“So what’s in the bag?”
“The solar system,” he says.
“If they aren’t part of my Legacy then why have you never shown me?”
“Because you needed to develop a Legacy in order to activate them.”
He clears the kitchen table and then sits across from me with the bag in his lap. He smiles at me, sensing my enthusiasm. Then he reaches down and removes seven glass orbs of varying sizes from the bag. He holds them up to his face in his cupped hands and blows on the glass orbs. Tiny flickers of light come from within them, then he tosses them up in the air and all at once they come to life, suspended above the kitchen table. The glass balls are a replica of our solar system. The largest of them is the size of an orange—Lorien’s sun—and it hangs in the middle emitting the same amount of light as a lightbulb while looking like a self-contained sphere of lava. The other balls orbit around it. Those closest to the sun move at a faster rate, while those farthest away seem to only creep by. All of them spinning, days beginning and ending at hyperspeed. The fourth globe from the sun is Lorien. We watch it move, watch the surface of it begin to form. It is about the size of a racquetball. The replica must not be to scale because in reality Lorien is far smaller than our sun.
“So what’s happening?” I ask.
“The ball is taking on the exact form of what Lorien looks like at this moment.”
“How is this even possible?”
“It’s a special place, John. An old magic exists at its very core. That’s where your Legacies come from. It’s what gives life and reality to the objects contained within your Inheritance.”
“But you just said that this isn’t part of my Legacy.”
“No, but they come from the same place.”
Indentations form, mountains grow, deep creases cut across the surface where I know rivers once ran. And then it stops. I look for any sort of color, any movement, any wind that might blow across the land. But there is nothing. The entire landscape is a monochromatic patch of gray and black. I don’t know what I had hoped to see, what I had expected. Movement of some kind, a hint of fertileness. My spirits fall. Then the surface dims away so that we can see through it and at the very core of the globe a slight glow begins to form. It glows, then dims, then glows again as though replicating the heartbeat of a sleeping animal.
“What is that?” I ask.
“The planet still lives and breathes. It has withdrawn deep into itself, biding its time. Hibernating, if you will. But it will wake one of these days.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“That little glow right there,” he says. “That is hope, John.”
I watch it. I find an odd pleasure in seeing it glow. They tried to wipe away our civilization, the planet itself, and yet it still breathes. Yes, I think, there is always hope, just as Henri has said all along.
“That isn’t all.”
Henri stands and snaps his fingers and the planets stop moving. He moves his face to within inches of Lorien, then cups his hands around his mouth and again breathes onto it. Hints of green and blue sweep across the ball and begin to fade almost immediately as the mist from Henri’s breath evaporates.
“What did you do?”
“Flash your hands on it,” he says.
I make them glow and when I hold them over the ball the green and blue come back, only this time they stay as my hands shine upon it.
“It’s how Lorien looked the day before the invasion. Would you look how beautiful it all is? Sometimes even I forget.”
It is beautiful. Everything green and blue, plush and verdant. The vegetation seems to waver beneath gusts of wind that I can somehow feel. Slight ripples appear on the water. The planet is truly alive, flourishing. But then I turn my glow back off and it all fades away, back to shades of gray.
Henri points at a spot on the globe’s surface.
“Right here,” he says, “is where we took off from on the day of the invasion.” Then he moves his finger half an inch from the spot. “And right here is where the Loric Museum of Exploration used to be.”
I nod and look at the spot he is pointing to. More gray.
“What do museums have to do with anything?” I ask. I sit back in the chair. It’s hard to look at this without feeling sad.
He looks back at me. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you saw.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, urging him on.
“It was a huge museum, devoted entirely to the evolution of space travel. One of the wings of the building held early rockets that were thousands of years old. Rockets that used to run on a kind of fuel known only to Lorien,” he says, and stops, looking back to the small glass orb hanging two feet above our kitchen table. “Now, if what you saw did in fact happen, if a second ship managed to take off and escape from Lorien during the height of the war, then it would have to have been housed at the space museum. There’s no other explanation for it. I’m still having a tough time believing that it would have worked, and even if it did, that it would have gotten very far.”
“So if it wouldn’t have gotten very far, then why are you still thinking about it?”
Henri shakes his head. “You know, I’m not really sure. Maybe because I’ve been wrong before. Maybe because I’m hoping I am wrong now. And, well, if it had made it anywhere, then it would have made it here, the closest life-sustaining planet aside from Mogadore. And that’s to assume that there was life on it in the first place, that it wasn’t just full of artifacts, or that it wasn’t just empty, meant to confuse the Mogadorians. But I think there had to have been at least one Loric manning the ship because, well, as I’m sure you know, ships of that nature couldn’t steer themselves.”
