I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Last Defense(28)

The girl darts around a corner and three aliens stand in her path. Her instinct makes her try to turn back, but her ankle twists and her legs come out from under her. She falls, hitting the sidewalk hard. One of the aliens makes a short, harsh noise—the girl realizes he’s laughing at her.

“Surrender or die,” it says, and the girl knows this isn’t really a choice. The aliens already have their guns raised and aimed, fingers nearly depressing the triggers.

Surrender and die. They’re going to kill her no matter what she does next. The girl is certain of this.

The girl throws up her hands to defend herself. It’s a reflex. She knows it won’t do anything against their weapons.

Except it does.

The aliens’ guns jerk upwards, out of their hands. They fly twenty yards down the block.

They look at the girl, stunned and uncertain. She doesn’t understand what just happened either.

But she can feel something different inside her. Something new. It’s as if she’s a puppeteer, with strings connecting to every object on the block. All she needs to do is push and pull. The girl isn’t sure how she knows this. It feels natural.

One of the aliens charges and the girl swipes her hand from right to left. He flies across the street, limbs flailing, and slams through the windshield of a parked car. The other two exchange a look and start to back away.

“Who’s laughing now?” she asks them, standing up.

“Garde,” one of them hisses in reply.

The girl doesn’t know what this means. The way the alien says it makes the word sound like a curse. That makes the girl smile. She likes that these things ripping up her neighborhood are afraid of her now.

She can fight them.

She’s going to kill them.

The girl throws one of her hands into the air and the result is one of the aliens lifting up from the ground. The girl brings her hand down just as quickly, smashing the airborne alien on top of his companion. She repeats this until they turn to dust.

When it’s done, the girl looks down at her hands. She doesn’t know where this power came from. She doesn’t know what it means.

But she’s going to use it.





CHAPTER ONE

WE RUN PAST THE BROKEN WING OF AN EXPLODED jet fighter, the jagged metal lodged in the middle of a city street like a shark’s fin. How long ago was it that we watched the jets scream by overhead, a course set for uptown and the Anubis? It feels like days, but it must only be hours. Some of the people we’re with—the survivors—they whooped and cheered when they saw the jets, like the tide was going to turn.

I knew better. Kept quiet. Only a few minutes later, we could hear the explosions as the Anubis blew those jets out of the sky, scattering pieces of Earth’s most sophisticated military all over the island of Manhattan. They haven’t sent any more jets in.

How many deaths is that? Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe more. And it’s all my fault. Because I couldn’t kill Setrákus Ra when I had the chance.

“On the left!” a voice shouts from somewhere behind me. I whip my head around, charge up a fireball without thinking about it, and incinerate a Mog scout as he comes around a corner. Me, Sam, the couple dozen survivors we picked up along the way—we barely break stride. We’re in lower Manhattan now. Ran here. Fought our way down. Block by block. Trying to put some distance between us and Midtown, where the Mogs are strongest, where we last saw the Anubis.

I’m exhausted.

I stumble. I can’t even feel my feet anymore, they’re so tired. I think I’m about to collapse. An arm goes around my shoulders and steadies me.

“John?” Sam asks, concerned. He’s holding me up. It sounds like his voice is coming through a tunnel. I try to reply to him, but the words don’t come. Sam turns his head and speaks to one of the other survivors. “We need to get off the streets for a while. He needs to rest.”

Next thing I know, I slump back against the wall of an apartment building lobby. I must have gone out for a minute. I try to brace myself, try to pull myself together. I have to keep fighting.

But I can’t do it—my body refuses to take any more punishment. I let myself slide down the wall so that I’m sitting on the floor. The carpet is covered in dust and broken glass that must’ve blown in from outside. There are about twenty-five of us huddled together here. These are all we could manage to save. Bloodstained and dirty, a few of them wounded, all of us tired.

How many injuries did I heal today? It was easy, at first. After so many, though, I could feel my healing Legacy draining my own energy. I must have hit my limit.

I remember the people not by name but by how I found them or what I healed. Broken-Arm and Pinned-Under-Car look concerned, scared.

A woman, Jumped-from-Window, puts her hand on my shoulder, checking on me. I nod to tell her I’m all right and she looks relieved.

Right in front of me, Sam talks with a uniformed cop in his fifties. The cop has dried blood all over one side of his face from a cut on top of his head that I healed. I forget his name or where we found him. Their voices sound far away, like they’re echoing down a mile-long tunnel. I have to focus my hearing to understand the words, and even that takes a colossal effort. My head feels wrapped in cotton.

“Word came in over the radio that we’ve got a foothold on the Brooklyn Bridge,” the cop says. “NYPD, National Guard, army . . . hell, everyone. They’re holding the bridge. Evacuating survivors from there. It’s only a few blocks away and they say the Mogs are concentrated uptown. We can make it.”