AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Sam sits in the very first row, a surly-looking girl with a mess of braids sitting next to him. He looks right at me, smiles and mouths hey.
Then, the commotion really starts.
“Look!” screams a Japanese girl, and it takes me a second to realize she’s pointing at us.
A murmur goes through the crowd as everyone notices us sitting around the table. At first, they all talk at once, peppering us with questions that I can’t even distinguish. Slowly, the room goes quiet. A respectful silence eventually falls. These are the human Garde. I can only imagine how bat-shit insane this whole thing is for them.
And now, I realize, they’re waiting for us to explain the situation.
I look around our table. Ella is still completely spaced out. Next to her, Setrákus Ra thrashes and struggles. Adam and Five both look like they’re about to hide under the table. Even Marina is blushing and looking uncomfortable. Unlike the others, Nine grins, nodding to as many people in the crowd as he can.
“What up,” he says. A few people in the audience snicker.
Obviously, one of us needs to say something more substantive than that.
John stands up, his chair scraping loudly against the marble floor. “It’s the dude from YouTube,” I hear someone whisper, and from the other side of the room someone else says, “It’s John Smith.” John looks at all the different faces, trying not to appear overwhelmed. I see Sam flash him a thumbs-up. John takes a deep breath, then hesitates. He turns to Ella.
“Do they all, uh, speak English?”
“I’m translating,” Ella answers simply, her eyes glowing intensely.
I don’t know when the hell she learned to do that. I’m not going to question it, though, and apparently neither is John.
“Hi,” John says, holding up his hand. A few people in the crowd mutter greetings. “My name’s John Smith. We’re what’s left of the Loric.”
John walks around the table. He ends up standing right next to Setrákus Ra.
“I guess you probably saw what we saw, right? Well, that story ends with Setrákus Ra here coming back to our planet, Lorien, and massacring everyone on it. Everyone except for us.” He lets this sink in for a moment before continuing. “If you aren’t sure what that has to do with you, well, maybe you’ve noticed all the alien warships on the news? Setrákus Ra is here. He’s going to do to Earth what he did to Lorien. Unless we stop him.”
John tries to make eye contact with as many people in the audience as possible. He’s really doing the whole leader thing pretty well.
“I don’t mean we as in my, uh, friends here sitting around the table,” John continues. “I mean you and us. Everyone in this room.”
That gets the kids in the crowd murmuring. The crying Hawaiian kid has at least stopped sobbing long enough to listen, but now I see his eyes darting around for an exit.
“I know this seems crazy. It also probably doesn’t seem fair,” John continues. “A few days ago, you were leading normal lives. Now, without warning, there are aliens on your planet and you can move objects with your minds. Right? I mean . . . is there anyone here that can’t do telekinesis yet?”
A few hands go up, including the crying boy’s.
“Oh, wow,” John says. “So you guys must be really confused. Try it when you get out of here. Just, uh . . . visualize something in your house moving through the air. Really focus on it. It’ll work, I promise. You’ll amaze yourself and probably freak out your parents.” John thinks for a moment. “Has anyone developed any other powers, besides telekinesis? We call them Legacies, by the way. Anyone else . . . ?”
A guy in one of the middle rows stands up. He’s stout with a shock of brown hair and he reminds me of a stuffed animal. When he speaks it’s with a slight German accent.
“My name is Bertrand,” he says, nervously looking around. “My family, we are beekeepers. Yesterday, I noticed, um, the bees . . . they talk to me. I thought I was going crazy but the swarm goes where I tell them to, so . . .”
“What a nerd,” Nine whispers to me. “Beekeeper.”
John claps his hands. “That’s amazing, Bertrand. That’s really quick to develop a Legacy. I promise the rest of you will get them too, and they won’t all be talking to insects. We can train you how to use them. We have people that know, people with experience . . .” Here, John glances around the table. I guess we’re all going to be Cêpan now. “Anyway, there’s a reason you’re getting these Legacies, especially now. In case you haven’t figured it out yet . . . it’s because you’re supposed to help us defend the Earth.”
That really gets the gallery talking. Some people actually cheer like they’re ready to fight, but mostly they murmur uncertainly, talking among themselves.
“John . . . ,” Ella says, her teeth now gritted. “Speed it up, please.”
I glance at Setrákus Ra. His thrashing is getting more and more forceful.
John raises both his hands for quiet. “I’m not going to lie and say what I’m asking you to do isn’t dangerous. It most definitely is. I’m asking you to leave your lives behind, to leave your families behind and join us in a fight that started in an entirely different galaxy.”
Something about the way John says all this makes me think he’s practiced it before. I notice he glances towards the girl sitting next to Sam. She smirks at him.
“I obviously can’t make you join us. In a few minutes, you’ll wake up from this little meeting back wherever you were before. Where it’s safe, hopefully. And maybe those of us who do fight, maybe the armies of the world, all of us . . . maybe that will be enough. Maybe we can fight off the Mogadorians and save Earth. But if we fail, even if you stay on the sidelines for this battle . . . they will come for you. So, I’m asking you all, even though you don’t know me, even though we’ve royally shaken up your lives—stand with us. Help us save the world.”
“Hell yeah,” Nine says, clapping for John. “You heard him, newbs. Quit being wimps and join the goddamn fight!”
The respectful silence that had mostly held during John’s speech breaks when Nine opens his mouth, like we’re in a press conference all of a sudden. There are shouted questions from every direction.
“Is that a Mogadorian at the table?”
“Go back to your galaxy, freaks!”
“How do I quit breaking stuff with my telekinesis?”
“I want to go home!”
“How can we stop them?”
“What’s with your eye patch, bro?”
“Can that scary guy see us?”
“Why do they want to kill us?”
And then, rising above the cacophony, a lanky guy with a bleached-blond Mohawk in the style of some long-retired punk rocker stands up on his seat and stomps down hard. I guess the sturdiness of his combat boots translates to the dreamworld because the sound is loud enough to shut everyone up.
“You lot are in America, right, mate?” the punk asks John, speaking with a thick English accent. “Let’s say I did want to join the fight and take it to these pasty wankers. How the hell am I supposed to get to you? In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no bloody transatlantic flights on account of the giant spacecrafts.”
John rubs the back of his neck, uncertain. “I . . .”
Ella’s hands tense on the table. “I can answer that,” she says, her voice ringing and melodious, definitely not Ella. This is Legacy speaking through her.
Above us, dots of light on the world map steadily brighten. Everyone turns their attention to the ceiling. I remember the brightest ones as the locations of the Loralite stones we used to teleport, but there are more, dimmer lights taking shape all over the globe.
“These are the locations of Loralite stones,” Ella says. “The brightest ones have existed on this planet for a very long time. The others are only now beginning to grow as I bond with the Earth. Soon, they will surface.”
Marina speaks up. “We needed . . .” She falters, gathers herself. “We needed a teleporting Legacy to use tho
se before.”
“Not anymore. Not now that I have awoken,” Legacy intones via Ella. “The Loralite are attuned to your Legacies. When you are close, you will feel their pull. All you need do is touch one of them and picture the location of another stone. The Loralite will do the rest.”
“Is that Stonehenge?” the Brit asks, squinting up at the map. “All right, then. That’s doable.”
“Uh, I think one of those is in Somalia,” says someone else.
