I CAN’T SLEEP. PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE CHEST. For all I know, one of the gems inside could give me power to morph into different creatures like Bernie Kosar, or one could create an iron barrier around me impossible to penetrate by enemy attack. But how will I know without Henri? I feel sad. Defeated.
But mostly I can’t stop thinking about Six, can’t stop picturing her face hovering inches above mine, or the sugary scent of her breath, or the way the setting sun had made her eyes glow. In that moment I had an irrepressible desire to stop training and to simply wrap my arms around her and squeeze her down onto me. A pang of longing to do that even now, hours later, has anchored itself in my heart, and that’s what’s really keeping me up. That, and the overwhelming guilt I feel about my attraction to her. The person I’m supposed to be longing for is Sarah.
There’s too much on my mind to expect sleep, too many emotions: pain, desire, confusion, guilt. I lie another twenty minutes before giving up on sleep. I whip aside my blanket and pull on a pair of pants and a gray tee. Bernie Kosar follows me from the room and down the hallway. I poke my head into the living room to see if Sam’s asleep. He is, wrapped up in a blanket on the floor like a worm in a cocoon, and I turn and walk back. Six’s room is directly across the hall from mine, and her door’s ajar. I stand looking at it, and I hear Six rustle on the floor.
“John?” she whispers.
I cringe, and my heart immediately races.
“Yeah?” I reply, still standing outside.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I whisper. “I can’t sleep.”
“Come in,” she says. I push open the door. Her room is pitch-black, and I can’t see anything. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I say. I barely turn on my Lumen, and the faint glow is like a night-light. I keep my eyes off her and on the carpet. “Just too much on my mind, you know. I was maybe thinking of going for a walk or a run or something.”
“Well, that’s kind of dangerous, don’t you think? Don’t forget you’re on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List with a fat reward on your head,” she says.
“I know, but . . . it’s still dark out, and you could make us invisible, couldn’t you? I mean, that’s if you wanted to come along.”
I increase the lights on my hands and I can see Six sitting on the floor with a couple blankets over her legs and her hair’s pulled back with loose strands falling around her face. She shrugs, then tosses the blankets aside and stands. She’s wearing black yoga pants and a white tank. I can’t stop myself from staring at her bare shoulders. I look away when I’m hit with the absurd suspicion that she can feel my eyes on her.
“Sure,” she says, pulling the band from her hair and rewrapping her ponytail. “I always have a hard time sleeping. Especially on the floor.”
“I hear that,” I say.
“Do you think we’ll wake up Sam, though?”
I shake my head. She responds with a shoulder shrug and lifts her hand. I take it immediately. Six disappears, but my hand still glows and I can see her foot imprints in the carpet. Then I extinguish my hand and we tiptoe from the room and down the hallway. Bernie Kosar follows, and when we reach the living room, Sam lifts his head from the floor and stares right at us. Six and I stop, and I hold my breath to remain silent. I think about Sam’s obvious crush on Six and how he’d be devastated if he saw us holding hands.
“Hey, Bernie,” he says groggily, then drops his head and rolls over with his back facing us. We remain silent for a few seconds, and then Six leads us across the living room and into the kitchen to leave through the back door.
The night is warm, and filled with the sounds of crickets and swaying palm fronds. I inhale deeply as Six and I walk hand in hand. I find it odd that Six’s hand seems so small and delicate in mine, despite her amazing physical strength. I love the way it feels. Bernie Kosar races through the heavy brush lining the gravel drive while Six and I stroll silently down its center. It dead-ends into a narrow road and we turn left.
“I can’t stop thinking about what you went through,” I finally say, but what I would rather tell her is that I can’t stop thinking about her. “Being held prisoner for half a year, having to witness Katarina being—well, you know what I mean.”
“Sometimes I forget it happened. And other times it’s all I can think about for days,” she replies.
“Yeah,” I say, drawing out the word. “I don’t know; I guess it goes without saying that I miss Henri, and it kills me that he’s gone. But after hearing your story I realize how lucky I really am. I mean, I got to say good-bye to him and everything. Plus, he was there while I went through my first Legacies. I can’t imagine going through that alone like you did.”
“It was really, really hard, that’s for sure. I could have used her the day I started to gain my invisibility Legacy. I could have used her even more for girl talks when I was growing up. They were pretty much our parents on Earth, right?”
“Right,” I say. “What I find funny is that now that Henri’s gone, the things I remember most about him are the things I usually hated. Like when we would leave some place behind and we’d drive for hours and hours and hours down the highway headed someplace I’d never even heard of when all I wanted to do was just get out of the car. Now, the conversations we had on those trips are the ones I remember most. Or when we started training in Ohio, and he made me do the same thing over and over and over again . . . I hated it so much, you know? But now I can’t look back on any of it without smiling.
