I swallow hard. I’m not sure if I really want to know the details of Ella’s visions, but I can’t stop myself from asking.
“What . . . what did you see?”
“Lots of things,” Ella says, calming down. She gets a distant look in her eyes as she tries to explain what seeing the future is like. “The visions start out as blurry possibilities. There are millions of them, I think. Some of them are more solid than others—those are the ones I can see. The ones that seem . . . I dunno. Likely? But even that’s not a guarantee. You remember that future we saw in Chicago. It felt real, impossible to escape, clear as day. It’s gone completely now. The future has changed too much. And it keeps changing.”
My head hurts. I feel half crazy just listening to Ella. We need a Cêpan, someone who could help her get control of these mental Legacies before they drive her insane. At least we’ve avoided the bleak future I witnessed. But what did we trade it for?
“Ella, did you see yourself die?”
She hesitates, and a knot of dread tightens in my stomach.
“Yes,” she says. Her body shakes and I realize it’s from holding in a sob. I crouch down in front of her and put my hands on her shoulders.
“It won’t happen,” I insist, my voice as firm as I can make it. “We’ll change the future.”
“But we win, John.”
Ella grabs my hands. Tears stream freely down her cheeks. I realize something, the way she’s looking at me, the way she’s squeezing my hands. Ella’s not feeling sorry for herself.
She’s feeling sorry for me.
“It’s going to hurt you so much, John,” she says, her voice cracking. “You have to be strong.”
“It’s me?” I don’t believe it. “Am I the one that—?”
I can’t even finish the question. I yank my hands away from Ella. I’d never hurt her, not even if it meant ending this war.
“There has to be another way,” I say. “Use your Legacy and find us a better future.”
Ella shakes her head. “You don’t understand—”
In the blink of an eye, Ella is changed. She looks like the girl stretched out on the operating table, black ooze worming its way beneath her skin. She struggles to focus on me. The docking bay around us gets weirdly hazy and starts melting away.
“Ella? What’s happening?”
“The Anubis is moving out of range,” she says, narrowing her eyes, trying to strengthen our telepathic connection. “I’m going to lose you. Quick! There’s one more thing you have to see!”
Ella snatches my hand and then we’re running towards the docking bay entrance. We step through it and—
Dirt crunches beneath my feet. Hot sun beams down on the back of my neck, the air sticky and humid. It’s disorienting to be suddenly transported from the sterile gloom of the Anubis into the heat of the jungle, vivid green on all sides, tropical birds loudly chirping. I’m standing on what looks to be an airstrip carved into the jungle. The black-armored hulls of a handful of Mogadorian Skimmers reflect the bright afternoon sun.
My eyes are drawn to the limestone pyramid that stands a few yards away from the airstrip, all the Mog gear seemingly positioned at a safe distance from the ancient structure. I instinctually recognize the temple, even though I’ve never actually seen it before. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it feels as if something buried within the centuries-old Mayan architecture is calling out to me. I feel safe here.
“This is the Sanctuary,” I say, my voice quiet and reverent.
“Yeah,” Ella says, and I notice that she’s also admiring the temple.
“Six, Marina and Adam . . .” I pause, realizing that Ella’s never met our Mogadorian ally. “Adam is a—”
“I know who he is,” Ella says, her tone giving nothing away. “We meet soon.”
“Okay, well, they were just here,” I continue, looking around for signs of our friends. “They’re probably headed back by now. Are you going to show me what they did to give the humans Legacies?”
“This isn’t the past or present, John. We’re in the future. One that I can see very, very clearly.”
I should’ve known that since the sun is out. I turn to face Ella, sensing that she hasn’t brought me here to deliver good news.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because of that.”
Ella points into the sky to the north of the Sanctuary. There, like a storm cloud rolling across the otherwise blue and cloudless sky, is the Anubis, slowly floating towards the temple. My legs jerk, reflexes still keyed to run for cover after I narrowly survived the bombardment in New York. I force myself to stay put and watch the warship approach.
