Nine lowered his voice as he came to a decision. “At least make it look good.” He jerked his chin in Isabela’s direction. “And leave her. She’s too hurt.”
“Estou bem. Eu quero ajudar!” Isabela stomped her foot in frustration when the others simply stared at her, then wobbled and sagged against Caleb’s clone. “Talvez não. Va, va . . .”
Ran nodded once to Nine, then gave Rabiya a shove. “Take us.”
Rabiya reached for the Loralite. Ran had a vise grip on her arm. Nigel held Ran’s hand, his other hand on Kopano’s shoulder.
Nine made a dramatic lunge forward.
The Caleb duplicate tackled him.
Isabela stood there looking puzzled, holding her bloody side.
In a flash of vivid blue light, the other four teleported away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
NIGEL BARNABY
HOFN, ICELAND
NIGEL REMEMBERED THE SENSATION OF TELEPORTING well. He was the bloody pioneer champion of teleportation, for God’s sake. He’d been the first Human Garde to use a Loralite stone back during the invasion. That dizzying feeling of getting flung halfway across the world toward adventure—he’d missed it.
This was what he always wanted. To make a difference. To take action. To do.
Like he’d told Kopano at the gas station, it wasn’t always glamorous. Nigel still had flashbacks to the massacre at Patience Creek. He still got a bitter taste in his mouth when he thought about the bodies.
But the reality of the fight—against Mogadorians, against Harvesters, against snotty-looking Garde from frozen wasteland countries—it didn’t scare Nigel off or make him second-guess his Legacies. The ugliness only made him want to fight more and fight harder. He’d spent so many years as a nobody, ignored by his parents, relentlessly picked on at Pepperpont—and now finally, finally he was going to take his rightful place in the world.
That’s why, when they arrived in Iceland, Nigel was grinning.
The change was jarring. First, it was cold here, and Nigel’s T-shirt was soaked through with sweat from the battle with the Harvesters. His breath misted in front of him and steam curled up from his narrow shoulders. It was also early morning. Even though the skies were clouded over and gray, the brightness stung his eyes. All the same, Nigel grinned.
Maybe it was Nigel’s half-mad smile that caused the large man in body armor to hesitate bringing down his sledgehammer. Nigel liked to think so. But it was probably the four teenagers who manifested right in front of him that momentarily stunned the intimidating chap.
That was their welcoming committee. A badass-looking dude poised to bring his hammer down on the stone they’d teleported in on. He hesitated only a moment, then continued his downwards swing, not appearing to care that Nigel’s head was now in the way.
Kopano caught the hammer in the palm of his hand with a metallic clang. Then, his fist heavy and hard, Kopano punched the guy square in the cheek. He slumped to the ground, unconscious, his jaw broken.
“He didn’t look friendly,” Kopano said.
Nigel patted him on the back. “He most certainly did not.”
They stood in a small wooden enclosure. The gate was open, footprints in the frost leading from the house to the now-unconscious brute. The house was quaint and cute, a log cabin, with a rock garden outside. It looked entirely too peaceful.
Ran put her forearm under Rabiya’s chin and slammed her up against the wall. “Where is this? Where did you bring us?”
Rabiya gagged, her eyes bugging out. Nigel touched Ran’s shoulder and she let up on the pressure.
“I told you! Iceland!” Rabiya said hoarsely. “This is Einar’s house. He took your friend.” Her gaze drifted to the man Kopano had knocked out and her eyes widened.
Nigel kicked the unconscious man. “Who’s this, then? You recognize him?”
“Blackstone,” Rabiya said. “Mercenaries. If they’re here, this place is burned. Your friend is gone or already dead. We should leave or they will kill us, too.”
Nigel looked down at the unconscious mercenary. “This wanker won’t even be able to eat solid foods in a dream, much less kill anyone.”
“There will be more.”
Ran half turned to look at Nigel and Kopano. “How should we—?”
The second Ran turned her attention away, Rabiya made a dive for the Loralite stone.