“Like one time after my telekinesis finally came, we were training in the snow and he was throwing all these objects so I could learn to deflect them. I had to redirect them back at the source, and he heaved a meat tenderizer really hard at me, and I used its own velocity to whip it back at him; and at the very last second he had to jump headfirst into the snow to keep from being hit,” I say, smiling to myself. “The pile of snow was actually a snow-covered rosebush with all these thorns. You would not believe the noise he made. Stuff like that I won’t ever forget.”
A car approaches on the side of the road and we scoot off into the ditch until it passes. It whips into a stone driveway of a nearby house, and a man in a black leather jacket jumps out. He pounds on the front door, yelling for whoever is inside to open up.
“Jesus. What time is it?” I ask Six.
Six moves towards the man and the house, my hand still in hers. “Does it matter?”
As we creep within ten feet of him, the smell of alcohol hits me. He stops pounding his fist against the door to yell, “You better goddamn open this door, Charlene, or you don’t wanna know what I’m gonna do!”
Six sees the revolver in his waistband the same time I do and she squeezes my hand. “Screw this guy,” Six whispers.
He pounds again and again until the lights in the front window turn on. Then, through the door, a woman shouts, “Get out of here! Just get out of here, Tim!”
“Open the door right now!” he yells back. “Or else, Charlene! Or else, you hear me?”
We’re within touching distance of him. I can see the faded tattoo below his left ear is a bald eagle holding a snake in its talons.
She yells back, her voice shakier than before: “Just leave me alone, Tim! Why are you here? Why won’t you just leave me alone?”
He pounds and yells even harder. I’m about to put him in a choke hold, squeeze that bald eagle and snake right off his neck, when I see the gun slowly crawl up his lower back until it floats away from him in Six’s invisible hand. She puts the barrel of the gun up against the back of the man’s head and buries it in his brown hair. She cocks the hammer with a loud click.
The man stops pounding on the door. He stops breathing, too. Six pushes the gun even harder into his skull and then she pushes it stiffly to the right, spinning the man around. The sight of the floating gun in front of his face makes him go white. He blinks and shakes his head violently, expecting to wake up in his bed or in the back alley of whatever bar he came from. Six moves the gun side to side and I wait for her to say something, to really spook the hell out of him, but instead she suddenly turns the gun towards his car. She shoots, and a radius of broken glass appears on the windshield. He screams, shrilly, and burst into tears.
Six aims the gun at his face again and he quiets down, letting a stream of snot hit his upper lip. “Please, please, please,” he says. “I’m sorry, God. I, I, I’m gonna leave right now. I swear. I’m leaving.” Six cocks the hammer again. I see the curtain of the front window move to the right, and expose the face of a large blond woman. I squeeze Six’s hand and she squeezes back. “I’m leaving right now. I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” the man sputters to the gun. Six aims at his car again and empties the chamber with a loud bang; the rear driver’s side window explodes into a thousand pieces.
“No! Okay, okay!” the man shouts. There’s suddenly a wet spot on the inner thigh of his jeans. Six motions the gun at the front window, and he makes eye contact with the blond woman inside. “And I’ll never come back. I’ll never, ever, ever come back.” The gun bobs to the left twice, indicating he can leave. The man rips his car door open and dives in. Stones spit out from under his tires as he reverses out of the driveway and then barrels down the road. The woman in the window continues to stare at the handgun that’s floating next to her front door, and that’s when Six flings it over the house with such force that it’s sure to land in the next county.
We run back to the road and then we continue to run until there isn’t a house in sight. I wish I could see Six’s face.
“I could do that kind of stuff all day,” she finally says. “It’s like being a superhero.”
“Humans do love their superheroes,” I say. “Do you think she’ll call the police?”
“Nah. She’s probably going to think it was all a bad dream.”
“Or the best dream she’s ever had,” I say. Our talk turns to all the good things we could do for Earth with our Legacies if we weren’t busy being hunted or hated.
“How did you train yourself, anyway?” I ask. “I can’t imagine learning the things I did if it hadn’t been for Henri pushing me so much.”
“What other choice did I have? Either we adapt or we perish. So I adapted. Katarina and I trained for years before we were captured, but obviously never once after my Legacies developed. When I finally got out of that cave I promised myself that her death wasn’t going to be in vain, and the only way to do that was to seek revenge. So I picked up where we had left off. It was hard at first, especially on my own, but little by little I began to learn and grow stronger. Besides, I’ve had more time than you. My Legacies came sooner than yours, and I’m older than you.”
