“He seems nice,” Taylor said dryly, glancing after the colonel as they approached campus.
“Look, there,” Isabela commanded, pointing at two large buildings on either side of the main walkway. “Boys’ dorm and girls’ dorm, okay? You’ll be rooming with me and Ran. We’re on the third floor. It’s not bad. Good light. I hope you won’t be dirty.”
“I’m . . . no, I’m not,” Taylor replied. “I won’t be.”
“Perfect.”
Isabela pointed out the other important landmarks—the administration building where they took their classes and where the faculty held office hours, the student center where meals were served, the gym, the military-grade training center. She gestured towards the cul-de-sac-style clump of small cabins set a distance away from the dorms, explaining that the faculty lived there. Taylor’s neck started to hurt from all the head-turning, Isabela’s finger speeding around the grounds.
“How do classes work?” Taylor asked.
“They are boring,” Isabela replied.
“Not really what I asked, but okay.”
Isabela sighed. “They’ll give you some tests. Sit you down with an academic adviser. Figure out if you are smart or dumb. Which is it, by the way?”
Taylor was taken aback. “Which . . . um? Smart? I guess.”
“Hmpf. Arrogant,” Isabela replied. Taylor couldn’t tell if she was joking. The fast-talking Brazilian had already moved on, lowering her voice. “If you make it seem like you’re uneducated, they will give you easier classes. I took algebra in Rio, now I’m taking it again. Very simple.”
“Oh,” Taylor said, nodding slowly. “I, um, I don’t think I’ll lie.”
“Suit yourself,” Isabela replied. “There is a lot of homework. They like keeping us busy. At first, I thought, why would I do this stupid shit, huh? What can they do? Suspend me? Call my parents? We are basically prisoners. What can they do to us?”
“What can they do?” she asked.
Isabela tossed her hair. She recalled her first few weeks at the Academy, when she had pushed the buttons of every authority in place, trying to find out how much she could get away with. Her experiments had paid off.
“First, they will take away privileges,” Isabela said, ticking off her fingers. “Make the recreation center off-limits, exclude you from movie night, allow you to eat only the boring food in the dining hall. The chef here is very good, surprisingly, so that one hurt a little.” Isabela watched Taylor, gauging her reaction.
“Okay . . . ,” Taylor replied, slightly amused by how Isabela puffed up with pride at her tales of misbehavior.
“After all that, I still wouldn’t do the work they asked of me,” Isabela bragged. “I was ready to live like a monk. There’s a decent beach here if you hike down the cliff. I figured I could spend my time down there until all the boring shit was over and they sent me off to be in Earth Garde. But then they started to punish my roommate and my classmates. Until Isabela does her work, they said, the student center will be off-limits to everyone.”
“Oh, wow,” Taylor said. “So you gave in?”
Isabela dramatically pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “They found my weakness. I could not stand being unpopular.”
Taylor’s shoulders slumped when Isabela finished her story. She still held out hope that her new reality would dissolve like a bad dream and she’d find herself back on her farm in South Dakota. Isabela pinched her cheek as they approached the student center. Taylor flinched.
“Don’t put on such a sad face,” Isabela chided. “It makes you ugly.”
Taylor blinked, startled. “Um, sorry.”
“I shouldn’t tell you these stories. I’m a bad influence. Anyway, life here is very boring, more boring than you’d expect considering the things we can do. Homework, at least, helps pass the time.” She squinted at Taylor. “You don’t want to be here, do you?”
Taylor met her gaze. “Is it that obvious?”
“Maybe you were thinking about getting yourself kicked out, hmm?” Isabela asked in a knowing singsong. “Don’t bother. You’re Earth Garde now.”
Taylor noticed a tall woman emerging from the nearby administration building. She was probably in her thirties, although it was hard to tell with her wrinkle-free mahogany skin. The woman carried a tablet computer, her fingers dancing across the screen as she walked towards the faculty housing.
Isabela followed Taylor’s gaze. “That’s Lexa. She’s in charge of cybersecurity or something. Later, you’ll have to meet with her and give her access to all your social media accounts and emails.”
“What? Why?”
