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Taylor managed to get the door open only about a foot before it knocked into something. A nightstand, pushed close to the door for some reason. And, when Taylor jostled it, a metal bell sitting atop it jingled sharply. It was as if Isabela had booby-trapped her room.
“Izz? What the hell?” Taylor whispered to herself, a moment before a dark shape lunged out of Isabela’s bed.
For a moment, Taylor thought she was back in her nightmare. In the moonlight, through the narrowly cracked door, Taylor couldn’t be sure exactly what she saw. The shape looked like Isabela—her slender body, her wild raven hair—but the face was twisted and wrong, scarred, like a horrible Halloween mask.
The apparition screamed at Taylor in a language she didn’t understand. Was that Portuguese? With a violent telekinetic thrust, the door slammed in Taylor’s face.
Taylor took a stunned step backwards.
“Is everything all right?”
Ran stood in the doorway to her room, hair tousled. In the weeks they’d been living together, Taylor hadn’t interacted very much with Ran. The Japanese girl was polite and pleasant, but generally kept to herself and had little to say. Isabela told Taylor not to take it personally; Ran was like that with everyone. Well, everyone except for that rangy British boy Nigel.
Taylor glanced back at Isabela’s closed door, uncertain what she just saw or how much to tell Ran. Eventually, she nodded, rubbing her eyes.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I just . . . had a bad dream. Sorry to wake you.”
“I was already awake,” Ran said.
“Okay. Well, good night.”
Ran said nothing, but remained in her doorway. Feeling like she’d experienced enough weirdness for one night, Taylor trudged back to her room with her head down.
When Taylor was nearly at her door, Ran spoke quietly. “I also have nightmares.”
Taylor turned back. “Really? You?”
Ran nodded. “Ever since the invasion. Why does that surprise you?”
“I don’t know. You just seem so . . .” Taylor shrugged. “Tough, I guess.”
Ran studied Taylor for a moment. Then, she stepped aside, gesturing into her room. “Would you like to talk about what you dreamed?”
“I . . .” The offer took Taylor aback, but after a moment’s consideration she nodded. “Okay. Sure.”
That night, huddled next to Ran on her bed, Taylor told her roommate about her farm, the Harvesters and the hideous creature that mauled her. Ran stayed quiet throughout the telling. At the end, Ran was still, her eyes closed. Taylor assumed she had fallen asleep. She yawned, her own eyes getting heavy.
“These dreams, they are creations of darkness,” Ran whispered, without opening her eyes. “When we talk about them, we drag them into the light. We realize that they cannot hurt us anymore.”
Taylor hoped that was true.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RAN TAKEDA
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN THE ADVICE SHE’D given to Taylor rang hollow to Ran herself. Nights when no amount of meditation could quiet the echoes from her past—her brother’s cries, the collapsing walls of her family’s home, the explosions. Nights when, lying in bed, Ran felt pursued, like the Mogadorians who had nearly killed her at Patience Creek were still out there, chasing her.
On those nights, she ran.
Only a few nights after she’d consoled Taylor, Ran found herself jittery and anxious. She untangled herself from sweaty sheets and pulled on her workout clothes, slipping quietly out of her suite. The students had a midnight curfew, but it wasn’t clear exactly when in the morning that was lifted. Anyway, it didn’t matter to Ran. No one ever bothered her about her four a.m. runs. She wasn’t sure anyone even noticed.
Ran first jogged around the dorms, picking up speed as she hit the path that led out to the woods. When she reached the tree line, she was in a full-on run. She turned—it was still too dark to go crashing through the woods—so she sped along the edge, her footfalls answering the steady buzz of crickets. In her uneasy state, she imagined the crooked shadows of tree branches as claws, reaching for her. She sprinted until her legs ached and her lungs burned, and then she pushed herself to go faster. If she went hard enough, maybe she could outrun the darkness at her back.
Eventually, her sweaty tank top cold against her spine, Ran doubled back for campus. The lights were on at the training center. That was unusual. Professor Nine sometimes held sessions before class, but not this early. Curious, Ran jogged in that direction.
