The Power of Six

“I can do this all day. Do you understand me? You’re going to tell me everything I want to know, starting with what number are you.”

Six had closed her eyes. When she reopened them he was at the desk, turning over a dagger that changed colors with movement. He’d held it up, wanting Six to see the blade twist and glow as it came to life. Six could feel its hunger, its desperation for blood.

“Now . . . your number. Four? Seven? Are you lucky enough to be Number Nine?”

Katarina had shaken her head in an attempt to keep Six quiet, and Six knew that no amount of torture would ever cause her Cêpan to talk. But she also knew she preferred death to seeing Katarina maimed and mutilated.

The Mogadorian had gone to Katarina, lifted the dagger so the tip was just over her heart. It jerked in his hand, as though the heart was a magnet pulling it forward. He looked into Six’s eyes.

“I have all the time in the galaxies for this,” he’d said without emotion. “While you are in here with me, we are out there with the rest of you. Don’t think anything has stopped us from moving forward because we have you. We know more than you think. But we want to know everything. If you don’t want to see her sliced into little pieces, then you better start talking, and fast. And every single word that comes out better be true. I will know if you’re lying.”

Six had told him everything she remembered about leaving Lorien and the trip here, the Chests, where they’d been hiding. She talked so fast that most of it came out jumbled. Six told him she was Number Eight—not wanting to tell him the whole truth—and there was something about the desperation in her voice that caused him to believe it.

“You really are weak, aren’t you? Your relatives on Lorien, as easy as they fell, at least they were fighters. At least they had some bravery and dignity. But you,” he’d said, and shook his head as if disappointed. “You have nothing, Number Eight.”

And then he’d jammed the knife forward, through Katarina’s heart. All Six could do was scream. Their eyes had met for a single second before Katarina drifted away, her mouth still gagged, slowly sliding down the wall until the chain had run out of slack and she hung limply by her wrists as the light drained from her eyes.

“They were going to kill her anyway,” Six says softly. “Telling them what I did, at least I spared her from horrible torture, as if there’s any comfort in that.”

Six wraps her arms around her knees and stares at some abstract point out the window of the train.

“Of course there’s comfort in that,” I offer, wishing I were brave enough to stand and wrap my arms around her.

To my surprise, Sam is that brave. He stands, and makes his way over to her. He doesn’t say a word when he sits down next to her, instead opening his arms. Six buries her face in Sam’s shoulder and cries.

She eventually pulls back and wipes her cheeks. “When Katarina was dead, they tried everything, and I mean everything, they could to kill me—electrocution, drowning, explosives. They injected me with cyanide, which did nothing—I didn’t even feel the needle going into my arm. They threw me in a chamber filled with poisonous gas, and it was like the air inside was the freshest I’d ever breathed. The Mogadorian who pushed the button on the other side of the door, though, he was dead within seconds.” Six takes another swipe at her cheek with the back of her hand. “It’s funny, you know, that I think I killed more Mogadorians when I was captured than I did at the school in Ohio. They finally threw me in another cell, and I think they’d planned on keeping me there until they killed Three through Seven.”

“I love that you told them you were Number Eight,” Sam says.

“I feel bad that I did it now. It’s like I tarnished Katarina’s legacy, or the real Number Eight’s.”

Sam places his hands on both her shoulders. “No way, Six.”

“How long were you in there?” I ask.

“One hundred and eighty-five days. I think.”

My mouth drops open. Over half a year locked away, completely and utterly alone, waiting to be killed. “I’m so sorry, Six.”

“I was just waiting and praying for my Legacies to finally develop so I could get the hell out of there. And then one day, the first one finally did. It was after breakfast. I looked down and my left hand just wasn’t there. Of course, I freaked out, but then I realized I could still feel my hand. I tried to pick up my spoon, and sure enough, I could. And that’s when I understood what was happening—and invisibility was the thing I needed in order to escape.”

How it started for Six wasn’t all that different from how it had started for me, when my hand began to glow in the middle of my first class at Paradise High.

Two days later Six had been able to make herself completely invisible, and when dinner rolled around that day, and the slot on the door was slid open and her meal pushed through, the Mogadorian guard saw an empty cell. He’d looked wildly around and then hit an alarm that sent a piercing wail through the cave. The iron door had been flung open and four Mogs charged in. While they stood there, dumbfounded as to how she’d escaped, she slid by and rushed out the door and down the tunnel, seeing the cave for the very first time.