“When?” I ask Ella. “When does this happen?”
Before Ella can answer, her form contorts, again turning pale and black-veined. The scenery flashes, the jungle suddenly overlapping with the Anubis operating room and also with what looks to be the inside of a subway car—all three places existing simultaneously, like three transparent pictures laid on top of one another. For a second, it’s impossible for me to focus on any particular detail, everything blending to the point where I feel unmoored from reality. But then Ella cries out, either from frustration or pain or both, and the jungle and the Sanctuary solidify once again.
“You’re pushing yourself,” I say, watching as dark circles form around her eyes. “We’re getting too far apart.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she replies hurriedly. “Doesn’t matter. This is where we’re going now, John. The Anubis is leaving for the Sanctuary right this second.”
“So Setrákus Ra will get there . . .”
“He’ll get there at sunset,” Ella says. “He stops in West Virginia to gather reinforcements after leaving so many warriors behind in New York, and then . . .”
Ella waves towards the Anubis. It’s closer now, the warship’s long shadow falling across the stones of the Sanctuary.
“What does he want?”
“He wants what’s inside!” Ella shouts. And yet, even though her voice is raised, she’s beginning to sound farther away. “I think it’s what he always wanted! They opened the door to the Sanctuary! It isn’t protected anymore!”
“What do—?”
She cuts me off, grabbing my arm. “John, listen! Six, the others, you have to warn them! Tell them—”
Ella’s hands pass through me. I see it all again—the Sanctuary and the Anubis, Ella squirming on the operating table, the darkened subway car—and then all the colors blend together, nothing solid to grab on to. Ella screams something at me, but she’s too far away. The words don’t reach me.
Then, darkness.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
I SNAP AWAKE ON A HARD PLASTIC BENCH, MY legs dangling off the end. I know I’m back in my body, no longer in Ella’s dreamworld because of the intense ache that immediately soaks through my every muscle. I’m on my side, facing the orange and yellow seatbacks of the subway bench. I’ve never been on one of these cars before, but I’ve seen enough movies and TV shows to recognize them immediately. On the wall above my head is a poster reading IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.
With a groan, I prop myself up on an elbow. Sam is slumped on the two-seater adjacent to my bench with his head propped against the window, snoring gently. Outside the window, I can see only darkness. This train is stalled underground somewhere, inside the tunnel. The passengers must have abandoned it early on during the attack. The train car is dead, unmoving and powerless, the panels of overhead lights completely dark.
And yet, there’s light coming from somewhere.
I sit up and look around, immediately spotting a row of cell phones spread throughout the train’s main aisle. With their flashlight apps turned on, the phones function like battery-powered candles. On the bench opposite from me, awake and watching, sits Daniela. Her feet are propped up on the duffel bag she carried out of that bank, the thing presumably filled with stolen money.
“You’re alive,” she s
ays, keeping her voice low so as not to wake Sam. I do the same, even though Sam’s snoring like he could sleep through another Anubis bombing.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
“It’s morning according to the phones,” Daniela replies. “About six hours, I guess.”
Morning already. I shake my head. An entire night wasted. We couldn’t find Nine and Five, and who knows which part of New York they’ve fought their way to by now. To make matters worse, I know where Setrákus Ra and the Anubis are heading—right to the last known location of the rest of the Garde. Because I lost contact with Ella at the last minute, I’m not sure what to do with that information, even if I could get in contact with Six and the others. Should they be getting ready to turn around and head back to the Sanctuary? Or does Ella want me to keep them as far from there as possible?
I need to move, to do something productive. But my body still doesn’t feel one hundred percent and Sam is out like a light.
“We’re still in the subway?” I ask Daniela, knowing the answer, but wanting to get a better grip on our situation before I make any decisions.
“Yeah. Obviously. We dragged you in here after you fainted.”
