“Where is she?”
“In the room next door, with Sam and Mark.”
I stand. My muscles and joints ache in protest, everything stiff and sore. I am wearing a clean T-shirt, a pair of mesh shorts. My skin is fresh with the smell of soap. The cuts have been cleaned and bandaged, a few of them stitched.
“Did you do all of this?” I ask.
“Most of it. The stitches were hard. We only had the ones Henri put in your head to go on as an example. Sam helped with them.”
I look at Sarah sitting on the bed, her legs pulled underneath her. Something else catches my eye, a small mass that has shifted beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. I tense, and immediately my mind returns to the weasels that sped across the gym. Sarah sees what I am looking at and smiles. She crawls to the bottom of the bed on her hands and knees.
“There’s somebody here who wants to say hello,” she says, then takes the corner of the blanket and gently peels it back to reveal Bernie Kosar, sleeping away. A metal splint goes the length of his front leg, and his body is covered with cuts and gashes that, like mine, have been cleaned and are already beginning to heal. His eyes slowly open and adjust, eyes rimmed with red, full of exhaustion. He keeps his head on the bed but his tail gives a subtle wag, softly thumping against the mattress.
“Bernie,” I say, and drop to my knees before him. I place my hand softly on his head. I can’t stop smiling and tears of joy surface. His small body is curled into a ball, head resting on his front paws, his eyes taking me in, battle scarred and wounded but still here to tell the tale.
“Bernie Kosar, you made it through. I owe my life to you,” I say, and kiss the top of his head.
Sarah runs her hand down the length of his back.
“I carried him to the truck while Mark carried you.”
“Mark. I’m sorry I ever doubted him,” I say.
She lifts one of Bernie Kosar’s ears. He turns and sniffs at her hand and then licks it. “So, is it true what Mark said, that Bernie Kosar grew to thirty feet tall and killed a beast almost double his size?”
I smile. “A beast triple his size.”
Bernie Kosar looks at me. Liar, he says. I look down and wink at him. I stand back up and look at Sarah.
“All of this,” I say. “All of this has happened so fast. How are you handling it?”
She nods. “Handling what? The fact that I’ve fallen in love with an alien, which I only found out about three days ago, and then just happened to walk headlong into the middle of a war? Yeah, I’m handling that okay.”
I smile at her. “You’re an angel.”
“Nah,” she says. “I’m just a girl crazy in love.”
She gets up from the bed and wraps her arms around me and we stand in the center of the room holding one another.
“You really have to leave, don’t you?”
I nod.
She takes a deep breath and exhales shakily, willing herself not to cry. More tears in the past twenty-four hours than I have ever witnessed in all the years of my life.
“I don’t know where you have to go or what you have to do, but I’ll wait for you, John. Every bit of my heart belongs to you, whether you ask for it or not.”
I pull her to me. “And mine belongs to you,” I say.
I walk across the room. Sitting on top of the desk are the Loric Chest, three packed bags, Henri’s computer, and all the money from the last withdrawal he made at the bank. Sarah must have rescued the Chest from the home-ec room. I place my hand on it. All the secrets, Henri had said. All of them contained within this. In time I’ll open it and discover them, but that time is certainly not now. And what did he mean about Paradise, that our coming wasn’t by chance?
“Did you pack my bags?” I ask Sarah, who is standing behind me.
“Yes, and it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
I lift my bag from the table. Beneath it is a manila envelope carrying my name across the front of it.
“What is this?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I found it in Henri’s bedroom. We went there after leaving the school and tried to grab everything we could; then we came here.”
I open the envelope and pull out the contents. All of the documents Henri had created for me: birth certificates, social security cards, visas, and so on. I count through them. Seventeen different identities, seventeen different ages. On the very front sheet is a sticky note in Henri’s writing. It reads, “Just in case.” After the last sheet is another sealed envelope, across which Henri has written my name. A letter, the one he must have been talking about just before he died. I don’t have the heart to read it now.
I look out the window of the hotel room. A light snow sifts down from the low, gray clouds overhead. The ground is too warm for any of it to stick. Sarah’s car and Sam’s father’s blue truck are parked beside each other in the lot. As I stand looking down at them a knock sounds at the door. Sarah opens it and Sam and Mark walk into the room; Six limps behind them. Sam hugs me, says he’s sorry.
“Thank you,” I say.
“How do you feel?” Six asks. She is no longer wearing the suit but is now dressed in the pair of jeans she wore when I first saw her, and one of Henri’s sweatshirts.
I shrug. “I’m okay. Sore and stiff. My body feels heavy.”
“The heaviness is from the dagger. It’ll eventually wear off, though.”
“How badly were you stabbed?” I ask.
