Attached to the record player was a short note in his mom’s elegant cursive. The walls are soundproof. No need to be considerate.
So after yesterday’s demonstration of dominance, this was the soft touch. Butter him up. Show him that life with the Foundation wasn’t so bad. They had tried the same thing with Taylor.
Also on the nightstand was a copy of the Guardian. The paper was folded to one of the interior sections, where Nigel immediately recognized a black-and-white photograph of the charred remnants of his family’s London home. Nigel skimmed the article—grieving family, wealthy philanthropists, accidental blaze, surviving daughter unavailable for comment—no mention of their names, Earth Garde, or any details that seemed indicative of foul play. It was as if his mother had written the article herself. He tossed the newspaper aside.
Across the room, a desk had been added and, on top of that, a tray of breakfast food. Pancakes and sausage, fruit, doughnuts, a carafe of juice and a kettle of tea. Nigel’s stomach growled. When was the last time he’d eaten? He had to remind himself that his mother was surely watching or else he would’ve lunged right for the food. He casually poured himself some tea and sipped.
On the table, there was a remote control for the TV. He turned it on, half expecting Bea’s face to pop up. Instead, the screen filled with icons—pretty much every streaming video service one could ask for.
Nigel looked up at the camera watching over him. “All the comforts don’t mean this isn’t a prison,” he said.
There was no response.
At first he thought he might resist and be Gandhi-like in his abstention, but Nigel was too hungry and too bored. He spent the day stuffing his face and listening to music.
He let himself smile and look content.
He knew his mother was watching. Let her go ahead and think it was this easy to break him down.
They’d wanted to get someone inside the Foundation. Here was their opportunity.
On the third day of his captivity, a strange glow woke Nigel in the middle of the night. He rolled over in bed and found his TV on. Bea was on-screen, a half-empty wineglass clutched in one hand, a nearly empty bottle visible in the foreground.
“Ah,” she said. “You’re awake.”
“I am now,” Nigel grunted. He worked himself up onto his elbows. “Were you watching me sleep?”
“Used to do that when you were a little boy,” Bea responded.
Was she drunk? Was this part of her manipulation? Nigel didn’t know what to think. He stayed quiet, waiting for her to speak.
“Your father’s greatest love was money,” his mom said wistfully. “Money or Asian call girls. One of the two.”
Nigel raised an eyebrow. “Okay.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I liked the money, too,” Bea continued. “But I also wanted to make the world a better place. I truly believed in what he told us.”
“What who told you?”
“Setrákus Ra.”
Nigel sat up straighter, eyes wide. His mom had just casually mentioned the leader of the Mogadorians, the tyrant who had driven the Loric to extinction and then, when that wasn’t good enough, invaded the Earth.
“You picked a real wanker for a role model, Mum.”
“He promised us a world without sickness or hunger,” she continued like she didn’t hear him. “All we had to do was make ready for his arrival.”
“You were MogPro,” Nigel said quietly. “You were bloody MogPro.”
“Many of us in the Foundation were.” She sipped her wine. “We learned the error of our ways, believe me. No one wanted to follow Setrákus Ra once we learned what he really was. The US did a thorough job of exterminating our American counterparts, but once the invasion was over, we here in Europe slipped through the cracks. Some of us formed the Foundation as a way to deal with our changing world.”
“Out with one evil organization, in with another,” Nigel replied.
“We’ve since expanded, blossoming into a better network than MogPro ever was. With Setrákus Ra, it was all lofty promises to pave the way for tyranny. Not with us. Thanks to our carefully cultivated relationships with your kind, we can actually deliver results. Miracles, even. We’re in more countries than Earth Garde now. We turn a profit.”
“Carefully cultivated relationships,” Nigel repeated with a snort. “Why are you telling me all this?”
She raised her glass to him. “I don’t know, darling. I suppose it’s like you said. The family business.”
