I Am Number Four ll-1

by Pittacus Lore

  Sarah arrives right on time. I walk outside and kiss her as she’s coming up to the front porch. I take her coat from her and hang it when we’re inside. Our home-ec midterm is a week away, and it was her idea to cook the meal before we’ll have to prepare it in class. As soon as we begin cooking Henri grabs his jacket and goes for a walk. He takes Bernie Kosar with him and I’m thankful for the privacy. We make baked chicken breasts and potatoes and steamed vegetables, and the meal comes out far better than I had hoped. When all is ready the three of us sit and eat together. Henri is silent through most of it. Sarah and I break the awkward silence with small talk, about school, about our going to the movies the following Saturday. Henri rarely looks up from his plate other than to offer how wonderful the meal is.

  When dinner is over Sarah and I wash the dishes and retreat to the couch. Sarah brought a movie over and we watch it on our small TV, but Henri mostly stares out the window. Halfway through he gets up with a sigh and walks outside. Sarah and I watch him go. We hold hands and she leans against me with her head on my shoulder. Bernie Kosar sits beside her with his head in her lap, a blanket draped over both of them. It may be cold and blustery outside, but it’s warm and cozy in our living room.

  “Is your dad okay?” Sarah asks.

  “I don’t know. He’s been acting weird.”

  “He was really quiet during dinner.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to go check on him. I’ll be right back,” I say, and follow Henri outside. He’s standing on the porch—looking out into the darkness.

  “So what’s going on?” I ask.

  He looks up at the stars in contemplation.

  “Something doesn’t feel right,” he says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Okay. Let’s have it.”

  “I don’t know how much longer we should stay here. It doesn’t feel safe to me.”

  My heart sinks and I stay silent.

  “They’re frantic, and I think they’re getting close. I can feel it. I don’t think we’re safe here.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “We’ve kept hidden.”

  Henri looks at me with a raised brow. “No offense, John, but I hardly think you’ve stayed in the shadows.”

  “I have where it counts.”

  He nods. “I guess we’ll see.”

  He walks to the edge of the porch and places his hands on the rail. I stand beside him. New snowflakes start falling, sifting down, specks of white shimmering on an otherwise dark night.

  “That’s not all,” Henri says.

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  He sighs. “You should have already developed telekinesis. It almost always comes with your first Legacy. Very rarely does it come after, and when it does, it’s never longer than a week later.”

  I look over at him. His eyes are full of concern, and creases of worry traverse the length of his forehead.

  “Your Legacies come from Lorien. They always have.”

  “So what are you telling me?”

  “I don’t know how much we can expect from here on out,” he says, and pauses. “Since we’re no longer on the planet, I don’t know if the rest of your Legacies will come at all. And if that is true, we have no hope of fighting the Mogadorians, much less defeating them. And if we can’t defeat them, we’ll never be able to go back.”

  I watch the snowfall, unable to decide whether I should be worried or relieved, relieved since perhaps that would bring an end to our moving and we could finally settle. Henri points at the stars.

  “Right there,” he says. “Right there is where Lorien is.”

  Of course I know full well where Lorien is without having to be told. There is a certain pull, a certain way that my eyes always gravitate towards the spot where, billions of miles away, Lorien sits. I try to catch a snowflake on the tip of my tongue, then close my eyes and breathe in the cold air. When I open them I turn around and look at Sarah through the window. She’s sitting with her legs beneath her, Bernie Kosar’s head still in her lap.

  “Have you ever thought of just settling here, of saying to hell with Lorien and making a life here on Earth?” I ask Henri.

  “We left when you were pretty young. I don’t imagine you remember much of it, do you?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Bits and pieces come to me from time to time. Though I can’t necessarily say whether they are things I remember or things I’ve seen during our training.”

  “I don’t think you would feel that way if you could remember.”

  “But I don’t remember. Isn’t that the point?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “But whether or not you want to go back doesn’t mean the Mogadorians are going to stop searching for you. And if we get careless and settle, you can be assured they’ll find us. And as soon as they do, they’ll kill us both. There’s no way to change that. No way.”

  I knows he’s right. Somehow, like Henri, I can sense that much, can feel it in the dead of night when the hairs on my arms stand at attention, when a slight shiver crawls up my spine even though I’m not cold.

  “Do you ever regret sticking with me for this long?”

  “Regret it? Why do you think I would regret it?”

  “Because there’s nothing for us to go back to. Your family is dead. So is mine. On Lorien there is only a life of rebuilding. If it wasn’t for me you could easily create an identity here and spend the rest of your days becoming a part of someplace. You could have friends, maybe even fall in love again.”

  Henri laughs. “I’m already in love. And I’ll continue to be until the day that I die. I don’t expect you to understand that. Lorien is different from Earth.”

  I sigh with exasperation. “But still, you could be a part of somewhere.”

  “I am a part of somewhere. I’m a part of Paradise, Ohio, right now, with you.”

  I shake my head. “You know what I mean, Henri.”

