The Last Days of Lorien (11 page)

I looked up past him to see the bottom of the van—the seats, the center console—above me. I was lying with my back against the interior roof. We were upside down.

In pain, I moved my head and could see, through a freshly smashed window, the grass of the park.

I didn’t know what we were going to do. There was no way we were going to be able to get the van right side up again, much less running. I climbed through the shattered window, ignoring the glass that scratched my arms. When I was through, I turned around, reached out, and yanked the boy through with me. We rolled back into the grass together, out of breath.

SKKKWONNNK. SKKKWONKK.
That noise again. Suddenly, next to me, the kid’s eyes widened. His jaw dropped. I flipped around and saw the monster standing right above us, so close I could smell the stink of his breath.

It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen, probably a full two heads taller than me, with pale white skin and a mouth jammed full of tiny, crooked teeth that were pointier and sharper than knives. I know what his teeth looked like because he was smiling. At his side, a giant curved sword dangled.

This, I knew, was a Mogadorian.

He growled at us with narrowed eyes. The noise was low and menacing, throaty and guttural.

The beast raised its sword over its head.

I had tried. I had. We had almost made it. Now it was over.

There was no use pretending my body would make any real shield for the kid. We would both die from the same blow.

Then I heard the strangest thing. It was something like music. I recognized it. Before I could react, there was a giant flash of light, and the music got louder, so loud that it sounded like it was coming from inside my skull.

It was Devektra’s song. It was beautiful.

The Mogadorian reeled backward and dropped his sword. His face twisted into a horrified mask of pain. He let out another growl—really more of a roar—and fell to his knees.

I didn’t even think about it. I knew what I had to do. I sprang to my knees, grabbed the sword and, with dazzling white lights flashing all around me, swung it with every bit of strength that I had. A geyser of blood erupted into the air as his head went flying.

I never saw her. I don’t know how she found us, or why she didn’t reveal herself. There probably just wasn’t time. But it was her. Devektra had saved me. More important, she had saved the boy.

He stood up, looked up at me quizzically, seemingly unfazed by what had just happened, and pointed to something that was lying in the grass a few yards away.

“Motorcycle?” he asked.

CHAPTER 15

We arrived at the airstrip in time.

I parked the cycle and raced to the ship with the kid in my arms, searching for Brandon, pushing past a group of Kabarakians and LDF Garde who were chaotically arranging a perimeter around the airstrip.

The Mogadorians would be here soon. These Loric would be the only thing protecting the ship as it took off. Like me, they would remain behind. We were going to die. There was no way around it. But with a little luck, the nine children and their Mentors would live, and with them, the Lorien people would survive.

The eight Mentor Cêpans stood outside the ship, waiting to go, while eight young children—ranging in age from infancy to six years old—were arrayed in a circle on the ground. Another man was leaning over each of the children, touching their heads.

It was the Elder Loridas. It looked like he was blessing them or something. Well, if I was going to die, at least I could say I finally saw one of the Elders.

When Brandon saw me approach, a look of disgust began to creep into his face. Until he saw the boy.

“This is the ninth,” I said. I knew they’d be leaving any minute and, anxious to make my case, the words tumbled out in a rush. “It’s not too late. You have to . . .”

“Quiet,” said Brandon, taking the child. He rushed over to Loridas, who had just finished whatever he was doing with the children. I nervously watched them confer, wondering how Loridas had made it to the planet.

“He’s the last.” I turned to see a woman with long dark hair in her early thirties. She had read my look of confusion. “The other Elders are gone. They sacrificed themselves for us.”

“Pittacus too?” I asked, stunned. I had never really thought much about Pittacus Lore, never reacted to his name with the unreserved awe that so many other Loric had for him, but it was still a shock. Even with everything that had happened tonight, it had never occurred to me that he could be
gone.
It was almost unimaginable.

An uncertain frown crept across the woman’s face. “Pittacus is . . . missing,” she said. “He may still be alive. We don’t know.”

I didn’t respond. What was there to say?

“You look awfully young to be a Mentor Cêpan,” she said.

