Chapter 10: Reluctance

[Five II - Numero Cinco]

Surprisingly, the great Number Nine knows how to sleep. I wouldn't have expected it from the guy- he's too god damn nervous about me stabbing him in his sleep "like I did to his friend Eight." What a card, this guy.

I don't have plans to do anything to him; not yet, in any case. As he snores bear-like, I take the other bed and distantly flip through channels on our television. It's flat screen, which I see getting more and more common in hotel rooms these days. I guess it'll do.

I try not to glance at the bathroom, or even at the wall that separates us from the wall and the bathroom- the water hasn't even stopped yet. The whole of the drywall looks like a wet towel, and about as sturdy as one. It might not have been the best idea to do that with the tub..

As I flip, one channel catches my eye. Like most channels, they show New York- but not from Jersey, or Long Island like most cell-phone videos do. This is full up professional video- almost HD, but not quite. Nine passes from my mind for a moment as I grope for the volume button on the remote.

The video is from some kind of armored car- I can tell from the hard, metal interior and the tiny window of hardened glass that separates the cameraman from the towering skyscrapers above him. He's on the ground,somewhere, in New York, in a… in a tank.

The video shifts to the right and to the left showing that there's a tank flanking our first man on either side, and then looks back ahead and focuses in on something at the end of the road, just around the corner. There's a single pizza shop remaining, untouched, on the corner, and an American Flag waves lightly in the utter silence of the screen.

And past that is a giant wall of cars. Stacked and cemented into the pavement, piled three high, surrounding some kind of building- it sits, squat, no more than five stories high- an outlier in its surroundings. Not even half the windows on the side facing the tanks remain, and inside I can see the hustle and bustle of a fucking lot of people. It's like a parade inside that building.

I hear the announcer with a start as they switch back to her- she's slightly wilted in her late fifties, if I had to take a guess, her greying blonde curls swishing as she shakes her head. "Those images are brought to us from the Second Loric Army in New York- or so they call themselves. SLANY leads the fight of the remaining New Yorkers who are still trapped inside the city as the sun sets here today, with that alien warship in the background," she takes a breath and continues, "Headed by a boy named John Smith, the SLANY have a very interesting story to tell us. This is video of Smith's speech to his almost three thousand followers at just two in the afternoon- almost six hours ago."

The announcer's face is gone, and suddenly John is there. The footage is significantly worse than the tank-photographer's, but I can still see him clear as day. I can hear his words as well, chilling me to the bone. Despite it being a balmy seventy-two in here, I still chill.

"My name is John Smith to most- but that's a name I've had for only a few months. Before I was Daniel Jones, and more- I travelled around the country, like all of my kind," He pauses and laughs silently to himself, looking out over the crowd. "I never would've thought I'd tell this story in front of a crowd, I'll have to say. My people, the Loric, and I - we've been on the run from the Mogadorians for eleven years now. They destroyed our planet Lorien in the fall of 1999, for a variety of reasons, but yet we still live. As far as we know, only twenty-one people made it off planet before they managed to get a tight radar to encompass the planet and siege out the remaining strongholds. I am one of these- an alien, who came to Earth to hide and to train, to continue the fight one day. Do I have any questions so far?"

Almost everyones' hand shoots skyward. When John picks one at random and three people talk, he tells them to go in turn. The first one speaks:

"Why didn't you warn us of the imminent attack?" It doesn't sound accusatory, just a genuine question.

John pours over that for a second, racking his brain for the correct answer, the one everyone wants to hear. "Let me ask you, instead. If I had told you that everyone on the planet would be invaded by aliens, would you have taken it seriously?"

This keeps him quiet.

"Besides. My legacies were still forming, I was not yet ready to fight. I am now. Next question?"

The asker is a girl, barely a teenager by the looks of it. She smiles up to John, at his place on the podium, and asks with a gap-toothed grin that I can see through the grains of the cell-phone camera. "What are Leg- Legasies?"

John smiles at this, then looks out at the crowd. "There is much you need to know. First, aliens do exist, as I have said before. Second, they come with superpowers," his grin widens. "Of the twenty-one known escapees from the planet, ten of us were known as Garde. When we come of age, Lorien gifts us powers- these can vary greatly in usage, but all are useful. All Garde are gifted with telekinesis," He lifts up the little girl and pushes her in a slight circle so she rotates a full 360, then sets her back down. Some of the crowd gasp in disbelief, but others seem to have seen John's power in action before.

"I myself also have the power called Lumen, which makes me impervious to heat and gives the ability to control fire. I can also talk to animals, I can heal any wound, lethal or nonlethal at a touch, and like all Garde I have physical enhancements."

"Can you show us?" The girl is so excited at the prospect that John can't resist. He lights his palms and shines them down at his feet, bright lasers that light his pant legs on fire. The whole group takes in a breath sharply as he continues to talk.

"I can control it. I can feel its ebbs and flows. I can shoot fireballs, I can do whatever I want with it," The fire travels quickly up his pants, engulfing everything up to his neck. He continues his speech for a moment like this, standing.

"I won't trouble you with the details of why I'm not naked at the moment, if you don't mind," he tells the little girl, laughing. With one hand motion he strikes downward and the fire goes out, as quickly as it was there.