As Ran drew close, she heard the clamor of the obstacle course in motion. Someone was making a run, which wasn’t allowed without faculty and medical supervision.
That rule, obviously, didn’t apply to Professor Nine.
Ran peeked into the gymnasium just as Nine stopped a burst of rubber shrapnel with his telekinesis and redirected the fragments so they would knock off course a sandbag swinging for his head. Nine wore only a pair of gym shorts and sneakers, so Ran could see where his prosthetic arm met the stump of his shoulder, the skin there red and upraised, run through with blackish scars.
As Ran watched, Nine leaped onto a balance beam and sprinted across it, dodging under a series of electrified wires. A piston-powered brick battering ram waited for Nine at the end of the beam. He put his shoulder into it, leaving cracks in the stone as he spun clear.
One of the course’s wall-mounted cannons took aim at Nine, tracking his movement and firing bursts of rubber slugs faster than his telekinesis could work. Nine evaded them by running up the nearest wall, his antigravity Legacy kicking in. The computer adjusted and pieces of the wall began to leak grease under Nine’s feet, making vertical progress difficult. He slowed down and the cannon fire began to catch up to him, so Nine leaped across the gym, towards the opposite wall, reaching out—
His fingers grazed the wall’s surface, failed to stick and he fell. He landed in an awkward heap on the course’s floor and was quickly peppered by rubber bullets. Ran grimaced.
Nine had tried to use his antigravity Legacy to go from wall to wall, but in the moment had forgotten about his prosthetic limb. His power didn’t work through the metallic fingers.
Ran slipped away as Nine pounded the floor in frustration, not wanting to further invade the Loric’s privacy.
Her stomach growled and so Ran headed for the dining hall. The doors were locked—the breakfast shift wouldn’t begin for another couple of hours—but that posed no problem to Ran and her telekinesis. After popping the dead bolt, she paused briefly in front of the dining hall’s bulletin board, reading the sign advertising the Academy’s upcoming “Wargames” event. The students would be taking on the UN Peacekeepers in some sort of battle scenario with Earth Garde present to observe. She
knew Nigel was excited about that, although also disappointed that they wouldn’t be working as a team.
Ran tiptoed into the kitchen, liberated an egg from the refrigerator and headed out through the service exit. Cupping the egg in her hands, she walked down the path that led to the Academy’s beach. It was cold by the water, but Ran didn’t mind. She plopped down in the sand and waited for sunrise. She liked how the sun would come from behind her, heating the sand first and turning the water slowly purple.
Holding her egg, Ran used her Legacy. She’d sworn off exploding things, that was true, but no one needed to know about this silly trick, which wasn’t even worth mentioning in Dr. Chen’s seminar. She pushed just enough kinetic energy into the egg so that she could feel the molecules vibrating, let the egg sit in that agitated state for a few seconds and then sucked the energy back into herself. That process—retrieving the energy she produced—stung her palms and made Ran flinch.
The end result was a hardboiled egg. She cracked the shell with her fingernail and began to peel it away.
“Thought you’d given up your Legacy,” said a voice from behind her.
Ran half turned. It was Professor Nine. She hadn’t heard him hiking down—the big Loric was surprisingly stealthy. Ran wondered if he knew she’d been watching him earlier. He sat down next to her, drying his sweat off with a towel.
“I had to file a report with Earth Garde about you,” Nine continued when she didn’t immediately respond. “Those dudes were pretty disappointed. I think they had a list of things for you to explode.”
Ran popped a piece of egg into her mouth. “You may tell Earth Garde that I will use my Legacy for breakfast purposes only.”
Nine snorted. He looked at Ran for a long moment and she could tell he wanted to say something. She waited in silence, looking out at the waves.
“Look, my job here is to make sure you and the others learn how to control your Legacies so you can go through life without hurting anybody. I mean, anybody you don’t want to hurt.” Nine paused. “After you graduate from here, you want to go be Earth Garde MVP, that’s cool. You want to live some boring-ass life as a very specific chef, that’s cool too.”
