“That’s one of ours,” I say. “Like the one that brought us here. To Earth, I mean.”
“How is that possible?” Adam replies.
“Are these our reinforcements?” Marina asks, not taking her eyes off the ship. “Did John mention anything about this?”
“He said he was sending Sarah, Mark and something else . . .” I answer them both dazedly. “Something we’d have to see to believe.” Who could be piloting a Loric ship? Where did it come from? I take a halting step forward.
A metal ramp unfurls from the back of the ship and I tense up. I have a hazy memory of running up a ramp like that as a child, Katarina at my side, explosions and screaming in the background. Here we are again, in the middle of a second Mogadorian invasion, and once again there’s a Loric ship in front of me. Only this time, I don’t know whether I should be running towards it or away from it. Even though John told me help was coming, I can’t shake the feeling this could be a trap. My paranoia has gotten me this far, no reason to ignore it now.
“Get ready for anything,” I tell the others. “We don’t know what’s coming out of there.”
And then a familiar beagle bounds down the ramp.
Bernie Kosar, tongue hanging out of his mouth, leaps onto me first, his front paws braced against my legs. His tail is a blur as he greets Marina next and then even jumps onto Adam. I hear an unfamiliar sound and quickly realize that it’s the Mogadorian laughing.
When I look back to the ship, Sarah Hart now stands at the top of the ramp, her arms open in greeting and a smile on her face.
“Hey, guys,” Sarah says casually. “Look what we found.”
Marina lets out a laugh of delighted surprise and jogs forward, meeting Sarah at the bottom of the ramp and immediately wrapping her in a tight hug. It’s been a while since we’ve seen Sarah—she’d already gone off on her secret ex-boyfriend mission when Marina and I returned from Florida. She has her blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and her smile is bright, but there are some lines under her eyes, which I notice are a little red-rimmed the closer I get. Sarah’s also sporting some fresh scrapes and bruises that her big smile can’t hide. Yeah, she’s happy to see us, but she’s also tired, stressed and a little beat-up. Regardless, she looks better than we do—filthy from a couple of days in the jungle, sunburned and exhausted. But I don’t hold it against her.
“You’re here,” I say to Sarah, hugging her, too. In truth, I’m a little distracted. I still can’t take my eyes off the ship.
“It’s good to see you, Six,” Sarah replies, squeezing me despite the sweat and grit. “John said you could use some help and a lift. We brought both.”
Who exactly the “we” is becomes apparent a second later. The Mark James who exits the ship behind Sarah is a hell of a lot different from the guy I briefly fought alongside in Paradise. He’s retired the whole gel-haired-jock thing. Mark’s dark hair is longer and scruffier. I think he may have lost some weight, his muscles leaner now than I remember. He’s got an overtired look on his face and squinty eyes that suggest he’s not used to so much sunshine.
“Whoa, shit,” Mark says, stopping halfway down the ramp. “You’ve got one of them behind you.”
“That’s Adam,” Sarah replies. “I thought I told you about him.”
“Yeah, I guess you did,” Mark says, shielding his eyes while he openly stares at Adam. “It’s just spooky to see one of them, you know, hanging around like a normal. Sorry, bro,” Mark adds, nodding to Adam.
“It’s all right,” Adam replies diplomatically. He gestures over his shoulder to where Phiri Dun-Ra is hooded and tied to a Skimmer. “I’m not the only Mog here, as you can see. But I am the friendliest.”
“Noted,” Mark replies.
Sarah starts to make the necessary introductions. I cut her off before she can really get started.
“I’m sorry, but where did you get this ship?” I ask, walking by her and up the ramp.
“Yeah, about that,” Sarah replies, motioning me onwards like I should keep exploring. “You’ll probably want to talk to her.”
“Who?”
