“You know too much,” I say. I feel guilty he’s eating my terrible meal on the floor of an abandoned house instead of feasting on his mother’s food at a dining-room table.

“Sam, I’m sorry you got caught up in this with us,” Six says. “But it’s nice that you’re here.”

He blushes. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel a weird connection to the whole situation. Can I ask you something? How far away is Mogadore from Earth?”

I think back to when Henri blew on the seven glass orbs, how they came to life. Soon we were looking at a floating replica of our solar system. “It’s a lot closer than Lorien is, why?”

Sam stands. “How long would it take to get there?”

“A few months maybe,” Six says. “Depends on what type of ship you’re flying and what type of energy it uses.”

Walking in circles, Sam says, “I think the U.S. government has to have a ship built somewhere that can handle that distance. I’m sure it’s a prototype and top secret and hidden under a mountain that’s hidden under another mountain, but I was just thinking about what would happen if we couldn’t find your ship and needed to take the fight to them—go to Mogadore. We have to have a Plan B, right?”

“Sure. What’s Plan A again?” I ask, biting my tongue. I can’t fathom fighting the whole planet of Mogadore on their own turf.

“Getting my Chest,” Six says. She pulls the blanket back over her head.

“And then what?”

“Training?”

“And then what?” I ask.

“We go find the others, I guess.”

“It just sounds like a bunch of running and not much of anything else. I think Henri or Katarina would have us doing something more productive somehow. Like studying how to kill certain enemies. Do you know what a piken is?”

“Those are those huge beasts that destroyed the school,” Six says.

“What about a kraul?”

“Those are the smaller animal things that attacked us in the gymnasium,” she answers. “Why?”

“In the dream that I had in North Carolina, when you and Sam heard me speaking Mogadorian, those two names were mentioned, but I’d never heard of them before. Henri and I simply called them ‘the beasts.’” I pause. “I had another dream earlier.”

“Maybe you aren’t having dreams,” she says. “Maybe you’re having visions again.”