“I’m just a trainee,” I said, my eyes locked on Brandon, Loridas, and the boy. “Engineering. Not a Mentor.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” she said, glancing over at the boy. Loridas took him by the hand and laid him down in the sole remaining part of the circle. The other children all looked on as Loridas began to perform some kind of ritual.

“Why are they all so young?” I asked the woman. “They’re too young to have been trainees at the Academy.”

“These children were identified by the Elders as the most powerful of their generation,” she told me. She sounded wistful as she said it. “They have a long road ahead of them. They will have to learn to adapt to a new home, and a new way of life that’s unlike anything we know here. It will be better if they have as little memory of Lorien as possible. It will be easier for them.”

I nodded sadly and turned back to watch the ritual. I was eager to take the whole sight in, but Brandon pulled me out to the edge of the airstrip.

“He has been admitted. The Eight is now Nine,” he said. “Funny thing is, Elder Loridas wasn’t fazed at all. When I said the ninth had arrived, he turned to me and looked at me as if he’d known he was coming all along.”

I turned back to the collected Mentor Cêpans, to the Garde arrayed on the ground, to the ship that would take them off this planet. I feared what my own fate would be, but was determined not to let Brandon see my fear. I wanted to make a gracious and noble exit.

“Go,” I said. “I’ll join the perimeter guard.”

The suns were just starting to come up, the dusk colored by the flame and smoke of the planet’s destruction.

“Good luck up there,” I said.

“Stop,” said Brandon. I turned back. “You’re coming with us.”

“Me? There’s not room.” I felt my heart rise in my chest. But I couldn’t go along. “What about the rest of the people here? The ones who have been fighting all along? The ones who actually believed?”

“The boy needs a Mentor. You brought him here. He trusts you. And the bond has taken place—I can sense it. It has to be you.”

“But I haven’t been trained.”

“The only thing any of us really need to know is to always put our Garde’s survival ahead of our own.” Brandon cast a glance back at the boy. “And it looks like you’ve got that part down.”

Another explosion rumbled about a mile off, bringing our gaze across the sky to the approach of a massive Mogadorian ship. What looked like little wisps were parachuting out of the ship and landing gently, soundlessly on the ground.

But of course, that was a trick of distance and perspective. They weren’t wisps. They were Mogadorian ground troops. And there was nothing gentle about them.

My fate had been decided. We rushed to the rest of the group to board the ship and leave our beloved Lorien before it was too late.

CHAPTER 16

“Oof.” Barely awake, I was already in agony.

The boy had just stepped hard on my legs, and was now jumping up the rest of my body, crushing my stomach, then my ribs.

“Wake up,” he said, still jumping painfully all over me. It was a hell of a way to wake up in the morning, but I was starting to get used to it.

“Wake up,” repeated the boy, who we had all started to call “Nine.” He was bright-eyed, playful, and so full of energy that five minutes in his company was enough to make me pray for his bedtime.

Nine and the other young Garde had made a quick recovery from the horrors of that awful night, barely a month ago, when Lorien had fallen to the Mogadorians. The other Mentor Cêpans couldn’t believe the childrens’ resilience. We envied it. None of us would ever get over what we’d seen.

“I’m getting up,” I said, swinging my legs over the bed and swiping my Kalvaka T-shirt off the hook on the wall. All of the other Mentor Cêpans were stuck with their LDA tunics, but I had only my street clothes from my last night out in Lorien.

“You’re too slow,” said Nine, yanking my arm as I tried to finish dressing.

“Sorry, buddy,” I said. “Had a late one last night.”

“What else is new?”

I looked up to see Brandon, smiling at the edge of the partition separating my sleeping quarters from the rest of the ship. Brandon was always getting on my case for being a late riser, for always being the last Cêpan socializing into the wee hours in the ship’s canteen. If Brandon had gone to bed there was always Kentra, or one of the others.

“Today’s the first day of pre-combat training,” he said. “I’ll take Nine, it’s not a problem.”

“Pre-combat? Already?” I had a hard time understanding that they were already going to start conditioning some of the Garde as warriors. Brandon and Kentra had explained it was just simple calisthenics and drills at this point, but still. The kids were so young.

