The Fallen Legacies (Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files #3)(16)

It takes me ten minutes to get to the quiet backstreet where the building is. I can’t believe the Garde safe house was right under our noses. If we had waited, Conrad Hoyle would have come to us, and all the mayhem on the streets could have been avoided. Of course, it’s lucky for me that things played out like they did.

I’m gasping for breath as I stand at the doorway to the building. It’s an old redbrick town house, now home to three apartments, according to the buzzers outside. Luckily, an old woman is just leaving to walk her white, puffy dog, and I’m able to catch the front door before it closes. I race to the second-floor apartment, the only one not to have a name stickered to the buzzer downstairs.

I pound on the apartment door, probably too hard. If I was a fugitive Garde, that kind of loud knocking would send me running for the fire escape. I hear startled movement inside the apartment, a TV being muted, and then silence.

I knock again, gentler this time, and press my ear to the door.

Muffled footsteps pad closer to the other side of the door, but the girl says nothing.

“Open the door,” I whisper, trying to keep my voice gentle and urgent. “You’re in danger.”

No response.

“Your Cêpan sent me,” I try. “You need to get out of here.”

There’s a lengthy pause, and then a small voice answers. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

Good question, but I don’t have time for this. By now Conrad Hoyle has probably been overcome by the Mogadorian strike team. I could tell this girl that her Cêpan is as good as dead, that my people will be here soon. I could try breaking down the door, but I doubt I have the strength.

Just like that, One is standing next to me in the hallway. Her face is somber and distant.

“Tell her about the night they came,” says One. “The night your people came.”

I think back to One’s memory of the airstrip, the frightened faces around her, the mad dash towards the ship.

“I remember the night they came,” I begin, uncertainly at first but gaining confidence as I go. “There were nine of us and our Cêpans, all running panicked. We saw a Garde fight off a piken. I don’t think he survived. Then they pushed us onto the ship and …”

I trail off, recounting the last night of Lorien making me feel strangely sad. I glance to where One was standing, but she’s disappeared back into my head.

A half dozen deadbolt locks are unlatched, and the apartment door swings open.





CHAPTER 17


Her alias is Maggie Hoyle.

From what little I saw of Conrad Hoyle, I’m expecting Maggie to be a minimilitant in training. Instead, she is the polar opposite of her Cêpan. Maggie can’t be more than twelve years old; and she’s small for her age, mousey, with a mane of reddish-brown curls hanging on either side of a pair of thick glasses. The only sign of Hoyle’s influence is the small handgun she’s holding when I walk in, the kind of polite-looking weapon a rich lady might carry with her in a bad neighborhood. Maggie looks relieved to set the gun down as soon as the door is locked behind me.

“Is Conrad all right?” she asks me.

The muted TV in the corner of the small flat is tuned to a news report, a helicopter filming the burning wreckage of Hoyle’s bus. It looks like the fight is over. We have to move quickly.

“I don’t know,” I tell her, not wanting to say that I doubt her Cêpan survived. We need to get moving, and I don’t want to upset her. There’s no time for grieving right now.

Not only is she way younger than I expected, Maggie doesn’t possess any of the bravado I thought came prepackaged with the Garde after spending years in One’s memories. She’s fidgety and nervous, not cool and confident, and not at all ready to fight.

So that makes two of us.

I take in the rest of the apartment. It doesn’t look lived in. Maggie probably moved in within the last week. A layer of dust still covers the empty mantel and countertops. There’s a small suitcase open next to a half-deflated air mattress, with piles of clothes spilling out onto the floor around it, and a desk with a bowl of cereal on it, a couple of marshmallows still floating in the pink-tinted milk. I scan around the room, looking for the Chest that we’ve been taught all the Garde have, but I don’t see it anywhere. Either she doesn’t have it or she’s found a good place to hide it.

Next to the cereal bowl is the laptop that brought me here. The computer is still open to the blog post, scrolled down to the bottom of the page where comments would go. The poor kid has just been sitting here waiting for someone to reply, and I’m the one who showed up.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I say, nodding to the laptop.

Maggie looks guilty, rushing over to the laptop to shut it.

“I know. Conrad would be mad,” she says, glancing over at the scene on TV. “I was just worried he wouldn’t come back and …”

Maggie stops herself, looking embarrassed. She doesn’t have to finish; I know what she was going to say. That she was afraid she’d be alone.

Fear. Loneliness. It was a similar blend of feelings that caused One to take up with brain-dead surfers and start shoplifting. I don’t really want to admit it, but they’re the same feelings I’ve been having since waking up.

“What number are you?” she says.