I clear my throat, trying to sound casual. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Both girls turn around to look at me. Sarah smiles big and waves with the hand not holding the gun.

“Hey, babe,” she says. “Six was just helping me learn to shoot.”

“Yeah, cool. I didn’t realize that’s something you wanted to do.”

Six gives me a strange look, like who wouldn’t want to learn to shoot? An awkward moment passes between us, where I’m feeling almost mad at her for giving Sarah this lesson without my permission. Not that Sarah needs my permission to do anything. The whole situation has me feeling flustered, and I must look it, because Six eases the gun out of Sarah’s hand. She clicks the safety on and holsters it.

“I think that’s good for now,” Six says. “Let’s do some more tomorrow.”

“Oh,” replies Sarah, sounding disappointed. “All right.”

Six pats Sarah on the arm. “Good shooting.” Then, she fixes me with a tight smile that I’m not at all sure what to make of. “Later, guys,” she says, and breezes past me out the door.

Sarah and I stand in silence for a moment, the lights of the Lecture Hall buzzing overhead.

“So,” I begin, awkwardly.

“You’re being weird,” she says, eyeing me, her head tilted to the side.

I pick up the paper Mogadorian, examining Sarah’s handiwork while I figure out what to say. “I know. Sorry. I just never took you for the armed and dangerous type.”

Sarah frowns at me. “If I’m going to be with you, I don’t want to be a damsel in distress.”

“You’re not.”

“Come on,” she snorts. “Who knows how long I would’ve rotted in New Mexico if you hadn’t shown up? And then, I mean, John, you pretty much brought me back to life.”

I slide my arm around her, not wanting to think about Sarah at my feet, nearly dead. “I’d never let anything happen to you.”

She shrugs me off. “You can’t say that for sure. You can’t do everything, John.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I’m starting to realize that.”

Sarah looks up at me. “You know, I thought about calling my parents today. It’s been weeks. I wanted to tell them I’m all right.”

“That’s not really a good idea. The Mogadorians or the government could be monitoring your house for phone calls. They could be tracking us.”

The words sound so cold and I regret them almost right away, how quickly I’m slipping into paranoid-and-practical-leader mode. But Sarah doesn’t seem offended. In fact, it looks like it’s exactly what she expected me to say.

“I know,” she says, nodding. “That’s exactly what I thought, and it’s why I didn’t actually go through with it. I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here with you guys and fight. But I don’t have any Loric superpowers. I’m just dead weight. I want to practice shooting so I can be more than that.”

I grab Sarah’s hand. “You are more than that. I need you here with me. You’re pretty much the only thing keeping me from completely melting down.”

“I get it,” she says. “You’re going to save the freaking world and I’m going to help you. That whole saying about behind every great man there is a great woman? I can be that for you. I just want to be a great woman with excellent aim.”

I can’t help but laugh, the tension between us breaking. I lift Sarah’s hand and kiss it. She wraps her arms around my waist and we hug. I don’t know what I was so tied up in knots about; having Sarah here just makes everything seem easier. Coming up with a battle plan to take down the Mogadorians? No problem. And as for that one kiss with Six, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Eight teleports into the room with a puff of displaced air. He’s wide-eyed and excited, but turns sheepish when he sees us.

“Whoa,” Eight says. “Sorry, I didn’t expect canoodling.”

Sarah snickers, and I glare jokingly at Eight. “This better be good.”

“You should go to the workshop and see for yourself. I’ve gotta go get the others.”

With that cryptic message, Eight teleports away. Sarah and I exchange a look, then rush out of the Lecture Hall and into Sandor’s old workshop.

Nine is already there, his arms crossed as he watches the bank of television screens on the wall. They’re all tuned to the same image, a newscast from some local station in South Carolina. Nine pauses the broadcast when we enter, freezing a still image of the gray-haired anchor.

“I turned on some of Sandor’s old programs the other day,” Nine explains. “They scan news feeds for weird shit that might be Loric related.”

“Yeah, Henri had the same thing set up.”

“Uh-huh, typical boring Cêpan stuff, right? Except this popped up tonight.”

Nine restarts the broadcast, the anchor resuming his teleprompter reading.

“Authorities are at a loss to explain the vandalism of a local farmer’s crops early yesterday morning. The prevailing theory is high-school prank, but others have suggested . . .”

I tune out the anchor’s theories as the image switches to an overhead shot of a twisting, mazelike emblem burned into the cornfield. It might look like a juvenile prank to the newscaster, but we recognize it immediately. Burned into those crops with jagged precision is the Loric symbol for Five.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“IF FIVE’S TRYING TO FIND US, THIS IS ABOUT the dumbest damn way possible,” Nine says.

“She could be scared and alone,” counters Marina, softly. “On the run.”

