later. I don’t know what else to do, so I’m just sitting. I’ve tried calling Malcolm. No answer. I tried picturing One in my head. It would have helped just to imagine her face. But it wouldn’t come to me. Even golden retriever Dust has given up trying to make me feel better. He’s just lying at my feet.
“I didn’t tell them,” Rex says. He’s standing a few paces away but doesn’t try to come any closer. “The scouts have been following you all along. They missed you a few times and then I think you gave them the drop when you decided to hop the train. But they were going to catch up eventually.”
“Where were you, then?” I ask. “Don’t try to tell me they attacked you too.”
“The truth?”
“Yeah,” I say. “For once. The truth.”
Rex pauses. “I was hiding,” he finally says. “They might have already seen me with you, but I didn’t want them to see me fighting to save you—to think that I’m a traitor. So I hid.”
I examine his face for signs that he’s lying. I honestly have no idea. I don’t know why it matters. But it does.
“So you were just going to let them kill me?”
He looks at the sky. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I was. If it came to that.”
“But now you’re helping me?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
Rex shuffles his feet nervously. “I don’t know,” he says. “I still believe in the Mogadorian cause. I still believe in Setrákus Ra’s principles. When it comes time to fight, I’ll be there with the rest of my brothers—if I’m still allowed to be. War is in my blood. But I’m helping you anyway. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. I can’t explain it even to myself. But it’s the truth.”
I don’t answer him. I don’t know how.
“So do you want to go to Plum Island and rescue the Chimæra or not?” he finally asks.
The ferry doesn’t go to Plum Island. There’s no reason it should—normal Americans need the highest level of clearance even to set foot on the island. That rules out getting there openly.
But in a seaside community like this, most people own a boat, at least a little one. Rex and I spend the afternoon peering into unattended garages until we find ourselves hauling a small rowboat towards the harbor. We stash it behind some trees in the neighboring park until the sun’s going down and we see the last ferry pull in. Then we wait another half hour just to be sure no one will spot us and drag it to the end of the dock. From there it’s easy enough to flip it over and lay it into the water, climb in and start rowing.
While I’d spent my morning passed out, Rex had been coming up with a plan to get us inside the facility. Sitting across from me in our rowboat, he explains it to me. It’s so simple that it sounds absurd.
“I’ll tell them you’re my prisoner,” he says. “That I tracked you from New Mexico until I captured you and brought you here. They’re looking for you, right? They send that many scouts to get you, they think you’re important. It might even go all the way up the chain to Setrákus Ra. If I bring you in, there’s no chance they’ll turn you away.”
“They could just shoot me on sight,” I say.
Rex scrunches his face and shakes his head. In the distance, I see lights. We’re getting closer. “Nah,” he says. “First, they’ll want to know how you took down Dulce. Hell, I want to know that myself.” A quick grin surfaces. “Then they’ll shoot you.”
“Gee, thanks.” I glance over to where Dust is gliding along beside us in hawk form, tilting to one side from time to time so a wingtip knifes through the water. “We don’t know anything about who they’ve got there, how they’re set up, what they’ve heard, what—”
Rex stops me. “Will you relax? Trust me, I know how our military works. I’ve got this covered.”
If I had to make a list of all the people I trusted, it would be a really short list, and Rex wouldn’t be on it. Even if I did trust him, I still wouldn’t like the plan. What if they know Rex has been working with me all this time? What if they kill us before we even get the chance to explain ourselves? It all relies too much on faith—and after yesterday, faith is something I’m pretty much all out of.
But before I can argue, Dust lands on the edge of the boat. He’s flapping his wings furiously, and then he shifts into cat form. Just as quickly, he changes again, this time into a wolf. He’s too big for the boat and nearly tips over, but now he’s shifting so quickly that I start to lose track of what he’s even supposed to be. And he’s making a noise that’s so loud I have to put my fingers in my ears, halfway between a howl and a trumpet blast, deep and quivery. I’ve never heard anything like it.