  “What is it that you think I’m missing?”

  “A life.”

  “You are my life, kiddo. You and my memories are my only ties to the past. Without you I have nothing. That’s the truth.”

  Just then the door opens behind us. Bernie Kosar comes trotting out ahead of Sarah, who is standing in the doorway half in and half out.

  “Are you two really going to make me watch this movie all by my lonesome?” she asks.

  Henri smiles at her. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says.

  After the movie Henri and I drive Sarah home. When we get there I walk her to her front door and we stand on the stoop smiling at each other. I kiss her good night, a lingering kiss while holding both her hands gently in mine.

  “See you tomorrow,” she says, giving my hands a squeeze.

  “Sweet dreams.”

  I walk back to the truck. Henri pulls out of Sarah’s driveway and steers towards home. I can’t help feeling a sense of fear while remembering Henri’s words the day he picked me up from my first full day of school: “Just keep in mind we might have to leave at a moment’s notice.” He’s right, and I know it, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. Like I’m floating on air when we’re together, and I dread the times when we’re apart, like now, despite having just spent the last couple of hours with her. Sarah gives some purpose to our running, and hiding, a reason that transcends mere survival. A reason to win. And to know that I may be putting her life in danger by being with her—well, it terrifies me.

  When we get back, Henri walks into his bedroom and comes out carrying the Chest. He drops it on the kitchen table.

  “Really?” I ask.

  He nods. “There’s something in here I’ve wanted to show you for years.”

  I can’t wait to see what else is in the chest. We pop the lock together and he lifts the lid in such a way that I can’t peer in. Henri removes a velvet bag, closes the Chest, and relocks it.

  “These aren�
�t part of your Legacy, but the last time we opened the Chest I slipped them in because of the bad feeling I’ve been having. If the Mogadorians catch us, they’ll never be able to open this,” he says, and motions to the Chest.

  “So what’s in the bag?”

  “The solar system,” he says.

  “If they aren’t part of my Legacy then why have you never shown me?”

  “Because you needed to develop a Legacy in order to activate them.”

  He clears the kitchen table and then sits across from me with the bag in his lap. He smiles at me, sensing my enthusiasm. Then he reaches down and removes seven glass orbs of varying sizes from the bag. He holds them up to his face in his cupped hands and blows on the glass orbs. Tiny flickers of light come from within them, then he tosses them up in the air and all at once they come to life, suspended above the kitchen table. The glass balls are a replica of our solar system. The largest of them is the size of an orange—Lorien’s sun—and it hangs in the middle emitting the same amount of light as a lightbulb while looking like a self-contained sphere of lava. The other balls orbit around it. Those closest to the sun move at a faster rate, while those farthest away seem to only creep by. All of them spinning, days beginning and ending at hyperspeed. The fourth globe from the sun is Lorien. We watch it move, watch the surface of it begin to form. It is about the size of a racquetball. The replica must not be to scale because in reality Lorien is far smaller than our sun.

  “So what’s happening?” I ask.

  “The ball is taking on the exact form of what Lorien looks like at this moment.”

  “How is this even possible?”

  “It’s a special place, John. An old magic exists at its very core. That’s where your Legacies come from. It’s what gives life and reality to the objects contained within your Inheritance.”

  “But you just said that this isn’t part of my Legacy.”

  “No, but they come from the same place.”

  Indentations form, mountains grow, deep creases cut across the surface where I know rivers once ran. And then it stops. I look for any sort of color, any movement, any wind that might blow across the land. But there is nothing. The entire landscape is a monochromatic patch of gray and black. I don’t know what I had hoped to see, what I had expected. Movement of some kind, a hint of fertileness. My spirits fall. Then the surface dims away so that we can see through it and at the very core of the globe a slight glow begins to form. It glows, then dims, then glows again as though replicating the heartbeat of a sleeping animal.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “The planet still lives and breathes. It has withdrawn deep into itself, biding its time. Hibernating, if you will. But it will wake one of these days.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “That little glow right there,” he says. “That is hope, John.”

  I watch it. I find an odd pleasure in seeing it glow. They tried to wipe away our civilization, the planet itself, and yet it still breathes. Yes, I think, there is always hope, just as Henri has said all along.

  “That isn’t all.”

  Henri stands and snaps his fingers and the planets stop moving. He moves his face to within inches of Lorien, then cups his hands around his mouth and again breathes onto it. Hints of green and blue sweep across the ball and begin to fade almost immediately as the mist from Henri’s breath evaporates.

  “What did you do?”

  “Flash your hands on it,” he says.

  I make them glow and when I hold them over the ball the green and blue come back, only this time they stay as my hands shine upon it.

  “It’s how Lorien looked the day before the invasion. Would you look how beautiful it all is? Sometimes even I forget.”

  It is beautiful. Everything green and blue, plush and verdant. The vegetation seems to waver beneath gusts of wind that I can somehow feel. Slight ripples appear on the water. The planet is truly alive, flourishing. But then I turn my glow back off and it all fades away, back to shades of gray.

