Caleb’s uncle was General Clarence Lawson. He’d been called out of retirement and put in charge of coordinating the armies of Earth with the Loric during the invasion. Since then, it had seemed to Caleb like his uncle was awaiting orders. Like he didn’t know what would happen next.
Back at Patience Creek, Caleb had acted as his uncle’s bodyguard. “In case any of these aliens get out of line, you’re the ace up my sleeve,” Lawson told his nephew. Caleb didn’t think he could go toe to toe with John Smith or one of the Loric, but he didn’t argue. It had been his uncle’s idea for Caleb to pose as twins. He was having problems controlling his duplication Legacy—a second body would pop out of him without warning—so it was better for his clone to simply hide in plain sight.
Since they arrived at the island, Caleb had dinner with his uncle every night in the man’s windowless office. These meals were largely silent, especially after one of Caleb’s duplicates manifested and hurled a plate of food into his uncle’s face. Since Patience Creek, the dupes were becoming harder to control. Rowdier. With minds of their own.
Caleb didn’t tell anyone this. He kept his mouth shut, like a good soldier.
To Daniela, he simply nodded. “You’re probably right.”
Nigel snorted. He didn’t buy anything that Caleb said. He turned away, watching his own Chimæra, the raccoon-shaped Bandit, root around for seashells.
Daniela clapped her hands together. “I just want to get back to New York, man,” she said. “Find my mom. Do something useful.”
They all nodded in agreement, even the silent Ran Takeda, the Japanese girl sitting in the sand nearby with her turtle-shaped Chimæra, Gamora, lightly stroking the back of her hand across his craggy shell. This was their life—watching news feeds of the aftermath of the invasion, eating microwaved military base food and hanging around on the beach. Sometimes, they practiced their telekinesis, copying the rudimentary games Nine had hastily taught them during their brief training session with him. They looked ahead, hoping they could eventually be of some use. And they tried their best not to think about Patience Creek.
Eventually, Daniela and Caleb drifted away, leaving Nigel alone on the beach with Ran.
“So, what do you think, silent and violent?” he asked. “We princes and princesses or prisoners?”
Ran looked over at Nigel. “I don’t think anyone knows what we are,” she said after a long pause.
Nigel grinned. He still couldn’t get over Ran speaking in her precise English. He thought she’d been mute when he first met her at the Niagara Falls Loralite stone and all the way through the ordeal at Patience Creek. Everyone assumed that she couldn’t speak English.
She had saved his life back at Patience Creek, maybe more than once, and so he stuck close to her. He started to notice the keen way her eyes tracked conversations happening around her.
And then he caught her smiling during one of his colorful rants. He confronted her and she admitted that she could speak English. Why hadn’t she said anything sooner? Because no one had bothered to ask. As far as Nigel knew, the others were still under the impression that she was either mute, couldn’t understand them or both.
That was how their alliance started. In the days after her confession, with nothing to do but sit on the beach and wait for news, Nigel and Ran got to know each other better. He told her about his dreary past in London, and she told him about her shattered life in Tokyo. They found they had something in common.
Neither of them had lives to go back to.
Nigel crouched down next to Ran and scratched under Gamora’s chin. “Of course they gave you the Chimæra named after a Godzilla monster, right? Bit stereotypical, innit? Thought the refugees of the advanced alien society would be better than that.”
“I don’t mind. I have always liked turtles.” She looked at him evenly. “You do not need to complain about everything, Nigel.”
Nigel sighed, glancing over his shoulder to where Daniela and Caleb had meandered down the beach. “You agree with me, though. That this situation we find ourselves in is bloody mental.”
“Yes,” Ran replied.
“So, you could speak up about it,” Nigel pushed. “Get my back when soldier-boy tells me everything’s peachy. I mean, you gotta start talking to the others eventually, yeah?”
Ran gazed out at the waves, thinking.
