The Fall of Five (I Am Number Four) (6 page)

She shrugs me off. “You can’t say that for sure. You can’t do everything, John.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I’m starting to realize that.”

Sarah looks up at me. “You know, I thought about calling my parents today. It’s been weeks. I wanted to tell them I’m all right.”

“That’s not really a good idea. The Mogadorians or the government could be monitoring your house for phone calls. They could be tracking us.”

The words sound so cold and I regret them almost right away, how quickly I’m slipping into paranoid-and-practical-leader mode. But Sarah doesn’t seem offended. In fact, it looks like it’s exactly what she expected me to say.

“I know,” she says, nodding. “That’s exactly what I thought, and it’s why I didn’t actually go through with it. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here with you guys and fight. But I don’t have any Loric superpowers. I’m just dead weight. I want to practice shooting so I can be more than that.”

I grab Sarah’s hand. “You are more than that. I need you here with me. You’re pretty much the only thing keeping me from completely melting down.”

“I get it,” she says. “You’re going to save the freaking world and I’m going to help you. That whole saying about behind every great man there is a great woman? I can be that for you. I just want to be a great woman with excellent aim.”

I can’t help but laugh, the tension between us
breaking. I lift Sarah’s hand and kiss it. She wraps her arms around my waist and we hug. I don’t know what I was so tied up in knots about; having Sarah here just makes everything seem easier. Coming up with a battle plan to take down the Mogadorians? No problem. And as for that one kiss with Six, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Eight teleports into the room with a puff of displaced air. He’s wide-eyed and excited, but turns sheepish when he sees us.

“Whoa,” Eight says. “Sorry, I didn’t expect canoodling.”

Sarah snickers, and I glare jokingly at Eight. “This better be good.”

“You should go to the workshop and see for yourself. I’ve gotta go get the others.”

With that cryptic message, Eight teleports away. Sarah and I exchange a look, then rush out of the Lecture Hall and into Sandor’s old workshop.

Nine is already there, his arms crossed as he watches the bank of television screens on the wall. They’re all tuned to the same image, a newscast from some local station in South Carolina. Nine pauses the broadcast when we enter, freezing a still image of the gray-haired anchor.

“I turned on some of Sandor’s old programs the other day,” Nine explains. “They scan news feeds for weird shit that might be Loric related.”

“Yeah, Henri had the same thing set up.”

“Uh-huh, typical boring Cêpan stuff, right? Except this popped up tonight.”

Nine restarts the broadcast, the anchor resuming his teleprompter reading.

“Authorities are at a loss to explain the vandalism of a local farmer’s crops early yesterday morning. The prevailing theory is high-school prank, but others have suggested . . .”

I tune out the anchor’s theories as the image switches to an overhead shot of a twisting, mazelike emblem burned into the cornfield. It might look like a juvenile prank to the newscaster, but we recognize it immediately. Burned into those crops with jagged precision is the Loric symbol for Five.

“IF FIVE’S TRYING TO FIND US, THIS IS ABOUT
the dumbest damn way possible,” Nine says.

“She could be scared and alone,” counters Marina, softly. “On the run.”

“No Cêpan in their right mind would go burning up crops, so they must be alone. Still . . .” Nine trails off, his brow furrowing. “Wait—what do you mean ‘she’? Five’s a chick?”

Marina rolls her eyes at
chick
, then shakes her head. “I don’t know. Just a guess.”

“Setting a field on fire seems like a guy thing,” Six puts in.

“I remember Henri reading a story about a girl lifting a car off someone in Argentina,” I say. “We always thought that could be Five.”

“Sounds like a tabloid story to me,” Six counters.

“Guy or girl doesn’t matter,” interrupts Nine, waving
at the computer screens. “Scared doesn’t haven’t to mean stupid.”

I find myself agreeing with Nine. Assuming this message is actually from Five and not some elaborate Mogadorian trap, it’s a really bad way to get our attention. Because if we noticed it, then the Mogadorians definitely did too.

We’ve all crowded into Sandor’s workshop. Nine has paused the newscast on the overhead shot of the Loric symbol while we figure out what to do next. I have the macrocosm from my Chest open, the holographic Loric solar system floating peacefully in the space over the table.