“Fainted,” I repeat with a grimace. “I passed out from exhaustion.”
“Same diff. Anyway, we were all pretty wiped after that cave-in stunt,” Daniela continues, maybe sensing my annoyance. “I fell asleep pretty much as soon as we got here.” Daniela glances at Sam, a faint smile on her face. “Your boy Sam was gonna stand guard, but I guess that didn’t go so hot. No big deal. Not like anyone is looking for us down here.”
“Not yet, at least,” I reply, thinking about the Mogadorians on the surface and wondering how their occupation of New York City is progressing.
One of the phones winks out. Daniela crouches over it, pressing a few buttons, but the battery is dead.
“People slept in front of the store for these things,” she says, holding up the dead phone for me to inspect. “Shit goes down, though . . . lot of people drop everything and run. What’s that make you think about humanity, alien guy?”
“That they’ve got their priorities straight,” I reply, glancing again at the duffel bag full of money.
“Yeah. I guess,” Daniela says, then casually tosses the phone to the other end of the train car, where it hits the floor and breaks apart. Even the phone shattering doesn’t disturb Sam. “That felt surprisingly good,” Daniela tells me, smirking in my direction. “You should try it.”
“Where’d you get all the phones?” I ask Daniela, watching her closely as she sits back down.
I still don’t know what to make of her. She’s a human with Legacies, which we don’t even have a word for. But she seems to think this entire situation is one big joke. I can’t tell if she’s unhinged like Five or hiding behind a massive defense mechanism. She mentioned before that the Mogs killed her stepfather and that her mom is missing. I know what it’s like—to lose people, to not know what’s happening to your loved ones. I could tell her that, except I don’t really think Daniela’s the type to open up easily. I wish Six were here. I have a feeling they’d get along great.
“I woke up first,” she says, gesturing around the train. “Went through all the cars. People left a lot of shit behind.”
“Back at the bank, did somebody leave all that cash behind, too?” I ask, jerking my chin at her duffel bag.
“Oh yeah, that,” Daniela says, looking to the side with feigned guilt, but unable to keep the smile off her face. “Wondered if you noticed.”
“I noticed.”
“Thing’s heavier than you’d think,” she says, nudging the bag with her filthy sneaker toe.
I rub my hand across my face, trying to figure out how I should approach this. It’s not like I haven’t stolen before. I always did it out of necessity, though, and never right in the middle of a full-scale invasion.
“Weird you had time to rob a bank while you were searching for your mom.”
“First of all, I didn’t steal it. I mean, not technically. There were some dudes hiding from the Mogs in that bank. They were the ones robbing it. I just ended up taking cover in there. They got blasted, then you showed up. I figure, why waste a perfectly good duffel bag?”
I frown, shaking my head. I have no idea if what Daniela’s telling me is the truth. I’m not sure if it even matters how she got the money. I’m more concerned with figuring out if this new Garde is someone we can trust. Someone we can rely on.
“Second of all,” she continues, leaning toward me, “my mom would be pissed if she found out I missed an opportunity like that.”
She tries to keep her voice cavalier, but a tremor sneaks in when she mentions her mom. Maybe this attitude is all a front, a way to cope with how screwed up her world has gotten in the last twenty-four hours. I get that. My expression must be too sympathetic, though, or maybe she noticed me noticing her voice shaking, because Daniela raises her voice and keeps going, more heated than before. It occurs to me that as much as I’m trying to figure her out, she’s also trying to figure out me.
“Third, I didn’t sign up for these superpowers that you don’t even know why I have. And I damn sure didn’t sign up to fight in your alien war. Neither did my family.”
“You think there was an alien invasion sign-up sheet getting passed around?” I ask sharply, trying and failing to keep my temper from flaring. “No one asked for this. The Loric, my people, we didn’t ask for the Mogs to destroy our home world. It happened anyway.”
