Dr. Linda leaned back. “I see,” she said evenly.
Had she bought it? Taylor couldn’t be sure. But the trap was set.
That night, beneath the training center, Taylor sheepishly endured a standing ovation from her friends.
“Yes, yes, everyone clap for the pizza bully,” Isabela said with mock dismay. Her eyes were purple with bruises, a bandage over the bridge of her nose. “Ignore poor Isabela and her devastating injury.”
“Bravo!” Nigel yelled. “The whole bloody Academy’s talking about you two! Isabela, you’ve never looked lovelier.”
Isabela smiled sarcastically at the scrawny Brit. “All for effect, dum-dum,” she said, and the bruises melted away, her pretty face restored as she shape-shifted. Even though she’d changed her appearance, Isabela’s voice was still nasally, her breath whistling in her nose.
Cringing, Taylor wrapped Isabela in a hug. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Let me fix it.”
Isabela brushed her hands away. “I’ve had worse,” she replied. “Save it for tomorrow. You can heal me in peer mediation and we’ll have a good cry.”
“I’m so sorry, Isabela.”
“Psh . . . please. You should really be apologizing to poor Professor Nine. His face when you called him an alien!”
“An emotionless alien,” Nine corrected, from where he sat at the head of the conference table.
Taylor lolled her head back in disbelief. “It was all part of the act—”
“Words hurt, Cook,” Nine replied with a wink. “That’s all I’m going to say about it. Words hurt.”
“This man-baby,” Isabela said scornfully, waving a hand at Nine. “I can’t believe Earth Garde would put such a whiner in charge.”
Lexa and Malcolm exchanged a look at that and both of them burst out laughing. Nine simply glared at Isabela and she glared right back. Kopano finally broke in, pulling out the chair next to him so Taylor could sit down.
“So, tell us, tell us,” he said, smiling at Taylor. “Did Dr. Linda buy it?”
“I might’ve laid it on a little thick,” Taylor told Kopano and the others. “But I think I definitely got across how much I hate it here. Hinted that I liked it better when I was with the Foundation.”
Lexa tapped her computer screen. “Linda already filed her incident report. She mentions that you’re feeling isolated and angry. Conveniently leaves out any mention of the Foundation.”
“All we can do now is wait for them to approach you again,” Nine said.
“I hope it happens soon,” Taylor replied, pushing a hand through her hair. “It’s not easy being disruptive and grumpy all the time.” She looked at Nigel. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Hey! Disruptive, maybe . . . but I am not grumpy.”
“What if they don’t come for Taylor?” Ran asked. “What if we’ve been wrong about Dr. Linda?”
“We are not wrong about Linda,” Nigel stated.
Nine blew out a sigh and glanced over his shoulder at their board of leads and suspects. “Then we keep hunting, keep digging, until we find another way in.”
“And if the Foundation does come?” Caleb asked, with a sidelong look at Taylor. “We’re sure it’ll be safe?”
“The hero’s journey is never totally safe,” Kopano interjected, putting one of his hands on Taylor’s shoulder. “But she can handle it.”
Taylor looked up at him and rolled her eyes. “God, you’re corny.”
Malcolm leaned forward to answer Caleb. “We’ve taken precautions. We’ll be prepared this time.”
“What about the other Loric?” Caleb asked. “Couldn’t they help with this?”
“Six is doing what she can,” Nine said. “As for John, Marina, and Ella—I don’t know what the hell they’ve been up to. Some secret project. We’re on our own.”
“I thought there were others,” Kopano said.
“No,” Nine replied brusquely. “All the others are dead.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that, the students leaving in a trickle to sneak back to the dorms. Even though Taylor had to wake up early for chores—she’d lost track of how much extra cleaning she was being forced to do for punishment—she lingered in the basement until only she and Professor Nine remained.
“Something on your mind?” he asked.
Taylor looked down at her hands. “It’s hard, you know? Pretending I don’t like it here. Acting like I hate my friends. I don’t actually mean any of that stuff.”