If she hadn’t been so badly injured by the Harvesters, she might have made it. Her body moved too slowly, though, and Ran brought her elbow down on the back of Rabiya’s neck. The girl slumped to the ground, her fingertips inches away from the Loralite stone.
“Damn,” Kopano said.
“Coulda let her go,” Nigel said with a shrug. “Poor thing’s been through the ringer.”
“The Academy does not know enough about these people,” Ran said. She dragged Rabiya’s body to the back of the enclosure and set her gently against the wall. “I am sure they will have questions.”
“That shit she said about Taylor—,” Nigel started to say.
“We must check,” Kopano replied.
As soon as he stepped out of the enclosure, Kopano was greeted by a burst of machine-gun fire. He grunted as the bullets struck him in the center of the chest. They didn’t penetrate, but his Legacy was slow to kick in. He would have bruises. Bad ones.
A second mercenary crouched behind a pile of rocks. When he saw that his bullets hadn’t harmed Kopano, he dropped his rifle and took a different weapon from his belt. An energy weapon. Mogadorian.
“Where is Taylor?” Kopano roared.
He charged across the backyard before the mercenary could get a shot off. Kopano picked the man up in both hands, headbutted him and kept running with the man held out in front of him. He smashed through the house’s back door using the mercenary’s body as a battering ram.
“Not a lot of teamwork in his approach, but it’s efficient,” Nigel commented.
Ran’s lips quirked in her almost-smile. “Let’s go,” she said.
The two of them emerged from the cover of the enclosure with a little more caution than Kopano had shown. They weren’t bulletproof. From inside the house, they could hear the sounds of objects breaking and Kopano repeatedly shouting Taylor’s name.
“This what you were expecting?” Nigel asked, looking over the cabin.
“Absolutely not,” Ran replied.
“Me neither.” Nigel nodded up at the wall above the back door. “See that?”
“Camera,” Ran said.
Nigel wiggled his fingers. “Wonder who’s watching.”
It was a lucky thing. If Nigel hadn’t called her attention to the camera, Ran might not have looked up and seen the glint of reflected light in an open upstairs window.
A scope. A sniper rifle.
“Watch out!” Ran yelled and shoved Nigel hard to the side.
Ffft! Ffft! Ffft!
The shots came like puffs of air, fired through a high-powered rifle’s silenced muzzle. Chunks of dirt and ice struck Nigel’s legs, one of the bullets hitting where he’d just been standing. He and Ran scrambled in opposite directions. Nigel got close to the house and around the corner, while Ran dove behind a pile of discus-shaped stones.
“Ran! You good?”
“Yes,” she replied, but Nigel heard a hitch of pain in her voice.
Ffft! Another shot exploded a rock near Ran’s head.
“I’m pinned down,” Ran yelled.
“On it!” Nigel replied.
From inside the house, Nigel heard the crash of a table being overturned. He peeked through a nearby window. Kopano was locked up against a large man with a thick beard and a scarred face, smashing through a fancy kitchen. Kopano punched the mercenary in the ribs, but his body armor absorbed the blow.
The man swung a combat knife for Kopano’s throat and connected. The slice merely made a grinding sound, though, not breaking Kopano’s impenetrable skin.
“Hah!” Kopano shouted, swinging again.
; The knife attack was only a feint, though. With his free hand, the mercenary pulled a manacle from his belt. As he ducked Kopano’s punch, the mercenary snapped the shackle around his wrist. Immediately, the bracelet emitted a humming vibration and Kopano was jerked downwards, his arm stuck to the side of the stainless steel fridge.
Kopano roared, trying to pull his arm free, failing, then trying to lift the fridge entirely and finding it too heavy. Quickly, the man drew a pistol from the holster attached to his thigh.
“Let’s see if your eyes are bulletproof,” he growled.
“Boo.”
Nigel threw his voice so it sounded as if he were right behind the mercenary. He spun around, found no one there. Nigel took the opportunity to yank the gun out of his hand. The man got off one shot that harmlessly thudded into a couch.
Kopano took the opening to seize him by the scruff of his neck using the arm that wasn’t pinned to the fridge. He slammed the guy’s head down against the countertop, then hefted him using his telekinesis, rammed his back against the ceiling and finally let him fall to the floor.