“I did not think I would survive the invasion,” she said at last. “All I wanted to do was fight. There was no point to talking, to making friends.” She paused. “After we came here, I kept it up so that General Lawson and those watching over us would speak freely around me. Our situation is a strange one, as you said. We need to know who we can trust, nakama.”
The four of them spent weeks on that island in a weird limbo while the rest of the world shakily recovered from the invasion.
Then, finally, they watched from the beach as a squadron of black helicopters arrived at the base. The choppers carried military personnel and posh people in suits and bookish-looking types with crates of high-tech equipment.
“The unholy triumvirate,” Nigel observed. “Soldiers, senators and scientists.”
“Something’s going to happen today,” Caleb said.
“No shit,” replied Daniela.
General Lawson spent his entire day in meetings with these new arrivals. The Garde twiddled their thumbs until almost sunset, when Lawson finally called them into one of the base’s dull conference rooms. Arranged on the table were a bunch of glossy brochures, all of them depicting a beautiful blond teenager in the process of lifting a chunk of brick wall over her head, freeing a family that had been trapped underneath. The caption read: OUR PLANET—OUR PROTECTORS—EARTH GARDE.
“A delegation from the United Nations arrived today,” General Lawson began without fanfare. “A decision has been made regarding—”
“Hold up,” Daniela interrupted, tapping one of the brochures. “Why does this bougie girl look so familiar?”
“That’s Melanie Jackson,” Caleb answered.
Daniela stared at him blankly.
“The first daughter? You know, of our president?”
“Oh yeah,” Daniela said. “She’s strong, huh?”
Nigel squinted at his copy of the Earth Garde pamphlet. “Lotta makeup for a spontaneous act of heroism.”
General Lawson pinched the bridge of his nose and pressed on. “Ms. Jackson is the first enrollee in the Earth Garde program, a UN-administered initiative to train and deploy you LANEs—excuse me, you Human Garde.”
LANE was a term first coined by the US military, possibly by Lawson himself. Depending on who one asked, it meant either Legacy-Augmented Native Earthling or Legacy-Afflicted Native Earthling.
Daniela smirked. “That what they’re calling us now? Human Garde?”
Lawson sighed. “It’s simple and less . . . offensive than LANE, apparently. There are PR gurus involved. Not my area of expertise.”
“Oi,” Nigel broke in. “Did you say deploy? As in, like, stormtroopers?”
Lawson began again. His patience for being interrupted had grown exponentially since he started working with Garde. “Participating countries, which include England and Japan—” He looked in Ran’s direction. “Ah, damn. Forgot to get the interpreter in here for this.”
“Not necessary,” Ran said. “Please. Continue.”
Everyone stared at her except for Nigel, who belted out a laugh. General Lawson puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, taking Ran’s revelation in stride.
“As I was saying, the Earth Garde program has been agreed upon by most UN member nations. All Human Garde from participating nations will be required to register with Earth Garde and undergo training and observation at the Human Garde Academy, which is currently under construction in California.” Lawson slid packets across the table, filled with forms and dense contracts. “The legal details are in here. If you want, we can have your parents flown in before you sign anything.”
“Bollocks to that,” Ni
gel said with a snort, thumbing through the pages.
Caleb exchanged a look with his uncle, then shook his head. “That’s okay.”
Ran and Daniela said nothing, both their families unaccounted for since the invasion.
“Once you’ve undergone training at the Academy and proven you won’t be a danger to society, you’ll be deployed to an Earth Garde unit. Not as stormtroopers,” Lawson said, with a glance in Nigel’s direction. “No one faces a combat situation until they’re at least eighteen years old and hopefully by then the remaining Mogadorians are routed and the world’s a goddamn utopia.” The old military man smirked. “As outlined, your time with Earth Garde will be spent doing humanitarian work. Currently, Melanie Jackson is assisting with the cleanup efforts in New York. Daniela, I know you’re from there and you’ve already demonstrated excellent control of your powers. I’ve arranged for you to skip the Academy and go straight to Earth Garde. Help rebuild your city.”