Another night of insomnia. I stand shirtless in front of the mirror, staring into it with both lights in my hands turned on. “I don’t know how much we can expect from here on out,” Henri said today. The light at Lorien’s core still burns, and the objects we brought from there still work, so why would that magic have ended there? And what about the others: are they now running into the same problems? Are they without their Legacies?
I flex in front of the mirror, then punch the air, hoping that the mirror will break, or a thud will be heard on the door. But there is nothing. Just me looking like an idiot standing shirtless, shadowboxing with myself while Bernie Kosar watches from the bed. It’s nearly midnight and I’m not tired in the least. Bernie Kosar jumps off the bed, sits beside me, and watches my reflection. I smile at him and he wags his tail.
“How about you?” I ask Bernie Kosar. “Do you have any special powers? Are you a superdog? Should I put your cape back on so you can go flying through the air?”
His tail keeps wagging and he paws the ground while looking at me through the tops of his eyes. I lift him up and over my head and fly him around the room.
“Look! It’s Bernie Kosar, the magnificent superdog!”
He squirms under my grip, so I set him down. He plops on his side with his tail thumping against the mattress.
“Well, buddy, one of us should have superpowers. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be me. Unless we go back to the Dark Ages and I can supply the world with light. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’m useless.”
Bernie Kosar rolls onto his back and stares at me with big eyes, wanting me to rub his belly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SAM IS AVOIDING ME. AT SCHOOL HE SEEMS TO disappear when he sees me, or always makes sure we’re in a group. At the urging of Henri—who’s desperate to get his hands on Sam’s magazine after combing through everything that came up on the internet and finding nothing like Sam’s magazine—I decide to just go over to his place unannounced. Henri drops me off after we’ve trained for the day. Sam lives on the outskirts of Paradise in a small, modest house. There’s no answer when I knock so I try the door. It’s unlocked and I open it and walk through.
Brown shag carpet covers the floors, and family photographs from when Sam was very young hang on wood-paneled walls. Him, his mother, and a man who I assume is his father, who is wearing glasses every bit as thick as Sam’s. Then I look closer. They look like the exact same pair of glasses.
I creep down the hallway until I find the door that must be to Sam’s bedroom; a sign reading ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK hangs from a tack. The door is open a crack and I peer inside. The room is very clean, everything consciously put in a place. His twin bed is made, has a black comforter with the planet Saturn repeated across it. Matching pillowcases. The walls are covered with posters. There are two NASA ones, the movie poster from Alien, a movie poster from Star Wars, and one that is a blacklight poster of a green alien head surrounded by dark felt. In the center of the room, hanging from clear thread, is the solar system, all nine planets and the sun. It makes me think of what Henri showed me earlier in the week. I think that Sam would lose his mind if he were to see the same thing. And then I see Sam, hunched over a small oak desk, with headphones on. I push the door open and he looks over his shoulder. He isn’t wearing his glasses, and without them his eyes look very small and beady, almost cartoonlike.
“What’s up?” I ask casually, as if I’m at his house every day.
He looks shocked and scared and he frantically pulls the headphones off to reach in one of the drawers. I look at his desk and see that he’s reading a copy of They Walk Among Us. When I look back up he is pointing a gun at me.
“Whoa,” I say, instinctively lifting my hands in front of me. “What’s going on?”
He stands up. His hands are shaking. The gun is pointed at my chest. I think that he’s lost his mind.
“Tell me what you are,” he says.
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw what you did in those woods. You’re not human.” I was afraid of this, that he saw more than I had hoped.
“This is crazy, Sam! I got into a fight. I’ve been doing martial arts for years.”
“Your hands lit up like flashlights. You could throw people around like they were nothing. That’s not normal.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I say, my hands still in front of me. “Look at them. Do you see any lights? I told you, they were gloves that Kevin was wearing.”
“I asked Kevin! He said he wasn’t wearing gloves!”
“Do you really think he would tell you the truth after what happened? Put the gun down.”
“Tell me! What are you?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes, I’m an alien, Sam. I’m from a planet hundreds of millions of miles away. I have superpowers. Is that what you want to hear?”
He stares at me, his hands still shaking.
“Do you realize how stupid that sounds? Quit being crazy and put the gun down.”
“Is what you just said true?”
“That you’re being stupid? Yes, it’s true. You’re too obsessed with this stuff. You see aliens and alien conspiracies in every part of your life, including in your only friend. Now quit pointing that damn gun at me.”