The Power of Six

When it clicks open I remove the lock, set it aside, and place my hand on the Chest’s top. Six and Sam both lean forward in anticipation.

I lift the lid. The Chest is yet again ablaze with light that hurts my eyes. The first thing I do is remove the velvet bag holding the seven orbs that make up Lorien’s solar system. I think of Henri and how we watched the light glow and pulsate at Lorien’s core, showing that the planet is still alive, albeit hibernating. I place the bag in Sam’s hand. All three of us peer down into the Chest. Something else is lit up.

“What is that glowing?” Six asks.

“No idea. It never did that before.”

She reaches down and plucks a rock from the bottom of the Chest. It’s a perfectly round crystal no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and when she touches it, the light brightens even more. And then it fades, and begins to slowly pulse. We watch the crystal, transfixed by the glow. Then, suddenly, Six lets it drop to the floor. The crystal ceases to pulse and resumes its steady glow. Sam reaches down to pick it up.

“Don’t!” Six yells.

He looks up, confused.

“Something doesn’t feel right about it,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“It felt like pinpricks against my palm. When I grabbed hold of it I got a really bad feeling.”

“This stuff is my Inheritance,” I say. “Maybe I’m the only one allowed to touch it?”

I bend down and carefully pick up the glowing crystal. Within seconds it feels as if I’m holding a radioactive cactus; my stomach compresses and acid climbs up my throat, and I instantly toss the crystal onto a blanket. I swallow. “Maybe I’m doing it wrong.”

“Maybe we don’t know how to use it. I mean, you said Henri kept you from seeing inside because you weren’t ready. Maybe you’re still not ready?”

“Well, that would be pretty lame,” I say.

“This sucks,” Sam says.

Six walks into the kitchen and returns with two towels and a plastic bag. She carefully grabs the glowing crystal with a towel and drops both into the bag, which she then wraps in a second towel.

“You really think that’s necessary?” I ask. My stomach continues to gurgle.

She shrugs. “I don’t know about you, but the feeling I got when I touched it was bad news. Better safe than sorry.”

What’s left in the Chest is everything comprising my Inheritance, and I’m not really sure where to start. I reach in and grab an object I’ve seen before, the oblong crystal Henri used to spread the Lumen from my hands to the rest of my body. It comes alive and bathes the dining room in its bright light. The crystal’s center begins swirling with what looks like smoke, twisting and turning back on itself, as I have seen it do before.

“Now we’re talking,” Sam says.

“Here,” I say, giving it to him. The crystal falls inert when it transfers hands. “I’ve already seen it.”

Also inside the Chest are a few smaller crystals, a black diamond, a collection of brittle leaves bound with twine, and a star-shaped talisman the same pale blue as the pendant around my neck, which tells me it’s Loralite, the rarest gem found only at Lorien’s core. There’s also a bright red oval bracelet and an amber-colored stone in the shape of a raindrop.

“What do you think that is?” Sam asks, pointing to a flat, circular stone the same milky white color as a pearl that’s stuck in the corner.

“Don’t know,” I say.

“How about that?” he asks, this time pointing to a small dagger that looks to have a blade made of diamond.

I lift it from the Chest. The handle fits snug in my hand as though it was made for it, and I suppose it was. The blade isn’t more than four inches long, and just by seeing the way the light glints along its edge, I can tell it’s far sharper than any razor one might find on Earth.

“What about that thing?” Sam asks again, pointing to something else, and I have no doubt he’ll ask the same question over and over until he’s inquired about every object inside.

“Here,” I say, setting the dagger down and removing the seven orbs in an effort to keep him occupied. “Check this out.”

I blow on them, and tiny lights flicker across their surfaces. Then I toss them up in the air, and they instantly spring to life, spinning in orbit around the orange-sized sun in the center.

“It’s Lorien’s solar system,” I say. “Six planets, one sun. And this one here,” I add, pointing to the fourth orb, which remains the same various shades of ashen gray as the last time I’d seen it, “is Lorien as it looks today, at this very moment. The glow at its center is what’s left.”

“Wow,” Sam says. “NASA dudes would be crapping themselves right now looking at this.”

“And watch this,” I say, illuminating my right hand. I sweep the light over the orb, and all at once the surface changes from its depressing gray tones to vibrant blues and greens of the forests and oceans. “This is the planet as it was the day before the attack.”

“Wow,” Sam says again, staring in awe with his mouth hanging open; and while the rotating planets have him transfixed, I look back in the Chest.

“Do you know what any of this is? Or what it does?” I ask Six, who doesn’t respond. I turn and see she’s just as amazed as Sam by the solar system spinning two feet above the floor. Since Henri had told me they weren’t part of my Legacy, which means they weren’t locked in the Chest, I had wrongly assumed she’d seen them before. But it makes sense she hasn’t; they can only be activated after the first Legacy develops.

“Six,” I say again. She comes back to reality, turns to me and I find myself looking away once we make eye contact. “Do you know what any of this stuff is?”

“Not really,” she murmurs, running her hands over the stones’ surfaces. “This is the healing stone Henri and I used at the school,” she says, pointing out a flat, black rock I’ve seen before. Then she freezes, a faint gasp escaping her lips. Sam and I exchange confused expressions. She lifts a pale yellow stone, its surface waxy and smooth, from the Chest and holds it up to the light. “Oh my God,” she marvels, flipping it over.

“Tell me,” I prod. She looks me right in the eyes.

“Xitharis,” she says. “It comes from our first moon.”

She brings the small stone to her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. The faint yellow shade of the stone darkens slightly. She opens her eyes and hands the stone to me. I frown and take it from her, my fingertips grazing the palm of her hand. Sam inhales sharply.

“What the . . .” He looks terrified, groping for me like he’s blind.

“What’s going on?” I ask, slapping Sam’s hands away from my face.

“You’re invisible,” Six says quietly. I look down at my lap, and it’s true: I’ve completely vanished. I drop the Xitharis on the floor like a hot potato, and instantly become visible.

“The Xitharis,” Six explains, “allows one Garde to transfer a Legacy to another, but only for a short period of time. An hour, I think, maybe two. I can’t say for sure. All you have to do is charge it by focusing your energy on the stone. Put it to your forehead, and bam, it’s ready to go.”

“Charge it, like a battery?” Sam asks.

“Exactly, and it won’t start using the Legacy until it’s touched again.”

I look at the stone. “Sweet. Looks like somebody other than you is taking a trip into town.”

“And somebody other than you is going to be resistant to fire,” she says playfully.

“If you’re nice to me, then it’s definitely a possibility,” I say.

Sam picks the stone up and clenches his entire body in deep concentration. Nothing happens. “Oh come on,” he says to the stone. “I promise to use it for the power of good. No girls’ locker rooms, I swear.”

“Sorry, Sam,” Six says. “I’m pretty sure this stuff only works on us.”

He sets the Xitharis down and we dig through the rest of the Chest to see if anything else is activated by touch; but after an hour of studying and holding all seventeen artifacts, blowing hot air on them, squeezing them tightly, nothing else engages aside from the glowing crystal wrapped in the towel, the larger oblong crystal with the smoky center, and the solar system still rotating above us. The healing stone, however, does cure the cuts and bruises Six has been stamping my body with.