I Am Number Four characters

Also known as Number Four

Appears from the start

The narrator, one of nine gifted Loric children evacuated to Earth as a small boy when the Mogadorians destroyed their planet. Each of the nine was placed under a charm that lets them be killed only in the order of their numbers, and only while they are apart. He is the fourth, and the first three are already dead, which makes him next. He has spent his life on Earth moving from town to town with his guardian, taking a new name in every one, never staying long enough to be remembered. He is a teenager, tired of running, and starting to want the ordinary life the hiding costs him. His inherited powers, called Legacies, have not yet appeared when the book opens.

Appears from the start

John's Cepan, the adult guardian assigned to him when the ships left Lorien. He has raised John since they landed, poses as his father, forges their identities, chooses the towns they run to, and carries the Loric Chest whose contents are meant for John alone. He remembers Lorien as it was and is the only living source of John's history. Protective to the point of severity, he is charged with training John once the Legacies arrive and with keeping him alive until the surviving Garde can find one another.

Appears from the start

The first of the nine Loric children to be found and killed by the Mogadorians, years before the book begins. Her death cut the charm's protection by one and left the first of the ring-shaped scars that burn into the ankles of every surviving Garde when one of their number dies. John never met her; he knows her only as a scar and a warning.

Appears from the start

The second of the nine, hunted down and killed in Europe some time after Number One. Her death left the second scar on John's ankle. Like the first, she is known to John only as a mark on his skin and as evidence that the Mogadorians are working steadily down the list.

Appears from the start

The third of the nine, hiding in Kenya, run to ground and killed by Mogadorian soldiers in the book's opening pages. His death burns the third scar into John's ankle on a beach in Florida and forces John and Henri to abandon their home that night. With Three gone, the charm now stands between the Mogadorians and John himself.

First appears in chapter 3

A student at Paradise High who gave up cheerleading and the popular crowd after a summer away and now spends her time behind a camera. Direct, warm, and uninterested in the town's pecking order, she takes to John quickly and photographs him for the school. She is the first person in any town who makes John want to stay, which is exactly what his guardian has always warned him against.

First appears in chapter 4

A quiet, bullied classmate who reads tabloids and magazines about alien visitors and is convinced the government is hiding what it knows. His father disappeared when he was a boy, after becoming obsessed with the same subject, and Sam has kept his father's collection of clippings ever since. He becomes John's first real friend in Paradise, and his obsession turns out to be far better informed than anyone in town assumes.

First appears in chapter 4

The star of the Paradise High football team, Sarah's former boyfriend, and the town's unchallenged bully. He treats John's arrival and Sarah's interest in him as a personal insult and spends the school year escalating from taunts to organized harassment. He is used to nobody in Paradise standing up to him.

First appears in chapter 6

A stray beagle that turns up outside the house in Paradise and refuses to leave, following John to school and waiting for him. John names him after a football player and Henri tolerates him. The dog is unusually watchful and unusually persistent, and John finds he can sense what the animal is feeling.

First appears in chapter 30

Another of the surviving Loric children, a young woman who arrives in Paradise having tracked the Mogadorians rather than hidden from them. She is years ahead of John in training and control: she can turn invisible and pull weather down out of a clear sky, and she fights without hesitation. She has been searching for the others of the nine, and she argues that the survivors have to find each other and learn to fight together instead of waiting to be picked off one at a time.