The Fate of Ten

I still don’t know what to make of her. She’s a human with Legacies, which we don’t even have a word for. But she seems to think this entire situation is one big joke. I can’t tell if she’s unhinged like Five or hiding behind a massive defense mechanism. She mentioned before that the Mogs killed her stepfather and that her mom is missing. I know what it’s like—to lose people, to not know what’s happening to your loved ones. I could tell her that, except I don’t really think Daniela’s the type to open up easily. I wish Six were here. I have a feeling they’d get along great.

“I woke up first,” she says, gesturing around the train. “Went through all the cars. People left a lot of shit behind.”

“Back at the bank, did somebody leave all that cash behind, too?” I ask, jerking my chin at her duffel bag.

“Oh yeah, that,” Daniela says, looking to the side with feigned guilt, but unable to keep the smile off her face. “Wondered if you noticed.”

“I noticed.”

“Thing’s heavier than you’d think,” she says, nudging the bag with her filthy sneaker toe.

I rub my hand across my face, trying to figure out how I should approach this. It’s not like I haven’t stolen before. I always did it out of necessity, though, and never right in the middle of a full-scale invasion.

“Weird you had time to rob a bank while you were searching for your mom.”

“First of all, I didn’t steal it. I mean, not technically. There were some dudes hiding from the Mogs in that bank. They were the ones robbing it. I just ended up taking cover in there. They got blasted, then you showed up. I figure, why waste a perfectly good duffel bag?”

I frown, shaking my head. I have no idea if what Daniela’s telling me is the truth. I’m not sure if it even matters how she got the money. I’m more concerned with figuring out if this new Garde is someone we can trust. Someone we can rely on.

“Second of all,” she continues, leaning toward me, “my mom would be pissed if she found out I missed an opportunity like that.”

She tries to keep her voice cavalier, but a tremor sneaks in when she mentions her mom. Maybe this attitude is all a front, a way to cope with how screwed up her world has gotten in the last twenty-four hours. I get that. My expression must be too sympathetic, though, or maybe she noticed me noticing her voice shaking, because Daniela raises her voice and keeps going, more heated than before. It occurs to me that as much as I’m trying to figure her out, she’s also trying to figure out me.

“Third, I didn’t sign up for these superpowers that you don’t even know why I have. And I damn sure didn’t sign up to fight in your alien war. Neither did my family.”

“You think there was an alien invasion sign-up sheet getting passed around?” I ask sharply, trying and failing to keep my temper from flaring. “No one asked for this. The Loric, my people, we didn’t ask for the Mogs to destroy our home world. It happened anyway.”

Daniela holds up her hands defensively. “All right, so you know what this is like. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be judging how I choose to spend my alien invasion. Shit is nuts.”

“I was too young to fight back when they attacked Lorien,” I tell her. “But you . . .”

“Oh shit, here it comes. The recruitment speech.” Daniela starts to do an impression, her voice suddenly higher pitched, her words theatrically enunciated. “Look outside your window,” she recites. “The Mogadorians are here. The Garde will fight them. Will you stand for Earth?”

I shake my head, confused. “What’s that?”

“It’s from your video, dude. The whole support the Garde thing. They played it on the news.”

I shake my head. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Daniela studies my face for a moment, and eventually seems satisfied with my bafflement. “Huh. You really don’t. Guess you probably haven’t been watching much TV. Me? I was glued to it when those ships first started appearing. It’s like, all of a sudden we’re living in one of those alien invasion movies. Was pretty cool until, well . . .”

Daniela waves her hand, encompassing not just our current situation of hiding out underground, but the citywide destruction we both lived through. I notice her hand trembles a little. She quickly hides this, folding her arms tightly across her chest

“Sam and I helped a group of people get out of Manhattan yesterday,” I tell her. “I wondered how some of them knew my name, but it was too chaotic to ask. Was it on the news? Did they show me fighting at the UN?”

Daniela nods. “They showed some of that. Except when that Clooney-looking creep turned into a genuine alien monster, people really started to freak out and the cameras got all shaky. You were featuring pretty heavy on the news before that, though.”

I tilt my head, not understanding. “How do you mean?”

“There was this, like, YouTube video. It got posted on some stupid conspiracy website first—”

“Wait—was it ‘They Walk Among Us’?”

Daniela shrugs. “‘Nerds Walk Among Us,’ I dunno, sure. It starts off with a picture of Earth that they totally snagged from Google images and this girl’s narrating like—‘This is our planet, but we are not alone in the galaxy, blah blah blah.’ She’s trying to sound all professional like it’s a nature documentary or something, but you can tell she’s our age. Why are you making that stupid face?”