“You must be Six and Seven,” she says after a moment of getting nothing but stunned looks from the two of us.

“You—you can call me Marina.”

“Noted, Marina,” the woman says with a gentle smile.

“Who are you?” I ask, finding my voice at last.

“My name is Lexa,” the woman answers. “I’ve been helping out your friend Mark under the name GUARD.”

“Are you one of our Cêpan?”

Lexa finally moves out of the doorway and takes a seat on one of the cots. Marina and I sit down across from her. “No, I’m not a Cêpan. My brother was Garde but he didn’t make it through training at the Lorien Defence Academy. I was enrolled there too, as an engineering student, when he . . . when he died. After that I kind of, ah, fell off the grid. As much as you could on Lorien. I didn’t exactly fit into one of their prescribed roles. I worked with computers a lot, sometimes not so legally. I was nobody special, basically.”

“But you ended up here,” Marina says, her head tilted.

“Yeah. Eventually, I got hired to retrofit an antique ship for a museum . . .”

That detail clicks for me. “You flew the second ship to Earth,” I say.

“Yes. I came here with Crayton and my friend Zophie. You probably know this by now, but we weren’t part of the Elders’ plan. We managed to escape Lorien because of Crayton—well, because Crayton worked for Ella’s father, and because we had access to that old ship. Ella’s father, he knew what was coming. That’s why he hired me to fix it up. I wasn’t even really a pilot. I had to learn, well . . . on the fly.”

I snort at Lexa’s bad joke and smile at her, but my mind is racing. There are more of us. Maybe the Loric aren’t as extinct as we thought. I should be excited about this, but instead I feel suspicious. I’m probably just being paranoid after what happened with Five. Still, I think of Crayton and how he raised Ella while secretly hunting for the rest of the Garde. He never mentioned that he came here with two other Loric. My eyes narrow a fraction.

“Crayton never told us about you,” I say, trying to make it sound not too much like an accusation. Crayton did withhold a lot from us, after all. Ella’s real origin didn’t even come out until after he died.

“I guess he wouldn’t have,” Lexa replies, frowning slightly. “His only concern was keeping Ella alive. We agreed not to have contact with each other. It was safer for everyone if we kept our distance. You know how the Mogs are. They can’t torture any information out of you if you don’t actually know anything.”

“What about your friend? Zophie? Where’s she?”