“But how will I get there?” she asked. “I’m nine.”
Her mom smiled. “You’ll see one day, Tay. A person can’t stay in Turner County forever. Even if it hurts now, you’ll come to understand.”
Minneapolis was just Taylor’s mom’s first stop in her flight from South Dakota. She kept going farther and farther east—after Minneapolis was Madison, then Chicago, and the last Taylor heard it was Philadelphia. Taylor never ended up visiting any of those places. Her mom promised that one day Taylor would understand, but she didn’t want that day to come because it’d mean she was like her mother. She’d take over the farm from her daddy, just like he’d taken it over from his daddy.
Her dad made patty melts and French fries for dinner that night. She got the feeling that he had noticed her hasty departure that morning and thought maybe she was mad at him, so he cooked one of her favorite meals. Taylor hugged him while he was frying up the burgers.
“There’s my girl,” her dad said, sounding relieved.
Over dinner, Taylor studied her dad. He was a handsome man with his half day’s growth of beard, brown hair graying at the temples, lean and tan from all the work around the farm. He’d never remarried after Taylor’s mom, not even a girlfriend as far as Taylor knew, although the single ladies in the county still sent over cookies and pies on a regular basis. She got teary-eyed while picturing a scenario where she’d have to say good-bye and leave him here all by himself.
Brian caught Taylor looking at him and rubbed a hand across his cheek. “What is it? I got slop on me?”
She laughed. “No, you’re all good, Daddy.”
“If you say so.” He kept looking at her. “What about you? You all good?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just tired.”
Then, Taylor reached for the salt and the little glass shaker slid across the table right into her waiting palm.
They looked at each other.
After a long silence, Brian said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Finally, Taylor started to cry, big heaving panicked sobs, and her dad came around the table to hold her. “Come on, now. I always knew you were a special one and this just proves it.”
“I don’t—I don’t want to be special!” Taylor replied through her tears. “I like our life here! I don’t want anything else!”
Taylor’s dad rubbed her back. “Come on, now,” he said quietly. “I saw them say on TV that the ones who get powers are the best among us. That they’re destined to be important people.”
“I saw that same show, Dad! The one lady said all that flowery bullcrap, and the other guy said it was all random. An alien lottery. And I didn’t want to win!”
“Well,” her dad said calmly, “I choose to believe the bit about destiny.”
“Are you not listening? I don’t want a great destiny. I like it here. With you. I don’t want to go to their dumb Academy.”
“Then you won’t have to.” Her dad nodded once, like he’d just come to this decision. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“But it’s a law now. You’re supposed to . . .” She swallowed. “You’re supposed to turn me in.”
Brian shook his head. “Not in a million years.”
“But someone else could see,” Taylor said. “You don’t know how hard it was today at school to control myself. All day, I wanted to use it. I’ll slip up.”
Brian considered this for a moment, studying Taylor, who was studying her hands like they’d suddenly become foreign.
“Just us and the hogs out here, most times,” her dad said slowly. “Maybe if you practice doing your alien-thing around the house, it’ll be easier when you’re out in public.”
“Ugh. Please don’t call it my alien-thing.”
“Sorry. Your Legacy.”
Taylor frowned. All day, she’d been thinking about ways to suppress her telekinesis. Maybe her dad was onto something. Maybe instead of ignoring her power, she could exhaust it in the moments when it was safe to use, get it out of her system.
“It’s worth a try,” she admitted.
“Besides,” her dad said, picking up the saltshaker and wiggling it through the air, “I think it’s pretty cool to watch.”
For a month, Brian’s plan worked. Taylor used her telekinesis around the house—she floated her homework books out in front of her while she studied, poured herself glasses of water in the kitchen while standing in the living room and spooned sugar into her dad’s morning coffee while flipping eggs. Her control began to get more precise, the tasks she could complete more complicated, the objects she could lift heavier. And while it felt like a part of her was asleep whenever she went to school or when Silas and the other farmhands were around, Taylor found it easier and easier to keep from slipping up in public.