Daniela’s eyes widened. Although she didn’t talk about it much, they all knew she was still holding out hope that her mom would be found somewhere in the rubble of Manhattan. The hospitals there were overwhelmed, many neighborhoods didn’t yet have power restored and survivors were still being found. It was possible.
She looked at the other three Garde. Back at Patience Creek, she had promised John Smith she would protect them. But the invasion was over. She’d kept her word. Nigel grinned at her, and Ran nodded once.
Daniela reached across the table for a pen. “Where do I sign?”
Nigel leaned back in his chair and studied Lawson. “Right, then. Who’s going to be in charge of this Academy thing? You?”
Lawson shook his head. “No. My job was the war, and the war is over. The UN has appointed someone better suited to training people of your unique abilities.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
The Americans lobbied hard to host the Academy. With everything the United States had done to coordinate the counterattack against the Mogadorian warships, none of the other world leaders were in a position to push back. The Academy would technically be on international soil, the entire thing UN-funded, with Peacekeepers handling the security.
Fifty miles north of San Francisco, the secluded Point Reyes was chosen as the location for the Academy, the people of California and the National Park Service generously gifting the land to the United Nations. With a promise to be as eco-friendly as possible, building began immediately on the coastal cliffs of the former nature preserve.
“Damn, dude. Place is going to be huge,” said the young man as he surveyed the construction, hundreds of workers already clearing earth and laying foundations, bulldozers and cranes rumbling across the landscape. “How many students we expecting?”
The older man standing next to him glanced up from his tablet. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Last count they’d registered more than one hundred Human Garde. Finding new ones every day.”
The young man whistled. His long black hair was tied back in a sloppy man-bun. It was windy here and he kept having to push rebellious strands of hair out of his eyes. He’d seen the blueprints and now, looking at the land, he tried to picture what the Academy would look like. Two dormitories each capable of housing five hundred students, a cul-de-sac of town houses erected for faculty housing, a school building equipped with state-of-the-art computers and laboratories, a recreation center, a training complex designed by the military, a sports fieldhouse, solar power and a tide-power generator. All that nestled between the fir trees of the valley and the rocky cliffs of Drake’s Bay. Not so unusual, a private school in the middle of nowhere, albeit this one would be surrounded by miles of electrified razor-wire fence, its perimeter patrolled by round-the-clock security.
“What are you thinking, Professor?” Dr. Malcolm Goode asked, emphasizing the title that his young friend had negotiated for, despite never actually finishing high school.
The young man rubbed the spot where his prosthetic arm joined his shoulder. The thing still itched him like crazy.
“It’s no penthouse,” Nine said. “But I guess it’ll do.”
CHAPTER THREE
TAYLOR COOK
TURNER COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
THE CLOSEST THING TO ACTION TAYLOR COOK SAW during the invasion was when a pickup truck filled with local boys rumbled by her family’s farm and asked her father if he wanted to go to war.
“We’re headed to Chicago, see if the army needs our help,” announced the driver, Dale, the manager of the local grocery store. “Kill some of these goddamn aliens.”
“Uh-huh,” Taylor’s dad, Brian, replied. “That right?”
Brian stood on their porch, his arms crossed skeptically. He and Taylor had run this farm together ever since Taylor’s mom had run off. She knew what her dad’s stance meant—it was the same as when one of the farmhands did something stupid. Her dad had an abiding patience for foolishness that Taylor didn’t exactly share.
From a few steps behind her father, Taylor assessed the contents of the pickup truck. There were three men stuffed in the cab and another four perched in the bed, all of them carrying rifles and dressed in hunting fatigues. There was something almost comical about this bunch going off to fight aliens with bright orange reflectors glued to their shoulders. This whole day—warships, invaders, superpowers—it felt like a crazy dream to Taylor. She was scared, sure, have to be insane not to be. But that didn’t stop her from smirking at her neighbors’ makeshift posse.