“Dust,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
I put my hand out to rub him in the hope that it will calm him down. His body feels like liquid, but it does the trick—he’s starting to get control of himself again. As he settles into lizard form, he finally quiets down. He’s still agitated though. He’s darting around the floor of the boat, cocking his head frantically in every direction, sniffing the air. It looks like he’s hearing something that Rex and I can’t—almost like there’s something calling to him.
It’s very weird, but I don’t know what to do about it. The island’s close enough now that I think I can just see where that harbor opens up. Rex pulls the oars in. “You ready to do this?” he asks. I’m not ready at all, but I nod. At least Dust has settled down enough to climb into the pocket of my hoodie. I can still feel him twitching nervously in there, but it seems like he’s getting back to normal.
Rex doesn’t pay any attention to how uneasy this is making me. He just digs through his pockets until he pulls out the plastic ties that he bought from a local hardware store while we’d been waiting for the ferries to clear out for the day.
“Give me your wrists,” he says. Every bit of my common sense is telling me not to do it. Letting myself be tied up and marched into a Mogadorian stronghold by a Mog I barely trust—doesn’t sound like the most brilliant scheme, does it?
Certain I’m walking into some kind of incredibly elaborate trap, I offer up my hands anyway. I’ve come this far. What else can I do but take the risk?
Within seconds Rex has me expertly bound. It’s almost like we’re back to the way we started at Dulce: one guard and one prisoner, this time with our roles reversed.
Hopefully it’s just for show.
We’re a few meters from the shore when a blinding searchlight engulfs us in its dazzling beam and a booming voice calls out. “Stop! Identify yourself!”
Rex straightens. “Rexicus Saturnus, from Dulce,” he shouts back. “And a prisoner!” He grabs my hands and raises them so those watching can see the restraints.
The pause has me sweating despite the chill coming off the waves, but finally the voice replies, “Come ahead.” They don’t offer to pick us up, but instead stay back and let Rex row us the rest of the way in. Typical Mogs.
“Shouldn’t there be regular soldiers here?” I whisper. “Instead of Mogadorians?”
“Used to be that way,” Rex says. “But we’re getting more and more power in the American government lately. Pretty soon the White House’ll be run by Mogadorians too.”
It’s a scary thought—and one that would have made me incredibly excited just a few short years ago.
I know it’s for the best. If I’m going to be thrown into a cell, I don’t want him trapped in there with me. Nonetheless, I feel incredibly vulnerable without him.
The feeling only intensifies when I see the squad of soldiers waiting for us on the dock, weapons drawn. They wait until our little rowboat bumps up against the logs and then reach down and haul us up.
“Who’s this?” the Mog officer in charge demands, staring into my eyes and grabbing me roughly by the arm.
“A low-life traitor,” Rex replies. “Adamus Sutekh, son of General Andrakkus Sutekh.” He punches me in the stomach, hard enough to double me over and leave me gasping for breath.
The captain’s frowning at us. He’s trueborn, of course, but the underlings flanking him are all vatborn, big and pale and typically creepy. “Why bring him here?” the captain asks after a second. “And what exactly happened at Dulce? We lost all communication with it—sent some scouts in but they reported the whole place destroyed.”
“He happened,” Rex replies, gesturing towards me. The captain’s frown deepens, and Rex hurries to explain. “I was stationed at Dulce Base. This traitor showed up with a human ally and attacked. They blew up the base. I was only stunned—I woke up in time to see him slip away, so I followed him all the way from Dulce to here. Once I was sure this was his next target, I captured him and brought him in for questioning.”
The captain nods. I can’t believe he’s buying this load of horseshit, but he is. “Good job,” he says. “We’ll notify the general and find out if he wants to question his son personally. In the meantime, Rexicus, you’ll need to be debriefed.”
He gestures at two of the soldiers. “Throw the traitor in a cell for now, but don’t get too carried away—the general will want to handle his punishment personally.”