But then came the day of the accident.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NIGEL BARNABY
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
SHE WAS PLAYING THE CLASSICAL MUSIC AGAIN. Nigel heard it as soon as he walked into Dr. Linda’s office. Daintily plucked violin strings, whistling woodwinds . . . and was that a bloody oboe? Nigel couldn’t tolerate that, so he reached out with his Legacy, grabbed hold of the sound waves rolling out of Dr. Linda’s stereo and bent them until they were a jangling mess of out-of-tune squeals.
Dr. Linda narrowed her eyes at him and turned off her stereo. “Nigel, we’ve talked about this. If you don’t like the music, you can ask me to change it.”
“Where’s the fun in that, love?” Nigel replied as he flopped down on Dr. Linda’s comfortable couch, hugged a pillow to his chest and put his combat boots up on the armrest.
Dr. Linda’s office was on the top floor of the administration building, the windows south-facing with a captivating view of the blue-glass bay. She kept the room open and bright, the walls covered in splotchy abstract paintings meant to evoke reactions from her patients. Her degrees, one each in psychiatry and developmental psychology, both from Stanford, hung over her neatly kept desk.
“We’ve also discussed respect for my space,” Dr. Linda admonished, eyeing his boots. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, with a cherubic face, graying brown hair cut in a bob and thick-framed lavender glasses that made her look like a naughty librarian. Nigel liked her, which was why he went out of his way to get on her nerves.
“What shall we talk about this week?” Nigel asked as he swung his feet to the floor. He slouched low, his long legs reaching across the space so he could almost play footsie with Dr. Linda. Not that he would. He idly flicked the barbell in his septum—his newest piercing, the thirteenth in his head alone. “Perhaps your love life for a change, eh, Doc? I’m bored talking about me, me, me, all the time.”
Dr. Linda regarded him levelly. “You know I record these sessions, right, Nigel?”
“Sure. So you can keep it all straight for that bestseller you’re gonna write, yeah?” Nigel used his Legacy, changing the pitch and timbre of his voice so that he sounded almost exactly like Dr. Linda. “I forced two hundred teenaged Garde to discuss their wet dreams. Here are my findings.”
Dr. Linda was, as usual, unperturbed by his sonic manipulation. “I do not make you or any of the others discuss their quote-unquote wet dreams,” she said dourly. “We could, though, if you’d like.”
“Well, you certainly called my bluff,” Nigel said, smirking as he worked a finger around the collar of his moth-eaten Suicide tank top.
“When I attempted to listen back to our session from last week, I couldn’t hear anything on the recording,” Dr. Linda pressed on as if he’d never interrupted. “Was that your doing, Nigel?”
Nigel tugged on his lip ring, not sure whether to fess up or lie. Eventually, he threw on his customary devil-may-care grin and nodded. “Sorry about that, Doc. Didn’t realize my powers would flummox your recorder.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“Neat bit of business, actually. I put us in a sound bubble.” Nigel was
unable to keep the pride out of his voice; this was a new application of his sonic manipulation Legacy. “Made it so nobody outside our little circle of trust could hear.”
Dr. Linda tilted her head. “Are you worried people might be listening to our sessions? I assure you, these are kept completely confidential.”
Nigel tucked his chin down and looked at the therapist skeptically. “If you say so, Doc. You live on campus, right? Over in the little faculty village?” He knew she did, so he kept going. “And you don’t ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Like every mirror’s got a bloke with a clipboard hiding on the other side?”
“That’s an interesting observation,” Dr. Linda responded. That was the token neutral statement she deployed whenever Nigel set off one of her therapy alarm bells. He kicked himself for giving her something to work with. “Do you think those feelings of paranoia might be rooted in your time at the boarding school?”
Nigel groaned. He’d been seeing Dr. Linda every week since he first arrived at the Human Garde Academy. You couldn’t see a woman like Dr. Linda that often for almost a year and not let a few secrets slip.
