I Am Number Four

I feel movement beside me. I tense myself, try to remain motionless so as not to be detected. A hand reaches up and touches the side of my face. A delicate touch done with love. My eyes come open, adjusting to the postdawn light until the ceiling of a foreign room comes into focus. I have no idea where I am, nor how I could have gotten here. Sarah is sitting next to me. She brings her hand to the side of my face and traces my brow with her thumb. She leans down and kisses me, a soft lingering kiss that I wish I could bottle and save for all time. She pulls away and I take a deep breath and close my eyes and kiss her on the forehead.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“A hotel thirty miles from Paradise.”

“How did I get here?”

“Sam drove us,” she says.

“I mean from the school. What happened? I remember that you were with me last night, but I don’t remember a thing after,” I say. “It almost seems like a dream.”

“I waited on the field with you until Mark arrived and he carried you to Sam’s truck. I couldn’t stay hidden any longer. Being in the school without knowing what was happening out there was killing me.

And I felt like I could help somehow.”

“You certainly helped,” I say. “You saved my life.”

“I killed an alien,” she says, as though the fact still hasn’t settled in.

She wraps her arms around me, her hand resting on the back of my head. I try to sit up. I make it halfway on my own and then Sarah helps me the rest of the way, pushing on my back but being careful not to touch the wound left by the knife. I swing my feet over the edge of the bed and reach down and feel the scars around my ankle, counting them with the tips of my fingers. Still only three, and in this way I know that Six has survived. I had already accepted the fate of the rest of my days being spent alone, an itinerant wanderer with no place to go. But I won’t be alone. Six is still here, still with me, my tie to a past world.

“Is Six okay?”

“Yes,” she says. “She’s been stabbed and shot but she seems to be doing okay now. I don’t think she would have survived had Sam not carried her to the truck.”

“Where is she?”

“In the room next door, with Sam and Mark.”

I stand. My muscles and joints ache in protest, everything stiff and sore. I am wearing a clean T-shirt, a pair of mesh shorts. My skin is fresh with the smell of soap. The cuts have been cleaned and bandaged, a few of them stitched.

“Did you do all of this?” I ask.

“Most of it. The stitches were hard. We only had the ones Henri put in your head to go on as an example. Sam helped with them.”

I look at Sarah sitting on the bed, her legs pulled underneath her. Something else catches my eye, a small mass that has shifted beneath the blanket at the foot of the bed. I tense, and immediately my mind returns to the weasels that sped across the gym. Sarah sees what I am looking at and smiles. She crawls to the bottom of the bed on her hands and knees.

“There’s somebody here who wants to say hello,” she says, then takes the corner of the blanket and gently peels it back to reveal Bernie Kosar, sleeping away. A metal splint goes the length of his front leg, and his body is covered with cuts and gashes that, like mine, have been cleaned and are already begi

“Bernie,” I say, and drop to my knees before him. I place my hand softly on his head. I can’t stop smiling and tears of joy surface. His small body is curled into a ball, head resting on his front paws, his eyes taking me in, battle scarred and wounded but still here to tell the tale.

“Bernie Kosar, you made it through. I owe my life to you,” I say, and kiss the top of his head.

Sarah runs her hand down the length of his back.

“I carried him to the truck while Mark carried you.”

“Mark. I’m sorry I ever doubted him,” I say.

She lifts one of Bernie Kosar’s ears. He turns and sniffs at her hand and then licks it. “So, is it true what Mark said, that Bernie Kosar grew to thirty feet tall and killed a beast almost double his size?”

I smile. “A beast triple his size.”

Bernie Kosar looks at me.Liar, he says. I look down and wink at him. I stand back up and look at Sarah.

“All of this,” I say. “All of this has happened so fast. How are you handling it?”

She nods. “Handling what? The fact that I’ve fallen in love with an alien, which I only found out about three days ago, and then just happened to walk headlong into the middle of a war? Yeah, I’m handling that okay.”

I smile at her. “You’re an angel.”

“Nah,” she says. “I’m just a girl crazy in love.”

She gets up from the bed and wraps her arms around me and we stand in the center of the room holding one another.

“You really have to leave, don’t you?”

I nod.

She takes a deep breath and exhales shakily, willing herself not to cry. More tears in the past twenty-four hours than I have ever witnessed in all the years of my life.

“I don’t know where you have to go or what you have to do, but I’ll wait for you, John. Every bit of my heart belongs to you, whether you ask for it or not.”

I pull her to me. “And mine belongs to you,” I say.

I walk across the room. Sitting on top of the desk are the Loric Chest, three packed bags, Henri’s computer, and all the money from the last withdrawal he made at the bank. Sarah must have rescued the Chest from the home-ec room. I place my hand on it. All the secrets, Henri had said. All of them contained within this. In time I’ll open it and discover them, but that time is certainly not now. And what did he mean about Paradise, that our coming wasn’t by chance?

“Did you pack my bags?” I ask Sarah, who is standing behind me.

“Yes, and it was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do.”

I lift my bag from the table. Beneath it is a manila envelope carrying my name across the front of it.

“What is this?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I found it in Henri’s bedroom. We went there after leaving the school and tried to grab everything we could; then we came here.”

I open the envelope and pull out the contents. All of the documents Henri had created for me: birth certificates, social security cards, visas, and so on. I count through them. Seventeen different identities, seventeen different ages. On the very front sheet is a sticky note in Henri’s writing. It reads, “Just in case.” After the last sheet is another sealed envelope, across which Henri has written my name. A letter, the one he must have been talking about just before he died. I don’t have the heart to read it now.

I look out the window of the hotel room. A light snow sifts down from the low, gray clouds overhead.

The ground is too warm for any of it to stick. Sarah’s car and Sam’s father’s blue truck are parked beside each other in the lot. As I stand looking down at them a knock sounds at the door. Sarah opens it and Sam and Mark walk into the room; Six limps behind them. Sam hugs me, says he’s sorry.

“Thank you,” I say.

“How do you feel?” Six asks. She is no longer wearing the suit but is now dressed in the pair of jeans she wore when I first saw her, and one of Henri’s sweatshirts.

I shrug. “I’m okay. Sore and stiff. My body feels heavy.”

“The heaviness is from the dagger. It’ll eventually wear off, though.”

“How badly were you stabbed?” I ask.

She lifts her shirt and shows me the gash in her side, then a different one on her back. All told, she was stabbed three times last night, and that’s not to mention the various cuts along the rest of her body, or the shot that left a deep gash in her right thigh, now wrapped tightly with gauze and tape, the reason for her limp. She tells me that by the time we made it back it was too late to be healed by the stone. It amazes me that she is even alive.