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“I am not,” Kopano cried, offended. “Come see.”
Taylor came over to put one of her hands on top of the dumbbell. She tried to force it down. Instead, she ended up rising off her feet along with the weight, lifted by Kopano’s telekinesis.
“A new record from the mighty Kopano!” he shouted.
“Put me down!” Taylor laughed.
Another day, they had yoga class, but with a twist. Throughout the stretches, their instructor commanded that they keep an egg telekinetically hovering over their heads. Taylor found she was good at this exercise. She moved between stretches fluidly—from down dog to a back bend and then into a sustained tree pose. Her mind cleared and her gentle hold on the egg became second nature. She dropped her egg only when Kopano violently exploded his own during a bow pose—the fourth egg he’d broken—and she could no longer keep in the laughter.
“So, they still haven’t figured out exactly how your Legacy works?” Taylor asked him after class. They’d been at the Academy more than a week.
Kopano scratched dried egg flakes out of his hair. “Not yet. They know that I am hard as steel when they try to poke me with their needles, but they do not know why it is so inconsistent or if I can control it.” Kopano grinned. “Professor Nine wants to shoot me.”
Taylor’s eyes widened in alarm. “What? Kopano, that’s insane!”
“I agree. Yet I am also strangely excited about it.” He looked at her. “I kind of want to know what would happen.”
Taylor squeezed his hand. “Kopano. Please. Don’t let anyone shoot you, okay?”
Taylor had recently gotten firsthand experience with gunshot wounds. In order to train her healing Legacy, Taylor was allowed to leave campus one day per week. Accompanied by Dr. Goode and a team of stone-faced Peacekeepers with concealed weapons, she traveled to a hospital down in San Francisco. Under the guise of a “clinical study,” Taylor saw a variety of patients with different types of injuries. When some of them realized what she was, they demanded a real doctor, but mostly the people she dealt with were sweet and eager to be well.
“I have some experience with Legacies like yours,” Dr. Goode told her during their first visit, perhaps anticipating her nervousness. “I once sustained an extremely grievous wound that was healed by a Loric. The process does not hurt the patient and I’ve suffered no ill effects since. All that is to say—you can only do good here today, Taylor.”
She looked down at her hands. “I’ll . . . I’ll do what I can, I guess.”
“I also understand that your Legacy has limits, especially as a beginner. No one is expecting you to heal everyone in this hospital. Part of what we’re trying to discover with these visits is just where your limits are and how far you can go beyond them,” Dr. Goode continued. “As for the process itself, I believe it helps to visualize the body knitting and to . . . ah . . . push positive energy out of your body.”
Taylor couldn’t help but snort at “positive energy.” The phrase sounded like something out of one of the New Age books her mom used to read before she bailed. However, when she focused on her first patient—a man in his twenties who had gashed his leg falling off a pier—she could feel the aura Dr. Goode spoke about come flowing out of her.
The cuts and bruises were the easiest to heal. She could visualize what the skin was supposed to look like, channel her warm energy through her hand and into the patient and the flesh would mend beneath her fingertips.
Broken bones were more difficult. The doctors observing her showed Taylor X-rays of where the fractures were. That helped a little. Taylor visualized filling in the shadowy crack in the bone and, slowly, her Legacy took over. It began to seem like Taylor could sense the injury. Visualization or not, her Legacy knew something was amiss and gave her the power to fix it. When a girl whose arm had been shattered in a car accident wrapped Taylor in a bear hug, she couldn’t keep the giddy smile off her face.
Taylor met her match with a middle-aged cancer patient. The woman was frail, her head wrapped in colorful scarves, her eyes wet with hope. Lymphoma, the doctors said. The woman was no longer undergoing treatment; everything had failed. Taylor swallowed hard and pressed her palms against the woman’s abdomen.
The healing energy poured out of Taylor, but was swallowed up by the sickness that grew inside the woman. Before, when she finished healing a person, Taylor felt a satisfying sense of reconnection—the patient’s body was whole again, her Legacy snapped off in response. But now, with the cancer, her Legacy just asked for more and more energy, feeding it into the woman but making very little progress.
