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Ran stopped. She turned to look at him. “Are you taking yours?”
After learning about what happened to them during the invasion, Dr. Linda had prescribed both Ran and Nigel the same antianxiety medication. Ran remembered how Nigel had clicked their two identical pill bottles together like they were cheers-ing. Now, he flashed her a sly smile.
“Nah. You know they made me tired. I gotta stay functional.”
“As do I,” Ran said.
“So we’re both full Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nigel observed with a shrug. Then, his face got serious again, an expression Ran wasn’t used to seeing on his pockmarked cheeks. “Look, you know I tell you all my shit . . .”
“Yes,” Ran said.
“But if I’m ever talking too much, if you need to get something off your chest, you know I’m your man, right?”
Ran smiled. A rare thing. She put both her hands on Nigel’s bony shoulders, carefully avoiding the spiky studs sewn onto his denim vest.
“You are my man,” she said. “Do not worry about me.”
Nigel laughed brusquely and looked away. “All right. We had our moment, didn’t we? Let’s go back to silently repressing our feelings, yeah?”
Ran let her hands drop away and they resumed their walk across campus. Nigel’s words were stuck in her head, a couple of random phrases that hinted at some bigger inspiration.
Gotta stay functional.
Repressing our feelings.
Ran stopped walking.
“I have to go back and see Dr. Chen,” she said suddenly.
“Huh? About what?”
But Ran was already jogging back towards the administration building. “I will see you at dinner!” she called over her shoulder.
Ran found Dr. Chen still in the seminar room, tidying up for the next class. The jog back hadn’t come close to winding her and Ran had a habit of entering rooms quietly. When she finally spoke, her soft voice made Dr. Chen jump.
“I have an answer.”
“Oh, wow—Ran. You scared me.”
“I am sorry about class before,” Ran said, believing Dr. Chen was referring to the near explosion at her desk.
“It’s okay,” Dr. Chen replied kindly. “So, you gave my question a little more thought?”
“Yes,” Ran said, a tinge of excitement in her voice. “The best way for me to benefit society using my Legacy—the only way, I believe—is for me to stop using it entirely.”
“Well, Ran, that’s not exactly the point of the exercise—”
“Please inform the other administrators,” Ran concluded. Her message delivered, she was already halfway out the door. “I will no longer blow anything up.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TAYLOR COOK
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
TAYLOR’S FIRST FEW WEEKS AT THE ACADEMY WERE so busy that she almost forgot to be homesick.
After a meeting with Dr. Chen to assess where she stood academically, Taylor was given a full schedule of classes. She started every day with the brutal back-to-back of organic chemistry and trigonometry, two classes where she immediately felt overwhelmed. The teachers at the academy were different from the ones back home—faster talkers, sharp and enthusiastic, demanding.
Once her brain was appropriately mushed, Taylor finished her school day with European history and then classic literature. Taylor got into the habit of sitting in the back during history, keeping her head down where it was safe. Sometimes, there were objects literally flying around the room. With such a diverse population, class discussions often boiled over into intense debates. On her second day, Taylor witnessed a girl freeze her neighbor’s hands to his desk during a shouting match about socialism.
Literature class Taylor actually enjoyed. She’d always liked that class best, but back home her classmates weren’t such enthusiastic participators. At the Academy, most of the other kids always had something to say, although their book discussions were thankfully much mellower than their history ones.
“I remember Mrs. Reynolds used to have to call on people to get them to talk about The Scarlet Letter,” Taylor told her father over the phone, reminiscing about her ninth-grade English teacher. “It was like pulling teeth. I used to feel embarrassed raising my hand so much.”
“Shoot,” her dad replied, his smile audible. “I used to keep my head down, pretend to be asleep until the teacher moved on. Although, in those days, they’d smack you with a ruler . . .”
