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“My father would be jealous,” Kopano muttered with a smirk. He held out his hands towards the stone again, not to touch it, but like one would reach toward a campfire.
“Do you feel something?” Orisa asked, producing a notebook from her lab coat.
“Yes,” Kopano replied, struggling at first to put the feeling into words. “It pulls me. I feel—I look at it, and I know it does not belong here. I should think of it as alien and strange.” Like the way my mother looks at me, he thought but didn’t add. “But instead, it feels natural. I know this stone like I know the sky.”
There was a mountain of paperwork waiting for Kopano downstairs. They asked Kopano to read what he at first thought was a book but turned out to be a contract, the huge document stamped with the UN logo, written in a dense legalese and filled with subsection after subsection. He looked to Orisa for help.
“Basically, it says that you agree to enter the custody of the United Nations and that, after a period of training and once you turn eighteen, you will be conscripted to the Peacekeepers’ Earth Garde division for a five-year term of service,” the scientist summarized. “It also lays out the laws that Garde must abide by, that you agree to be held accountable for your actions and that you won’t hold your home country or the United Nations responsible should anything happen to you.”
Kopano nodded once, flipped to the last page of the mammoth contract and signed where indicated.
“Can I see my mother now?” he asked. “I’d like to say good-bye.”
Orisa’s brow furrowed. “Oh, I thought you already . . . she left, Kopano. The soldiers brought her to a hotel in Abuja. After she told us of your troubles; the rest of your family is being gathered as we speak.” She glanced at her watch. “Your plane will be coming soon, but I could have her brought back . . .”
Kopano shook his head. “No worries,” he said, and forced a smile.
She had left him. He would begin this great journey alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TAYLOR COOK
POINTS IN BETWEEN
BEFORE THE SHOOTING STARTED, WHEN THE COSTUMED zealots with their snake-and-scythe tattoos were still making their way to the farm, while her dad was alone on the porch sitting watch with his shotgun in his lap, Taylor Cook decided to call the hotline.
“You have reached Earth Garde North America, how may I assist you?” a lady operator said, her voice kind but detached.
Taylor sat on the floor with her back against her bed, hands cupped around her cell phone, even though there was no chance her father could overhear. They advertised the hotline on TV and on billboards and all over the internet. The commercials featured young people practicing telekinesis, or accidentally setting trees on fire with Legacies. Any Human Garde or extraterrestrial activity was supposed to be reported.
“I can hear you breathing,” said the operator. “Hello?”
Taylor worked some moisture into her mouth, then finally spoke.
“I’m one of them,” she said. “A Garde.”
“Okay, honey,” the operator replied briskly. “What makes you think that?”
“What—what makes me think that?” Taylor blinked. “I can move things with my mind. My dad, he got a cut on his head, and I healed it.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“I’m showing your location as South Dakota. Is that correct?”
“Yes, but listen, we need—”
“What you’re going to want to do is get your parents to drive you on down to Denver. That’s the evaluation center nearest to you. They’ll take a look at you there, assuming what you say is true. We used to send out investigators, but we got too many pranks. If you’ve got video evidence of Legacies, you can upload it to our secure site. Let me give you that address . . .”
Taylor’s mouth hung open, stunned by the woman’s casual tone, the mundanity of it all. She raised her voice, hands shaking.
“You don’t understand! There are people . . .” She got control, overcompensated and started to whisper. “There are people coming to hurt us. To hurt me.”
There was a pause. When she spoke again, the operator wasn’t so dismissive. She must have recognized the tautness in Taylor’s voice.
“If you’re in danger, honey, you should call nine-one-one.”
“I know, I know. But . . . but my dad’s worried you’ll come take me away if we tell. It all started with this jerk with a weird tattoo—”
“Stay on the line, please. I’m contacting emergency services in your area.”
“Wait—”
The line went quiet except for a series of clicks. Seconds stretched on. Taylor felt her palms getting sweaty.
“Okay, this is strange,” the operator said, suddenly back in Taylor’s ear. Her flippant tone was replaced with a gravity that rattled Taylor. “We can’t get a response from the sheriff station in your area.”
“Oh God.”
“Help is on the way,” the operator said. “If you can get to a safe place, you should do so.”
An hour later, the Harvesters encircled their house. Taylor’s father stood alone on the porch, rifle in hand, listening to a preacher dressed like an outlaw give an impromptu sermon on Taylor’s “sinful” condition.
Help still hadn’t arrived.
Guns went up. Her father got off one shot. Dozens of Harvesters fired back, the sound like a drumroll. Taylor dropped to the floor, huddled against the wall next to their front door. She expected shattering glass. She expected the chunk-chunk-chunk of bullets eating away at the wooden walls of her house. She expected not to make it through the next few seconds.
Instead, there was a sudden silence.
And a glow. A warm, orange glow, like fire. It was as if the sun had risen.
Taylor peeked out from behind the door frame. In the strange, fiery glow, Taylor noticed what she at first took for a swarm of gnats hanging a few inches from her father’s rifle. His buckshot, she reali
zed, suspended in midair, the heavier silver rounds fired by the Harvesters likewise stuck glittering over their front yard. Taylor glanced down at her hands—for a moment, she wondered if the stress had caused her Legacies to trigger, like the day her father rolled the tractor. But no, she realized, she wasn’t capable of such a spectacular feat of telekinetic control.
The glowing young man floating over her driveway was.
Taylor heard the pitter-patter of rain. It was the bullets, falling harmlessly to the ground.
“Drop your weapons or I’ll drop them for you,” the glowing figure said.
Taylor recognized him immediately. The entire world knew John Smith’s face. His sandy-blond hair had grown out from the picture they always used on the news and a patchy beard covered his cheeks. Seeing him there, floating fifteen feet in the air, his hands glowing with fire that spread up to his forearms, it was like a comic book come to life. Even the Harvesters, who moments ago had seemed so threatening, gawked up at the leader of the Loric. It was said that he possessed every possible Legacy, his powers near godlike, and that he’d single-handedly destroyed at least one Mogadorian warship during the invasion.
What in the hell was he doing in South Dakota?
Well, the operator had said she’d send help.
Brian dropped his gun as commanded, the clatter of his rifle against the porch breaking the stunned silence.
The Harvesters weren’t so ready to comply.
“The devil himself is among us, brothers and sisters!” the preacher shouted through his outlaw bandanna. “The source of the infection that corrupts our young!”
The Harvesters trained their guns on John Smith. He didn’t flinch. A second later, instead of a volley of gunfire, screams of surprise filled the air. With his telekinesis, John Smith had ripped the weapons away from the mob, a number of trigger fingers broken in the process. The disarmed Harvesters watched as each of their guns folded and twisted until they were nothing but useless metal rings.
