THE SIX
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
FROM ICELAND, THEY TELEPORTED BACK TO NEW Mexico, where Isabela, Caleb and Professor Nine were still waiting. There was a lot of commotion over the amount of blood on their clothes, but Taylor had healed most of their injuries. She’d done a bad job mending her own broken ankle—had put only enough healing energy into the shattered bones to allow her to walk on it—so she needed to lean on Kopano for support.
He didn’t mind.
They brought Freyja with them. Strangely, they found that the choker had simply fallen off her neck. The little girl claimed it “just happened.” Taylor wondered what that meant. It seemed as if the Foundation had let them off the hook.
Freyja was turned over to the UN Peacekeepers. She’d have a long flight home, but they would reunite her with her family. She thanked Taylor and Nigel before the Peacekeepers took her away, but Taylor was disappointed to see fear in her eyes. The child was afraid of Garde. It was hard to blame her; the girl had seen firsthand what the worst of their kind could do.
Kopano offered to teleport the Peacekeepers and Earth Garde back to Iceland so they could apprehend the mercenaries and investigate Einar’s house. It took them thirty minutes to get clearance for such an operation, but eventually they took him up on the offer.
But when they were ready, Kopano found he was unable. The Loralite stone in Einar’s backyard was gone. Someone must have smashed it.
The six of them returned to the Academy. They were allowed two days of rest and recovery. Then, the punishment kicked in. They were assigned training sessions at dawn five days a week, immediately followed with a shift serving breakfast in the dining hall, not to mention weekly sessions with Dr. Linda to deal with any psychological fallout.
Rumors about the six of them swirled around campus. They didn’t talk about their adventure. Even Isabela refrained from bragging.
People started calling them the Fugitive Six.
As the weeks went by and things ostensibly returned to normal, the six of them had a hard time hanging out with other students around the Academy. The others—they hadn’t seen what was out there. They hadn’t really fought yet. They had Legacies, but they weren’t yet Garde.
After one of their early-morning training sessions on Nine’s brutal obstacle course, Caleb turned to the others as he toweled off.
“Do you guys ever get the feeling that this isn’t exactly punishment?” he asked.
“No,” Isabela groaned, rubbing her sore neck. “It is worse than punishment. It’s torture.”
“No, I mean . . .” Caleb shrugged. “I don’t know. These team workouts, it’s like . . .”
“We are being groomed,” Ran said.
They all looked up at the catwalk that crossed over the training center.
Nine watched them from above.
She might have hated the arduous physical training, but Isabela threw herself into her studies like never before. One subject in particular interested her. Almost every night, she would knock on Taylor or Ran’s door.
“Flash cards?” Isabela would ask with a nervous smile.
They practiced her English for hours every night. Soon, she wouldn’t need Simon’s Legacy at all.
“Can I show you something?” Caleb asked Nigel, about a month after they’d returned from Iceland.
“That question makes me nervous, mate,” Nigel replied with a smirk. “What is it?”
“It’s upstairs.”
Nigel followed Caleb up three floors to one of the unoccupied sections of the dorms. Technically, they weren’t allowed up here, but even with the stricter security protocols that had been implemented since their little excursion, the dorms remained largely a free-for-all. The abandoned floors were a popular hookup spot if you had a prudish roommate.
“Caleb, man, you’re a good lad and all, but I don’t feel that way about you.”
“What? No!” Caleb glanced over his shoulder at Nigel and blushed. “I’m not—I mean—it’s okay that you are but I’m—um . . .”
“Relax, mate. I’m messing with you.”
“I know,” Caleb said, relaxing.
He stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall. Nigel noticed soundproofing pads had been stapled to the surface.
“Ready?” Caleb asked.
“I’m not sure that I am, brother.”
Caleb swung the door open.
Inside was a garage band setup that warmed Nigel’s heart. A five-piece drum kit, a bass guitar, a banged-up electric guitar and a keyboard. Each of the instruments and the soundboard that managed the volume were manned by one of Caleb’s clones.
“Seriously?” Nigel said. “Clone band?”
“Hardly anyone ever uses the music room, so I liberated some stuff and brought it here,” Caleb explained. “It’s our practice space.”
“You can play all these instruments?”
Caleb shrugged. “I mean, not well. But we’re learning. It helps that I can have each clone practice on their own.”
Nigel raised an eyebrow at that. “Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He walked farther into the room and grabbed the microphone stand. He tilted it in Nigel’s direction. “Thing is, we need a front man.”
Nigel grinned.
“I’m afraid we’ve been going about your training all wrong,” Dr. Goode told Kopano apologetically. He had the Nigerian young man hooked up to an array of machines that produced a variety of readings, all of them gibberish to Kopano.
“I don’t know,” Kopano said cheerily. “I think you’ve been doing a solid job.”
Dr. Goode smiled. “Yes, well, you see, we believed your Legacy was a variation of Fortem that was tied to your skin. That you were somehow creating an impenetrable subdermal layer.”
“But I’m not,” Kopano replied. “Right?”
“No, it’s much more amazing than that,” Dr. Goode said. “Your Legacy is in your every cell, Kopano. In the atoms, in fact, that make up your cells. To put it simply, based on my preliminary findings, you can separate or contract your cells on a subatomic level. You can alter your density. You can become very heavy and hard or weightless to the point of transparency. Now, it’s just a matter of learning how to control it.”
Kopano looked down at his hands. “I haven’t been able to do what I did since . . . since the ice.”
“Oh, we’re going to change that, big boy,” Professor Nine said, striding into the room. In front of him, he floated a cube wrapped completely in barbed wire. He let the strange object bob in the air before Kopano.