Isabela rolled her eyes. “For our own good, they say,” she replied, then lowered her voice. “I think she is secretly Professor Nine’s sexy older girlfriend.”
“Who’s Professor Nine?”
“Ha! You will see.”
Isabela led Taylor into the student center. The two-level atrium was clean and brightly lit. At one end of the room was an open kitchen, a few hot trays out for midday snacking. Long tables filled the room, with smaller booths on the balcony level. About thirty students were present, most of them a crowd of young men watching a soccer game on a wall-mounted flat-screen TV, although there were some students trying to study quietly on the second level.
“You said you came from South Dakota, yes?” Isabela prodded the quiet newbie, trying to wring some small talk out of her. “They made me learn all the states in geography. That’s one of the boring middle ones, yes?”
Taylor’s mouth tightened. “Some people think so.”
“Lots of cows and stuff, right?” Isabela didn’t wait for Taylor’s defense of South Dakota, continuing on obliviously. “Did you have cliques in your little high school?”
“No,” Taylor said with a tired roll of her eyes. “We Midwest barbarians haven’t learned such complex social concepts yet.”
Isabela picked out an orange from a fruit bowl, then raised an eyebrow at Taylor. She held up her arm, reminding Taylor of the bracelet charged with Simon’s Legacy. “Sorry, the translator doesn’t do well with sarcasm. Also, if I seem rude, please understand, it’s just the language barrier.”
“Oh. Oh no, you’re fine,” Taylor replied half truthfully. “I’m just exhausted.”
Isabela smiled. There was nothing wrong with Simon’s Legacy-powered translator. Isabela punctured the orange with her fingernail, peeled it and offered Taylor a slice. She gestured towards the group of boys watching soccer, noting with no small amount of satisfaction that a few of them had turned to subtly check her out.
“The boys here, they are probably the same as the boys where you’re from. Dirty and stupid.” Isabela waved at the group watching her and Taylor, then led her new roommate back towards the door. “They all gravitate together like smelly, immature meteors. But there are some differences. The Americans tend to hang out more with the Americans. We foreigners outnumber you here and it makes you all—” She slipped into a cartoonish southern accent. “Y’all, hmm? It makes y’all uncomfortable. Am I making you uncomfortable, pard’ner?”
“We don’t all talk like that,” Taylor replied with a raised eyebrow.
Isabela shrugged blithely. “Sounds like it to me. Anyway, the ones designated for combat—that means they have violent powers—they also tend to cling to each other, like the star athletes might, always trying to one-up each other. They are our jocks.”
“Jocks I get,” Taylor said.
“The ones who are close to graduating, they will pursue you the most, always flirting, because they think it’s their last chance to get some before they go off to be Peacekeepers, you know? Pigs! Well, some aren’t so bad.” Isabela wrinkled her nose. “I am supposed to be showing you where the library is, but this is the stuff that really matters, yes?”
Taylor was surprised to find that she was smiling. Short of slapping the girl, there was no other way to respond to Isabela’s irrepressible bluntness. Also, it was good to talk about mundane t
hings—like boys—instead of contemplating the stranger side of her new surroundings.
“You sound like you’re making a nature documentary or something,” Taylor said. “Like, the lady who went to live with gorillas.”
“Sometimes it feels that way!” Isabela replied with a dazzling smile. “Observation is my hobby.”
Isabela led Taylor out of the student center and took her down the walkway towards the training area.
“We girls, our cliques are much different. Many get tight with their roommates, whispering secrets long into the night.” She flashed Taylor a sharp look to communicate that this would be out of the question. “There are the goody-goodies who do all their work. I thought maybe you were like this at first, but now I’m starting to think there’s more to you. Maybe a secret rebel.”
Taylor chuckled. “No. I’m definitely a goody-goody.”
“That’s okay. At least you aren’t the brooding type. Like Ran. We get a lot of those, too. Boys and girls. Simon calls them little Bruce Waynes, but this is a reference I do not understand.”
“That’s Batman. His parents died and he became a superhero.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I choose not to understand these silly pop culture phrases. Everything is like . . .” She shifted into a stoner accent. “Whoa, man, this is just like that movie or that TV show or who cares.”
