I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Last Defense(23)

“Sam, my son, is with him now in New York. Fighting the Mogs. John’s his best friend.”

Is Sam safe? The question is in the back of my mind, as always.

“Did you see it too, then?” she asks.

I shake my head. She frowns and looks away.

“Why me?” she asks. “Why’d I get sucked into their weirdo dream world?”

“Can you tell me anything else?” I ask. “Did they say where they were? Did they mention . . .” I rack my brain. “Maybe a place called the Sanctuary?”

She shakes her head, squinting her eyes, trying to remember.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “There were these people from all over the world. They had . . .” She catches herself, pausing. “They told us we could travel using a ‘low-light’ stone or something like that. A bunch of them popped up on a map that this creepy little girl showed us.”

“Loralite . . . ,” I murmur. That doesn’t make any sense. From what I understand, the Garde needed Eight’s teleportation power in order to use the stones. When did that change? Is this somehow related to the new Legacies?

“What else did John say?” I ask.

“He wanted to get us to join him. He says we can save the world if we rise up against the bad guys.”

“And your father said Setrákus Ra was there. Did he . . . say anything?”

“He said he was going to hunt me down. All of us.” Tears fall on her cheeks. “He said he was going to kill each one of us who was there watching. He . . . Dad, he was horrible.”

Jackson gets on one knee and pulls her in close, looking up at me with gritted teeth. My mind reels, trying to figure out what could possibly be going on. It sounds like John was trying to recruit people, but none of the Garde have ever shown the power to create some kind of widespread illusion before. Unless it’s a new Legacy or . . .

New.

I think of Sam. And of the girl he mentioned. Of the fact that there might be new Garde popping up all over the world.

“Melanie,” I say softly. “When did you start moving things with your mind?”

I’m taking a chance, but it’s obvious I’ve hit a nerve. She stops crying—stops breathing, actually. Slowly, she pulls away from her father until her bleary eyes are locked on mine.

“How did you . . . ?”

“The same thing is happening to my son,” I say, working things out as I speak. “To a lot of people in the world, I think. Probably all those other kids you saw in your dream.”

“Then it’s not just me? I thought . . . I was afraid I was the only one. I thought maybe I was going crazy and that this whole dream thing was just proof I needed to get locked up in an insane asylum.”

“Melanie, what’s going on?” Jackson asks, looking back and forth between us. His voice is measured, but it’s impossible to not hear the urgency and pain behind it.

Melanie looks at him, her features contorted in a strange mixture of hope and fear, a deep groove appearing in the space between her eyebrows.

“This morning I was staring at a picture of Mom I brought with me. You were already gone. I wanted to talk to her, for her to be here. And then it just floated over to me. Like, flew off the nightstand and smacked me in the face. I . . . I thought it was something the aliens did to me. Like I was going to die. But then I kept doing it to things.”

“What?” Jackson’s question is hardly more than breath.

“Can you show us?” I ask, glancing around the room. There’s a bottle of water on the coffee table in front of us. “There. Can you bring it to yourself?”

She concentrates. Slowly, the bottle begins to wobble, until it’s rising off the table. It floats through the air, splashing water over its rim. Jackson is on his feet in a flash.

“Baby . . . you’re doing this?” he asks.

“Don’t talk to me,” she says, her eyebrows furrowing more. “This is hard.”

“But . . . how. How are you—”

“Dad, I said—”

The bottle suddenly crunches, sending a jet of water up in the air between the three of us. Then it drops to the floor.

“I’m not very good at it,” Melanie says quietly. “My room is . . . kind of a mess.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jackson asks. He keeps shaking his head, trying to make all the puzzle pieces in his head fit together.

“I was scared.”

Jackson smiles, but then something must dawn on him, because his face quickly contorts into a grim frown.

“Mutation,” he murmurs. “Unnatural abilities . . .”

“This is nothing to be afraid of,” I say, even though I’m not sure of that at all. “Though . . . Melanie, you may get more strange abilities. All the Garde have more than one. I think telekinesis is usually the first to surface.”

She looks up at me with huge brown eyes, mouth agape. Then she turns to her father.

“We have to help them,” she says.

“Who, baby?” Jackson asks.

“The Garde!” Her voice is louder, more serious. “We can’t let that monster beat them and then take the rest of us. He’s already invaded Earth and blown up New York. And the way he stared at me when he was yelling, telling me he was going to kill me—all of us . . .”