“We know that, Cook.”
“But sometimes, I feel so angry, like really angry,” Taylor continued. “And I’m worried that I’m screwing my whole life up for nothing.”
“We’re doing the right thing,” Nine replied. He put a hand on her shoulder, realized it was his cold, mechanical one, and switched it up. “The world will be a better place when we’re finished, Taylor. I promise. It’ll all work out.”
She looked up at him, uncertainty in her eyes. “It better.”
Chapter Seven
TAYLOR COOK
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—PORT REYES, CALIFORNIA
A KEY PART OF THE FUGITIVE SIX’S PLAN HAD nothing to do with the Academy. It was the piece that made Taylor feel sick to her stomach whenever she thought about it, especially since she was the one to suggest the idea. She had made it happen. If their plan failed to bust the Foundation, she’d have sacrificed a lot for nothing.
And the sacrifices weren’t all hers.
About a month ago, her dad had come to visit.
“You sure you want to do this?” Professor Nine had asked.
Taylor took a deep breath, steeling herself. “I’m sure I want to get the Foundation. But this part of it?” She shook her head. “No. I’m not sure at all.”
It was the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Taylor bit her lip, thinking about how she’d almost forgotten to call her dad last week. When she first came to the Academy, she’d called him every chance she got. As she settled in and got used to her strange situation, Taylor scaled back the calls to like once a week. And then—well, she obviously couldn’t call her dad from Iceland, where she’d been kidnapped to, but, even after that, she was calling less.
“How much did you tell him?” Nine asked. “About what happened to you?”
“You probably already know. Don’t you guys record all those conversations?”
“Pft, you think I want to listen to that shit?” Nine scoffed. “Not enough hours in the day.”
The two of them sat on a picnic table in the visitation area outside the Academy. There were a few quaint little cottages spread out here, all of them stocked with food and board games and outdoor activities like baseball gloves and Frisbees. The area gave off a campground vibe. It reeked of normalcy—that is, if one didn’t look south, to where the UN Peacekeepers kept their barracks, an assortment of military-grade trucks and even a tank parked there. This is where parents came to visit. Tours of the Academy itself were possible, but because of security concerns, they were rarely approved. Taylor sometimes wondered whether the administration was trying to protect the Academy’s secrets from the parents or protect the fragile human parents from the volatile Garde housed there. Probably a little of both.
“I haven’t told him anything,” Taylor said to Nine. “What would I say? That I got kidnapped by some psycho rich people, then rescued, and some of my friends almost died? That these same kidnappers got back in contact with me by hiding a letter in with the ones sent from my old school? That they want me back like I just finished a summer internship or something and I’m a top recruit? That I actually want to take them up on their offer, so that I can be like an undercover agent? That these Foundation monsters are probably watching him and might try to use him as leverage? No.” Taylor took a breath. “Of course I didn’t say anything.”
“For the best.” Nine grunted.
Taylor frowned. “I used to tell him everything. The first thing I ever hid from my dad was my Legacies, and that barely lasted a week.” Sh
e shook her head. “It’s weird. He can tell I’m holding something back.”
Nine fiddled with the joints on his cybernetic hand. Taylor watched him out of the corner of her eye. She hadn’t known Nine for long, but already Taylor recognized how he could get awkward and flustered whenever he tried to go into heart-to-heart mode.
“It can be tough when parents are involved,” Nine said. “I mean—I wouldn’t know, personally, but I can imagine. We don’t have to do this part, not if you don’t want to.”
Taylor pushed a hand through her hair. “It’ll be temporary,” she said. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”
“Right,” Nine said. “Your dad sounds like a cool dude. He’d probably be proud if he knew what you were doing.”
“Proud and freaked out. Or miserable and lonely. Maybe all the above.”