I saw Four, Brandon’s Garde, poking his head out from behind Brandon’s back. He shyly put his hand out for Nine to take, inviting him to walk to pre-combat together.

Seeing this, I hoped Nine would take Four’s hand. It was a sweet gesture.

“Prucawbat! Rawr!” squealed Nine, and jumped back onto the bed, either unaware of Four’s overture or too keyed up to notice.

I smiled, simultaneously exhausted by and proud of my Garde’s hyperactivity. I scooped Nine off the bed and put him on the floor.

“You go off with Brandon and Four, okay? I’ll see you at One-on-Ones after.” One-on-Ones were training and development sessions between Mentor Cêpans and their Garde. It had been decided that my One-on-Ones with Nine would be overseen by another Mentor Cêpan, owing to my inexperience and lack of training. But even with Brandon or Kater breathing down my neck, One-on-Ones were my favorite time of the day: just me and the kid.

The large ship had an open plan with no walls, but in the interest of our privacy and sanity, programmable holographic partitions separated areas of the cabin into “rooms.”

The canteen was one such space, located close to the ship’s cockpit. It was nearly empty when I finally got there, and the food options were slim: a packet of freeze-dried karo fruit; a plate of mushy, lukewarm flurrah grain.

Ah, I thought. The perils of oversleeping.

I settled for the Karo and took a seat next to Hessu, the only Cêpan there. Hessu was the oldest of the Cêpans, and shy to boot. I never knew what to say to her so I just nodded at her and ate my breakfast in silence.

As tended to happen when I had a moment to myself, my thoughts drifted to the events back on Lorien, both the things I had witnessed—the destruction of the capital; those heartbreakingly muddy tears on Nine’s grandfather’s cheeks—and those I had only imagined: my parents’ chalet in Deloon blasted by Mog missiles; Devektra, finally succumbing to the Mogadorian ground troops while valiantly defending her beloved city.

I also thought back to the ship’s takeoff, watching out the window as we pulled up and over the airstrip. The Elder Loridas, who had insisted not to be taken on board, faded to a dot on the ground as we breached the planet’s atmosphere, with the fighting Lorien Defense Forces and Kabarakians still down there, holding off the advancing Mog horde.

The first few days in space had been the worst. We Mentor Cêpans had all huddled in the canteen together, our impatient, traumatized charges in our laps, waiting for word from the ship’s pilot about the fate of Lorien. Brandon had explained that the vast majority of the council, the academy and the LDF had been killed in the first wave, but there were bound to be survivors, heroes like Devektra who would fight off the invading forces no matter how bad the odds. It had been decided by a vote that once we had reached a distance of relative safety, the ship would hang back, watch, and wait. If there were any sign that the defeat of Lorien was incomplete, that whatever resistance movement had formed stood even a meager chance of survival, we would turn back and aid however we could.

But after many sleepless days and nights, the pilot emerged into the canteen from the front of the ship and shook his head. “From the ship’s scans . . .” he said, fighting back tears. “There’s nothing. Nothing’s left.”

For every horror I had endured, that was the worst, the most devastating.

Slowly but surely, things improved. And as dark as my thoughts got, it was hard to stay down when we had nine rambunctious, energetic kids all around us, every second of the day.

“She’s sick,” announced Hessu. I almost did a double take: Hessu never spoke without first being spoken to.

It took me a second to realize she must be talking about her Garde, the girl we called “One.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night with a bad feeling, so I went to the children’s quarters to check, and sure enough when I touched her forehead it was hot. A bad fever.” Hessu’s aversion to eye contact was just part of her personality, but the intense way she avoided my look made me fear the worst.

“Where is she?” I asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’s in the Autodoc.” Because no one on board had any medical knowledge, the ship had been outfitted with a small climate-controlled area called an Autodoc. It monitored a patient’s vital signs and administered medicine as needed through the air vents. “Machine says she’ll be fine.”

“Well then,” I said, relieved. “That’s good.”

Hessu merely shrugged. Her mouth was pursed, bitter-looking, like she’d been sucking on something sour.