While that was happening, Nigel clambered in through the window. He glanced out the back door—Ran was still huddled behind some rocks. As he watched, she used her telekinesis to fling a glowing stone at the second level of the cabin, aiming blindly for the sniper.
A small explosion soon followed. The air was still for a moment. Ran started to peek her head out—ffft!—and yelped when another bullet nearly took her head off. The shot grazed her cheek, opening a deep cut there.
“Sniper upstairs!” Nigel yelled to Kopano as he ran for the stairs.
“I’m stuck!”
“One bloody thing at a time, mate!”
Nigel bounded up the steps, taking them two at a time. His telekinesis tingled on his fingertips—ready to disarm the sniper as soon as he came into view. He raced down the hall, counting doorways to match the windows outside.
He burst into the room where the sniper should be. The window was empty.
“Where—”
Behind him. The sniper spun Nigel around and clocked him in the bridge of the nose with the butt of his rifle.
Nigel fell on his back with a cry, blood streaming down his face. The sniper spun his gun back around, smiled and took aim—
Nigel screamed. The sound was piercing and high-pitched enough that the glass on the rifle’s scope shattered. The mercenary flinched and grabbed at his ears.
That was all the space Nigel needed. He yanked the rifle away from the mercenary with his telekinesis, grabbed it out of the air and pulled the trigger.
He shot the sniper right in the chest. The bullet cracked into his body armor and sent him flying backwards into the hall, where he slumped against the wall. Nigel got up, still holding the rifle, and stood over the man as he gasped for breath.
“Shouldn’t go shooting at everyone who teleports into your backyard, mate,” Nigel said as he chambered another round. “Maybe we were just coming by for a cup of sugar, eh? Guess you’ll never know.”
Nigel might have killed the mercenary—the guy had shot Ran and certainly would’ve done the same to Nigel if given the chance. But movement in the corner of his eye distracted him.
A little girl stood at the end of the hallway. Frightened and pale, she watched Nigel with wide eyes. Around her neck was a strange choker that she kept nervously tugging at.
Instead of shooting the mercenary, Nigel sighed and brought the rifle around and down like he was swinging a golf club. A swift blow to the temple knocked the sniper unconscious. Nigel then used his telekinesis to bend the muzzle of his gun into an unusable pretzel, a trick he’d picked up from Nine.
Finally, he turned to the girl. “Are you some kind of tiny assassin?”
“No . . . ,” the girl replied with a shake of her head.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Are you here to rescue me?”
Nigel looked around. “Sure, love.”
The girl approached him cautiously, still tugging at that weird collar. Nigel noted more cameras mounted along the hallway and in the rooms. What kind of weird shit went on in this Nordic cabin?
“How many of these guys were here?” he asked, nudging the unconscious mercenary with his foot.
“Four,” the girl said.
Nigel made a quick count. “Right, then. Got them all.” He crouched down to better look the girl in her face. “What’s your name?”
“Freyja.”
“Freyja, is there another girl hiding hereabouts? My age, American, pretty if that’s your thing.”
“Taylor,” Freyja said, then shook her head. “She was here, but he took—”
A scream from downstairs distracted Nigel from the rest of Freyja’s sentence. That didn’t sound like Ran or Kopano.
It sounded like Taylor.
Regardless, screaming was a bad sign. “Stay here,” he snapped at Freyja, then bolted back downstairs.
The first thing Nigel saw when he came down the steps was Kopano, still pinned by the wrist to the side of the fridge by that magnetized manacle. An uneasy feeling came over Nigel. There was fear in Kopano’s eyes—not an emotion he’d seen on the big man before.
“Nigel Barnaby,” said a smooth, accented voice.
The guy from the highway—Einar, Rabiya had called him—stood in the back door. He wore gray slacks and a white dress shirt, the latter spattered with fresh blood. He smiled at Nigel in a way that made his skin crawl.
