TAYLOR COOK
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
TAYLOR’S FIRST FEW WEEKS AT THE ACADEMY WERE so busy that she almost forgot to be homesick.
After a meeting with Dr. Chen to assess where she stood academically, Taylor was given a full schedule of classes. She started every day with the brutal back-to-back of organic chemistry and trigonometry, two classes where she immediately felt overwhelmed. The teachers at the academy were different from the ones back home—faster talkers, sharp and enthusiastic, demanding.
Once her brain was appropriately mushed, Taylor finished her school day with European history and then classic literature. Taylor got into the habit of sitting in the back during history, keeping her head down where it was safe. Sometimes, there were objects literally flying around the room. With such a diverse population, class discussions often boiled over into intense debates. On her second day, Taylor witnessed a girl freeze her neighbor’s hands to his desk during a shouting match about socialism.
Literature class Taylor actually enjoyed. She’d always liked that class best, but back home her classmates weren’t such enthusiastic participators. At the Academy, most of the other kids always had something to say, although their book discussions were thankfully much mellower than their history ones.
“I remember Mrs. Reynolds used to have to call on people to get them to talk about The Scarlet Letter,” Taylor told her father over the phone, reminiscing about her ninth-grade English teacher. “It was like pulling teeth. I used to feel embarrassed raising my hand so much.”
“Shoot,” her dad replied, his smile audible. “I used to keep my head down, pretend to be asleep until the teacher moved on. Although, in those days, they’d smack you with a ruler . . .”
“It’s so different here,” Taylor said. She lowered her voice, even though the corner of the student union with the shared phones was completely empty. “These kids all have so much to say. They have so many opinions. This one guy got into an argument with our teacher because he doesn’t think Shakespeare actually existed. Nobody would ever come up with a crazy theory like that back in Turner, much less go at it with a teacher over it.”
“So, wait,” her dad said. “Shakespeare is real or no?”
“It’s like they’re all so sure of themselves,” Taylor continued. “Like because they got Legacies, everything about them is suddenly marked for greatness.”
“Well, you superpowered types are the chosen ones,” her dad said. Taylor laughed. “Don’t know why you’re laughing, kiddo. You’re one of ’em.”
Taylor still couldn’t believe that.
“You do know they record all those phone calls, yes?” Isabela scornfully said one night when Taylor returned from her nightly talk with her dad. “That is why we cannot have cell phones. There is no privacy. The internet, too. Think about the resources this Academy has, hmm? We should all have laptops. Two laptops! But we must go to the computer lab like third world people in the nineties. All so they can monitor us.”
Throughout her rant, Isabela lounged on the couch in their common room, her legs draped across Lofton. During her few weeks at the Academy, Taylor had learned that he was something of a fixture around their suite. She’d begun to think of him as handsome furniture.
“Wait,” Lofton said. “They keep track of our internet use?”
Isabela raised an eyebrow. “Why do you sound so concerned, hmm? What have you been looking at?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
“Pervert,” Isabela replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Do not touch me.”
“Anyway,” Taylor said, steering the conversation away from Lofton’s browsing habits. “I’m just talking to my dad. I don’t care if they listen in, if that’s even true.”
“Of course it is true!” Isbaela said. She quickly moved on. “Your dad’s coming to visit soon, yes?”
“Next month,” Taylor replied with a frown. The Academy allowed visits from family only once a month and she’d arrived just after the most recent Family Day. It’d been too long since she’d seen her dad face-to-face.
“Taylor’s dad is a muscular farm man and a bachelor. I am very excited to meet him,” Isabela explained to Lofton.
Taylor groaned. “You’re disgusting. I’ve got homework.”
And she did have homework. Essays and work sheets and lab reports, but also less mundane assignments. Every night, she was required to use her telekinesis to levitate grains of rice—not all at once, but one at a time—and keep count of how many she could manage before letting one drop. Telekinetic precision, Taylor soon learned, was much more difficult than blunt force. By the end of her second week, she was up to thirty-seven.