It had been a massive labyrinthine network of long, interconnected tunnels that were dark and drafty. There were cameras everywhere. She’d passed thick glass windows revealing chambers that looked like scientific labs, clean and brightly lit. The Mogadorians inside had worn white plastic suits and goggles, but she’d raced by so swiftly she couldn’t tell what they were doing. A sprawling room housed a thousand or so computer screens with a Mogadorian sitting in front of each, and Six assumed they were looking for signs of us. Just like Henri, I thought. One tunnel was lined with heavy steel doors she had been sure held other prisoners. But she sped on, knowing her Legacy was far from developed and terrified she wouldn’t stay invisible for very long. The siren had continued to wail. And then she reached the heart of the mountain, a great, cavernous hall a half mile wide and so dark and murky she could hardly see to its other side.

The air had been stifling and Six was already sweating. The walls and ceiling were lined with huge wooden trellises to keep the cave from collapsing, and narrow ledges chiseled into the rock face connected the tunnels dotting the dark walls. Above her, several long arches had been carved from the mountain itself to bridge the great divide from one side to the other.

She had pressed herself against a rocky crag, her eyes darting back and forth for a way out. The number of passageways had been endless. She’d stood there overwhelmed, her eyes sweeping across the hollow darkness, seeing nothing at all that looked promising. But then she did—far across the ravine, a pale pinprick of natural light at the end of a wider tunnel. Just before she climbed the wooden trellis to reach the stone bridge that led to it, something else caught her eye: the Mogadorian who had killed Katarina. She couldn’t let him get away. She followed him.

He entered the room where he had killed Katarina.

“I went straight to his desk and took the sharpest razor I saw, then grabbed him from behind and slit his throat. And as I watched the blood gush and spread across the floor, followed by him bursting into ash, I found myself wishing that it would have been possible to kill him a little more slowly. Or to kill him again.”

“What did you do when you finally got out?” I ask.

“I hiked up the opposite mountain, and when I got up there I stared down at the cave for an hour, trying to remember every little detail I could. Once I was satisfied with that, I took note of everything I passed on the five-mile run to the nearest road, and from there I jumped on the back of a slow pickup truck. When it stopped a few miles down the road to get gas, I stole his map, a notepad, and a couple of pens from the cab. Oh, and a bag of potato chips.”

“Niiiiice. What kind of chips?” Sam asks.

“Dude,” I say.

“What?”

“They were barbecue, Sam. I marked the cave’s location on the map I showed you guys back at the motel, and in the notepad I drew a diagram of everything I remembered, like a chart that would lead whoever read it straight to its entrance. I kind of panicked and hid the diagram not far from the town but kept the map, then I stole a car and drove straight to Arkansas; but of course by then my Chest had long since been taken.”

“I’m so sorry, Six.”

“Me, too,” she says. “But they can’t open it without me anyway. Maybe I’ll get it back someday.”

“At least we still have mine,” I reply.

“You should open it soon,” she says, and I know she’s right. I should have opened it already. Whatever’s in that Chest, whatever secrets it holds, Henri had wanted me to know them. The secrets. The Chest. He had said as much in his final breaths. I feel stupid for having put it off this long; but whatever’s in the Chest, I have a feeling it’s going to set the four of us on a long, uphill journey.

“I will,” I say. “Let’s just get off this train and find a safe place first.”

Chapter Nine

I’M THE FIRST ONE OUT OF BED WHEN THE MORNING bell rings. I always am. It’s not necessarily because I’m a morning person but because I prefer being in and out of the bathroom before anyone else.

I rush through making my bed, which I’ve gotten very good at over time. The key is getting the sheet, blanket, and comforter tucked deeply in at the foot. From there it’s just a matter of pulling the rest to the head, tucking the sides, and adding pillows to give it that clean, a-quarter-could-be-bounced-off-it finish.

By the time I’m done, across the room in the bed nearest to the door, Ella, the girl who arrived on Sunday, is the only other one up. Like the previous two mornings, she’s trying to emulate the way I make my bed, though she’s struggling with it. Her problem is that she’s trying to work from the top down instead of the bottom up. While Sister Katherine has been lenient with Ella, her rotation ends today and Sister Dora’s weeklong shift begins tonight. I know she won’t allow Ella to skimp on perfection, regardless of how new she is or what she’s going through.

“Would you like help?” I ask, crossing the room.

She looks at me with sad eyes. I can see she doesn’t care about the bed. I imagine she doesn’t care about much of anything right now, and I can’t blame her, given the death of her parents. I’d like to tell her not to worry, that unlike those of us who are “lifers,” she’ll be out of this place within the month, two at the most. But what consolation can that be to her now?

I bend down at the foot of the bed and pull the sheet and blanket until there’s enough to tuck them both beneath the mattress, then I stretch her comforter over them both.

“Want to grab that side?” I ask, nodding to the left of the bed while I go to the right. Together we give the whole bed the same tight, clean look as my own.

“Perfect,” I say.

“Thank you,” she replies in her soft, timid voice. I look down into her big brown eyes and can’t help but like her and feel some need to look after her.