“He must not have his Chest open,” I say. “This would change into the globe if he did.”

Eight stands next to me, clutching a red communication crystal he pulled from his chest. It’s the same one we found in Nine’s and used to try sending Six a message when she was in India.

“Are you out there, Five?” Eight speaks into the crystal. “If you are, you should probably stop setting things on fire.”

“I think he can only hear you if his Chest is open,” I explain. “In which case, he’d show up on the macrocosm.”

“Ah,” says Eight, lowering the crystal. “They couldn’t have packed us cell phones?”

Meanwhile, Nine has plugged our locater tablet into one of Sandor’s computers. The newscast blips out of existence, replaced by a map of Earth. There’s a cluster of pulsing blue dots in Chicago—that’s us. Further south, there’s another dot, moving extremely fast from the Carolinas towards the middle of the country. Nine looks over at me.

“He’s made a lot of miles since I checked on him this morning. First time he’s come in from the islands, too.”

Six points at the screen, tracing a line back to where the crops were burned. “It makes sense. Whoever it is, they’re on the run.”

“They’re moving really fast, though,” puts in Sarah. “Could they be taking a plane somewhere?”

The dot on the screen suddenly takes an abrupt northward turn, crossing through Tennessee.

“I don’t think planes move like that,” says Six, her brow furrowing.

“Super speed?” Eights asks.

We watch as the blue dot crosses right through Nashville, never slowing down or changing directions.

“There’s no way they just zipped through a city at that speed on a straight line,” Six says.

“Son of a bitch,” growls Nine. “I think this idiot can fly.”

“We’ll have to wait until they stop moving,” I say. “Maybe then they’ll open their Chest and we can send
a message. We’ll watch in shifts. We need to get to Five before the Mogs do.”

Marina volunteers to take the first shift. I linger in the workshop after the others have gone. Even with all this excitement about Five, I haven’t forgotten about our other problems, specifically Ella and her nightmares.

“I talked to Ella today,” I begin. “In her nightmares, Setrákus Ra asks her if she’s opened some letter. Any idea what that could mean?”

Marina looks away from where Five’s pulsing beacon cruises across Oklahoma. “Crayton’s letter, maybe?”

“Her Cêpan?”

“Back in India, right before he died, Crayton gave her a letter.” Marina frowns. “With everything that’s happened, I almost forgot about it.”

“She hasn’t read it?” I ask, feeling a little exasperated. “We’re fighting a war here; it could be important.”

“I don’t think it’s that easy for her, John,” Marina says, levelly. “Those are Crayton’s last words. Reading it would be like admitting that he’s really gone and not coming back.”

“But he is gone,” I reply quickly. Too quickly. I pause, thinking back to when Henri was killed. He’d been like a father to me and, even more than that, he was the only constant in a life spent constantly on the run. For me,
the idea of Henri was almost like the idea of home—wherever he was, that’s where he was safe. Losing him was like having the world ripped out from under me. I was older than Ella when it happened, too. I shouldn’t expect her to be able to just brush it off.

I sit down next to Marina, sighing. “Henri—my Cêpan—he left me a letter too. He gave it to me when he was dying. We were on the road for days before I could bring myself to read it.”

“See? It’s not so easy. Plus, if Setrákus Ra showed up in my dreams and told me to do something, I’d definitely do the opposite.”

I nod. “I get it. I do. She needs to grieve. I don’t mean to sound heartless. When all this is over, when we win, we’ll have time to mourn the people we’ve lost. But until then, we need to gather all the information we can and find anything that might work to our advantage.” I wave my hand at the screen with Five’s location. “We have to stop just waiting around for the next crisis and start acting.”

Marina thinks about what I’ve said, gazing at the holographic macrocosm of Earth we’ve left open just in case Five should open his or her Chest. This is probably what she was expecting to hear from me this morning when she gently asked if I had a plan for us. I didn’t then—and I don’t exactly now—but the first
step definitely has to be figuring out what we have to work with, and Ella is key to that.

“I’ll talk to Ella,” she says. “But I won’t force her to do anything.”

I hold up my hands. “I’m not asking you to. You guys are close. Maybe you could nudge her along?”

“I’ll try,” she says, at last.