She lifts her shirt and shows me the gash in her side, then a different one on her back. All told, she was stabbed three times last night, and that’s not to mention the various cuts along the rest of her body, or the shot that left a deep gash in her right thigh, now wrapped tightly with gauze and tape, the reason for her limp. She tells me that by the time we made it back it was too late to be healed by the stone. It amazes me that she is even alive.
Sam and Mark are wearing the same clothes as the day before, both filthy and covered in mud and dirt with smatterings of blood mixed in. Both with heavy eyes as though they’ve yet to sleep. Mark stands behind Sam, shifting his weight uncomfortably.
“Sam, I always knew you were a wrecking machine,” I say.
He laughs uncertainly. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. “How about you?”
“Doing okay.”
I look over his shoulder at Mark.
“Sarah told me you carried me off the field last night.”
Mark shrugs. “I was happy to help.”
“You saved my life, Mark.”
He looks me in the eye. “I think every one of us saved somebody at some point last night. Hell, Six saved me on three separate occasions. And you saved my two dogs on Saturday. I say we’re even.”
I somehow manage to smile. “Fair enough,” I say. “I’m just happy to find out you’re not the dick I thought you were.”
He half grins. “Let’s just say that had I known you were an alien and could kick my ass at will, I might have been a little nicer to you that first day.”
Six walks across the room and looks at my bags atop the table.
“We really should get going,” she says, and then looks at me with implicit concern, her face softening. “There’s really only one thing left undone. We weren’t sure what you wanted us to do.”
I nod. I don’t need to ask to know what she is talking about. I look at Sarah. It’s going to happen much sooner than I thought. My stomach turns. I feel as though I could vomit. Sarah reaches out and takes hold of my hand.
“Where is he?”
The ground is damp with the melting snow. I hold Sarah’s hand in mine and we pass through the woods in silence, a mile away from the hotel. Sam and Mark walk in the lead, following the muddy footprints they created a few hours before. Up ahead I see a slight clearing, in the center of which Henri’s body has been laid out on a slab of wood. He is wrapped in the gray blanket pulled from his bed. I walk to him. Sarah follows and places a hand on my shoulder. The others stand behind me. I pull the blanket down to see him. His eyes are closed, his face is ashen gray, and his lips are blue from the cold. I kiss his forehead.
“What do you want to do, John?” Six asks. “We can bury him if you want. We can also cremate him.”
“How can we cremate him?”
“I can create a fire.”
“I thought you could only control the weather.”
“Not the weather. The elements.”
I look up at her soft face, concern written upon it but also the stress of time at our having to leave before reinforcements arrive. I don’t answer. I look away and squeeze Henri a final time with my face close to his and I lose myself to grief.
“I’m so sorry, Henri,” I whisper in his ear. I close my eyes. “I love you. I wouldn’t have missed a second of it, either. Not for anything,” I whisper. “I’m going to take you back yet. Somehow I am going to get you back to Lorien. We always joked about it but you were my father, the best father I could have ever asked for. I’ll never forget you, not for a minute for as long as I live. I love you, Henri. I always did.”
I let go of him, pull the blanket back over his face, and lay him gently on the wooden slab. I stand and hug Sarah. She holds me until I stop crying. I wipe the tears away with the back of my hand and I nod at Six.
Sam helps me clear away the sticks and leaves and then we lay Henri’s body on the ground so as not to dilute his ash with anything else. Sam lights an edge of the blanket and Six makes the fire rage from there. We watch it burn, not a dry eye among us. Even Mark cries. Nobody says a word. When the flames end I gather the ashes in a coffee can that Mark was astute enough to bring from the hotel. I’ll get something better the second we stop. When we walk back I put the can on the dashboard of Sam’s dad’s truck. I feel comforted to know that Henri will still travel with us, that he’ll look out over the roads while we leave another town as the two of us have done so many times before.
We load our belongings into the back of the truck. Along with Six’s things and mine, Sam has also loaded in two bags of his own. At first I’m confused, but then I realize that between him and Six some agreement has been made that Sam will come with us. And I’m happy for that. Sarah and I walk back into the hotel room. The second the door closes she takes my hand and turns me towards her.
“My heart is breaking,” she says. “I want to be strong for you right now but the thought of you leaving is killing me inside.”
I kiss her on the head.
“My heart is broken already,” I say. “The second I get settled I’ll write. And I’ll do my best to call when I know it is safe.”
Six pokes her head in the doorway.
“We really have to go,” she says.
I nod. She closes the door. Sarah lifts her face to mine and we kiss standing there in the hotel room. The thought of the Mogadorians returning before we’ve left, and thus putting her in danger yet again, is the only source of strength I can find. Else I might collapse. Else I might stay forever.