Sarah gives me a look like I should quit asking questions and just go, so I do. This exchange raises Marina’s eyebrows too. She follows me up the ramp into the ship. A few steps inside, and I’m hit with major déjà vu. We’re in the passenger area. It’s a wide-open space, completely devoid of any furniture. The walls give off a gentle light indicating that the ship is still powered on. I have a vague memory of being lined up in here alongside the other Garde, our Cêpan pushing us through aerobic exercises and some light martial arts training.
I walk over to the closest wall and trace my fingers across the surface. The soft plastic material responds, shining brighter, the trail from my fingers lit up. The walls act as one big touch screen. I pull a command from my memory, quickly drawing a Loric symbol on the wall. The symbol flashes once to show it’s been accepted and then, with a hydraulic hiss, the floor opens up and a couple dozen cots rise into view. Marina has to hop backwards as one opens up right where she was standing.
“Six, is this . . . ?”
“It’s our ship,” I say. “The same one that brought us to Earth.”
“I always assumed that it was destroyed or . . .” Marina trails off, shaking her head in wonderment. She traces her fingers across the opposite wall, inputting another command. The entire wall turns into a big high-definition screen displaying a picture of a happy-looking beagle chasing down a tennis ball.
“In English, dog,” says a recorded voice with a noticeable Loric accent. “Dog. The dog runs. En español, perro. El perro corre . . .”
Earth language training. How many times did we have to sit through this video as we flew towards our new planet? I’d forgotten about it, or blocked it out, but all the boredom of my childhood came rushing back. A whole claustrophobic year spent in here, watching that dog run through a bright green field.
“Oof, turn it off,” I say to Marina.
“You don’t want to see what the dog does next?” she asks with a little smile. She swipes her hand across the wall and the program stops.
I walk over to one of the cots and crouch down next to it. The sheets smell musty and a little like the greasy inner workings of the ship. They’ve probably been stowed down there for the last decade. I push aside the blankets and the thin matress, inspecting the frame.
“Ha, look at this,” I say.
Marina leans in over my shoulder. There, carved into the metal frame by a bored little girl, is the number six.
“Vandal,” Marina laughs.
The low hum of the ship’s engine slowly decreases to silence and the touch-screen walls flicker and turn off. Someone has just powered down the ship.
“Just like you left it, right?”
Marina and I both turn in the direction of the voice and wind up facing a woman as she slowly emerges from the ship’s cockpit. My first reaction is that she’s breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin is a dark shade of brown, her cheekbones high and pronounced, hair dark and buzzed short. Even though she’s dressed in a baggy mechanic’s jumpsuit complete with fresh grease stains, the woman looks like she belongs on the cover of a fashion magazine. I quickly come to realize that what’s so stunning about her isn’t purely looks. It’s an indistinct quality most people on Earth wouldn’t be able to put their finger on but which I notice immediately.
This woman is Loric.
She looks almost nervous to see me and Marina. That’s probably why she took such a long time to power down the ship. Even now, the woman lingers in the cabin doorway, as uncertain of us as we are of her. There’s a jumpiness about her, like at any moment she might retreat into the cockpit and lock the door. I can tell she’s trying to psych herself up to keep talking to us.
“You must be Six and Seven,” she says after a moment of getting nothing but stunned looks from the two of us.
“You—you can call me Marina.”
“Noted, Marina,” the wom
an says with a gentle smile.
“Who are you?” I ask, finding my voice at last.
“My name is Lexa,” the woman answers. “I’ve been helping out your friend Mark under the name GUARD.”
“Are you one of our Cêpan?”
Lexa finally moves out of the doorway and takes a seat on one of the cots. Marina and I sit down across from her. “No, I’m not a Cêpan. My brother was Garde but he didn’t make it through training at the Lorien Defence Academy. I was enrolled there too, as an engineering student, when he . . . when he died. After that I kind of, ah, fell off the grid. As much as you could on Lorien. I didn’t exactly fit into one of their prescribed roles. I worked with computers a lot, sometimes not so legally. I was nobody special, basically.”
“But you ended up here,” Marina says, her head tilted.
“Yeah. Eventually, I got hired to retrofit an antique ship for a museum . . .”