Eight appears in the doorway of the workshop, holding two cups of tea. Marina’s face lights up when she sees him, although she quickly looks away, suddenly acting really interested in the macrocosm. I notice a blush creeping up her cheeks.

“Hey,” Eight says, setting down the tea. “Sorry. I, uh, only made the two cups.”

“It’s cool,” I reply, catching a meaningful look from Eight that suddenly makes me feel like a third wheel. “I was just leaving.”

I stand up and Eight takes my seat in front of the macrocosm. Before I’m even out the door, Eight whispers some joke to Marina that immediately gets her giggling. I’ve been so focused on Sarah and my agonizing battle planning that I hadn’t put much thought into how much time Marina and Eight have been spending together. That’s good. All of us deserve a little happiness, considering what we’re facing.

It’s almost dawn when Eight comes to our room, waking me and Sarah. The others are already gathered in the workshop. Six sits in front of the computers, Marina next to her.

“Another brain-dead maneuver from our missing compadre,” Nine says by way of greeting. He’s standing on the wall using his antigravity legacy. Ella is sitting Indian style on his back, wrapped up in a blanket. I arch an eyebrow at her.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“Don’t want to,” Ella says.

“She’s been helping me with my strength training,” announces Nine. He hunches his shoulders, jostling Ella. She almost falls off his back, but laughs—a rare laugh—and hangs on. She slaps his back in annoyance. “Didn’t even feel that.”

Ignoring the others, Six turns to me. “Five stopped moving about an hour ago. Then started up again.”

I glance at the tablet’s screen. Five’s beacon has cruised along west since the last time I looked in. It now hovers around the eastern border of Arkansas.

“The genius stopped just long enough to send us another message,” grouses Nine.

Marina narrows her eyes at Nine. “Do we really need to be critiquing what Five does? He or she is probably alone and scared.”

“Honey, I spent months in a Mogadorian jail cell for my stupidity. I’ve earned my right to color commentate—ow.”

Ella slaps Nine on the back again and he shuts up. I stay focused on Six and the computer screen.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“One hour ago, this was posted in the comment section of a news story about the crops burning,” says Six, thankfully keeping it matter-of-fact. She opens up a window and drags it over to where we can all see it on the big screen.

“What does it mean?” asks Sarah. “It’s like a riddle.”

Six clicks open a web browser, bringing up the cheesy-looking website of something called the Boggy Creek Monster. “We found this on Google. It’s a dumb little tourist attraction in Arkansas called the Monster Mart.”

“You think Five is headed there?”

“We won’t know for sure until he stops moving,” Six answers, gesturing at the blue dot on the tablet. “But I’d bet yes.”

“Does he think the Mogadorians don’t have Google?” Nine spits.

“Speaking from experience,” Six says, “the Mogadorians monitor the internet like hawks. If we’re seeing this, then you can bet they’ve seen it too and are trying to figure it out. They’ll likely trace his IP address first and waste some time looking for his location, which is good because we can tell from this that he’s moved on from wherever he sent the message. Even so, they’ll figure it out eventually.”

“Then we better move fast,” I say.

“Hell yeah,” Nine says, hopping down from the wall and catching Ella as she tumbles after him. He sets her down and cracks his knuckles. “Finally, some freaking action.”

It’s like something in me clicks and, after days of overthinking our position, a plan just comes spilling out of me. “Our advantage here is that we know Five’s exact location. Hopefully, that gives us a head start on the Mogs. We need to be fast and we need to be sneaky. Six and I will go to Arkansas. With her invisibility, we should be able to sneak Five out without tipping off the Mogadorians. We’ll bring Bernie Kosar, too.”

“Oh, the dog gets to go?” Nine says flatly.

“His shape shifting will make it easy for us to scout ahead,” I counter. “And he can make it back to you
guys if something goes wrong. If we’re captured, Eight, I expect to see you teleporting our violent friend Nine here into my cell within twenty-four hours. And, if the unthinkable happens—”

“It won’t,” Six interrupts. “We’ve got this.”

I look around the room. “Does everyone agree?”

Eight and Marina nod, their faces grim but confident. Ella gives me a small smile from her spot next to Marina. Nine doesn’t look too thrilled about being left out of the mission, but he grunts his approval. Sarah says nothing, looking away.