“Very good!” Kopano said enthusiastically when she told him. “I can only do twenty-nine. Rice! I would much rather cook and eat it.”
Another day, another six hours of classes, followed by a few more hours of rigorous physical activity in the training center. Taylor and Kopano didn’t have any classes together, so they often found each other during gym time. They trained their telekinesis by tossing objects back and forth, chatting about their days in this strange new place. Neither of them was allowed to run the obstacle course yet—a daunting gauntlet of ropes and barbed wire, pits and water traps, powered by a projectile-launching AI that adapted to their abilities. They watched from the sidelines as their classmates attempted the course and came back bruised and bloodied, never able to reach the off switch at the end of the run.
There was regular exercise, too, under the watchful eye of the Academy’s staff of fitness professionals, who were all as impressively credentialed as the professors. Kopano chased Taylor around the track, huffing and puffing, unable to match her pace. In turn, Taylor looked on in awe as Kopano curled mammoth barbells.
Kopano winked at her. “My muscles are yawning,” he told her as he effortlessly curled another 150-pound weight. “These weights, they must be broken. Or else I am the strongest boy here. That is probably it. They think my Legacy is Fortem, like Nicolas, but that mine is presenting in a much different way.”
Taylor put her hands on her hips. “I saw Nicolas lifting way more than one fifty.”
“I am just warming up!” Kopano replied. He switched hands and Taylor noticed the barbell remained suspended in the air.
She glared at him, catching on. “You’re using your telekinesis, you cheater!”
“I am not,” Kopano cried, offended. “Come see.”
Taylor came over to put one of her hands on top of the dumbbell. She tried to force it down. Instead, she ended up rising off her feet along with the weight, lifted by Kopano’s telekinesis.
“A new record from the mighty Kopano!” he shouted.
“Put me down!” Taylor laughed.
Another day, they had yoga class, but with a twist. Throughout the stretches, their instructor commanded that they keep an egg telekinetically hovering over their heads. Taylor found she was good at this exercise. She moved between stretches fluidly—from down dog to a back bend and then into a sustained tree pose. Her mind cleared and her gentle hold on the egg became second nature. She dropped her egg only when Kopano violently exploded his own during a bow pose—the fourth egg he’d broken—and she could no longer keep in the laughter.
“So, they still haven’t figured out exactly how your Legacy works?” Taylor asked him after class. They’d been at the Academy more than a week.
Kopano scratched dried egg flakes out of his hair. “Not yet. They know that I am hard as steel when they try to poke me with their needles, but they do not know why it is so inconsistent or if I can control it.” Kopano grinned. “Professor Nine wants to shoot me.”
Taylor’s eyes widened in alarm. “What? Kopano, that’s insane!”
“I agree. Yet I am also strangely excited about it.” He looked at her. “I kind of want to know what would happen.”
Taylor squeezed his hand. “Kopano. Please. Don’t let anyone shoot you, okay?”
Taylor had recently gotten firsthand experience with gunshot wounds. In order to train her healing Legacy, Taylor was allowed to leave campus one day per week. Accompanied by Dr. Goode and a team of stone-faced Peacekeepers with concealed weapons, she traveled to a hospital down in San Francisco. Under the guise of a “clinical study,” Taylor saw a variety of patients with different types of injuries. When some of them realized what she was, they demanded a real doctor, but mostly the people she dealt with were sweet and eager to be well.
“I have some experience with Legacies like yours,” Dr. Goode told her during their first visit, perhaps anticipating her nervousness. “I once sustained an extremely grievous wound that was healed by a Loric. The process does not hurt the patient and I’ve suffered no ill effects since. All that is to say—you can only do good here today, Taylor.”
She looked down at her hands. “I’ll . . . I’ll do what I can, I guess.”
“I also understand that your Legacy has limits, especially as a beginner. No one is expecting you to heal everyone in this hospital. Part of what we’re trying to discover with these visits is just where your limits are and how far you can go beyond them,” Dr. Goode continued. “As for the process itself, I believe it helps to visualize the body knitting and to . . . ah . . . push positive energy out of your body.”