Isabela popped another orange slice in her mouth, tossed the peel away on the lawn and began ticking off fingers again.
“Then there are the artsy types, the hippies who want to use their Legacies to fix the world, the ones like me who don’t give a shit and—oh, the tweebs.”
“What’s that?”
“A person who’s only developed their telekinesis,” Isabela explained. “They stick with each other, commiserating about what losers they are, waiting for their big moment. They are like virgins, but worse.” She flashed Taylor a devilish look, her tone growing conspiratorial. “We had another healer before you. Vincent from Italy. He’s off with Earth Garde now. You will be very popular. The idiot boys, they’re always hurting each other. And you’re much prettier than Vincent.”
They entered the training center. In a huge grassy area cordoned off by a safety net, a handful of Garde practiced using their telekinesis to launch bricks at straw dummies carrying plastic machine guns. Low-tech, yes, but why waste the resources on gear the young Garde were just going to destroy? Everyone knew that Professor Nine had designed much of their training material himself. All the equipment—from the mundane straw dummies to a reprogrammable obstacle course with a vicious AI—had been inspired by Nine’s own training methods when he was their age.
To Taylor, it was like stepping into another world. Her eyes darted from a girl shooting a torrent of frost from her hands that was cold enough to ice over a small pool to a boy who punched through the solid ice and lifted a massive chunk over his head. She jumped when a scrawny bleached-blond punk let out a piercing screech that exploded a pane of glass. Isabela smirked when the new girl shied back, half hiding behind her.
“Chaos, no?”
“It’s . . . it’s very intense.”
“Eventually, you’ll get used to the madness.”
Nearby, a crowd had gathered around two boys. They stood twenty feet apart, hands outstretched towards each other, both of them sweating profusely despite not moving at all. One of them was small, barely thirteen, with dark hair and almond eyes. The other appeared to be almost eighteen, tanned, with fried-looking dreadlocks and a lean surfer body. Taylor watched them with her eyebrows furrowed. Isabela noted her interest with a sly smile.
“Checking out my boyfriend?” she asked.
“What? No.” Taylor replied quickly.
“It’s okay. He’ll be graduating soon. Mentally, I’m already moving on.”
Taylor tilted her head and made a show of examining the smaller boy. “Really? He looks young to be graduating,” she said innocently.
“Not Miki!” Isabela replied with offense before she realized Taylor was joking. “Aha. So you are funny.”
“I was just wondering what they’re doing,” Taylor said.
Isabela made a face. “A stupid game the boys here invented. They call it Thrust. Probably because they aren’t getting any.” She waved her hand in the direction of Miki, the diminutive Inuit, and her boyfriend, Lofton. “They are pushing on each other with their telekinesis.” She sighed. “Lofton is good-looking, but not very smart. Everyone knows Miki is strong for his size. Telekinesis is not about muscle, it is about willpower.”
As soon as Isabela finished her sentence, there was a sound like dry wood breaking and Lofton was thrown across the room, overwhelmed by Miki’s telekinesis. Some of the onlookers used their own Legacies to catch Lofton and set him down gently, but he came up cradling his wrist.
“Case in point,” Isabela said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Dummy probably sprained his wrist again.”
“Oh. Should I . . . ?” Taylor started forward, but Isabela grabbed her shoulder.
“No, no. Once they know you’ll heal them, they’ll be hounding you nonstop. Are you ready for that today?”
Taylor rubbed her face. “Um, not at all.”
Isabela dismissed Lofton with a wave, then dragged Taylor out of the training center. “Let him go see the nurse and then later he can lie to me and tell me he won his silly game while I rub ice on his muscles.”
“You know, you never told me . . . ,” Taylor began.
“What is my Legacy?” Isabela finished her question, leading her towards the dorms.
“Yeah,” Taylor replied with a quick laugh. “Guess superpowers aren’t one of my go-to conversation topics.”
“That will change soon.” She stopped, turned to Taylor and covered the other girl’s eyes with her hand. “Close your eyes.”
“Okay . . .”
“Now open them.”
Isabela was gone.
In her place was Taylor.