“You know,” I say, “my sixteenth birthday—or at least the day I celebrated as my birthday with Henri—was two days ago.”
“John! Why didn’t you tell us?” she asks, then lets go of my hand and playfully shoves me away, making me instantly visible. “We could have celebrated.”
I smile and reach for her, feeling blindly in the dark. She takes my hand and interlocks her fingers in mine, allowing my thumb to rest over hers. The thought of Sarah comes into my head, and I find myself instantly pushing it out.
“So what was she like?” I ask. “Katarina?”
A moment of silence passes. “Compassionate. She was always helping others. And she was funny. We used to joke and laugh a lot, which probably seems hard to believe, seeing how serious I usually am.”
I chuckle. “I didn’t say it, you did.”
“But hey, no changing the subject. Why didn’t you say anything about your birthday?”
“I don’t know. I actually forgot about it until yesterday, and then it just seemed pointless with everything else going on.”
“It’s your birthday, John; it’s not pointless. Every birthday any of us are lucky to have is cause for celebration, considering what’s hunting us. And anyway, had I known I might have even taken it easy on you in training.”
“Yeah, you must feel terrible beating up a guy like that on his birthday,” I say, and then nudge her. She nudges me back. Bernie Kosar leaps from the brambles and trots beside us. Several burrs are stuck to his fur like Velcro, and I let go of Six’s hand to pluck them all off.
We reach the end of the road. Tall grass and a winding river lie ahead of us. We turn around and amble back towards the house.
“Does it bother you that you never got your Chest?” I ask after a few minutes of silence.
“In a way I think it fueled me that much more. It was gone; there was nothing I could do about it. So I did what I thought was smart and chose to focus on finding the rest of you. I just wish I could have found Number Three before they did.”
“Well, you found me. I can’t imagine I would have survived this long if you hadn’t. Or Bernie Kosar, for that matter. Or even Sarah.” As soon as I say Sarah’s name, Six’s grip loosens a little. Guilt rises in my chest as we make our way back to the house. I do love Sarah, but it’s hard to imagine a life with her when I’m so far away, on the run, with no sense of where the future will take me. The only life I can imagine right now is the one I’m living. The one with Six.
We reach the house, and I find myself wishing our walk wasn’t over. I try to stall, slowing my steps, hovering at the end of the driveway.
“You know, I only know you as Six,” I say. “Did you have a name at one time?”
“Of course I did, but I didn’t use it very often. I didn’t go to school like you. Well, I did for a little while, but then we decided I was better off staying home.”
“So, what was your name?”
“Maren Elizabeth.”
“Whoa, really?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
“I don’t know; Maren Elizabeth seems kind of dainty and feminine. I think I expected you to have something strong and mythic, like Athena, or maybe Xena, you know, like the warrior princess? Or even Storm. Storm would have suited you perfectly.”
Six laughs, and the sound of it makes me want to pull her to me. Of course I don’t, but I want to, and maybe that’s what’s most telling.
“I’ll have you know, I used to be a little girl who once wore ribbons in her hair.”
“Yeah, what color?”
“Pink.”
“I think I’d pay money to see that.”
“Forget it, you don’t have enough.”
“I’ll have you know,” I say, mimicking the same playful voice she just used, “I have a whole Chest of rare gems at my disposal. Just point me in the direction of a pawn shop.”
She laughs, then says, “I’ll keep my eyes open for one.”
We continue to stand at the mouth of our driveway, and I look up at the stars and the moon, which is three-quarters full. I listen to the wind and to Six’s feet on the gravel as she shifts her weight from one leg to the other. I take a deep breath.
“I’m really glad we went for that walk,” I say.
“So am I.”
I look where she’s standing, wishing she were visible so I could read her expression. “Could you imagine if every night were like this, living your life without having to worry about what or who might be lurking out of sight, without always having to peer over your shoulder to see if you’re being followed? Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to forget, just once, what’s peeking over the horizon?”
“Of course it’d be nice,” she says. “And it will be nice when we finally have that luxury.”
“I hate what we have to do. I hate the situation we’re in. I wish it were different.” I look for Lorien in the sky and release her hand. She makes herself visible. I grab her by the shoulders and turn her towards me.
Six inhales deeply.
Just as I duck my head towards hers, an explosion rocks the back of the house. Six and I scream and tumble to the ground. A plume of fire lifts up over the roof, and flames instantly spread inside.
“Sam!” I yell. From fifty feet away I rip the front windows out. They shatter against the concrete walkway. Smoke comes billowing out.
Before I know it I’ve burst into a dead sprint. I take a deep breath and leap, crashing into the house and splintering the door from its hinges.