Taylor couldn’t help but snort at “positive energy.” The phrase sounded like something out of one of the New Age books her mom used to read before she bailed. However, when she focused on her first patient—a man in his twenties who had gashed his leg falling off a pier—she could feel the aura Dr. Goode spoke about come flowing out of her.
The cuts and bruises were the easiest to heal. She could visualize what the skin was supposed to look like, channel her warm energy through her hand and into the patient and the flesh would mend beneath her fingertips.
Broken bones were more difficult. The doctors observing her showed Taylor X-rays of where the fractures were. That helped a little. Taylor visualized filling in the shadowy crack in the bone and, slowly, her Legacy took over. It began to seem like Taylor could sense the injury. Visualization or not, her Legacy knew something was amiss and gave her the power to fix it. When a girl whose arm had been shattered in a car accident wrapped Taylor in a bear hug, she couldn’t keep the giddy smile off her face.
Taylor met her match with a middle-aged cancer patient. The woman was frail, her head wrapped in colorful scarves, her eyes wet with hope. Lymphoma, the doctors said. The woman was no longer undergoing treatment; everything had failed. Taylor swallowed hard and pressed her palms against the woman’s abdomen.
The healing energy poured out of Taylor, but was swallowed up by the sickness that grew inside the woman. Before, when she finished healing a person, Taylor felt a satisfying sense of reconnection—the patient’s body was whole again, her Legacy snapped off in response. But now, with the cancer, her Legacy just asked for more and more energy, feeding it into the woman but making very little progress.
Dr. Goode stepped in. “Taylor, perhaps that is enough for today.”
Taylor had gotten lost in the work. Five minutes had passed. She was sweaty, yet the back of her neck was cold. In fact, she was chilled all over.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” the woman said. She brushed a damp curl of hair out of Taylor’s face. “I knew it was a long shot.”
“I’ll keep trying,” she promised. “I’ll get better. We’ll both get better.”
Later, Taylor sat in the dining hall and pored over an anatomy textbook. Maybe if she could better understand the human body, she could improve the potency of her healing.
“Look at this one, doing extra work,” Kopano observed, sitting across from her. “Where is the girl of a few weeks ago who didn’t even want to be here? Although, I suppose you did want boring and well—” Kopano squinted at a chart of the nervous system. “It appears you have found it.”
“Don’t make fun,” Taylor replied. “This is serious. I felt like—like I really did some good today.”
Kopano’s expression immediately straightened out. “I did not mean to joke,” he said. “You are a hero already in ways I have only dreamed of. You are changing lives. Isn’t it amazing?”
“It’s . . .” Taylor felt her face get hot. She couldn’t help but agree. “It kind of was. Yes.”
“Aha! At last, you admit it!” Kopano replied, his irrepressible grin breaking loose.
Taylor shook her head. “I just . . . I have to get better. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I could feel the power inside me . . . and I could feel it start to weaken gradually, the more I used it.”
“I know that feeling,” Kopano said. “Like the headaches we get when we use too much telekinesis.”
“I’ve never gotten one of those.”
“No? Well, you have never floated your little brother around for eight hours.”
“This feeling was different.” Taylor searched for the right words. “My Legacy—it was like a sun existing inside me. And every time that I healed someone, it got a little dimmer, a little closer to setting. So, by the end of the day, I could still feel the warmth from my Legacy but . . . but it was like night, you know? I knew the sun would come back eventually, but I couldn’t bring any more light. Does that make any sense?”
Kopano stared at her. “It does. It’s like poetry.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Taylor said with a wave of her hand. “The point is, I need to figure out how to make that sun brighter.”
“I have no doubt you will succeed,” Kopano said firmly.
Lying in bed that night, Taylor realized that she was actually excited about the next morning. About her strange and sometimes unruly classes, her training, her friendships with Isabela and Kopano. She felt almost guilty when she thought about her father, because she was beginning to settle in.
So, of course, that was when the nightmares started.
In the dream, Taylor found herself back on her farm. The grass was overgrown and it swayed around her legs. Something caught her eye—rivulets of blood on the emerald-green blades.