That detail clicks for me. “You flew the second ship to Earth,” I say.
“Yes. I came here with Crayton and my friend Zophie. You probably know this by now, but we weren’t part of the Elders’ plan. We managed to escape Lorien because of Crayton—well, because Crayton worked for Ella’s father, and because we had access to that old ship. Ella’s father, he knew what was coming. That’s why he hired me to fix it up. I wasn’t even really a pilot. I had to learn, well . . . on the fly.”
I snort at Lexa’s bad joke and smile at her, but my mind is racing. There are more of us. Maybe the Loric aren’t as extinct as we thought. I should be excited about this, but instead I feel suspicious. I’m probably just being paranoid after what happened with Five. Still, I think of Crayton and how he raised Ella while secretly hunting for the rest of the Garde. He never mentioned that he came here with two other Loric. My eyes narrow a fraction.
“Crayton never told us about you,” I say, trying to make it sound not too much like an accusation. Crayton did withhold a lot from us, after all. Ella’s real origin didn’t even come out until after he died.
“I guess he wouldn’t have,” Lexa replies, frowning slightly. “His only concern was keeping Ella alive. We agreed not to have contact with each other. It was safer for everyone if we kept our distance. You know how the Mogs are. They can’t torture any information out of you if you don’t actually know anything.”
“What about your friend? Zophie? Where’s she?”
Lexa shakes her head. “She didn’t make it. Her brother was the pilot of this ship. Your ship. Zophie went looking for him, actually thought she’d found him through the internet, but . . .”
Marina fills in the blank. “Mogs.”
Lexa nods sadly. “After that, I was alone.”
“You weren’t alone, though,” I say. “We were out there. A lot of us—hell, all of us, we lost our Cêpan. Some of us pretty damn quick. We could’ve used some guidance. Why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you try to find us?”
“You know why, Six. For the same reasons that your Cêpan didn’t try to find each other. It was dangerous to try making contact. Every internet search risked exposure. I did what I could from afar. I funneled money and intel to groups that were working on exposing the Mogadorians. I started a website called ‘Aliens Anonymous’ to try spreading the word, to maybe expose what they were up to with MogPro. That’s how I met up with Mark.”
I think about what it must’ve been like for her, a stranger in a strange land, with no one to rely on. Actually, I don’t have to imagine what she went through. I lived it myself. I knew the dangers and I never stopped looking for the others. I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Dangerous for us? Or dangerous for you?”
“For all of us, Six,” Lexa replies. I can tell that my words stung her. “I know it’s not even a fraction of the responsibility the Elders hung on the nine of you but . . . I didn’t ask for this either. I took a cake job in a museum and next thing I know I’m flying an antique ship to a planet in a completely different solar system with one of the last living Garde as cargo. I lost my brother, my best friend, my whole life.”
She takes a breath. Marina and I are both silent.
“I told myself that helping you all from afar was enough. So, I did what I could from a distance. I erased whatever information I found about you all online. I tried to make you invisible, not just to the world, but to me. Maybe it was cowardice. Or shame. I don’t know. I knew deep down that I should be doing more. I always intended to get this ship, though, and contact you, once you were old enough and once I . . .”
“You’re here now,” Marina says gently. “That’s what matters.”
“I couldn’t stay away any longer. I’d already fled one planet during an invasion. I decided it was time to stop running.”
That hits home for me. In a way, after spending years hiding from the Mogadorians, we’ve all decided it’s time to stop running. I only hope it isn’t too late.
“Would it be okay if I gave you a hug now?” Marina asks Lexa.
The pilot is taken by surprise, but she nods. Marina wraps her up in a big hug, burying her face in the woman’s shoulder. Lexa sees me watching and gives me a tight, almost embarrassed smile before closing her eyes and letting herself be squeezed. She sighs, and maybe I’m just imagining this, but some invisible weight seems to lift from Lexa’s shoulders. I don’t join in. The group-hug thing isn’t really for me.
