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“Yes,” Ran agreed. “We are lucky to have someone so . . . ethically flexible.”
“Speaking of which, what’d you make of those two last night?” Nigel asked. “Fancy boy in the suit and his sidekick the Loralite grower.”
Kopano’s hands tightened on the wheel at the mention of the mind controller.
“Not Earth Garde,” Ran said simply.
“Yeah, bloody obvious, that,” Nigel replied. He itched the bandage on his calf. “But who, then? Free agents? Reckon that was a Mog blaster he shot me with.”
“Yes,” Ran agreed. “That was strange.”
“I thought the Academy had all of us Legacy types rounded up,” Nigel continued thoughtfully. “I know some countries didn’t join the party but I figured our people at least had tabs on ’em. Spies or what have you. So is there some other group out there? Some shadow Academy we don’t know about? One fulla ne’er-do-wells in dress-up?”
The picture Nigel painted—a murky one, where Garde did not all work together for the betterment of mankind—greatly disturbed Kopano. He parked alongside the gas station, thrusting the shifter into place with more force than was necessary. He sensed both Nigel and Ran watching him.
“I’m going inside,” Kopano announced. Without waiting for a response, he got out of the van and slammed the door.
He thought of the bodies in the road, of Taylor being carried off by a strange Garde with malicious intentions. Anger bubbled up inside him. Not the violent rage the mind controller had burned into him, but a righteous fury that such awful things could happen. This world was not as he’d imagined.
“What’s it like? Pretending to be someone you aren’t?”
Isabela and Caleb wandered through Fresno International Airport’s long-term parking lot. Just two travelers who had misplaced their car. Isabela had altered her features again. She appeared as a woman in her midthirties with tied-back black hair and glasses, wearing a professional if colorful pantsuit.
She shot him a glare when he asked his question, then quickened her pace so she could walk a few steps ahead of him.
“I already went over this with the others,” she said, a note of exasperation in her voice. “I am not pretending to be anyone. That is me. At least, it is who I should be. Who I used to be.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” Caleb explained hurriedly. “I mean like when you pretended to be Professor Nine or . . . or right now. How you’re looking like, uh, an attractive Spanish teacher, I guess?”
Isabela smirked and raised an eyebrow at him. “Did you have a crush on your Spanish teacher, Caleb?”
“I took German.”
“Of course you did.”
Caleb didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but he sensed it was an insult. Last night, he and his duplicates had stood over Isabela’s prone body, protected her, while Taylor tried to heal her. But he didn’t expect any special treatment from the Brazilian. What did his older brother used to call him? A magnet for mockery? That’s just how it was.
“A middle-aged woman and her goofy son will draw less attention than two teenagers,” Isabela said simply.
“Oh. Okay.” Caleb frowned, but didn’t dispute the goofy part.
They wandered down another row of cars. Isabela tapped her fingers on her chin, looking for the perfect vehicle. Caleb thought she was done talking, so was surprised when Isabela decided to elaborate.
“It is liberating, to be someone else,” she said. “And it’s enlightening. Seeing the world through different eyes. Seeing the way the world looks back at you, how it can be so different depending on which face you have on.”
Caleb nodded, feeling a slight sense of jealousy. “Yeah. I imagine it’d be freeing.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, an eyebrow raised. “What is it like to be able to physically confront the parts of yourself that you don’t like, hmm?”
Caleb snorted. “What? I don’t know.”
“Of course you do. All those duplicates. Some of them mean, some of them geeky, some of them strange, some of them perverted.” She smirked. “There are parts of me that I would like to slap across the face, if they would pop out of my brain for just a minute.”
“Really?” Caleb smiled.
“No, I am perfect,” Isabela replied sharply. She got up on her tiptoes and tapped Caleb on the forehead. “What is it like in there? Do they ever shut up?”
Caleb looked away. “No. Not really.”
“Hmm. You know, I heard you before the Wargames started, telling Lofton your strategy ideas. He did not listen because he was stupid. But they were not bad ideas. Not as good as mine, of course, but not bad.” She patted Caleb gently on the cheek. “I think you should practice being the loudest voice in the room. Or, at least, being the loudest voice in your own head. Yes?”