“You have no idea how happy I am to see you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TAYLOR COOK
ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES • HOFN, ICELAND
“TAYLOR,” EINAR SAID, HIS VOICE SOFT BUT commanding. “Get up.”
Taylor opened her eyes slowly. Her muscles felt tired, her fingertips and palms still tingling from the protracted use of her healing Legacy. Her mouth was dry, as were her nasal passages. She coughed scratchily, sitting up on the divan where she had passed out.
Einar handed her a glass of water. “You’ve been sleeping for almost six hours,” he said. “I think that’s long enough.”
Taylor worked some moisture into her mouth. “You didn’t do any healing. How would you know?”
Einar didn’t reply. He simply grabbed her by the arm and helped her stand. They were in one of the palace’s hundred guest bedrooms. This one was decorated with pictures of the sheikh—grim as he looked when Taylor first saw him—standing next to a variety of expensive cars. Taylor rubbed her eyes.
“What happens now?”
“We go home,” Einar said.
Taylor gave him a look.
“Back to my home,” Einar clarified.
“And then what? Wait around until this Foundation of yours picks another rich prick to have me heal?”
Einar raised an eyebrow. “Did you not enjoy it? Using your Legacy to save a life? To do the impossible?”
Taylor hesitated. She and the other healers—they had cured the prince’s leukemia. Cleaned it right out of his body.
The cancer was deep in the prince’s cells. She could feel it there. Alone, Taylor wouldn’t have been able to produce enough healing energy to cure the sickness—but with the group, it was possible. Vincent had been of similar strength to Taylor; Jiao’s healing energy was the most focused and precise; the crippled boy a font of raw power. After getting over her initial reservations, Taylor had thrown herself into the work, her energy commingling with the others, beating back the corruption that infested the prince’s body.
The process had taken four hours. After, all of them were spent and ready to pass out. Oddly and despite the fact that they were strangers to her, now that she’d broken away from the other healers, she missed the warm feeling of their energy.
Taylor didn’t tell any of this to Einar. “You know, the Academy had me healing people too,” she said instead. “They didn’t pick special cases. They let me heal whoever was in need.”
“The prince is a valuable all
y. His family helps keep this region of the world stable.”
“Who told you that? The Foundation?”
Einar said nothing, which Taylor took as a yes. He walked out of the guest room, forcing Taylor to follow him.
“These people you’re working for, they get to decide who gets healed? They get to control the healing? Is that it?” Taylor pressed him.
“I’m sure we could arrange for you to do some kind of charity, if that makes you feel better,” Einar said.
“It would make me feel better to not have some shadowy organization controlling my life.”
Einar stopped, looking around. The hallways of the palace were clearer now than when they’d arrived; there didn’t seem to be a squadron of guards assigned to them. There also weren’t cameras mounted over every doorway.
“I liked what you said to the prince. ‘Are you a good person?’” Einar chuckled quietly. “It does these people well to be reminded, once in a while, who really holds the power.”
Taylor started to say something, but realized that Einar was being genuine. Opening up, even. She closed her mouth and let him keep talking.
“The Foundation, Earth Garde, the Academy. They are all just ways to control us,” Einar said. “We are young now and not strong enough to make our own way. One day, though, we will be. In the meantime, we’re forced to choose who we allow to exploit us. The Foundation . . .” Einar met her gaze. “They provide a good life. To fight against them, at this point, would be futile.”
Einar resumed his walk down the hallway. Taylor followed after him, mulling over his words. So, he wasn’t blindly loyal to the Foundation. But they’d corrupted him to the point where he’d do their bidding. She didn’t agree with what Einar said about the Academy—that felt like home to her, which surprised her. Taylor hadn’t wanted to go there in the first place, but now badly wanted to go back. She needed to find a way out. A way to free herself, and Freyja, from the grasp of these Foundation creeps.
As they entered the courtyard with the Loralite stone, Taylor had begun to remove her headscarves; they’d become annoyingly tangled while she was passed out. She and Einar stopped short. A dozen of the white thobe–wearing guards stood in the courtyard, blocking their path to the Loralite stone. All of them were armed and, while their weapons weren’t raised, they all seemed ready for action.