“Dad?” she called out.
Her farm looked decrepit. The walls were singed, the shutters hung crookedly from the windows, the roof sagged. There was something on the porch. In her father’s rocking chair. Was that a body? A skeleton? Was that . . . ?
Someone behind her chuckled. Taylor whipped around. She saw the Harvester preacher in his vestments, a black bandanna covering the lower half of his face. He led something on a leash—a creature, gray-skinned and reptilian, but with the hulking appendages of a large gorilla. The thing salivated, licking its long, purple tongue across rows of razor-sharp teeth. It watched her hungrily through empty black eyes.
“Abomination!” the preacher shouted.
He dropped the leash. The beast charged her. Taylor tried to run, but . . .
Taylor woke with a barely stifled scream, out of breath, sweating.
Shaken, Taylor stumbled out of her room, still half asleep. In the common room, she padded over to their mini-fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. Her hands were shaking. She wanted to call her dad, but the student union would be closed at this time of night.
Instead, she knocked gently on Isabela’s door. She remembered Isabela’s policy on slumber party secret-sharing—we are not children!—but that wasn’t what Taylor had in mind. She needed the blustery Brazilian to tell her she was being stupid, to tell her to go back to her own bed. She needed to not be alone, just for a few minutes.
When Isabela didn’t answer, Taylor gently nudged open her door. “Isabela? Are you awake?” she whispered.
Taylor managed to get the door open only about a foot before it knocked into something. A nightstand, pushed close to the door for some reason. And, when Taylor jostled it, a metal bell sitting atop it jingled sharply. It was as if Isabela had booby-trapped her room.
“Izz? What the hell?” Taylor whispered to herself, a moment before a dark shape lunged out of Isabela’s bed.
For a moment, Taylor thought she was back in her nightmare. In the moonlight, through the narrowly cracked door, Taylor couldn’t be sure exactly what she saw. The shape looked like Isabela—her slender body, her wild raven hair—but the face was twisted and wrong, scarred, like a horrible Halloween mask.
The apparition screamed at Taylor in a language she didn’t understand. Was that Portuguese? With a violent telekinetic thrust, the door slammed in Taylor’s face.
Taylor took a stunned step backwards.
“Is everything all right?”
Ran stood in the doorway to her room, hair tousled. In the weeks they’d been living together, Taylor hadn’t interacted very much with Ran. The Japanese girl was polite and pleasant, but generally kept to herself and had little to say. Isabela told Taylor not to take it personally; Ran was like that with everyone. Well, everyone except for that rangy British boy Nigel.
Taylor glanced back at Isabela’s closed door, uncertain what she just saw or how much to tell Ran. Eventually, she nodded, rubbing her eyes.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I just . . . had a bad dream. Sorry to wake you.”
“I was already awake,” Ran said.
“Okay. Well, good night.”
Ran said nothing, but remained in her doorway. Feeling like she’d experienced enough weirdness for one night, Taylor trudged back to her room with her head down.
When Taylor was nearly at her door, Ran spoke quietly. “I also have nightmares.”
Taylor turned back. “Really? You?”
Ran nodded. “Ever since the invasion. Why does that surprise you?”
“I don’t know. You just seem so . . .” Taylor shrugged. “Tough, I guess.”
Ran studied Taylor for a moment. Then, she stepped aside, gesturing into her room. “Would you like to talk about what you dreamed?”
“I . . .” The offer took Taylor aback, but after a moment’s consideration she nodded. “Okay. Sure.”
That night, huddled next to Ran on her bed, Taylor told her roommate about her farm, the Harvesters and the hideous creature that mauled her. Ran stayed quiet throughout the telling. At the end, Ran was still, her eyes closed. Taylor assumed she had fallen asleep. She yawned, her own eyes getting heavy.
“These dreams, they are creations of darkness,” Ran whispered, without opening her eyes. “When we talk about them, we drag them into the light. We realize that they cannot hurt us anymore.”
Taylor hoped that was true.