So, much to his great regret, Nigel had told Dr. Linda about the Pepperpont Young Gentlemen’s Preparatory Academy. “After that fuckin’ helltrap, superhero training school is easy-peasy,” he’d told her at the time. Nigel had recounted the details of his four years at Pepperpont grimly—the uniforms, the stiff professors, the chores, the very particular tie knots. “But you could get all that from Dickens, eh?” He went into the darker details. The rich boys with bad taste in music. The rich boys who wanted to get experimental with him, then pretended like it never happened, then beat the piss out of him every day for months. The endless teasing, name-calling, abuse. The time that they stripped him, shaved him and dropped him out of a second-story window.
“Like prison,” he’d explained, “except instead of knowing how to fix up a shiv from a toothbrush, all these blokes knew the rules of cricket. Future barristers and brokers, the lot.”
When the invasion happened and Nigel discovered he’d developed telekinesis, he released himself from the custody of Pepperpont. He found an open tattoo parlor to push clear the holes in his ears that had started to close, bought an updated wardrobe at a thrift store and pledged to live the rest of his days as the alien-fighting punk rocker that lived inside him, the same badass gorilla the nice people of Pepperpont had tried so hard to tame.
There was a warship over London. That’s where his parents lived, although at the time they were in Zurich on a ski trip with his older sister and her stockbroker fiancé. If they tried to call him during the invasion—“Surely, they tried to locate you; you’re their son,” Dr. Linda had said—Nigel was long gone by the time they rang. He hadn’t seen them since. There were visiting days at the Academy, but Nigel refused to add them to the list. He couldn’t forgive them for Pepperpont.
“Perhaps you have lingering anxieties from your days there,” Dr. Linda said in the present. Nigel had spaced out. “Even though you’re safe here, perhaps you still feel the need to keep a part of yourself walled off.”
“Yeah, you got it in one, Doc,” Nigel replied. “Bloody breakthrough.”
Dr. Linda raised an eyebrow. “How’s it going with your roommate?”
A sudden change of topic. Nigel hated when she pulled that.
“Fine,” he said. “The same. Whatever. Ask him yourself. Captain America’s got his weekly head shrink scheduled right after me, doesn’t he?”
“Have you reached out to him? Last week, you promised you would visit the dining hall with him at least once a week.”
Nigel folded his arms. Any chance of him becoming besties with Caleb went out the window that day on the island, when he helped turn their Chimæra over to the government. Nigel held a grudge, but Dr. Linda was persistent about trying to mend that relationship. “He apologized to you, didn’t he?” Dr. Linda pressed when Nigel remained stubbornly silent.
Nigel grunted. “So?”
“So, I think forgiveness might be a good skill for you to work on, Nigel.”
Nigel scowled. He thought about Caleb and their months spent rooming at the Academy together, surrounded by dozens of other Human Garde. Nigel was popular around campus—his classmates remembered him from the shared vision during the invasion, they knew he’d gone to fight the Mogs. The legend about how he and Ran had taken down a Mogadorian skimmer at Niagara Falls grew and grew—in every telling, they killed more Mogs, battled against greater odds. The other Garde who were there—Fleur and Bertrand, who had died at Patience Creek—were omitted from the story. Nigel didn’t stop the tale from circulating. He liked having a reputation, even though it came at the expense of some real-life pain.
And maybe he’d let slip, when the other Human Garde were first getting to know each other, that Caleb was a government plant who would report their every action to the Earth Garde administrators. So what? It was true, wasn’t it? Caleb spent more and more time alone in his room rather than with his fellow Garde.
Well, alone wasn’t exactly right. Caleb had the duplicates, after all.
“He doesn’t have any friends. Still. After all this time,” Nigel complained.
“Which is why you should reach out to him.”
“What’s that they say about a bloke, huh? A creep who can’t make friends . . .”
“Do you think the boys at Pepperpont thought of you that way, Nigel?”
“Aw, that’s a bloody low blow, Doc. Totally different scenario.”
Dr. Linda regarded him evenly. “Is it?”