Dr. Goode stepped in. “Taylor, perhaps that is enough for today.”
Taylor had gotten lost in the work. Five minutes had passed. She was sweaty, yet the back of her neck was cold. In fact, she was chilled all over.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” the woman said. She brushed a damp curl of hair out of Taylor’s face. “I knew it was a long shot.”
“I’ll keep trying,” she promised. “I’ll get better. We’ll both get better.”
Later, Taylor sat in the dining hall and pored over an anatomy textbook. Maybe if she could better understand the human body, she could improve the potency of her healing.
“Look at this one, doing extra work,” Kopano observed, sitting across from her. “Where is the girl of a few weeks ago who didn’t even want to be here? Although, I suppose you did want boring and well—” Kopano squinted at a chart of the nervous system. “It appears you have found it.”
“Don’t make fun,” Taylor replied. “This is serious. I felt like—like I really did some good today.”
Kopano’s expression immediately straightened out. “I did not mean to joke,” he said. “You are a hero already in ways I have only dreamed of. You are changing lives. Isn’t it amazing?”
“It’s . . .” Taylor felt her face get hot. She couldn’t help but agree. “It kind of was. Yes.”
“Aha! At last, you admit it!” Kopano replied, his irrepressible grin breaking loose.
Taylor shook her head. “I just . . . I have to get better. It’s hard to explain, but . . . I could feel the power inside me . . . and I could feel it start to weaken gradually, the more I used it.”
“I know that feeling,” Kopano said. “Like the headaches we get when we use too much telekinesis.”
“I’ve never gotten one of those.”
“No? Well, you have never floated your little brother around for eight hours.”
“This feeling was different.” Taylor searched for the right words. “My Legacy—it was like a sun existing inside me. And every time that I healed someone, it got a little dimmer, a little closer to setting. So, by the end of the day, I could still feel the warmth from my Legacy but . . . but it was like night, you know? I knew the sun would come back eventually, but I couldn’t bring any more light. Does that make any sense?”
Kopano stared at her. “It does. It’s like poetry.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Taylor said with a wave of her hand. “The point is, I need to figure out how to make that sun brighter.”
“I have no doubt you will succeed,” Kopano said firmly.
Lying in bed that night, Taylor realized that she was actually excited about the next morning. About her strange and sometimes unruly classes, her training, her friendships with Isabela and Kopano. She felt almost guilty when she thought about her father, because she was beginning to settle in.
So, of course, that was when the nightmares started.
In the dream, Taylor found herself back on her farm. The grass was overgrown and it swayed around her legs. Something caught her eye—rivulets of blood on the emerald-green blades.
“Dad?” she called out.
Her farm looked decrepit. The walls were singed, the shutters hung crookedly from the windows, the roof sagged. There was something on the porch. In her father’s rocking chair. Was that a body? A skeleton? Was that . . . ?
Someone behind her chuckled. Taylor whipped around. She saw the Har
vester preacher in his vestments, a black bandanna covering the lower half of his face. He led something on a leash—a creature, gray-skinned and reptilian, but with the hulking appendages of a large gorilla. The thing salivated, licking its long, purple tongue across rows of razor-sharp teeth. It watched her hungrily through empty black eyes.
“Abomination!” the preacher shouted.
He dropped the leash. The beast charged her. Taylor tried to run, but . . .
Taylor woke with a barely stifled scream, out of breath, sweating.
Shaken, Taylor stumbled out of her room, still half asleep. In the common room, she padded over to their mini-fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. Her hands were shaking. She wanted to call her dad, but the student union would be closed at this time of night.
Instead, she knocked gently on Isabela’s door. She remembered Isabela’s policy on slumber party secret-sharing—we are not children!—but that wasn’t what Taylor had in mind. She needed the blustery Brazilian to tell her she was being stupid, to tell her to go back to her own bed. She needed to not be alone, just for a few minutes.
When Isabela didn’t answer, Taylor gently nudged open her door. “Isabela? Are you awake?” she whispered.
