“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?”
While Daniela’s speaking, I can’t help a dumb smile from crossing my face.
I try to keep my expression neutral as I lean forward. “What else happens?”
“So, they show some pictures of Mogadorians and say they’ve come to enslave humanity. These pale aliens look like they could be guys in corny monster makeup or something. Nobody would’ve taken this shit seriously if, you know, there weren’t a ton of UFOs menacing cities. And then, she starts talking about you. There’s video of you jumping out of a burning house that shouldn’t be possible, and then there’s footage of you healing this FBI agent’s burned-up face and . . . well, it’s pretty grainy but the special effects would have to be mad good for it to be fake.”
“What . . . what does she say about me?”
Daniela smirks, eyeing me. “She says your name is John Smith. That you’re a Garde. That you’ve been sent to our planet to fight these aliens. And now, you need our help.”
That’s what Daniela was quoting before. Her terrible impression was supposed to be Sarah. I sit back, thinking about the video that Sarah and Mark made, their contribution from the sideline. Even though she’s mocking it, the video seems to have made an impression on Daniela. She could quote it from memory. Hell, the survivors we came across in the street had certainly seen it. They trusted me. They were ready to stand and fight. But was it all too little too late?
I grimace involuntarily, thinking out loud. “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the Mogadorians that were hunting me here on Earth. Getting stronger. Training. The war was always being fought in secret. We were starting to get our allies together, though, starting to figure things out. I wonder if we’d only gone public sooner, how many lives could we have saved if New York was ready for an attack like this?”
“Nah,” Daniela says, dismissing this notion with a wave of her hand. “Nobody would’ve believed that shit even a week ago. Not without people on CNN shouting about spaceships appearing over New York. I mean, you needed that whole UN fight for it to really sink in. Before that, the news people were debating whether it was a hoax, a viral stunt for a movie, whatever. I saw one lady on TV saying you were an angel. Pretty funny.”
I chuckle dryly, not really feeling in the mood. “Yeah. Hilarious.”
I realize that Daniela’s trying to comfort me in her caustic way. I’ll never know what would have happened if we’d spent the last few months trying to make our war with the Mogadorians public. There were humans at high levels involved with MogPro that would’ve made any attempt at exposing the Mogs extremely difficult, if not impossible. I know all this, logically. And yet I can’t help feeling that yesterday’s colossal loss of life is on me. I should’ve done more.
“How old are you, anyway?” Daniela asks.
“Sixteen,” I tell her.
“Yeah.” Daniela nods, like she already knew this. “You’re like the girl that narrates the video. You got that whole wise-beyond-your-years thing going, that’s true. And you look like you’ve been through some shit. But take a closer look . . .” She trails off, clicking her tongue in thought. “You should be finishing high school, man. Not saving the world.”
I can’t let what happened in New York bury me under guilt. I need to make sure nothing like it ever happens again. I need to find my friends and figure out a way to kill Setrákus Ra, once and for all.
I square my shoulders and smile at Daniela, affecting a nonchalant shrug. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”
Daniela smiles back for a second, then catches herself and looks away. For a second there, I thought she might volunteer to join the fight. I can’t make her stick with us after we get out of the subway. I just have to trust that she, and the other humans out there, have developed their Legacies for a reason.
“We need to get moving,” I say.
I shake Sam’s shoulder and he snorts awake. His eyes are bleary for a moment, adjusting slowly to the bluish LCD lighting of the subway car.
“So it wasn’t a bad dream,” he sighs, standing up slowly and stretching out his back. His gaze drifts over to Daniela. “You decided to hang around, huh?”
Daniela shrugs, like the question embarrasses her. “You mentioned getting some people out of New York . . . ,” she says to me.
“Yeah. The army and the police have secured the Brooklyn Bridge. They’re evacuating people from there. At least, they were last night.”
“I’d like to go there,” Daniela replies, standing up. She straightens her dust-covered and blood-spattered T-shirt. “Maybe see if my mom made it.”
“All right,” I say. I don’t want to push her on joining forces. If it’s going to happen, she’s the one who has to make the decision. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stick together for the time being. “We should head that way too.”
Sam rubs his eyes, still working moisture into his mouth. “You think Nine and Five battled their way to the evacuation point?”
“Doubt it,” I reply. “But Nine’s a big boy, he can handle himself for a little longer. Priorities have changed. I really need to get in touch with Six. If anywhere has working phones, I think it’ll be the evacuation point.” I turn to Daniela. “Can you lead us out of here?”
Daniela nods. “Only one way to go with the uptown tracks caved in. We follow the tracks for a few more stops, we should just about make it to the bridge.”
“Wait. How did priorities change while we were sleeping down here?” Sam asks.
I tell Sam how Ella reached out to me telepathically from her prison aboard the Anubis, explaining that Setrákus Ra is headed for the Sanctuary. Daniela listens in, her eyes wide and locked on me, mouth slightly opened. When I’m finished describing the dreamscape, prophecies and endangered Lorien historical sites, she shakes her head in total mystification.