“Nah,” I say. “Lead on. This is my first penthouse.”

“Mine too,” my dad adds, smiling.

“Awesome,” John replies, looking relieved that we aren’t being as antisocial as Five. “I think you guys are really going to like the next stop.”

My dad trails a few feet behind the group, admiring the artwork. Once we’ve continued down the hallway and put Five’s room out of earshot, Eight asks the question that I think most of us are thinking.

“What’s with the new guy?” He glances over at me. “Not you, Sam. You seem perfectly normal.”

“Thanks.”

John shakes his head, looking a little bewildered. “I don’t know, honestly. He’s a little strange, right? Not exactly what I was expecting.”

“He’s probably just nervous,” Marina adds. “He’ll settle in.”

“Where’s his Cêpan?” I ask. “What has he been doing all these years?”

“He was pretty closed off the whole car ride back,” John answers. “Even Sarah couldn’t get much out of him, and you know how she is.”

“Yeah. She’s social enough to get you secretive Loric talking about pretty much anything.”

John chuckles, catching my joke right away. “Sarah is so charming she could convince an on-the-run alien to get his picture taken for the school paper.”

“So charming that same alien might even throw rocks at her window in the middle of the night, even if the feds are staking out her house.”

Eight and Marina exchange a look of confusion as John and I start laughing.

“You threw rocks at Sarah’s window?” Marina asks John, her eyebrow cocked in amusement. “Like Romeo and Juliet?”

“Uh, allegedly, according to the FBI—oh, check it out, we’re here,” John says, anxious to change the subject. I smirk at Marina and nod.

At the end of the hall, John shows us into a room that looks like the Garde have been using for a base of operations. There are huge computer screens on one wall, one of them running a program similar to my dad’s web crawler. The Loric Chests are stored here, along with the tablet we recovered from my dad’s laboratory. The rest of the room is absolutely cluttered with various pieces of tech; some of it new and just out of the box, other pieces looking like they were recovered from a junkyard. In some places along the walls, the gadgets and spare parts are piled as high as the ceiling. My dad’s face immediately lights up.

“This is quite the collection,” he exclaims, his eyes scanning the room like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Nine’s Cêpan, Sandor, this was his workshop,” explains John. “We’ve put some of the stuff to use, but none of us are exactly technological whizzes.” John turns to my father. “I’m hoping you could see if there’s anything useful, Mr. Goode. Er, Malcolm.”