Eight's Origin (Lorien Legacies: The Lost Files Bonus) by Lore Pittacus Read Free Book Online

I've reached the point where I don' know how long I've been alone anymore. I should have been keeping track all this time, I guess, marking off days, noting as the weeks and months passed. Or has it already been a year by now? Maybe, maybe not. I really have no idea. I do know that it has been longer than a season and shorter than a lifetime.
    I'm definitely taller than I used to be. My hair now falls almost to my shoulders and my arms have grown thick and ropy with muscle.
    But there's no one to ask how much I've grown or what else about me may have changed. There's no one who remembers what I looked like before. The only one who really knew me was Reynolds, and he's gone.
    Here, now, there is only me—me and the mountains and the sky and the animals. Sometimes I wonder where I stop and the rest of it begins. Sometimes I think there is no difference at all.
    It might drive some people crazy, living like this, but the quiet keeps me company. I spend my days swimming in the lakes and running through the mountains. I have no name, and I like it that way because when I'm myself, not trying on some new, different identity, my memories return. I try to linger only on the ones that make me happy and skip over the ones that are painful, but sometimes it's hard to know which are which. Sometimes they are one and the same.
    I've learned that some memories surprise you and reveal a sharp edge just when you least expect it. I could be wandering through the woods, stumbling down rocky mountain paths in search of dinner and thinking about a happy time with Reynolds—the two of us wandering through the markets of New Delhi, me sucking on a juicy mango as he tells me a story about the life he left behind on our faraway planet, his face at a certain angle where the light catches his laughing eyes, his smile tilted up at the corner just so. Then, suddenly, the scene will shift and I'll see those same laughing eyes, that same tilted smile, but they'll be for Lola. And just like that, the memory becomes darker, terrible. And I'll be taken back to the time she betrayed us.
    I never cry with these memories. But sometimes I scream.
    I should have been able to save him.
    I blame myself.
    Reynolds had been training me for that moment ever since we arrived on Earth, first teaching me to be fast and strong and then, when I was older, teaching me to master my abilities—my Legacies—for the day I would confront my enemies, the ones who drove me from Lorien to this distant planet.
    When I discovered that I could move objects with my mind, Reynolds taught me how to exercise my brain like a muscle, until I could go from lifting a small pebble to lifting almost anything. And then, when I disappeared one day on a crowded street only to find myself a block away from where I'd started, he taught me to control my teleportation power so that I could do it whenever I wanted, as easily as blinking my eyes.
    And he taught me about who I really am. Who we are: that there are others like me out there somewhere.
    In the beginning there were nine of us. We are called the Garde. I know from the scars on my ankle that there are only six of us left. Three are dead. I also know that someday, somehow, I will rejoin the others. I am Number Eight.
    But without Reynolds, I have no idea how to find them. I don't know what they look like; I don't know their names. My Chest—the only physical tie I still had to my planet, Lorien—is also gone and I'm vulnerable without it. But coming together again is part of our destiny. I believe that as much as I believe in Lorien. So I can only hope that one of the others has a plan. That they know more about the rest than I do. That the other Garde find each other, and then ñnd me, before the Mogadorians return again.
    Because even though Reynolds had been helping me develop my Legacies, training me for the day when I would come face-to-face with the Mogadorians and be able to defeat them, I wasn't ready. Alone, I couldn't stop them.