Free I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Fallen Legacies by Lore Pittacus Page A

you’re hiding out in,” I snarl, “go back there and leave me alone.”
    “You could’ve at least kicked the gun to her,” she says, ignoring me. “Given her a fighting chance.”
    It’s a scenario I’ve agonized over: Two’s silly little gun lying at my feet, her only a short distance away. I’ve played out the possibilities in my head and managed to rationalize the fear I was feeling at the time as strategic self-preservation. There was no way Two was getting out of that room alive, whether I helped her or not. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any less a coward.
    “They still would have killed her,” I say, voice shaking. “And then they would’ve killed me.”
    “Which is what you’re really worried about,” replies One, rolling her eyes. “Saving your own skin.”
    “If I die, what happens to you?” I ask, my voice rising. I want One to understand.
    “I’m already dead, dummy.”
    “Are you? Because it sure seems like you’re here now, making me feel worse than I already do. I’m sorry I couldn’t save Two, but—”
    I’m interrupted by a soft knock on my bedroom door. I was so distracted by One I didn’t even hear footsteps coming up the stairs. Without waiting for me to invite her, my mother slowly opens my door, looking concerned. I wonder how much of my conversation with my imaginary friend she overheard.
    “Who are you talking to?” she asks.
    I shoot a surreptitious glance to where One was standing a moment ago. She’s gone now, retreated back into my brain.
    “No one,” I snap, sitting down on the foot of my bed. “What do you want?”
    “I wanted to check on you,” she says, and gently takes my chin in her hands. She examines the yellowing bruise on my jaw, the scabbed-over spot on my bottom lip. “He should not have done this.”
    “I was being insubordinate,” I say, the token reply to one of the General’s rebukes coming easily.
    My mother sits down on the bed next to me. I get the feeling that she wants to say more but is having trouble finding the words.
    “He told me what happened,” she begins, hesitating. “With you and the Garde child. He wanted to send you to West Virginia, but I talked him out of it.”
    There’s a mountain base in West Virginia where intensive training classes take place. I’ve heard the “training” is really endless hours of laboring in underground tunnels. For a trueborn like me to be sent there would be the equivalent of a human teenager being sent to military school.
    “Thanks,” I reply, not entirely sure why my mother is telling me this.
    She stands up and goes to my window, looking out at the lights of the banquet.
    “Get back to your studies,” she says quietly. “Grow stronger. And the next time you have a chance to take down a Garde, do it.”
    My mother kneels in front of me, cupping my bruised face in her hands. She stares into my eyes, her look beseeching.
    I stare back at her in disappointment, sensing that there’s something more she wants to say.
    “Yes, Mother,” I reply. She opens her mouth to speak, but closes it without saying a word.

CHAPTER 21
    I am a model young Mogadorian.
    I am dedicated to my studies. My understanding of Ra’s Great Book is lauded by my instructors, my dedication to Mogadorian progress unquestioned. I finish top of my class in Advanced Tactical Planning, my final essay on how a Mogadorian guerrilla force could overwhelm a well-defended human city with a minimum of Mogadorian casualties trumpeted as something my father might have written in his younger days.
    “Your son makes me certain that our military will continue to flourish well into the next generation,” I overhear one of my instructors tell the General. My father replies with only a grim nod. We have not spoken since London. It has been two years.
    I keep my other tactical plans to myself. Secreted away in my room, I scribble out a plan for how a human army with proper strategic intelligence could repel a Mogadorian