Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files (22 page)

Just when I feel like my brain is about to be fried to a crisp by the bombardment of colors, everything snaps into focus.

Suddenly, I’m standing in a sunlit banquet hall. Light pours into the room via a skylight through which I can see trees unlike any I’ve ever seen before, red and orange flowered vines hanging off tangled branches.

Although I’ve never been there—have only looked down on it from orbit—somehow I know that this is Lorien. And then I realize that I know where I am because Number One knows.

This is one of her memories.

In the center of the room is a large table covered with strange yet delicious-looking foods. Seated all around the table are Loric, all of them wearing fancy dresses and suits. I flinch when I see them—I’m outnumbered and my first instinct is to run, yet I’m pinned to this spot. I couldn’t move if I tried, stuck in this memory.

The Loric are all smiling, singing. They don’t seem at all alarmed that a Mogadorian has just appeared at their party. That’s when I realize they can’t see me. Of course not, I’m just a tourist in Number One’s mind.

And there she is, seated at the head of the table. She’s so young, maybe five or six, her blond hair pulled into two braids that dangle down her back. When the adults finish singing, she claps her hands in excitement, and I realize this is her birthday celebration. We don’t celebrate such foolish occasions on Mogadore, although some great warriors are known to mark the anniversary of their first kill with a feast.

What a useless memory. The General won’t be impressed if all I come back with is intel on Loric birthday parties.

Just like that the world goes blurry again and I’m falling. Time passes in a rush and I’m swept along, feeling sickeningly out of control.

Another memory takes shape.

Number One wanders through an open field, her hands extended so that the tall grasses tickle her outstretched palms. She’s maybe a year older than at the birthday party, still just a child, happily wandering around her undestroyed planet.

Boring.

One bends down and picks some flowers, twining the stalks together, then wrapping the flower chain around her wrist like a bracelet. How much of this am I going to have to sift through?

Maybe if I focus I can get some control of these memories. I need to see the other Garde, not this girly, happy Loric crap. I try to think about what I want to see—the faces of the Garde, their Cêpans—and then the memory in the field flashes away and I am somewhere else.

It’s nighttime, although the darkness is lit by dozens of fires raging nearby. The two Loric moons hang on opposite sides of the horizon. The ground shakes beneath my feet, an explosion nearby.

Number One and eight other children rush across a secluded airstrip, headed for a ship. Their Cêpans hurry them along, shouting orders. Some of the children are crying as their feet slap against the pavement. Number One is not; she stares over her shoulder as a Loric in a sleek bodysuit fires a cone of freezing cobalt energy into the face of a snarling piken. Number One’s eyes widen in admiration and fear.

This is it. The First Great Expansion. Exactly the memory I need to see.

“Run!” the Loric in the bodysuit shouts at the fleeing group of young Garde. His Legacies fully developed and powerful. Still, he’ll die on this night, just like all the others.

I sweep my eyes over the children, trying to take in as many details as I can. There’s a feral-looking boy with long black hair and another blond girl, younger than Number One, being carried by her Cêpan. Number One is older than most of the other kids, a detail that I know will help my father construct profiles of the remaining Garde. I count how many of them are boys and how many are girls, and try to memorize their most distinguishing features.

“Who the fuck are you?”

The voice is clearer than the thunderous sounds of war from the memory, as if it’s being piped right into my brain.

I turn my head and realize Number One is standing right next to me. Not the child Number One of the memory—no, this is Number One as I last saw her: blond hair flowing down her back, shoulders squared defiantly. A ghost. She’s looking right at me, expecting an answer.

She can’t be here; that doesn’t make sense. I wave my hand in front of her face, figuring that this must be some kind of glitch in Anu’s machine. There’s no way she’s really seeing me.

Number One slaps my hand away. I’m surprised that she can touch me, but then I remember that we’re
both
ghosts here.

“Well?” she asks. “Who are you? You don’t belong here.”

“You’re dead,” are the only words I can muster.

One looks down at herself. For a moment, the massive wound on her abdomen flickers into being. Just as quickly, it’s gone.