“Howdy, I’m from South Dakota,” Isabela said, her voice now Taylor’s. “I like cheeseburgers and fireworks.”
Taylor screamed. Then, she clapped both her hands over her mouth, embarrassed by the other students now peering in their direction.
Isabela grinned with Taylor’s face. She knew how convincing her shape-shifting could be. She’d gotten Taylor perfect, right down to her threadbare hooded sweatshirt and ugly old sneakers.
Taylor finally managed to collect herself. “Wow,” she said at last. “Do I seriously look that tired?”
In the blink of an eye, Isabela was back to her tanned and beautiful self. She still grinned. Most people, when she stole their shapes, tried to tell her that she wasn’t getting it quite right. Not Taylor. She was chill enough to make a joke about it. Isabela liked that. She decided, much to her own chagrin, that she kind of liked this new girl. That was something of a personal milestone. With the exception of Ran, who she warily tolerated, Isabela didn’t like any of the other girls on campus. Despised them, in fact. This half-clever, self-deprecating American, though—well, she might make a worthy apprentice. A project.
Isabela put her arm gently around Taylor’s shoulders and guided her to the dorms.
“Yes. Let’s get you a nap,” she said, then leaned in close to Taylor and whispered, “And when you’re ready to escape this place, I will show you how.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RAN TAKEDA
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
MONDAY MORNING FOUND RAN TAKEDA IN DR. SUSAN Chen’s weekly Adjusting to the New World course. Dr. Chen was in her midthirties, pretty, with her hair always arranged in a fastidious braid. She was Chinese by way of Canada and, like most of the Academy’s faculty, academically impressive; she held dual PhDs in world literature and behavioral science. Ran enjoyed Dr. Chen’s literature class but liked these weekly New World meetings even more. The discussions were always freewheeling and wide-ranging—last week, they’d spent the entire session debating w
hat to do about the Mogadorians in the Arctic internment camps. Ran wasn’t much of a participator, but she liked listening to the debates, and especially the way Dr. Chen made complicated real-world problems of life and death seem like they could be solved right there in the classroom with rational debate.
This week, Dr. Chen had written “Constructive vs. Destructive Legacy Use” on the board. In the seat next to Ran, Nigel yawned dramatically.
“Look around at your classmates,” Dr. Chen began. “What do most of you have in common?”
Ran pushed her overgrown black bangs out of her eyes and did as she was told.
She looked first at Nigel. Her nakama. The literally loudmouthed punk who Ran knew was secretly fragile. Nigel did the talking, Ran did the listening. Nigel caught her staring at him and made an ugly face. Ran subtly raised an eyebrow. In their secret language of facial expressions, Nigel would interpret that correctly as amusement.
In the next seat over from Nigel was Lisbette. From Bolivia. Capable of creating and projecting ice.
Caleb Crane. America. The duplicator.
Omar Azoulay. Morocco. Immune to fire and capable of breathing it like a dragon.
Lofton St. Croix. Canada. His skin projected razor-sharp quills at will.
Nicolas Lambert. Belgium. Enhanced strength.
Maiken Megalos. Greece. Enhanced speed.
And on and on, around the room Ran went, until she arrived back at herself.
Ran Takeda. Japan. Girl who blows things up.
“Combat,” Ran said under her breath.
Nigel raised his hand, getting Dr. Chen’s attention.
“Oi, I got it, Susan,” he said, and Ran’s mouth tightened in disapproval. She didn’t like the disrespectful way he insisted on addressing their instructors, but Nigel was Nigel. “We’re all a bunch of considerable badasses, aren’t we? Take over the bloody world with this bunch, couldn’t you?”
Some laughter from the rest of the class. Dr. Chen nodded in patient agreement with Nigel’s bluster.
“Exactly, Mr. Barnaby,” she said. “These seminars weren’t put together at random. This group, in particular, intentionally includes those with advanced control of Legacies that Earth Garde deems combat-oriented. One day soon, when your training here is completed, you’ll be placed into a division of Earth Garde Peacekeepers and potentially be deployed into dangerous situations. War zones, riots, Mogadorian insurgents. That is your future.”