It would be too easy if Nigel just said, “Sure, great, I’m in,” and tried to join up with the Foundation. His mom would see through that. No, if she was going to believe he’d been won over, he needed to live up to his stubborn reputation.
So, Nigel made a wanking motion. “You really think I’m going to buy into this? A little drunken chat, some mild imprisonment, and we’re on the same team? Piss off.”
“Setrákus Ra told us the history of the Loric and why he overthrew them,” Bea continued. “How those with Legacies reigned over those without, a council of elders composed of the planet’s nine most powerful Garde. Did you know that’s how their society worked? Like something out of Nietzsche.”
Nigel could guess what the Mogadorian tyrant probably told his mother. The old bastard wrote an entire book of propaganda. But, on the day he first got his Legacies, Nigel had been sucked into a vision of Lorien’s past, just like all the first generation of Human Garde. He’d seen firsthand the truth of Setrákus Ra’s motivations. He wasn’t a liberator; he was petty and power-hungry.
“Setrákus Ra was a liar,” Nigel said simply.
“Perhaps. But then, history is written by the winners,” Bea countered. “True or not, there are lessons to be learned from what happened on Lorien.”
“Like?”
“Like how your Academy is destined to fall apart. It was formed during a time of unprecedented goodwill, the world’s nations bound together after confronting a common enemy.” She drained the last of her wine and poured herself another. “That goodwill’s all dried up now. Training teenagers to serve some nebulous global entity? Please. Countries will abandon Earth Garde—it’s already happening—and hoard their Garde like nuclear weapons.”
Nigel grimaced. What his mother said appealed to his cynical side, the anarchist side, the part of him that had lived through Pepperpont and that assumed all people were basically shit. But then he thought of Kopano and Ran, the heroic ones, how hard they tried to do good in the world. He thought about how he himself had run away from a bad situation—one caused by his parents, as it happened—to go fight an alien invasion.
“You’re wrong,” he replied, wishing he sounded more certain. “People are better than you give them credit for.”
She smiled, almost like she was proud that her offspring was capable of such optimistic thought. Her teeth were stained with wine.
“And then what will happen,” Bea continued, “is war. A war between those with powers and those without. The end result being either the extinction of Legacies—a great loss to humanity—or the subjugation of the nonpowered, which, well . . . not so rosy either way, is it? We in the Foundation believe we can head off these eventualities but, unfortunately, the first battles are already being fought and soon it will be too late to reverse course.”
Nigel squinted at the screen. “What first battles? What are you on about?”
“One of yours has already broken the Garde Declaration. He’s killed humans in cold blood. Colleagues of mine in the Foundation, their security, anyone who gets in his way.”
A cold feeling took hold of Nigel. He sensed where this conversation was going.
“He killed your father,” Bea continued. “He almost killed you.”
Nigel gritted his teeth. “Einar.”
A shadow crossed Bea’s face, as if the boy’s very name frightened her. She nodded once.
“He’ll come for me, eventually,” she said simply. “The security I have here won’t be enough to st
op him.”
Nigel looked away. He said nothing.
“Will you let me die, Nigel? Your own mother?”
Nigel didn’t sleep that night. Bea’s words rattled around in his brain.
His parents were bad people. MogPro rejects, bloodthirsty capitalists, murderers. When Nigel was a boy, his father had sent him away as soon as his presence had become inconvenient. After Nigel fled Pepperpont, the old man had never even tried seeking him out. Too busy with the Foundation, probably. He didn’t love the bastard.
So why did he feel the cold yearning for revenge?
Well, he told himself, Einar did try to drown me. He owed him for that.
Now, his mother only wanted him around to save herself. Or did she still have some repressed maternal affection? She’d been happy to have him saved in Iceland. She’d been watching him sleep . . .
Could he let Einar kill her?
And his mother was probably right. Einar’s going around slaughtering Foundation people—bad as they were—could set off a war. The psycho would ruin all their lives.
Nigel wanted to scream. So, he did. After all, the walls were soundproof.