“Not in here.” She shrugs. “These are my memories. So in here I guess you’re stuck with me.”

I shake my head. “It’s impossible. You can’t be talking to me.”

One squints at me, thinking. “Your name is Adam, right?”

“How do you know that?”

She smirks. “We’re sharing a brain, Mog-boy. Guess that means I know a thing or two about you, too.”

Around us, the fleeing Garde have all boarded their ship, the engines now rumbling to life. I should be scanning the ship for any helpful details, but I’m too distracted by the dead girl sneering at me.

“Your scary-ass pops is going to be so disappointed when you wake up with nothing juicy to tell him.” She grabs me by the elbow, and the feeling is so real that I have to remind myself that this is basically just a dream.

A dream that Number One is suddenly in control of.

“You want my memories?” she asks. “Come on. I’ll give you a guided tour.”

As the scene changes again, I start to understand what’s happened.

I’m trapped in here with my sworn enemy. And she seems to be in charge.

CHAPTER 6

This time the memory shift is different. Before, I was falling through time, falling through memory. Now I feel still, and suddenly I’m standing outside a secluded ranch in Coahuila, Mexico. In this memory, One and her Cêpan are carrying boxes into the house. It’s moving day. This is the first place One and her Cêpan—Hilde, her Cêpan’s name was Hilde—settled after the Garde landed on Earth and parted ways.

Wait—how do I know all this?

It’s strange. In addition to finding myself existing here, observing this particular moment in One’s life, I also have a general sense of her memories of the time. I know the things that she knows and remember what she remembers. The memories are so vivid, it’s like they’re my own.

It’s like I’m her.

Ghost-One appears next to me, watching with me as the younger version of herself and Hilde unpack dishes in the kitchen. It’s creepy to have her here, gives me a feeling like vertigo. I try to ignore her, but she just keeps talking to me.

“We stayed here for a while,” she says, sounding almost wistful. “Then Hilde thought she saw some of your peeps snooping around the city, so we had to leave.”

The Garde move a lot, city to city, country to country, their movements unpredictable. My father will want to know this. It’s completely the opposite of the way we Mogadorians have done it, consolidating our power in bases across the globe. That’s why they’re so difficult to track.

“She was sort of a drag sometimes,” says One, watching her Cêpan. “Probably a lot like your dickbag dad. Except, you know, not eeee-vil.” She rubs her fingers together and cackles an eeee-vil cackle in punctuation.

“Shut up,” I spit, sounding angrier than I even realized I was. “You don’t know him.”

I find myself studying Hilde in spite of myself. She’s in her late fifties, and her face is wrinkled, both with the natural lines of age and the premature weathering of stress. Her gray hair tightly bound in a stern braid. Her eyes have a hardness to them; her voice is steely and measured, even when just telling One—the “real” One—which cupboard the plates belong in. Truth be told, she does remind me of the General.

“I loved her like a mom, though,” says ghost-One, sadness breaking her voice. My mind drifts to the dead old woman we left to rot in Malaysia, and I feel something like guilt but quickly push it away. She’s messing with your head, Adamus.

“I wish you’d stop talking to me,” I tell her.

“Yeah? Well I wish your people hadn’t killed me.”

After Mexico, One and Hilde move to Austin, Texas. I try to push my way out of these memories, to get back to that night on the Loric airstrip where I can actually find out something useful, but One won’t let me. Somehow she’s blocking me.

I may be an uninvited guest in her mind, but it’s still hers. She can’t kick me out entirely, but she does have some control over which rooms I’m allowed to visit.

Most of the time when I try to force my way through her memory, One makes me sit through one of her and Hilde’s training sessions.

“I used to hate these,” One says, grinning. “Hope you feel the same.”

Hilde is a master martial artist, though it’s a fighting style that would never make it into Mogadorian training, where brute force is prized above all else. Hilde’s is a defensive martial art, one that uses an attacker’s own momentum, focusing strikes on nerve centers that will temporarily incapacitate the enemy.