He points to the other one who started to talk at first. "The third question?"

"Yeah, when you say you were on the run… what if you got, like… caught? Wouldn't that screw things up badly for you guys?

"The Loric elders took every precaution in making us safe and secure until it was our time- they cast an ancient charm on the Nine of us who they could find, branding us together and making it so that we could only be killed in order. Number One died in 2004, somewhere in Malaysia. Number Two died in an apartment in London in 2007, after being tortured for half an hour for information on the rest of us. Number Three died six months ago in the jungles of Kenya. That's when Number Six found me in Ohio after I supposedly destroyed that school. That was the loophole in the Charm- once we come together, the charm is broken.

"We split up, as we knew we must. Six went to Spain to find Seven and a tenth member of the Garde who arrived on a second ship from Lorien, called Ella. I went to the Mogadorian's base of operations in West Virginia and found Nine hidden away in their cells, long forgotten.

"Six, Seven and Ten journeyed to India to find Number Eight. There they teleported back to New Mexico and met up with me and Nine, and there in the desert we had our first showdown with the Mogadorian leader, Sektrakus Ra. He very nearly decimated us, but with the knick-of-time arrival of a Mogadorian defector, Adamus Sutekh, he was forced to retreat.

Now they're all puzzled by this; I can see it on their faces. Disbelief, maybe. Doubt. But then John continues.

"We regrouped in a safehouse in Chicago, in the John Hancock building, which I'm sure you all have heard what happened to in these last few days. We journeyed to Arkansas to find the last of the Garde, Number Five, but he was not who we thought he was. Just as Adamus was a defector to our cause, Five had betrayed us for the Mogadorians. He tricked us into taking a trip into an ambush where he killed Number Eight and split the rest of us up, just four days ago in the Everglades. In Chicago they sacked our safe-house and abducted Ella for unknown reasons.

"And here we stand now. Me, Six, Seven, Nine and Adam- the Second Loric Army, along with our human allies in the Goode family, Sarah Hart and Mark James, as well as Agent Karen Walker and the members of her task force still loyal to her after today.

"Here I stand up here, in front of you, with a plea. If we do nothing, the Mogadorians will do to Earth exactly what they did to Lorien. They have already set up their radar systems, they have already begun the siege of you-our-cities. The fire in John's eyes grows ever brighter as he talks.

"Join us! The time to stand and fight is now! The time to unite is now!"

The crowd erupts in cheers as we transfer back to the interviewer, the old lady with the white-blonde hair. "Here at Channel 9, we stand with the Loric, I don't know about our viewers. They number close to ten thousand in SLANDY as the sun sets, and no doubt there will be more by morning. I think they could use a little help right now. We will continue to update you with the situations in New York and Los Angeles as the night wears on. Stay tuned, we'll be right back," And then they transition to some commercial about toothpaste.

"Johnny Boy's sure a talker, isn't he?" Nine startles me- I wasn't even paying him enough attention to know that he had woken up.

"Yep. He sure is," I grit my teeth ever so slightly. None of what he said is wrong, really… I'm just… I don't know how I feel about it. I did slay Eight, I did defect… I like to think I can make up for that. What's the old term? An eye for an eye?

"Well, old boy, I think we should probably be getting back to our… friend, right? Join him and his growing army? Get out and murder some Mogs? That is… unless you want to go back to your Beloved Daddy."

I shoot him eyes like hateful icicles. "No. We can't."

He stands, approaches me with a cold stare. "And why not? I don't need you, Flyboy. I'm going, whether you come or not," there's almost no anger in his words. Just as if he's stating a fact.

When I don't say anything, he continues. For whatever reason.

"Look, I know you don't believe anymore. You go to Loric hell for all I care. But I'm not going there, I am not going there." The last part is mostly him mumbling to himself as he rounds the beds, straightening his shirt to cover his still-bloody wounds.

As he moves for the door I grab him on his arm, on a still-open glass cut. He winces and turns around to me, ready to swing. "Do I have to say twice?"

"No, we can't go there. I think there's only one place we can agree to go- and you know as well as I do."

"The fuck are you talking about?" He can't see it. It's been eating at me since I saw that, too- Ella being taken as John falls. These things are spreading way faster than they should be, it's only been hours. But I set it aside when I saw the footage- She's up there- another of my kind. And with him.

"Ella, Nine! She's up there with Ra, probably being tortured for turning on him! You can't say you feel nothing for her, I've seen you two!"

His gaze, if it is possible, turns even more to stone. He rips my hand away, but doesn't make for the door this time. "What makes you think we could do it?"

"Low radar profile, mostly."

He shoots me a quizzical look.

"I mean, being just the two of us would give a very safe ascent to their warship floating above the bay! That's how we can get her- both of us know that's where she is."

He nods.

"And I don't think I can rescue her alone, Nine. I just don't think I can."

That wins the asshole over. "I figured as much, Flyboy," he stomps a few more steps forward in deep concentration. Then he turns around. "Fine. We'll go it your way. But don't think for a second I'm doing it for you, you hear?"

It's my turn to nod.