“It’s so different here,” Taylor said. She lowered her voice, even though the corner of the student union with the shared phones was completely empty. “These kids all have so much to say. They have so many opinions. This one guy got into an argument with our teacher because he doesn’t think Shakespeare actually existed. Nobody would ever come up with a crazy theory like that back in Turner, much less go at it with a teacher over it.”
“So, wait,” her dad said. “Shakespeare is real or no?”
“It’s like they’re all so sure of themselves,” Taylor continued. “Like because they got Legacies, everything about them is suddenly marked for greatness.”
“Well, you superpowered types are the chosen ones,” her dad said. Taylor laughed. “Don’t know why you’re laughing, kiddo. You’re one of ’em.”
Taylor still couldn’t believe that.
“You do know they record all those phone calls, yes?” Isabela scornfully said one night when Taylor returned from her nightly talk with her dad. “That is why we cannot have cell phones. There is no privacy. The internet, too. Think about the resources this Academy has, hmm? We should all have laptops. Two laptops! But we must go to the computer lab like third world people in the nineties. All so they can monitor us.”
Throughout her rant, Isabela lounged on the couch in their common room, her legs draped across Lofton. During her few weeks at the Academy, Taylor had learned that he was something of a fixture around their suite. She’d begun to think of him as handsome furniture.
“Wait,” Lofton said. “They keep track of our internet use?”
Isabela raised an eyebrow. “Why do you sound so concerned, hmm? What have you been looking at?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
“Pervert,” Isabela replied with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Do not touch me.”
“Anyway,” Taylor said, steering the conversation away from Lofton’s browsing habits. “I’m just talking to my dad. I don’t care if they listen in, if that’s even true.”
“Of course it is true!” Isbaela said. She quickly moved on. “Your dad’s coming to visit soon, yes?”
“Next month,” Taylor replied with a frown. The Academy allowed visits from family only once a month and she’d arrived just after the most recent Family Day. It’d been too long since she’d seen her dad face-to-face.
“Taylor’s dad is a muscular farm man and a bachelor. I am very excited to meet him,” Isabela explained to Lofton.
Taylor groaned. “You’re disgusting. I’ve got homework.”
And she did have homework. Essays and work sheets and lab reports, but also less mundane assignments. Every night, she was required to use her telekinesis to levitate grains of rice—not all at once, but one at a time—and keep count of how many she could manage before letting one drop. Teleki
netic precision, Taylor soon learned, was much more difficult than blunt force. By the end of her second week, she was up to thirty-seven.
“Very good!” Kopano said enthusiastically when she told him. “I can only do twenty-nine. Rice! I would much rather cook and eat it.”
Another day, another six hours of classes, followed by a few more hours of rigorous physical activity in the training center. Taylor and Kopano didn’t have any classes together, so they often found each other during gym time. They trained their telekinesis by tossing objects back and forth, chatting about their days in this strange new place. Neither of them was allowed to run the obstacle course yet—a daunting gauntlet of ropes and barbed wire, pits and water traps, powered by a projectile-launching AI that adapted to their abilities. They watched from the sidelines as their classmates attempted the course and came back bruised and bloodied, never able to reach the off switch at the end of the run.
There was regular exercise, too, under the watchful eye of the Academy’s staff of fitness professionals, who were all as impressively credentialed as the professors. Kopano chased Taylor around the track, huffing and puffing, unable to match her pace. In turn, Taylor looked on in awe as Kopano curled mammoth barbells.
Kopano winked at her. “My muscles are yawning,” he told her as he effortlessly curled another 150-pound weight. “These weights, they must be broken. Or else I am the strongest boy here. That is probably it. They think my Legacy is Fortem, like Nicolas, but that mine is presenting in a much different way.”
Taylor put her hands on her hips. “I saw Nicolas lifting way more than one fifty.”
“I am just warming up!” Kopano replied. He switched hands and Taylor noticed the barbell remained suspended in the air.
She glared at him, catching on. “You’re using your telekinesis, you cheater!”