  Henri points at a spot on the globe’s surface.

  “Right here,” he says, “is where we took off from on the day of the invasion.” Then he moves his finger half an inch from the spot. “And right here is where the Loric Museum of Exploration used to be.”

  I nod and look at the spot he is pointing to. More gray.

  “What do museums have to do with anything?” I ask. I sit back in the chair. It’s hard to look at this without feeling sad.

  He looks back at me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you saw.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say, urging him on.

  “It was a huge museum, devoted entirely to the evolution of space travel. One of the wings of the building held early rockets that were thousands of years old. Rockets that used to run on a kind of fuel known only to Lorien,” he says, and stops, looking back to the small glass orb hanging two feet above our kitchen table. “Now, if what you saw did in fact happen, if a second ship managed to take off and escape from Lorien during the height of the war, then it would have to have been housed at the space museum. There’s no other explanation for it. I’m still having a tough time believing that it would have worked, and even if it did, that it would have gotten very far.”

  “So if it wouldn’t have gotten very far, then why are you still thinking about it?”

  Henri shakes his head. “You know, I’m not really sure. Maybe because I’ve been wrong before. Maybe because I’m hoping I am wrong now. And, well, if it had made it anywhere, then it would have made it here, the closest life-sustaining planet aside from Mogadore. And that’s to assume that there was life on it in the first place, that it wasn’t just full of artifacts, or that it wasn’t just empty, meant to confuse the Mogadorians. But I think there had to have been at least one Loric manning the ship because, well, as I’m sure you know, ships of that nature couldn’t steer themselves.”

  Another night of insomnia. I stand shirtless in front of the mirror, staring into it with both lights in my hands turned on. “I don’t know how much we can expect from here on out,” Henri said today. The light at Lorien’s core still burns, and the objects we brought from there still work, so why would that magic have ended there? And what about the others: are they now running into the same problems? Are they without their Legacies?

  I flex in front of the mirror, then punch the air, hoping that the mirror will break, or a thud will be heard on the door. But there is nothing. Just me looking like an idiot standing shirtless, shadowboxing with myself while Bernie Kosar watches from the bed. It’s nearly midnight and I’m not tired in the least. Bernie Kosar jumps off the bed, sits beside me, and watches my reflection. I smile at him and he wags his tail.

  “How about you?” I ask Bernie Kosar. “Do you have any special powers? Are you a superdog? Should I put your cape back on so you can go flying through the air?”

  His tail keeps wagging and he paws the ground while looking at me through the tops of his eyes. I lift him up and over my head and fly him around the room.

  “Look! It’s Bernie Kosar, the magnificent superdog!”

  He squirms under my grip, so I set him down. He plops on his side with his tail thumping against the mattress.

  “Well, buddy, one of us should have superpowers. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be me. Unless we go back to the Dark Ages and I can supply the world with light. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’m useless.”

  Bernie Kosar rolls onto his back and stares at me with big eyes, wanting me to rub his belly.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SAM IS AVOIDING ME. AT SCHOOL HE SEEMS TO disappear when he sees me, or always makes sure we’re in a group. At the urging of Henri—who’s desperate to get his hands on Sam’s magazine after combing through everything that came up on the internet and finding nothing like Sam’s magazine—I decide to just go over to his place unannounced. Henri drops me off after we’ve trained for the day. Sam lives on the outskirts of Paradise in a small, modest house. There�
��s no answer when I knock so I try the door. It’s unlocked and I open it and walk through.

  Brown shag carpet covers the floors, and family photographs from when Sam was very young hang on wood-paneled walls. Him, his mother, and a man who I assume is his father, who is wearing glasses every bit as thick as Sam’s. Then I look closer. They look like the exact same pair of glasses.

  I creep down the hallway until I find the door that must be to Sam’s bedroom; a sign reading ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK hangs from a tack. The door is open a crack and I peer inside. The room is very clean, everything consciously put in a place. His twin bed is made, has a black comforter with the planet Saturn repeated across it. Matching pillowcases. The walls are covered with posters. There are two NASA ones, the movie poster from Alien, a movie poster from Star Wars, and one that is a blacklight poster of a green alien head surrounded by dark felt. In the center of the room, hanging from clear thread, is the solar system, all nine planets and the sun. It makes me think of what Henri showed me earlier in the week. I think that Sam would lose his mind if he were to see the same thing. And then I see Sam, hunched over a small oak desk, with headphones on. I push the door open and he looks over his shoulder. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and without them his eyes look very small and beady, almost cartoonlike.

  “What’s up?” I ask casually, as if I’m at his house every day.

  He looks shocked and scared and he frantically pulls the headphones off to reach in one of the drawers. I look at his desk and see that he’s reading a copy of They Walk Among Us. When I look back up he is pointing a gun at me.

  “Whoa,” I say, instinctively lifting my hands in front of me. “What’s going on?”