Defenders of Earth (Book 2 of the Keepers Trilogy)

Chapter 1

My gut tells me there's something off about that girl.

The girl that, for the past couple months, has slept in my house, in the guest room across the hall from me. The girl who was found, unconsious and injured, in my backyard at the beginning of October, who said nothing that day except something that sounded like German, but wasn't. The girl who shut up in that language until she could speak English. The girl with no records, no past, leading police officers to believe that she escaped from an extremely troubled home and may have not been let out of the house at all. But abusive homes don't explain why the doctors that we took her to were baffled by her anatomy. Human, but not quite, they said. Proportions were slightly off, the blood slightly orange. They asked if they could study her. My mother and father said no.

All we know about her is that her name is Calypso, but everyone called her Callie. She was raised by a man named James whom she was very fond of. This man is now dead, according to her. She refuses to give details. But at night, I hear her sobbing for him.

Callie owns two necklaces, neither of which she takes off. One is a locket with a tree branch on it. The other has a bronze clock on it. She doesn't explain the significance of either necklace. When asked, she replies with, "They're reminders."

She also knows quite a lot. She took a test to figure out what level of school she should be in, and the evaluators all agree that in math and science, she was beyond college level, but very low in history or literature. One even told her, "Imagine what level you'd be at if you were completely fluent in English."

She just shrugged at that.

Callie is, surprisingly enough, fun to be around. Although she doesn't entirely understand English, she gets jokes and is really sarcastic. But underneath that sassy and fun personality, it can be pretty dark. She's hiding something.

It's not uncommon to find her curled up with a book, like now as I enter the living room. "Hi, Callie," I say.

"Hello, Mark. How are you?" she asks a little robotically.

"I'm good. How about you?"

"I'm okay. I spent the day-"

"Reading, I know. It's normal for you," I say, plopping down next to her. "Whatcha reading?"

She holds up the book. It's an American History textbook. I wonder how she's getting along with it. "I do not understand a few words, though," she admits.

"Like what?" I lean over to look at the page. She's surprisingly good at reading English, but the occasional word stumps her. Mostly names, but now she's pointing at massacre. Cheerful.

I pronounce it slowly, and she follows suit. Then I explain what it is. At the end of my explanation, her face is pale and she looks disturbed. "I think that I am done for today," she mutters, shutting the book and putting in on the coffee table before retreating from the room.

Have I mentioned that she's super sensitive? Especially to things involving death. I think she's traumatized or something. She's been taken to therapy, but she refuses to speak about her past.

I hear her run up the stairs and into her room. Don't worry, I think to myself. She'll emerge. Eventually.

I sit down on my bed, regretting that I asked. Of course. Of all the words to struggle with, it's massacre.

I reach for a small notebook that I always keep by me. I write the word down in English-or human, as we call it on Azera- and then the Azeran equivalent. Everyone thinks this notebook is a diary. I view it more as a grammar book/ dictionary. I write the word in Azeran twice-once in the Azeran alphabet, and once in the English alphabet-then I write the English word below it.