“Yeah,” Caleb agreed. “Okay.”
“Good,” Isabela said, clapping her hands. She pointed out a shiny black Escalade. “Now, steal me that car.”
Inside the gas station, Kopano sullenly spun a rack of postcards. Fresno, Death Valley, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Reno—all these colorful places flipped past. He wanted to pick a couple out to send to his little brothers. He’d written to them every week, telling them about his days at the Academy. With every postcard, the details about Kopano’s training started to seem, to him, to be mundane and routine. But his brothers always wrote back with enthusiasm, eager for more details.
His mother and father were less forthcoming in their letters. A few sentences here and there. A detail about some distant cousin who had struck it rich or fallen ill. A prayer. Earth Garde had provided them with a new apartment on Victoria Island, a secure place where they would be protected. His mother only wrote that it was “too big.”
Finally, Kopano had something exciting to tell his relatives. A story of adventure scrawled on a colorful postcard. An ambush on the road, a great battle.
But adventure in the real world—the ugly real world—it no longer seemed so glamorous.
He remembered how it was after he and his father were attacked in Lagos. How he’d wanted to just go home and sleep. He wished he could do that now.
Kopano jumped as Nigel clapped him on the back. He hadn’t heard his roommate approach, so lost was he in his gloomy thoughts.
“You all right, mate?”
“No. I don’t think I am.”
“You want to cuddle up in my lap, have a chat about it?”
Kopano looked down at the much smaller Nigel, his frown unwavering.
“This is serious,” he said.
“I’m just taking the piss,” Nigel replied. He glanced over his shoulder. The gas station attendant—a very tan man in his fifties wearing a sweat-stained tank top—watched them with narrowed eyes. The two of them certainly made an odd pair. Nigel elbowed Kopano. “Come on. Let’s retire to the privacy of the snack aisle.”
Kopano gave the postcard rack one last spin, then followed Nigel. They were surrounded on all sides by colorful packages, greasy chips and candies. Kopano’s stomach growled. He ignored it.
“My mom never wanted me to eat stuff like this. She said it was how my father got his fat belly,” Kopano said, wistfully dragging his fingers across a package featuring a cartoon cheetah bathing in cheese dust.
“My mum was a health nut, too. Also an actual nutter, come to think of it.” Nigel put his hands on his hips and looked up at Kopano. “You want some crisps? That what this is about?”
Kopano went on as if he hadn’t heard Nigel. “When I first got my powers, my family was proud. All except for my mother. The way sh
e looked at me changed. She saw me as . . . as an abomination. Something against God. Taylor told me about those Harvester men, about the things they preached. I think, if she had been born an American, my mom might have been one of them.”
Nigel leaned against the shelves, the better to look at Kopano. “Brother, I doubt that. Those Harvester wankers don’t raise upstanding young lads like yourself.”
“I am starting to think . . .” Kopano hesitated. “I am starting to think maybe my mom was right to look at me like that. I thought the Academy would be like one of those superhero movies, you know? But now I see what I am capable of. Now I see how the world works. For the rest of our lives, we’ll have to fight like we did last night.”
Nigel bit the inside of his cheek, gathering his thoughts. “I know the look you’re talking about, brother. The hairy eyeball. My parentals used to hit me with that before I even got Legacies. They couldn’t understand me or didn’t want to. Shipped me off to a private school with a bunch of hateful rich assholes.”
Kopano slowly turned to look at Nigel. “That sucks.”
Nigel nodded. “It did indeed. Couldn’t wait to get outta that place. John Smith gives me a telepathic ring and I bust out of Pepperpont faster than an eye blink. I felt like you did—like it was the start of some grand bloody adventure and I was the main character. All those years of suffering were leading up to this.” Nigel looked down at the floor. “Got my rude awakening during the invasion. Mogs came to our hideout, killed some of my new friends and a whole lot of soldiers. Brutal stuff. Grown men screaming and crying, dragging themselves about with missing limbs. Not like in the comic books, you know?”
“No,” Kopano said quietly. “It’s not like that at all.”
Nigel gripped Kopano’s shoulder with enough force that Kopano felt his Legacy almost trigger. “But listen, I stuck it out after that, nightmares and all. So did Ran.”
