RAN TAKEDA
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN THE ADVICE SHE’D given to Taylor rang hollow to Ran herself. Nights when no amount of meditation could quiet the echoes from her past—her brother’s cries, the collapsing walls of her family’s home, the explosions. Nights when, lying in bed, Ran felt pursued, like the Mogadorians who had nearly killed her at Patience Creek were still out there, chasing her.
On those nights, she ran.
Only a few nights after she’d consoled Taylor, Ran found herself jittery and anxious. She untangled herself from sweaty sheets and pulled on her workout clothes, slipping quietly out of her suite. The students had a midnight curfew, but it wasn’t clear exactly when in the morning that was lifted. Anyway, it didn’t matter to Ran. No one ever bothered her about her four a.m. runs. She wasn’t sure anyone even noticed.
Ran first jogged around the dorms, picking up speed as she hit the path that led out to the woods. When she reached the tree line, she was in a full-on run. She turned—it was still too dark to go crashing through the woods—so she sped along the edge, her footfalls answering the steady buzz of crickets. In her uneasy state, she imagined the crooked shadows of tree branches as claws, reaching for her. She sprinted until her legs ached and her lungs burned, and then she pushed herself to go faster. If she went hard enough, maybe she could outrun the darkness at her back.
Eventually, her sweaty tank top cold against her spine, Ran doubled back for campus. The lights were on at the training center. That was unusual. Professor Nine sometimes held sessions before class, but not this early. Curious, Ran jogged in that direction.
As Ran drew close, she heard the clamor of the obstacle course in motion. Someone was making a run, which wasn’t allowed without faculty and medical supervision.
That rule, obviously, didn’t apply to Professor Nine.
Ran peeked into the gymnasium just as Nine stopped a burst of rubber shrapnel with his telekinesis and redirected the fragments so they would knock off course a sandbag swinging for his head. Nine wore only a pair of gym shorts and sneakers, so Ran could see where his prosthetic arm met the stump of his shoulder, the skin there red and upraised, run through with blackish scars.
As Ran watched, Nine leaped onto a balance beam and sprinted across it, dodging under a series of electrified wires. A piston-powered brick battering ram waited for Nine at the end of the beam. He put his shoulder into it, leaving cracks in the stone as he spun clear.
One of the course’s wall-mounted cannons took aim at Nine, tracking his movement and firing bursts of rubber slugs faster than his telekinesis could work. Nine evaded them by running up the nearest wall, his antigravity Legacy kicking in. The computer adjusted and pieces of the wall began to leak grease under Nine’s feet, making vertical progress difficult. He slowed down and the cannon fire began to catch up to him, so Nine leaped across the gym, towards the opposite wall, reaching out—
His fingers grazed the wall’s surface, failed to stick and he fell. He landed in an awkward heap on the course’s floor and was quickly peppered by rubber bullets. Ran grimaced.
Nine had tried to use his antigravity Legacy to go from wall to wall, but in the moment had forgotten about his prosthetic limb. His power didn’t work through the metallic fingers.
Ran slipped away as Nine pounded the floor in frustration, not wanting to further invade the Loric’s privacy.
Her stomach growled and so Ran headed for the dining hall. The doors were locked—the breakfast shift wouldn’t begin for another couple of hours—but that posed no problem to Ran and her telekinesis. After popping the dead bolt, she paused briefly in front of the dining hall’s bulletin board, reading the sign advertising the Academy’s upcoming “Wargames” event. The students would be taking on the UN Peacekeepers in some sort of battle scenario with Earth Garde present to observe. She knew Nigel was excited about that, although also disappointed that they wouldn’t be working as a team.
Ran tiptoed into the kitchen, liberated an egg from the refrigerator and headed out through the service exit. Cupping the egg in her hands, she walked down the path that led to the Academy’s beach. It was cold by the water, but Ran didn’t mind. She plopped down in the sand and waited for sunrise. She liked how the sun would come from behind her, heating the sand first and turning the water slowly purple.
Holding her egg, Ran used her Legacy. She’d sworn off exploding things, that was true, but no one needed to know about this silly trick, which wasn’t even worth mentioning in Dr. Chen’s seminar. She pushed just enough kinetic energy into the egg so that she could feel the molecules vibrating, let the egg sit in that agitated state for a few seconds and then sucked the energy back into herself. That process—retrieving the energy she produced—stung her palms and made Ran flinch.
The end result was a hardboiled egg. She cracked the shell with her fingernail and began to peel it away.
“Thought you’d given up your Legacy,” said a voice from behind her.
Ran half turned. It was Professor Nine. She hadn’t heard him hiking down—the big Loric was surprisingly stealthy. Ran wondered if he knew she’d been watching him earlier. He sat down next to her, drying his sweat off with a towel.
“I had to file a report with Earth Garde about you,” Nine continued when she didn’t immediately respond. “Those dudes were pretty disappointed. I think they had a list of things for you to explode.”
Ran popped a piece of egg into her mouth. “You may tell Earth Garde that I will use my Legacy for breakfast purposes only.”
Nine snorted. He looked at Ran for a long moment and she could tell he wanted to say something. She waited in silence, looking out at the waves.
“Look, my job here is to make sure you and the others learn how to control your Legacies so you can go through life without hurting anybody. I mean, anybody you don’t want to hurt.” Nine paused. “After you graduate from here, you want to go be Earth Garde MVP, that’s cool. You want to live some boring-ass life as a very specific chef, that’s cool too.”
“Hmm,” Ran replied noncommittally.
“Point is, you don’t want to use your Legacies for Earth Garde, that’s fine with me. I don’t know if those UN tools will be chill about it, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But what I gotta know, if I’m going to graduate you from the Academy, is that should push come to shove, if your life or someone else’s life depends on it—I need to know you won’t hesitate to drop all this pacifist horseshit and blow up some bad guys. Because whether you like it or not, you’re a Garde, and situations like that tend to happen to us.”
Ran considered Nine’s words.
“I will not hesitate,” she said quietly.
Nine nodded once, satisfied, and stood up. He laid his towel out in the sand and began the process of detaching his prosthetic limb. Ran realized he planned to go swimming.
“By the way,” he said, “how’s the new roommate?”
Ran tilted her head. “Taylor? She is fine. Adjusting, I think.”
“Good,” Nine replied, and set his arm down in the towel. “Keep an eye on her, yeah? You wouldn’t think it, but healers got it worse than badass types like us. The whole savior thing, it can mess ’em up.”
There was something in Nine’s tone—almost like a warning, almost like he wasn’t saying exactly what he meant. Before Ran could ask him any further questions, he jogged towards the water and dove into the waves.