Taylor rubbed her forearm, feeling the skin where there should have been a scar. She’d had a minor surgery last week, performed by Lexa and Dr. Goode under the training center. She had healed the wound herself, but it still felt off.
“That feel okay?” Nine asked.
“Yeah. Just . . . weird, I guess.”
Nine flexed his metal arm. “You’ll get used to it.”
Some movement on the road leading into the barracks drew Taylor’s attention. It was beyond strange to see her dad’s dented brown pickup truck rolling through a security checkpoint. The context was all wrong.
Taylor stood up, feeling a little dazed.
“I’ll be over here if you need me to, uh, hop in and be all official or whatever,” Nine said.
“I’m good, thanks,” Taylor replied over her shoulder, crossing the grass to where her dad had parked.
There he was. Her dad looked a little road weary, his beard grown in, his hair messy, but he grinned when he saw Taylor. She ran the last few steps to him and he wrapped her in a hug, smoothed her hair down, and kissed her forehead. For a minute, Taylor felt like a little girl again.
Her dad held her out at arm’s length. “Look at you. Wow.”
“Come on, Dad,” she said. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“I know, I know. But you’ve changed,” he replied, studying her. “Can’t quite say how, exactly. It’s good, though. You look like . . . well, like a young lady I’d choose to protect the planet, I suppose.”
“Oh, stop,” Taylor said. She took her dad by the elbow. “You hungry? All these cabins have food. I could make you something.”
Her dad took a deep breath and puffed out his chest. “Feels good to stretch my legs, actually. Air is nice out here. I’ve never been to California.”
So they walked around the grounds. The Academy and the surrounding barracks and visitors’ center were built on a former nature preserve, so there were plenty of woodsy trails for them to hike along.
She told him about her classes, her training of her powers at the hospital, and about her friends. All things that they’d covered before on her phone calls, back when they were more regular. In turn, he brought her up to speed on the dreadfully mundane lives of her cousins, on the TV shows they used to watch together, and on the condition of the farm.
“Those Harvesters really tore up the fields,” he said. “Kind of ironic. They’d make terrible farmers.” He shook his head. “The government was nice enough to clear away all the wreckage they left behind, but they still set me back some. Figure if I tighten my belt and subsist on microwave dinners for the winter, I should get through well enough.”
“You’re already hurting for money,” Taylor mumbled, half in thought.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’m hurting. Just going to be a lean season—”
“No, Dad, it’s okay. In fact, it’s great.”
Her dad raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”
By then, the two of them had done a full circuit of a trail and returned to the main visitors’ area. Nine was still hanging out by the picnic tables. He gave Taylor a discreet nod when she glanced in his direction—everything was all set.
Taylor took her dad by the elbow and led him towards one of the cabins.
“Come on, I’ll explain in here,” she said. “Where it’s private.”
“Don’t seem any more private in here than out there,” her dad observed once they were inside. The cabin was simple and cozy—a sofa and some chairs, a dining table, a selection of movies, none of which were rated higher than PG-13 or had anything to do with aliens. And, of course, there was a security camera in one corner. That’s what her dad was focused on, his hands on his hips. The setup reminded Taylor of Einar’s cabin in Iceland; perfectly comfortable and seemingly normal, but never unobserved.
“Yeah, those things are everywhere,” Taylor said, looking at the camera, too. She covered her mouth as if she were yawning and whispered. “Just act normal for a second.”
“Normal?” her dad replied. “I thought I was acting normal.”
Taylor grimaced as her dad failed to follow her lead on the secretive whispering, but just then the red recording light on the security camera blinked twice. That was the signal.
She exhaled and turn to her dad. “Okay, we aren’t being watched anymore.”
Taylor’s dad glanced from her, to the camera, and back. Taylor expected total bafflement, but instead she got her dad’s bemused squint, the same one he used on a farmhand that tried to cut corners.
“So,” he said, “now you’re going to tell me what’s going on with you, right?”
“You could tell, huh?”