Daniela holds up her hands defensively. “All right, so you know what this is like. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be judging how I choose to spend my alien invasion. Shit is nuts.”
“I was too young to fight back when they attacked Lorien,” I tell her. “But you . . .”
“Oh shit, here it comes. The recruitment speech.” Daniela starts to do an impression, her voice suddenly higher pitched, her words theatrically enunciated. “Look outside your window,” she recites. “The Mogadorians are here. The Garde will fight them. Will you stand for Earth?”
I shake my head, confused. “What’s that?”
“It’s from your video, dude. The whole support the Garde thing. They played it on the news.”
I shake my head. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Daniela studies my face for a moment, and eventually seems satisfied with my bafflement. “Huh. You really don’t. Guess you probably haven’t been watching much TV. Me? I was glued to it when those ships first started appearing. It’s like, all of a sudden we’re living in one of those alien invasion movies. Was pretty cool until, well . . .”
Daniela waves her hand, encompassing not just our current situation of hiding out underground, but the citywide destruction we both lived through. I notice her hand trembles a little. She quickly hides this, folding her arms tightly across her chest
“Sam and I helped a group of people get out of Manhattan yesterday,” I tell her. “I wondered how some of them knew my name, but it was too chaotic to ask. Was it on the news? Did they show me fighting at the UN?”
Daniela nods. “They showed some of that. Except when that Clooney-looking creep turned into a genuine alien monster, people really started to freak out and the cameras got all shaky. You were featuring pretty heavy on the news before that, though.”
I tilt my head, not understanding. “How do you mean?”
“There was this, like, YouTube video. It got posted on some stupid conspiracy website first—”
“Wait—was it ‘They Walk Among Us’?”
Daniela shrugs. “‘Nerds Walk Among Us,’ I dunno, sure. It starts off with a picture of Earth that they totally snagged from Google images and this girl’s narrating like—‘This is our planet, but we are not alone in the galaxy, blah blah blah.’ She’s trying to sound all professional like it’s a nature documentary or something, but you can tell she’s our age. Why are you making that stupid face?”
While Daniela’s speaking, I can’t help a dumb smile from crossing my face.
I try to keep my expression neutral as I lean forward. “What else happens?”
“So, they show some pictures of Mogadorians and say they’ve come to enslave humanity. These pale aliens look like they could be guys in corny monster makeup or something. Nobody would’ve taken this shit seriously if, you know, there weren’t a ton of UFOs menacing cities. And then, she starts talking about you. There’s video of you jumping out of a burning house that shouldn’t be possible, and then there’s footage of you healing this FBI agent’s burned-up face and . . . well, it’s pretty grainy but the special effects would have to be mad good for it to be fake.”
“What . . . what does she say about me?”
Daniela smirks, eyeing me. “She says your name is John Smith. That you’re a Garde. That you’ve been sent to our planet to fight these aliens. And now, you need our help.”
That’s what Daniela was quoting before. Her terrible impression was supposed to be Sarah. I sit back, thinking about the video that Sarah and Mark made, their contribution from the sideline. Even though she’s mocking it, the video seems to have made an impression on Daniela. She could quote it from memory. Hell, the survivors we came across in the street had certainly seen it. They trusted me. They were ready to stand and fight. But was it all too little too late?
I grimace involuntarily, thinking out loud. “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the Mogadorians that were hunting me here on Earth. Getting stronger. Training. The war was always being fought in secret. We were starting to get our allies together, though, starting to figure things out. I wonder if we’d only gone public sooner, how many lives could we have saved if New York was ready for an attack like this?”
“Nah,” Daniela says, dismissing this notion with a wave of her hand. “Nobody would’ve believed that shit even a week ago. Not without people on CNN shouting about spaceships appearing over New York. I mean, you needed that whole UN fight for it to really sink in. Before that, the news people were debating whether it was a hoax, a viral stunt for a movie, whatever. I saw one lady on TV saying you were an angel. Pretty funny.”
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