“Thanks for coming,” I say after a moment. “Welcome to the Sanctuary.”
With that, I lead the two of them out from the ship. I take one last lingering look at the passenger area before tamping down that memory of fleeing Lorien. I’m not a child anymore. This invasion is going to play out differently.
Outside, Adam and Mark are in the middle of a discussion. Sarah stands a few feet away from them, closer to the ship, obviously waiting for us. She raises her eyebrows questioningly when she sees me and I let out a deep breath in response.
“Crazy who you run into in Mexico,” I say, trying to play off the shock and mixed feelings of encountering Lexa.
Together, we walk over to Mark and Adam. Mark, already sweating through his T-shirt, looks like he’s having trouble wrapping his mind around something.
“A hole,” he says flatly. “You’re going to kill Setrákus Ra with a hole in the ground.”
Adam sighs, pointing to the sections of the jungle where we’ve hidden Mog artillery. “You’re really stuck on the hole aspect of the plan. I told you, we’ve got guns, bombs—”
“But for Setrákus Ra, you’ve got a hole.”
“I realize it’s low-tech, but our options are seriously limited,” Adam replies. “And we aren’t trying to kill him. That’s not even a possibility considering any damage we do to him will be reflected onto Ella. We just want to slow him down and buy ourselves some time.”
“Time to do what?” Mark asks.
Adam glances at me. “To rescue Ella, steal the Anubis out from under Setrákus Ra’s nose or both.”
“Why don’t we just bail?” Mark asks, thumbing towards the newly arrived Loric ship. “I get that all these booby traps might’ve been a good idea when you were, like, stranded. But we can leave now.”
“That’s not an option,” Marina replies. “The Sanctuary must be defended at all costs.”
“At all costs?” Mark repeats, glancing back to the ship, then over to the temple. “What the hell is so special about this place?”
I notice that Lexa’s been awfully quiet during this discussion. Her eyes are locked on the Sanctuary, her face blank, sort of like how Marina looks when she goes into one of her reverent trances. Lexa must sense me watching her, because she abruptly shakes her head and meets my gaze.
“This place . . .” She searches for the right words. “There’s something special about it.”
“It’s a Loric place,” Marina replies. “The Loric place now, actually. The source of our Legacies resides inside.”
“We just sealed the entrance or I’d give you the tour,” I put in.
“Could’ve introduced you to the creature living in there. Pretty nice for an Entity made out of pure Loric energy.”
Lexa flashes me a quick smirk before replying. “I can feel it . . . whatever’s in there. I can feel it in my bones. I understand why you’d want to protect this place.”
“Thank you,” Marina replies.
“That said . . .” And now Lexa glances in my direction. “Keep in mind that my ship—our ship—is ready. If you need it. It has outrun their warships before.”
I nod subtly and exchange a quick look with Adam. Marina might not want to admit we need one, but we’ve got an exit strategy all the same, and it’s now a lot better than running into the jungle.
“Man, so whatever’s inside there, it’s like in charge of the Legacies?” Mark asks, looking at the Sanctuary with his hands on his hips.
“We think so,” I reply.
“So, that’s what decided that nerdy Sam Goode should get superpowers and that I . . .” Mark trails off, grimacing. “Shit. I should’ve been nicer in high school.”
I try not to laugh. John must have filled Sarah and Mark in on humans getting Legacies thanks to our messing around in the Sanctuary. I don’t know how the Entity decided who would get Legacies, but I wouldn’t really expect a guy like Mark to make the cut, even if he’s been risking his ass for us over the last couple of months. Sarah, on the other hand . . .
“What about you?” I say, facing her.
Sarah shrugs and looks down at her hands, like she’s expecting rays of light to shoot out of them at any moment.
“Nothing yet,” she says, frowning. “Still just a regular old human.”
Sarah tries to play this off, but I can tell it’s bothering her. After all she’s done for us, for John in particular, it does strike me as a major oversight on the Entity’s part to pass her over when choosing which humans receive Legacies.