“Sure. Some days.”
“Why do you stay, then? You could go anywhere.”
He shrugs. “Several reasons.” He pours more wine into his glass. “For one, there’s no one else to take care of my mother. Plus, this place is my home, and I’m not convinced there’s much better out there. My experiences have taught me that things rarely improve with a simple change of scenery.”
“Maybe so, but I still can’t wait to leave. I only have a little over four months left at the orphanage, you know? And you can’t tell anyone this, but I think that I’m going to leave sooner than that.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Marina. You’re very young to be on your own. Where will you go?”
“America,” I say without hesitation.
“America?”
“There’s somebody there I need to find.”
“If you’re so determined, then why haven’t you already left?”
“Fear,” I say. “Mostly fear.”
“You’re not the first,” he says, taking a moment to empty his entire glass. His eyes have lost their sharpness. “The key to change is letting go of fear.”
“I know.”
The door to the café opens, and a tall man wearing a long coat and carrying an old book enters. He moves past us and takes a table in the far corner. He has dark hair and bushy brows. A thick mustache covers his upper lip. I’ve never seen him before; but when he lifts his head and meets my gaze, there’s something I immediately don’t like about him and I quickly look away. From the corner of my eye, I can see he’s still staring at me. I try ignoring it. I resume talking to Héctor, or rather I babble, hardly making sense, watching him refill his glass with red wine; and I hear next to nothing of what he says in reply.
Five minutes later the man’s still staring, and I’m so bothered by it that the café seems to spin. I lean across the table and whisper to Héctor, “Do you know who the person in the far corner is?”
He shakes his head. “No, but I’ve noticed him watching us, too. He was in here on Friday, sitting in the same seat and reading the same book.”
“There’s something about him I don’t like, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Don’t worry, you have me here,” he says.
“I really should leave,” I say. An odd desperation to get away has come over me. I try not to look at the man, but I do anyway. He’s reading the book now, the cover of which is angled toward me as though he wants me to see it. It’s brittle and worn, a dusty shade of gray.
PITTACUS OF MYTILENE
AND THE
ATHENIAN WAR
Pittacus? Pittacus? The man is watching me again, and though I can’t see the bottom half of his face, his eyes suggest a knowing grin on his lips. All at once I feel as though I’ve been struck by a train. Could this be my first Mogadorian?
I jump up, smacking my knee against the bottom of the table and nearly knocking over Héctor’s wine bottle. My chair falls backwards, crashing to the ground. Everybody in the café turns.
“I gotta go, Héctor,” I say. “I gotta go.”
I stumble through the doorway and make a mad dash for home, running faster than a speeding car, not caring if anyone sees. I’m back at Santa Teresa in seconds. I crash through the double doors and quickly slam them shut. I put my back against them and close my eyes. I try to slow my breathing, the twitching in my arms and legs, my quivering bottom lip. Sweat runs down the side of my face.
I open my eyes. Adelina stands in front of me, and I fall headlong into her arms, not caring about the tension from an hour before. She tentatively hugs me back, probably confused by my sudden display of affection, which I haven’t shown her in years. She pulls away and I open my mouth to tell her what I’ve just seen, but she brings a finger to her lips the same way I did to Ella at Mass. Then she turns and walks away.
That night, after dinner and before prayers, I stand at the bedroom window gazing out as darkness falls, scanning the landscape for anything suspicious.
“Marina? What are you doing?”
I turn around. Ella stands behind me; I hadn’t heard her approach. She moves through these halls like a shadow.
“There you are,” I say, relieved. “Are you okay?”
She nods, but her big brown eyes tell me otherwise. “What are you doing?” she repeats.
“Just looking outside, that’s all.”
“What for? You’re always looking out the windows at bedtime.”
She’s right; every night since she arrived, since I saw the man watching me in the nave window, I’ve been looking outside at bedtime for any signs of him. I’m now certain he’s the same man I saw in the café today.
“I’m looking for bad men, Ella. There are bad men out there sometimes.”
“Really? What do they look like?”
“It’s hard to say,” I reply. “I think they’re very tall, and they’re usually very dark and mean looking. And some might even be muscular, like this,” I add, doing my best bodybuilder pose.
Ella giggles, going to the window. She stands on her tippy toes and pulls herself up to see out.
It’s been several hours since I was in the café, and I’ve managed to calm down a bit.
I place my index finger on the foggy window and trace a figure onto it with two quick squeaks.
“That’s the number three,” Ella says.
“That’s right, kiddo. I bet you can do better than that, huh?”
She smiles, sticks her finger onto the bottom of the window, and soon there is the beginning of a beautiful farmhouse and backyard barn. I watch as my number three is absorbed by Ella’s perfect silo.
