CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: I'M LEAVING THE GROUND

9

I press my head back into the nape of my neck, close my eyes and take a deep breath.

When I was younger, I always imagined joining the other Garde and fighting the Mogs would be fun and exciting. I dreamed of epic battles, action-packed chases, thrilling duels and glorious victories.

But this, this is just plain stupid. No one ever told me that saving the world would be so frustratingly monotonous.

Boring.

I sigh and open my eyes again. Guess being an alien is harder than it appears.

Looking up at the ceiling, I continue checking for spots that won't crumble right away when I try landing on them.

But since I pretty much destroyed every single one of those spots the last few times I wandered around up there, it's almost impossible to find one. In fact, facing the web of gaping cracks that covers the ceiling's entire surface, I wonder how the whole structure didn't collapse right on top of us yet.

Well, got to act before that happens, right? With one last look at the hopeless mess of a ceiling we got there, I decide to just try anyway. What's the worst thing that can happen?

Okay, hundreds of tons of marble could come crashing down on us and bury us alive, but in the end, that's still better than getting caught by the approaching Mog troops, right? At least I won't have to hear Six' nagging anymore this way.

I crouch down and get ready to jump up there one more time. The warm sensation of summoning my antigravity powers is already tickling in my bones when Six grabs me by the shoulder and holds me back.

"What the hell do you think you are doing?" she grumbles, not even trying to hide the aggressiveness in her voice. Who could blame her? The constant noises of battle outside are starting to give me a headache, too.

"Getting out of here?" I reply, trying to shake off her hand, but she doesn't let me.

"You'll never learn, will you? You remember what happened the last few times you tried doing it that way?" she says and I shrug.

"If you never try you never know."

"Yeah, but you've tried nine times already," she points out sceptically.

"Let's make it a round number, then."

"Are you really this dumb, Nine?" she says with an annoyed undertone. "You are so lucky you got the last number. If you were anything below four you'd already be dead long ago."

I grind my teeth about that last comment and turn to face her.

"Alright then, Six, if you are so much smarter than me, then tell me how else we're going to make it out of here! You wouldn't possibly have a way to reach that hole without climbing the ceiling?"

"Actually I do," she replies. "It's pretty simple. We just lift each other up there by using telekinesis. End of the story."

I blink at her a few times. I didn't expect her to actually have a plan, and now she caught me off guard.

The only times I used my telekinesis on anything but inanimate objects was to bash Mogs out of my way. I have no idea if I'll actually be able to levitate Six without breaking every bone in her body.

On the other hand, that won't be much of an issue. If Six thinks she can do it, I sure as hell can, too.

As much as I try to deny it, all in all her idea sounds way better and less dangerous than anything I've come up with so far.

"Might be worth a try," I grumblingly admit and Six gives me a triumphant grin.

"Lift me up first, and once I'm through the hole, I'll get you up there," I add to make her moment of victory pass as quickly as possible.

She nods, and without further warning, she takes a step away from me, closes her eyes and raises both her arms in a fluent motion.

I let out a manly squeak as a sudden grasp forms around my body and squeezes the air out of my lungs. My initial instinct to break free of the invisible force that presses against me from all sides is useless. It's way stronger than I had imagined. In fact, it's so firm, I can hardly breathe.

"Not…so…tight," I manage to get out, gasping for air.

"Oh, sorry, I hadn't noticed" she says in a somewhat unconvincing way. She keeps me on tenterhooks for another moment, then the clamp around me loosens up a bit.

"You know, they say a firm grip says a lot about a person," she adds with a pleased giggle. I role my eyes and let out a muffled grunt.

"Ready?" Six asks.

"Does it matter?" I respond, and she shoots me a sheepish smile. Or at least I think so. I'm not sure, because at the next moment I'm yanked off my feet, heading towards the ceiling. It's one of the strangest feelings I've ever experienced, the sensation of suddenly losing the ground below your feet, followed by complete weightlessness and the pressing and squeezing everywhere.

I press my lips together to prevent any more screams from escaping.

"You alright up there?" Six yells, and I nod down at her in confirmation. I don't trust my voice not to be pitched quite yet.

I'm already about ten feet above the ground, still rushing higher when I suddenly notice something is wrong. Something has changed. Something is missing. Something that has been there for a while now is gone.

It takes me a few seconds of concentrated thinking to realize what it is.

The sounds of battle outside our cell have disappeared. No more gunfire, no more cries, no more explosions. The fight seems to be over. One of the two sides must have won. And you don't have to be a strategic genius to know which one that could be.

Just as this thought strikes me, a sudden noise nearby makes me tense up.

"Are you hearing this?" I yell down at Six.

"Hearing what?" she shouts back up.

"Someone's talking, like, right outside our cell," I say, closing my eyes to hear more clearly. It's louder than just a few seconds ago, which means whoever it is that is talking over there must be getting closer to our cell.

It must be at least two people talking to each other – hi not Mogadorians, thank god – and by the sound of it they aren't exactly having the friendliest conversation.