One of the boys in the back of the truck caught Taylor’s eye. “See something funny?” he asked. She recognized Silas, her father’s main farmhand. He was in his early twenties, dark hair slicked back by a gloss of gel, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Taylor tossed her blond hair over her shoulder and crossed her arms, unintentionally copying her dad’s posture.
“Have you seen the size of those spaceships?” she asked, meeting Silas’s gaze. “What’re your hunting rifles going to do against that? Jesus, they’ve got guys who can fly.”
“The flying guy’s on our side,” Silas responded.
“Whatever,” Taylor said. “I’m sure he’s waiting for you to come save him, Silas.”
“Better than sitting around doing nothing, anyway,” he muttered.
“Running off to get killed, that’s what you’re doing,” Taylor said. “You’ll probably fall out of the back of that truck before you even hit the state line.”
Some of the other boys in the back of the truck snickered. Silas seethed and fell silent.
“Folks on the news say we ought to stay in our homes,” Brian stated coolly, sparing Taylor a glance over his shoulder. “Go home to your families for Pete’s sake. It’s a ten-hour drive to Chicago and who-knows-what. Safer to wait this out.”
“It’s the end of the world,” Dale countered, his meaty arm hanging out the window. “We at least gotta go down swinging. Figured it wouldn’t be neighborly if we didn’t stop by and ask you to join us.”
“Well,” Brian replied with a sigh, “you asked. I’m staying right here, with my daughter. If you fellas insist on rushing off to do something dangerous, hell, you’ll be in my prayers. I hope to see you again.”
“Good knowing you, Brian,” Dale said, throwing the truck into drive.
“I won’t be in to work tomorrow, Mr. Cook,” Silas yelled out as the truck started to pull away.
“Wouldn’t expect you to be, son,” Brian replied.
Taylor and her dad stood in silence, watching the truck careen up their dirt driveway and back the way it had come. When it was out of sight, their land was peaceful again. A butterfly floated by. The hogs squealed rambunctiously in the barn. To Taylor, it didn’t look like the planet was in jeopardy.
“You don’t think it’s really the end of the world, do you?” she asked her dad.
“Don’t know, sweetheart,” Brian said calmly. Nothing shook her father, not even these so-called Mogadorians. “You want some ice cream? Might as well eat it, just in case
the power goes out.”
So, Taylor and her dad spent the invasion in front of their television, glued to news reports from the major cities. When the cable feeds occasionally cut out, they played tense games of Connect Four and Scrabble. Except for feeding the animals, they let their chores go and instead ate all the junk food in the house. Taylor tried to call and message some of her friends to see how they were doing, but the cellular networks were down. The farm started to feel like an island far removed from the battles taking place all over the world.
And then, just like that, it was over. The Mogadorian leader was killed, the warships went down and the Loric were hailed as heroes. The death toll was high, especially in the major cities, but those numbers seemed almost made-up to Taylor, like the entire invasion had taken place in a different universe. No one from Turner County died. When Silas slunk back to the farm a week after the invasion, she learned that he and the morons who took off to Chicago in their pickup truck had been turned back by the National Guard at a gas station on the Minnesota border. They spent the invasion getting drunk.
Within weeks, things were pretty much back to normal, at least in Taylor’s part of the world. She saw the stories about human teenagers getting Legacies, about Mogadorians waging guerrilla warfare in Russia, about new laws that would apply to how extraterrestrials like the Loric would have to behave on Earth. None of this changed her daily grind. A war with her alarm clock, a few quick chores, school, dinner, homework, repeat.
At school, they called an assembly—all 158 students at the high school packed into the gymnasium—to talk about Earth Garde. It was a law now that anyone who developed Legacies needed to report them to their local authorities. Taylor had read about the Academy they were constructing for Human Garde in California. She didn’t understand why the UN had to build that in America, or why the president and other politicians had pushed so hard to host. Anyone with Legacies was getting pulled out of their regular schools and sent there.