Stuck in these memories, when boredom sets in, I find myself aping Hilde’s movements, practicing alongside young One. I know that none of this is real, that it’s all in my mind. Or One’s mind. I’m not so sure there’s a difference.

My slight frame has never served me well in Mogadorian combat training, much to the disappointment of my father and the amusement of Ivan. But in One’s memories, I never get tired. Even if this training is basically imaginary, it feels good to finally move in a way that suits me.

Besides, I’m supposed to be gathering intelligence. How the Garde fight is essential information.

In the earlier training memories, One is an eager pupil. She practices with Hilde from dawn until sunset, listening rapt as Hilde tells stories of the Loric heroes she’s helped train. Hilde is full of tales of honorable competition, of noble battles fought on Lorien. They’re meant to inspire, to demonstrate to One the Loric spirit of perseverance. Compared to the stories in the Great Book, there is a surprising lack of bloody violence and decimation in them.

“One day,” says Hilde, “you will take your place among them as a great hero to our people. You will be known as the One who protected the Eight.”

I can feel the pride Number One takes in Hilde’s words, but also the doubt. There’s a part of her that wonders how she can possibly stand alone in opposition to the Mogadorians that conquered her entire planet in a single night.

“I always wondered why I couldn’t have gotten lucky and been number
nine
,” muses One as I practice forms next to her younger self. “But
nooo.
I have to go and be the
first
. Otherwise known as the most doomed of nine doomed assholes. The Elders really screwed me over.”

In Austin, Hilde lets One start attending school, all the better to fit in. I’m dragged along on these memories of her classes. School seems so pointless. The General would never even consider letting us freely socialize with the humans.

And yet, as the memories go by, I find myself being drawn into One’s life. She makes some friends, takes up skateboarding. It all starts to feel like something approaching a normal life. At the same time, her training slips. She starts blowing off sessions, even after her telekinesis develops, which is when she should’ve been working extra hard. For all her rigidity, Hilde couldn’t really do anything to One if she slipped out a window to go hang out with her friends. How do you ground the last hope for a dying race?

I don’t really care about One’s freaking social life. This girl is the enemy of my people. Her death is inevitable, has already happened. And yet … drifting through her memories, I can’t help but put myself in her situation. Even though she travels the Earth under the constant threat of execution, I realize that One has gotten to see more of this planet than I have. The General has never allowed us to travel out of Washington. Hilde might be a tough Cêpan, but she still allows One to go to school, to make friends, to live a life not entirely dedicated to war.

I wonder what that’s like. I wonder what my life would be like without the need to serve Mogadorian expansion, without the drills and training, the supervised readings from Ra’s Great Book.

“This is, like, one of my all-time favorites,” says ghost-One, introducing the memory of her punching a cheerleader in the face. The cheerleader started it; she’d been picking on One since she started school in Austin. It’s weird, but I feel some of One’s sense of satisfaction.

Of course, the punch gets her kicked out of school, which is all the reason Hilde needs to relocate them again. They leave Austin in a beat-up station wagon, heading for California. One sulks in the passenger seat the whole ride, reclined all the way back, ignoring Hilde in favor of the three seashells she keeps levitated above her with her telekinesis.

We Mogadorians have been warned of the Garde’s deadly telekinesis. Watching One juggle the seashells, scrunching up her nose in concentration, it doesn’t seem all that deadly. More like mesmerizing. And it’s not just the telekinesis either. The way her blond hair is fanned beneath her …

I turn away. Was I just checking out the dead Garde whose memories I’ve stolen? I tell myself it was for research purposes, although a description of how the sun brings out the blonder streaks in One’s nice hair is likely not the intel my father expects of me.

When they arrive in California, Hilde tries to inspire One with some kind of Loric magic so that she’ll start taking her training more seriously.

“You’ll want to see this,” ghost-One tells me, appearing at my side to watch.

Using what appear at first to be plain glass orbs, Hilde creates a floating map of the Loric galaxy. The swirling cosmos, the bright orange sun, and the dead, gray planet Lorien.

“Do you see what the Mogadorians have done?” Hilde asks young Number One.