“I never did anything to those wankers as bad as what Caleb did to me,” Nigel said defensively. As she stared at him, unspeaking, Nigel heard his tone of voice change. This wasn’t his Legacy at work; this was the whiny boarding school aristocrat coming out. “This my therapy hour or Caleb’s? I’m starting to wonder.”
“What else would you like to talk about, Nigel?”
“How about me having to come see you every week?” he replied sharply. “Me and Ran, Caleb—we’re the only ones on campus who see you all the time. People might start to think we’re bloody abnormal.”
“They will not.”
“They definitely already think that about Caleb.”
“You know very well why you’re monitored more closely than the others. Precisely because you’ve been exposed to a life-and-death scenario.”
“It wasn’t even all that traumatic,” Nigel muttered, thinking back to the brutal fight at Patience Creek. “I never think about it.”
“No more nightmares?” Dr. Linda asked him.
Another little fact Nigel should have never let slip; he had a reccurring dream of being pursued down a smoky hallway by the mad Mogadorian woman who’d hunted them.
“No,” he lied.
“Then I suppose you are cured,” Dr. Linda replied. “See you next week.”
In the posh waiting room outside Dr. Linda’s office, Nigel found Caleb waiting for his appointment, seated next to one of his duplicates. The two were huddled close, apparently deep in a whispered conversation that cut off as soon as they noticed Nigel. It looked like Caleb had been scolding his clone.
“He wanted to eavesdrop,” Caleb said sheepishly, gesturing to his duplicate.
“Uh-huh,” Nigel replied, raising an eyebrow. “You’re gonna want to cut that shit out, mate. It’s not couples therapy. Wouldn’t want the doc thinking you’re a freak.”
Caleb nodded in agreement. “Yeah, Linda says I shouldn’t . . .” He trailed off, looking at his clone. “Never mind. He was just leaving.”
The clone kept its gaze on Nigel, even as Caleb began to absorb it. The process still made Nigel’s skin crawl. The clone went transparent, like a ghost, and then slowly flowed back into Caleb. There was always a moment when they were back together but still overlapped slightly that would give Caleb a blurry four-eyed look, like a person coming apart. Nigel suppressed a shudder. He wasn’t the only one on campus who
Caleb unnerved, as evidenced by Dr. Linda pushing Nigel to be friends with the aloof duplicator.
When there was only one of him, Caleb stood up. He patted Nigel companionably on the shoulder—these Americans were always touching, high-fiving, back-patting—then brushed by him, into Dr. Linda’s office. “See you back at home,” Caleb said, as he closed the door.
Nigel wondered, not for the first time, if tonight would be the night that an army of Calebs held him down in bed and smothered him.
CHAPTER NINE
TAYLOR COOK
TURNER COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED ON A SATURDAY, THE DAY dry and sunny. “Got lucky with the rain,” Taylor’s dad reported. “Good baling weather.”
The Cooks owned ten acres of hayfield, just enough to feed their own animals every year and maybe sell a few leftover bales to their neighbors. The weekend before, Brian and Silas had cut the field, raked the stalks into rows and left them out to dry. Today, Brian would attach the small baler to the tractor and ride over the rows, while Silas and a couple of other farmhands would trail behind, collecting the freshly made bales and lugging them to the barn. As usual, Taylor’s job would be to direct traffic. Left to their own devices, Silas and the others would stack the bales nonsensically, like the year they’d piled the hay right where the tractor was always parked. Her dad hadn’t realized until after the farmhands had left and he had to move every bale himself before he could get the tractor in the barn.
“You know,” her father mused over breakfast, “we could do this whole thing just you and me. Probably only take us until noon. Nobody’d even break a sweat.”
“Dad.” Taylor rolled her eyes.
“My superpowered farmhand would be the envy of all our neighbors,” he said with a laugh. Brian stroked his chin, suddenly deep in thought. “Probably save us a lot, actually. Could get to some of those projects I’ve been putting off. Well, you could, anyway, and I would supervise.” He winked at Taylor. “This place might actually turn a profit.”