That morning, his fourth day in captivity, the door to his room slid open.
His mom stood there, hair a bit tousled, cheeks puffy from last night’s drinking. There was no team of mercenaries behind her—she was alone, fragile. Nigel could’ve easily pushed her aside with his telekinesis and made his escape. She must have known that, but she opened the door anyway.
Bea said nothing. She clasped her hands and waited. It was on him.
“All right,” Nigel said, deciding right then what he would do. “I’ll help you.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
CALEB CRANE
MELBOURNE, FLORIDA
CALEB’S SHOULDERS WERE STARTING TO BURN. With a groan, he rolled over on the blanket and reached for his T-shirt. He pulled it onto his sunbaked torso.
“Ow,” he said.
“Man, I told you to reapply,” Daniela scolded. She grabbed the tube of sunscreen and tossed it into Caleb’s lap. “Pale ass is gonna look like a lobster out here.”
“Yeah,” he replied, blowing out a sigh. “Yeah, you told me.”
It was a cloudless day, unseasonably warm, the white-capped waves sending salty spray up on a lazy breeze. The sand shimmered here, the beach pristine, without any other people in sight. Next to Caleb, Daniela reclined on her elbows, her lean body clad in a white bikini, sweat dimpling her abdomen. Caleb should’ve been enjoying the hell out of this.
So why wasn’t he?
A private beach, all to themselves on Florida’s Space Coast—so called because it was where NASA and any number of defense contractors, including Sydal Corp, were headquartered. Maybe it was their host that bothered him. Maybe that’s what kept Caleb from completely turning off his mind and enjoying this unearned vacation.
But Mr. Sydal—Wade, he insisted they call him Wade—had been nothing but nice to them. They stayed in guest rooms in his sprawling beachside mansion. He fed the visiting Garde lavish meals cooked by his personal chef, showed off his multitude of engineering projects, and let them use the beach and his infinity pool. Massages and tennis lessons were also on offer, although Caleb hadn’t partaken in either. It’d been almost a week of that pampering and Mr. Sydal—Wade—asked for nothing in return.
Sydal spent most of his time in his technology-filled basement workshop. The gadgets and gizmos in there would’ve made Dr. Goode jealous, Caleb thought. Sometimes, he took meetings at the navy base in the area. He had his own paid security detail.
This was a cream-puff detail. There was no reason for Caleb to feel so on edge.
And yet, he couldn’t shake that feeling.
Caleb thought about calling his uncle. But what would he tell Uncle Clarence? That Melanie Jackson was a huge wimp who needed a “break” from Earth Garde life after a week of photo ops and some light construction work? She’d been protected from the worst of the invasion by her president father, had never gone to the Academy, and was basically coddled at Earth Garde. Did she really need a vacation from her vacation?
Maybe that wasn’t the most charitable assessment of Melanie, but it didn’t help Caleb’s opinion that she mostly ignored him and Daniela, preferring instead to spend her free time video-chatting with people from her old life—prep school classmates, senators’ kids, future leaders of the free world.
No. Lawson wouldn’t care about that. That was kid stuff.
What did his uncle want him to uncover?
A crab scuttled past their blanket, black eyes like twin periscopes swiveling around. The little guys were called ghost crabs. Caleb had first spotted them scampering across the sand a few days ago. Bored and tired of swimming, he’d spent a solid hour reading about them online.
“Check it out,” Caleb said, pointing the gold-tinted crustacean out to Daniela. “Those guys change their colors to blend in with the sand. Pretty cool, huh?”
Daniela tipped down her paperback—some lurid romance novel she’d picked up at the airport—so she could regard Caleb.
“You could learn something from them,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
As they watched, the crab buried itself back in the sand, only its pair of elongated eyes visible.
“It means you could try going with the flow a bit,” Daniela replied. “I see you over there, wheels turning and shit. You’ve been sulking around since we got here.”