"…Heavy casualties, Ma'am. Those missiles took out half the base before we could react. And have you seen their guns, Ma'am? They just tore through tanks like they were nothing. It's like those guys are not from this world," a male voice rings through to us.

"You are seeing ghosts, Jenkins," a woman answers with a loud, pitched laugh. "Now open this door or I'll get over there and do it myself. You don't want agent Purdy to hear about this disregard of orders, now, do you?"

"That's her," Six gasps and turns around to where the voices are coming from. "That's agent Walker!"

In her excitement, Six seems to completely forget about moving me any higher. With a jolt, my ascent comes to a stop and I'm stuck in mid air, floating a few feet below the ceiling.

I'd tell her to finish getting me up there before anything bad happens, but I don't want to miss out on what the two people outside our cell are saying. Maybe they have news about the other Loric. Who knows.

"…and that's why you will open it, immediately!" the woman is yelling, and now I recognize her voice, too. Six was right, it is our good old agent Walker.

"Ma'am, you… With all due respect, you need to go see a medic. That wound on your head…" the man begins in a nervous tone, but Walker interrupts him.

"To hell with the god damn wound, Jenkins, stop blubbering about it," agent Walker's voice rings through to us and I can't help but shudder at its sound. There's something oddly creepy about it, something that gives me cold goosebumps.

"If ol' agent Walker wanted to hear someone cry around all day long, I would have become a nurse and not an FBI agent."

She lets out another hysteric, pitched laugh.

"Now open this darned cell, Soldier, I need to have a little talk with our little friends."

"You can't go in there now, Ma'am," the man firmly says after a short pause of silence. "I mustn't open it, those are my orders. No one enters this cell, whether it's one of them or one of us. No exceptions."

"But…But… But I'm the one who gives orders around here, soldier!" Walker barks back, her voice changing from sounding miserable to freaking furious within just one sentence.

"Not anymore," the man replies, and you can clearly hear the nervousness in his voice. "Agent Purdy told us not to take orders from you anymore, Miss. He said you were suspended after the park-fiasco."

"FIASCO?"

There's a short pause, during which Walker starts to repeatedly let out snorts of anger while mumbling things like "he did not just..." or "that's just not fair". After a while, she gets louder and louder, until she finally reminds me of a bull's panting in a rodeo, right before he's about to dash off towards the matador.

"Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to…" the soldier begins, but a deafening gunshot cuts him off. A loud groan and the sound of a body dropping to the floor follow.

Six inhales loudly and seems to have fully forgotten about me still floating around in the air, because her grip around me slowly begins to loosen up.

"Umm, Six?" I gingerly ask, but she's too distracted by the scene we just witnessed to even notice.

"Six, if you don't mind…" I try again, but she doesn't even seem to hear me.

And before I can say anything else, her grasp around me is fully gone and the next thing I know is I'm dropping the entire thirty feet from the ceiling to the ground one more time.

The cracking sound my bones make when I land on my back is scary. A numbing pain shoots through my spine, and I think I must have broken at least a few ribs.

Six turns around to me, startled by my groans of pain. It takes her a second to realize how I got from floating around near the ceiling to lying down here so quickly.

"Oh, woops, sorry," she mumbles, rushing over to where I landed. Grabbing me by the arm, she slowly helps me up.

"Are you alright, Nine?" she says in a strange tone I've never heard from her before. That couldn't possibly be concern in her voice?

I let out a loud moan in response. The pain creeping through my back as I get on my feet is sharp, but bearable. Maybe I didn't break anything after all. Maybe I was lucky.

"I'll take that as a yes," Six says and turns back to the direction agent Walker's voice came from.

I roll my eyes and let out a resigning sigh. Six can be so easy to hate at times.

I try walking, which works just fine, the only problem is that I can't keep my upper body upright while doing so. All in all, though, I'm glad nothing else happened. Things could be much worse right now.

And that's exactly when it gets worse.

A loud buzz comes from the force field, so loud it keeps on ringing in my ears a few seconds after the actual sound is gone already. I toss my head from side to side, looking for the source of the sudden noise. A small hole begins to form at exactly the same spot agent Walker entered through last time she paid our cell a visit. And just like last time, I hardly recognize the FBI agent as she limps through the hole and enters our cell with a shrill "TADAAAA!".

It's hard to believe, but her appearance actually seems to have worsened even more since we last saw her. There's a huge gash on her head, still fresh and bleeding heavily, as if it has just recently been inflicted. From the fight with the Mogs, maybe. Or maybe she just hit her head somewhere. She's so unsteady on her feet, uncontrollably swinging from side to side as she slowly moves towards us, I wouldn't be surprised if she got it from falling on her face.

Pens and small scraps of white paper are sticking out of the scorched orange tufts that once used to be her hair, and I don't even want to know how they got there. The left half of her face is covered in a crust of soot, blood and dirt. This combined with the sinister, insane smile on her lips gives her the looks of some sort of psychopathic murderer. Her eyes are torn wide open, staring at Six and me with a mix of irritated emptiness and mad amusement.