“No Cêpan in their right mind would go burning up crops, so they must be alone. Still . . .” Nine trails off, his brow furrowing. “Wait—what do you mean ‘she’? Five’s a chick?”

Marina rolls her eyes at chick, then shakes her head. “I don’t know. Just a guess.”

“Setting a field on fire seems like a guy thing,” Six puts in.

“I remember Henri reading a story about a girl lifting a car off someone in Argentina,” I say. “We always thought that could be Five.”

“Sounds like a tabloid story to me,” Six counters.

“Guy or girl doesn’t matter,” interrupts Nine, waving at the computer screens. “Scared doesn’t haven’t to mean stupid.”

I find myself agreeing with Nine. Assuming this message is actually from Five and not some elaborate Mogadorian trap, it’s a really bad way to get our attention. Because if we noticed it, then the Mogadorians definitely did too.

We’ve all crowded into Sandor’s workshop. Nine has paused the newscast on the overhead shot of the Loric symbol while we figure out what to do next. I have the macrocosm from my Chest open, the holographic Loric solar system floating peacefully in the space over the table.

“He must not have his Chest open,” I say. “This would change into the globe if he did.”

Eight stands next to me, clutching a red communication crystal he pulled from his chest. It’s the same one we found in Nine’s and used to try sending Six a message when she was in India.

“Are you out there, Five?” Eight speaks into the crystal. “If you are, you should probably stop setting things on fire.”

“I think he can only hear you if his Chest is open,” I explain. “In which case, he’d show up on the macrocosm.”

“Ah,” says Eight, lowering the crystal. “They couldn’t have packed us cell phones?”

Meanwhile, Nine has plugged our locater tablet into one of Sandor’s computers. The newscast blips out of existence, replaced by a map of Earth. There’s a cluster of pulsing blue dots in Chicago—that’s us. Further south, there’s another dot, moving extremely fast from the Carolinas towards the middle of the country. Nine looks over at me.

“He’s made a lot of miles since I checked on him this morning. First time he’s come in from the islands, too.”

Six points at the screen, tracing a line back to where the crops were burned. “It makes sense. Whoever it is, they’re on the run.”

“They’re moving really fast, though,” puts in Sarah. “Could they be taking a plane somewhere?”

The dot on the screen suddenly takes an abrupt northward turn, crossing through Tennessee.

“I don’t think planes move like that,” says Six, her brow furrowing.

“Super speed?” Eights asks.

We watch as the blue dot crosses right through Nashville, never slowing down or changing directions.

“There’s no way they just zipped through a city at that speed on a straight line,” Six says.

“Son of a bitch,” growls Nine. “I think this idiot can fly.”

“We’ll have to wait until they stop moving,” I say. “Maybe then they’ll open their Chest and we can send a message. We’ll watch in shifts. We need to get to Five before the Mogs do.”

Marina volunteers to take the first shift. I linger in the workshop after the others have gone. Even with all this excitement about Five, I haven’t forgotten about our other problems, specifically Ella and her nightmares.

“I talked to Ella today,” I begin. “In her nightmares, Setrákus Ra asks her if she’s opened some letter. Any idea what that could mean?”

Marina looks away from where Five’s pulsing beacon cruises across Oklahoma. “Crayton’s letter, maybe?”

“Her Cêpan?”

“Back in India, right before he died, Crayton gave her a letter.” Marina frowns. “With everything that’s happened, I almost forgot about it.”

“She hasn’t read it?” I ask, feeling a little exasperated. “We’re fighting a war here; it could be important.”

“I don’t think it’s that easy for her, John,” Marina says, levelly. “Those are Crayton’s last words. Reading it would be like admitting that he’s really gone and not coming back.”

“But he is gone,” I reply quickly. Too quickly. I pause, thinking back to when Henri was killed. He’d been like a father to me and, even more than that, he was the only constant in a life spent constantly on the run. For me, the idea of Henri was almost like the idea of home—wherever he was, that’s where he was safe. Losing him was like having the world ripped out from under me. I was older than Ella when it happened, too. I shouldn’t expect her to be able to just brush it off.

I sit down next to Marina, sighing. “Henri—my Cêpan—he left me a letter too. He gave it to me when he was dying. We were on the road for days before I could bring myself to read it.”

“See? It’s not so easy. Plus, if Setrákus Ra showed up in my dreams and told me to do something, I’d definitely do the opposite.”

I nod. “I get it. I do. She needs to grieve. I don’t mean to sound heartless. When all this is over, when we win, we’ll have time to mourn the people we’ve lost. But until then, we need to gather all the information we can and find anything that might work to our advantage.” I wave my hand at the screen with Five’s location. “We have to stop just waiting around for the next crisis and start acting.”