“What’s this?” Kopano asked.
“That’s a box with a cupcake inside it,” Nine said. “I wrapped it in razor wire. You want the cupcake, you gotta reach through the razors and into the box. Break apart your atoms and feast on deliciousness. Or slice your hand up. Come on. Try it.”
Kopano eyed the box warily. “What kind of cupcake?”
It took Kopano weeks to finally master Nine’s game with the barbed-wire box. When he finally did, he wrote home to his parents, describing the function of his Legacy.
He had yet to hear back.
They weren’t supposed to talk about what happened in New Mexico and Iceland, but that didn’t extend to their weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Linda.
“Do you have those feelings often, Nigel?” Dr. Linda asked in her usual lilting way, Nigel spread out on the couch across from her. “The feelings that you felt when you walked out on the ice?”
“No.”
“Are you being truthful?”
Nigel’s lips curled. He scratched the back of his neck.
“Maybe I used to feel like that sometimes. Like a hopeless bloody case. But I haven’t had that darkness in my life for a while. Not since I came here.” His look turned dark as he thought about what happened in Iceland. “It was that wanker, the one I told you about. He put those feelings in me.”
“I’d very much like to meet that young man,” Dr. Linda replied. “His Legacy . . . it’s quite interesting.”
“Yeah. Quite,” Nigel said dryly. “I’d like to see him again, too. Get some things off my chest.”
“Now, Nigel, these thoughts of vengeance aren’t healthy.”
Nigel grinned crookedly. “I feel just fine, Doc. But you’re right. They ain’t healthy. For him.”
“It’s very unlikely you will ever get to act on these revenge fantasies,” Dr. Linda said. “If you let them fester inside you . . .”
Nigel didn’t reply. His cavalier smile gave nothing away.
But there was something Dr. Linda didn’t know.
Dr. Goode and Nine had personally driven their wayward students back from New Mexico to the Academy. They were all exhausted and injured, traumatized to varying degrees, but Taylor remembered how happy they were to be together. How close she felt to them all.
She told them everything. Einar, Iceland, the Foundation, Jiao, the sheikh, the healers, the strange British woman. Everything.
When she was done, Nine and Malcolm exchanged a look. Dr. Goode pulled over the car. Nine turned around to address his students. Behind them, the sun was just starting to rise.
“Listen, this might sound weird, but I think it’s best if you keep most of the details of what happened between us,” he said.
Taylor’s brow had furrowed. “What? Why?”
“We think there are people within the Academy . . .” Dr. Goode hesitated. “We believe we’ve been compromised.”
“A mole,” Nigel said quietly.
“Like a spy movie,” Kopano added.
“We’ve known about these Foundation assholes for a while, but we haven’t had a name for them,” Nine continued. “We just know that they’re constantly trying to hack our system.” Nine exchanged a look with Malcolm. “But we’ve got some brainy computer people of our own. We’ve been able to head them off, most of the time . . .”
“They knew things about me,” Nigel said. “Things they shouldn’t have known.”
“Me too,” Ran said.
Malcolm nodded. “Indeed. With their efforts to access our systems blocked, we think they’ve resulted to planting agents. Perhaps faculty. Perhaps students.”
“Falta muito para chegar?” Isabela asked in Portuguese, looking around confusedly, not understanding the discussion.
“We’re going to root these people out,” Nine said evenly, looking at each one of them in turn. “We’re going to expose them. And you can help us.”
“How?” Caleb asked.
“To start with, by keeping your mouths shut,” Nine said.
Taylor thought about that conversation often in the weeks after their return to the Academy. She thought about all the things that she’d seen since becoming a Garde. The kindness and heroism of her friends; the ugliness of the Harvesters; the cruelty of the Foundation. The other Garde, both here at the Academy and spread around the world, all of them with desires and agendas, with the potential to shape the future.
When she first got her powers, she’d wanted to hide them. But now, Taylor knew that wasn’t an option. She couldn’t settle for a boring life. She needed to be here. She needed to be where she could make a difference.
A package arrived for her, filled with letters from the students at her old school. At least the ones who didn’t think she was a freak. They were sweet—wishing her well, asking for details and gossip, wondering what John Smith was like in person. Taylor read each one of them, even if she felt like she didn’t know these people anymore and, more important, like they couldn’t possibly know her.
Slipped in among the letters from high schoolers was a piece of expensive stationery, thick and cream-colored, covered in a delicate cursive. Immediately, Taylor knew this letter didn’t belong with the others.
Dear Taylor,
I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your assistance in Abu Dhabi and Iceland. I am truly sorry for the unpleasantness that transpired with your host. I fear that his bad example has created a poor impression for our organization. I hope, in the future, you will give us a second chance.
The world is a better place for your efforts. The prince sends his fond regards. A number of sizable donations have been made in your name to a variety of low-income hospitals in the region. By saving one life, you have saved thousands more.
I look forward to working with you again in the future, should you desire such an opportunity.
Sincerely yours,
B
The Foundation
The British woman she’d caught a glimpse of on Einar’s screen. It had to be.
Taylor’s teeth clenched. She nearly crumpled the letter in her hands.
Then, she marched straight to Professor Nine’s office. He stood at his window, gazing out at the students walking from the dorms to the student center. Taylor tossed the letter onto his desk.
“They want me back,” she said. The hardness and resolve Taylor heard in her own voice surprised her.
Nine picked up the letter, scanning it quickly.
“They’ve got moles here,” Taylor said. “Maybe we should get some there.”