“Of course I could tell. I’m your dad. You might be a Garde now with problems that I can’t even begin to understand, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know when something’s gnawing at you.”
Taylor bit the inside of her cheek. “The thing is . . . there’s only so much I can tell you. Um, for your own good.”
“For my own good,” he repeated, then lowered himself into one of the kitchen chairs. “Gosh, I better sit down for this. My daughter’s gone and become a secret agent.”
Taylor couldn’t help but smile at that. If he only knew. The truth was, there was only so much Taylor wanted to tell her dad. It was probably better that he didn’t know she’d been kidnapped, or that she was trying to return to those same kidnappers.
“There are some bad people outside the Academy, worse than the Harvesters, even . . . ,” Taylor began slowly. She had rehearsed this speech earlier but was still carefully choosing her words. “They see people like me—Garde—as commodities. It’s like, they want to get a monopoly on us and then charge high prices for our services. And they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.”
A deep frown set in across her dad’s face. “Always comes down to money in this world, don’t it? I imagine you’d be in high demand, being a healer and all. Some people see the miraculous and are like—hell, how can I turn a buck off this?”
“Yeah. Exactly,” Taylor replied. “My professor, you saw him out there—”
“Number Nine. ’Course I saw him.” Taylor raised an eyebrow, so her dad explained. “I’ve been doing my research on the people taking care of my daughter. Nine, he’s the wild one.”
“He’s chilled out a lot,” Taylor said with a shrug. “Anyway, he thinks these people are going to try to recruit me to their organization. He thinks they might even have spies in the Academy. We want one of their people to approach me so that we can expose them.”
Her dad rubbed his jaw. “These people sound dangerous, Taylor.”
“I know, but—”
“I’m sorry, you don’t need to explain,” her dad said, interrupting her. “I just broke a promise to myself.”
“You what?”
“I promised myself that—no matter what you told me, because I knew it was going to be something—I promised myself that I wouldn’t go on about how dangerous it might be. Your life is dangerous now. I saw that firsthand, when those nuts showed up on our doorstep. You’ll always be my little girl, and so there’s obviously a part of me that’d like noth
ing better than to drag you back to Turner County, government contracts be damned, lock you up on the farm, and keep you safe forever.”
Taylor smiled sadly. “There’s a part of me that’d like to go.”
Her dad wagged a finger at her. “Maybe, but I don’t think it’s a very big part anymore. And that’s okay. I hear it in your voice. You want to get these people.”
“What they’re doing is wrong, Dad,” Taylor said, her voice steely. “It’s disgusting.”
“Well, I’d hate to be them, on the wrong side of my daughter with her mind made up. You just promise me that you and the other heroes are watching each other’s backs.”
“We’re not heroes, Dad, but . . . yeah. I promise.”
“Good,” her dad said. “So, what do you need from me? How can I help?”
Taylor looked down at her feet, scuffing the wood floor. “I’m not sure you’re going to like it. You can say no.”
“Lay it on me.”
“So the thing is, we need to give these people an in. A reason to approach me. Something they can try to bribe me with . . .”
Her dad tilted his head. “Aha. I see. Your poor dad subsisting on Hot Pockets is something these folks might use as leverage.”
“Yeah,” Taylor replied. “Well, it’s a start, anyway . . .”
One week later in Turner County, South Dakota, two watchers waited for Brian Cook to drive his junker of a pickup truck down the country road. They were parked on the shoulder, in a nondescript wood-paneled station wagon. Nothing that would stand out. These two were pretty used to hiding in plain sight.
“There he is,” said the guy in the passenger seat, pointing at Brian’s passing truck.
“Right on time,” his partner answered. She sat behind the steering wheel, her blond hair bundled under a thick woolen hat. If Mr. Cook noticed them there, waiting for him to leave his farm, he didn’t acknowledge the fact. She waited until Cook’s truck was out of sight, then opened her door. “Come on. Let’s go on foot, just in case someone’s watching.”