“I’m not sulking,” Caleb responded sulkily. “Don’t you just think . . . I don’t know? Like this is weird?”
“Man, we saved the world from an alien invasion,” Daniela replied, her braids shaking back and forth as she laughed. “I mean, the Loric did most of it, but we were there, too. They should be giving us free vacations for the rest of our lives. Be like the crab, man. Chill.”
“I think they blend in like that to avoid predators.”
“You see any predators out here, Caleb?”
Caleb turned his head to look back at the beach house.
“I don’t know.”
People were starting to gather on the house’s back deck. Caleb could see Wade there. The man was supposedly in his fifties, but his baby face and angular black goatee made him look younger. He wore his hair long like a surfer, not a strand of gray in there—just like his beard. In another bout of boredom, Caleb had watched some of Mr. Sydal’s TED talks from before the invasion, where he lectured on the possibility of achieving immortality—physical or digital. It all went over Caleb’s head, but just by looking at him and listening to him talk, Caleb could tell the guy wanted desperately to stay young forever.
Sydal was surrounded by the usual horde of assistants and interns. All of them were young and attractive, fresh out of Ivy League schools. They mingled with the more professionally dressed research-and-development reps from various engineering and military concerns, everyone gathered to watch the day’s launch from the comfort of Sydal’s estate.
Caleb could pick out the military brass from the crowd by their haircuts and rigid postures. For a second, he swore he saw his dad up there. Too much sun.
In the middle of it all, of course, was Melanie. Even at a distance, she looked especially vibrant. Her blond hair flowed loose around her head, the wind plucking at her tennis skirt and blouse. Sydal kept a fatherly arm around her shoulders, introducing her to his various guests. Just like on their missions with Earth Garde, Melanie held herself apart from Caleb and Daniela, so much so that he was always surprised to see how easily she turned on the social charms.
Waiters circulated through the crowd on the deck with hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. Caleb and Daniela had been invited to Sydal’s little party but had opted to watch the launch from the beach instead.
“Crazy that guys like him are still interested in space travel,” Caleb said to Daniela. “Especially when we know there’s nothing really out there. All the aliens are trying to come here.” r />
“You’re just full of deep thoughts today.”
“Thanks.”
A loud chant started on the deck. A countdown from ten.
Caleb tipped his sunglasses down to watch the vessel take off. The sleek, silver-plated ship rose up from its launchpad down the beach and cut soundlessly through the perfect blue sky. The aircraft was disc-shaped, like the cliché idea of a flying saucer. Sydal probably thought that was clever. A crimson glow came from the wannabe UFO’s underbelly. It looked like it was on fire, but those were actually the thrusters.
That was repurposed Mogadorian technology. The military had recovered tons of Skimmers after the invasion and Sydal had been selected as one of the developers to work on reverse engineering it. Today was a big day for Wade and Sydal Corp: they were the first company to get a prototype flight-ready. In an effort to distance his work from the hostile aliens that provided its foundation, Sydal had christened the ship the Shepard-1, named for the first American to make it into space.
The Shepard-1 swooped around, propelled by its thrusters, stable and under control. It did a loop-the-loop, much to the delight of Sydal’s guests. Then, the ship went vertical, rising higher and higher, until it was just a silver speck. Caleb lost sight of it. The plan was for the Shepard-1 to reach the exosphere. The crowd on the deck fell silent, huddled around Wade and his tablet that displayed the craft’s diagnostics.
“Hope it doesn’t blow up,” Daniela remarked.
Moments later, a cheer went up from the deck. The Shepard-1 had reached the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Soon, the ship came back into sight, drifting gracefully back down and onto its launchpad.
Everyone applauded. A complete success.
“Cool,” Daniela said dryly, barely looking up from her book. “Nice to see we humans have got spaceships now. And it’s nice that thing didn’t shoot at us, huh?”
Caleb glanced back at the deck where Sydal was getting bombarded with back-patting and handshakes.