To be honest, she looks way scarier than most of the crazy killers in all those horror movies Sandor and I used to watch back when he was still alive. She just seems so…real.

"Good evening, my little alien friends," Walker says in one of the creepiest voices I have ever heard. I know right then that this moment will haunt me in my sleep for a very long time.

I shake my head and force myself to focus. Walker is alone, there's no sign of any other enemies, neither human nor Mogadorian. I don't know exactly what happened to the soldier she talked to earlier, but I don't think this version of agent Walker let him walk away just like that. The agent doesn't look like she actually knows what's going on around her. She's definitely in a way worse condition than us; we can easily take her down, no problem.

If we do it quickly, Six and I might even still have enough time to escape through the hole in the ceiling and get as far away form here as possible before the Mogs get to this cell. With a headstart, we might have a chance of escaping the situation without having to deal with an entire army of angry Mogadorian folks.

Walker whistles a cheerful tune as she slowly moves closer towards us, occasionally stopping and muttering unintelligible things to herself before raising her voice again.

"My little alien friends!" She greets us, making a small pause to run her tongue over her lips with a creepy slurping sound.

"Ol' agent Walker believes she owes you an apology. It was rude of her to just leave you pretty little alien kiddies standing like that on her last visit. Not nice at all. So, in order to continue discussing the matters we talked about earlier, might ol' agent Walker invite you to join her on a little walk outside these adorably comfortable premises?" she asks, her voice pitched in childishly overacted friendliness.

"Yeah, sure, a little walk while there are thousands of Mogs waiting for us outside this cell," I reply calmly. The sarcasm in my voice seems to irritate Walker, and she briefly just stares at me with an empty expression.

"So is that a yes, then?" she asks hopefully, and I role my eyes in disbelief. What the hell is wrong with these humans?

Taking a deep breath, I prepare to attack the agent at the next opportunity. We can't waste any more time with her.

"No? They don't want to come with us? That's a shame. Well, then we'll just have to do it the hard way, right?" Walker silently mumbles, and I get the strange feeling that she's not talking to us.

"My little alien friends," she then adds with a louder voice. "Ol' agent Walker didn't want it to come to this, but she brought you a gift, just for this very special occasion."

With a quick movement, she takes out a big, old-fashioned hunting rifle from the inside of her coat.

She curses as it gets caught in a loose rag from her shirt, though, and for a second she's too occupied with trying to free it to pay us any attention. This is our chance.

Before I can reconsider it, I start dashing towards Walker, ready to tackle her and wrest the gun from her hands before she can fire it.

But just when I am close enough to reach her with one big leap, a sharp, piercing pain shoots through my spine. All those times I landed on my back finally seem to take their toll.

I stumble and fall to the floor, a blaring cry of pain escaping my throat. My vision ignites in a harsh white spark and for a moment, I'm unable to do anything but just lie on my side and gasp for air, trying not to lose consciousness.

Then, there's another scream, not mine this time. Six' voice seems to come form really far away when she shouts something I can't quite understand, as if I was lying behind a thick layer of glass. The panic and anger in her voice are enough to somewhat clear my head, though and after a few seconds of struggling with myself, I manage to more or less regain control over my mind.

When I open my eyes, all I see are strangely buckled, blurry objects and lights. I force myself to focus on the one that resembles Six the most and wait for my eyes to adjust. It takes about four or five seconds for my vision turns sharp again, and slowly but surely, I can make out Six' silhouette. Shaky details follow: her long, blonde dyed hair, the olive skin tone of her face, her mouth gaping wide open in some sort of shock, her flashing grey eyes filled with disbelief and horror, fixed on me.

"What?" I manage to cough with a hoarse voice, trying to sit up, but Six just shakes her head. She seems too upset to even speak. With a shaky hand, she points at my chest, her mouth opening and closing over and over again without making a single sound.

I hesitatingly follow her gaze and look down at myself, from my torn up shoes to the dirty Jeans all the way up to my ripped shirt.

Then I raise both eyebrows in surprise.

That's odd. Last time I checked, the heavily bleeding hole gaping right in the middle of my chest wasn't there.

Hey there, folks!

It'sa me, back with another chapter, yay.

Thanks for all your reviews, made me so happy I spent the entire day on this piece of crap =)

SWOOOSH, TRANSITION TO THE REVIEW-ANSWERING SECTION:

ArcticBlue: There ya go :D

ZazzyZ: I'm afraid you're gonna have to wait presumably one or two more chapters before you'll find out, sorry bout that

Seretly-I-am-Number-Nine: Thanks, I personally can't really stand that part :)

I-wish-I-could-be-Number-five: Thanks, the last couple of chapters of that new story of yours, too, lovely work, grats, really

lorpujan: I'm not gonna give away anything :) Why does everyone hate Sarah/John so much, though o.O

destinybroughtme: This might just be your lucky day, mate

See you all next chapter, have a great time until then, and thanks so much for reading my story :D