Three is the only reason I was allowed to leave that café today, it’s the distance from John Smith to myself. I’m now absolutely convinced that he is Number Four by the way he is being hunted; just as I’m convinced the man at the café was a Mogadorian. This town is so small I rarely see someone I don’t recognize, and his book—Pittacus of Mytilene and the Athenian War—plus his constant stare, are no coincidence. The name “Pittacus” is one I’ve heard since childhood, since long before we made it to Santa Teresa.
My number: Seven. It’s my only refuge now, my greatest defense. As unfair as it might be, I’m separated from death by the three others who all must die before me. So long as the charm holds, which, I assume, is why I was left alone and not attacked right at the café table. But one thing is certain: if he is a Mogadorian, they know where I am and they could take me any time they choose and hold me until they kill Four through Six. I wish I knew what’s keeping them at bay and why I’m allowed to sleep in my bed again tonight. I know the charm ensures that we can’t be killed out of order, but perhaps there’s more to it than that.
“You and I, we’re a team now,” I say. Ella puts the finishing touches on her window drawing, curling her fingernails over the heads of a few cows to give them horns.
“You want to be a team with me?” she asks in a tone of disbelief.
“You bet,” I say, and hold out my pinky. “Let’s pinky-swear on it.”
She smiles widely and hooks her pinky around mine. I shake it once.
“There, that settles it,” I say.
We turn back to the window, and Ella wipes her picture away with the heel of her palm. “I don’t like it here.”
“I don’t like it here either, believe me. But don’t worry, we’ll both be out of here soon enough.”
“You think so? We’ll leave together?”
I turn and look at her. That wasn’t what I had meant at all, but without thinking twice I nod in agreement. I hope it isn’t something I’ll regret promising. “If you’re still here when I leave, then we’ll leave together. Deal?”
“Deal! And I won’t let them hurt you.”
“Who?” I ask.
“The bad men.”
I smile. “I would appreciate that very much.”
She leaves the window and walks to another, again pulling herself up to look out. As always, she moves like a ghost, making no sound. I still have no idea where she might have hidden today, but wherever it was, it was clearly a place no one would think to look. And then an idea occurs to me.
“Hey, Ella? I need your help,” I say. Ella drops from the window and looks at me expectantly. “I’m trying to find something here, but it’s hidden.”
“What is it?” she asks, leaning forward in excitement.
“It’s a chest. It’s wooden and looks very old, like you might expect to see on a pirate ship.”
“And it’s here?”
I nod. “It’s here somewhere, but I have no idea where. Somebody did a very good job of hiding it. You’re just about the most clever girl I know. I bet you can find it in no time.”
She beams, rapidly nodding her head. “I’ll find it for you, Marina! We’re a team!”
“That’s right,” I agree. “We are a team.”
Chapter Thirteen
SIX DRIVES OUR CHARCOAL-COLORED SUV, WHICH we saw for sale in a yard two miles down the road for fifteen hundred dollars, into town to buy groceries. While she’s gone, Sam and I spar together in the backyard. The three of us have spent a week training, and I’m amazed at how good Sam’s gotten in the short amount of time. Despite his small size, he’s a natural; and what he lacks in strength, he makes up for in technique, which is much better than my own.
At the end of each day as Six and I retreat to the corners of the living room or to our empty rooms, Sam stays up studying fighting techniques on the internet. What Six learned from Katarina and I learned from Henri is a method of combat that loosely resembles a blend of jujitsu, Tae Kwon Do, karate and Bojuka here on Earth, a system designed to be committed to muscle memory, including grappling, blocks, fluid body movements, joint manipulation and strikes to vital points of a person’s central nervous system. For Six and me, having the benefit of telekinesis, it’s a matter of sensing the subtlest of motions in a radius around us and then reacting to them. Sam, however, needs to keep his enemies in front of him.
While Six ends each session without a mark, Sam and I both finish with new scrapes and bruises. But despite them, Sam never loses passion or drive. Today is no different. He comes at me, chin tucked and eyes alert. He throws a right cross that I block, then a left side kick that I counter by sweeping his right leg out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground. He stands, then charges me again. Though he connects often, with my strength, his shots aren’t very effective. But sometimes I feign pain to boost his confidence.
Six gets home an hour later. She changes into shorts and a T-shirt and joins us. We drill for a while, slowly doing the same block-counterkick over and over until it becomes second nature. But while I take it somewhat easy against Sam, Six goes all out against me, thrusting me backwards with such force that the wind is knocked out of me. Sometimes I get irritated, but I can still tell I’m getting better. She’s no longer able to deflect my telekinesis with a casual flick of the wrist. Now she’s required to throw her whole body into it.