The Rise of Nine (2012)

The Rise of Nine is a young adult teen fiction novel by Pittacus Lore and the third novel in the Lorien Legacies. It is published by HarperCollins, & was released on August 21, 2012, in the US and by Penguin on August 30, 2012 in the UK. It is the first book in the series to be written after Jobie Hughes left the project.

The Fall of Five continues the Lorien series.

Characters

Number Four: One of the Garde who is the unofficial leader of the team. He goes by the name John Smith.

Number Six: A female Garde who is a candidate for the strongest of them in terms of raw power.

Number Seven: A female Garde from Spain who goes by the name Marina. She is vegetarian and the cook of the group.

Number 10: An 11 year old girl who was brought to earth by her father, and not with the rest of the Garde. She goes by the name Ella.

Number Nine: A recently escaped prisoner who is hotheaded and cocky, and is debatably the strongest of them. He is the best fighter and never runs from a fight.

Crayton: Ella’s Cêpan

Number Eight: A free spirited and fun boy who spent his life hiding in India masquerading as the Hindu deity Vishnu.

Sarah: Number Four’s girlfriend who they find imprisoned at the Dulce Base. She is kind and supportive, and serves as the heart and soul of the team.

Sam: Number Four’s best friend from Paradise. He is a firm believer in aliens and government conspiracies.

Setrákus Ra: The Mogadorian Leader bent on the colonization of Earth and enslaving its inhabitants.

Plot

Marina and Six, along with Ella (previously unknown member of the Garde) and Crayton (her Cêpan) are on a plane heading towards India, where they hope to find another member of the Garde: Number Eight. As soon as they land at the New Delhi airport they are picked up by men who worship Eight as they believe him to be the reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu (it is later revealed that he appeared to them in the form of Vishnu, thanks to his shape-shifting abilities). They plan to take the four to the summit of a mountain in the Himalayas, which is where Eight has made his home. However, before they reach him, they were ambushed by soldiers of the Lord's Resistance Front, an organization of people who want to kill Eight and all of those associated with him. After defeating their attackers and reaching the mountain, Six, Seven and Ten have to face three of Vishnu's avatars, which are used as a way of testing whether they are really members of the Garde.

Once Number Eight realizes that they are Loric, he tells them his story; his Cêpan Reynolds was killed by Mogadorians after being betrayed by the love of his life, a human named Lola. During this same attack, Eight's chest was taken by the Mogadorians (Marina finds it afterwards). Eight has been living in the Himalayas since. They discover that one of Eight's legacies is the ability to teleport, which they plan to use to reach New Mexico, where they can easily make their way to Number Four.

They travel further up the mountain to a Loric cave that contains a large stone of Loralite, and acts as a "door" between several other locations that have a Loralite stone. In the cave they see paintings on the walls that are a timeline of the events that have happened. (They see One's, Two's, and Three's deaths, Four's battle in the school and Number Five battling Mogs from a tree). They then come across a painting of a Loric with a sword through them, although the face is ripped off. It is revealed this is Number Eight, who ripped off the face to try to avoid his fate. The Mogs then burst into the cave and kill Crayton, forcing the group to perform a hurried teleportation together from the Himalayas. Six is teleported to a desert in New Mexico while Eight, Seven, and Ten end up in Somalia. Six is dehydrated due to desert heat but manages to make it to an abandoned town, where she is captured by FBI agents. After intense questioning she manages to break out and in the process comes across Sarah Hart, Four's girlfriend who supposedly turned him in to the FBI in the previous novel. To Six's horror, the false Sarah Hart forms into Setrákus Ra. She challenges Setrákus Ra to a one-on-one fight before being thrown into a cell with the real Sarah Hart.

Meanwhile, Four and Nine, along with Bernie Kosar, Four's shape-shifting Chimæra, are captured by the FBI, who are now working with the Mogs. Whilst in transit they escape easily, seriously wounding their captors in the process. Four asks one of the dying agents, Agent Walker, where Sam and Sarah are being held and is told that they are being held out west. Walker then seemingly dies. Once he helps Nine fight off the rest of the FBI, Four returns to the van they had been traveling in only to find that all the bodies are gone.

The pair take a freight train to Chicago and argue about what to do next. They eventually decide to go to Nine's safe house, although Four is angered by how little Nine seems to care about Sam and Sarah. Nine reveals that his safe house is in the top floor of the John Hancock Center, including training rooms, weapon cabinets and citywide surveillance systems. Nine shows off how experienced he is with all the rooms and, when the talk returns to Sam and the tablet the two found, that he has a piece of equipment that fits the tablet. When they use it they see a map of the Earth with several pulsing blue dots; two in Chicago, one in Jamaica and four in India. They realize that the tablet shows the locations of the other Garde and, seeing that there are seven dots instead of six, realized that there was a second ship that made it to Earth, carrying with it a tenth Garde member. They then see two green dots, one in New Mexico and the other in Egypt, and realize that these are their ships. As they watch, the four dots in India suddenly reappear, with three off the coast of Somalia and one in New Mexico.