AllFreeNovel
Share Us
One of the men he’d tossed into the wall rushed forward with a butterfly knife and stabbed Kopano in the stomach.
“Kopano!” yelled his father, spitting blood.
Kopano looked down. Where there should have been a wound, there was only a hole in his shirt. The knife’s blade was folded up like it was made from paper.
His skin. It looked normal, but it was as durable as titanium.
Kopano backhanded the knife-fighter away from him, eyes wide with sudden fury. “You would have killed me! For what? For what?”
“Kopano!” his father shouted again, as Kopano loomed over his would-be murderer. “The bag! He’s getting away with the bag!”
Kopano whipped around, spotted the man who’d taken the duffel bag sprinting down the street, laboring under the weight. The runner was already nearly a hundred yards away. Kopano squinted, tried to bring his telekinesis to bear. He’d never used his Legacy at this distance. He thrust out his hand, a telekinetic shove—and flattened the windshield of the car nearest the runner. The thief glanced over his shoulder, then hooked down an alley. Gone.
“I . . . I missed,” Kopano said. The other thieves had used his distraction to scurry off, except for the two Kopano had knocked out.
“You let him get away!” his father barked. He came around the car, kicked one of their fallen assailants and tore off his mask. Neither of them recognized the guy. He was nobody. “Come on! We have to get out of here.”
On the ride home, Kopano rubbed his knuckles and forearms. His skin didn’t feel different. His sense of touch was unchanged. Yet, he knew, there was a new hardness lurking within him. He wondered if his new Legacy was a result of the jobs he’d been doing with his father.
“I do not think we should do this anymore,” he said quietly.
“What!” his father bellowed. “Do you not understand what just happened, boy? We lost a delivery! The next job is the least of our worries. We will need to make amends and quickly.”
Kopano didn’t know what that meant. He shook his head and stared out the broken window, hot air rushing into the car. “This is not what I wanted,” he said.
His father snorted, ignoring him. They rode home in silence.
That night, when he tried to sleep, Kopano could hear his father’s pleading voice through the walls. Udo had been on the phone almost nonstop since they returned home, talking to whatever mysterious big man was in charge of the package they’d lost. He spoke in a meek voice that Kopano wouldn’t have thought his father capable of. Kopano tossed and turned, Udo’s wheedling apologies the worst kind of lullaby.
Kopano must have drifted off, because he did not hear the door to his room open, nor notice the shadow that padded across the floor. His eyes snapped open only when a cool hand pressed over his mouth.
“Kopano,” a voice said. “It is time to go.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
TAYLOR COOK
TURNER COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
TAYLOR DISCOVERED THAT SHE WAS ONE OF THEM on the Wednesday morning when she reached for her buzzing alarm clock and accidentally sent the thing flying across her bedroom. The clock smashed against the wall, made a squawking sound like a dying goose and was silent. Taylor was 99 percent sure she hadn’t laid a finger on it.
“Okay, get a grip,” she told herself. “You were still half dreaming. It was an accident. You’re freaking out over nothing.”
Taylor held her hand out toward the broken alarm clock, gasping when it levitated and floated back to her.
“Dad!” she shouted.
Brian didn’t hear her. He was already out of the house. Taylor threw open her bedroom window and gazed out over their small farm. The barn doors were open, her dad probably in there feeding the hogs.
A dented pickup truck made its way up their dirt driveway. That would be Silas. He got out of his truck, hair slicked back as usual, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his flannel shirt, like a dingy version of some old movie star. Over the last few months, ever since she spoke up to him during the invasion, he’d started looking at Taylor in a new way, a creepy way. He always made a point of telling her how much she’d grown. He saw her watching and waved.
Taylor shut her window. Took a step back.
“This isn’t happening,” she told herself.
It’d been almost a year since the world got crazy. Things had been normal here, though, just like Taylor had hoped. She’d even gotten comfortable with the idea of aliens and superpowers in the world. But now . . .
“I . . . I can’t be one of them.”
But she was. Taylor realized she hadn’t used her hands to shut her window just then. She’d used her mind. She went back to the glass, peering out, praying that Silas hadn’t noticed anything. Taylor watched him saunter into the barn like nothing had happened and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Okay. Okay.” She looked down at her hands. They were shaking. “Nothing has to change.”
Taylor decided then and there that she would act like nothing happened. She got ready for school. Wiping steam off the bathroom mirror after her shower, Taylor studied her reflection. Blue eyes, wavy blond hair, a small nose and rounded cheeks. She didn’t look any different than yesterday. Granted, every day she looked more and more like her mother, a fact that annoyed Taylor. But there was no physical manifestation of her telekinesis.
Telekinesis. A year ago that word was strictly in the vocabulary of comic book readers and science fiction fans. Now it was everywhere. The telltale sign of a Garde developing their powers. There were PSAs on TV about what to do if you spotted someone using telekinesis. Taylor never thought she’d be one of them.
She would hide. There were fewer than ten thousand people in all of Turner County. Those government people she saw on TV would never come to South Dakota looking for one of their so-called Human Garde. Her dad had said no one would bother with their little town.
“Going to school!” she yelled into the barn as she half jogged down the driveway to where the bus waited. Usually, she’d never leave without giving her dad a hug and a kiss, but Silas was there, lingering in the barn’s doorway waiting to take the tractor out, and even though Taylor knew he was just eyeballing her in his usual pervy way, she felt extra exposed that morning and couldn’t bring herself to get too close.
Taylor zoned out in her history class, daydreaming about the fiery images she’d seen of the invasion, imagining herself there, clumsily floating around a broken alarm clock while pale aliens shot at her with lasers. She got scolded, her classmates giggling after the teacher calle
d her name five times. At lunch, her friends told her that she seemed distracted and Taylor brushed them off, making an excuse about not sleeping well. When the kid in front of her grabbed the last peach iced tea from the drink cooler, Taylor nearly used her telekinesis to snatch the bottle out from under his fingers, then immediately felt ashamed. Whenever she needed to reach for something, she could feel the telekinesis urging her to use it. Ignoring the ability was like not scratching an itch. It frightened her how much the telekinesis already felt like a part of her, an instinct she had to fight against.
“It’ll get easier,” she promised herself in the bathroom mirror as she washed her hands. Then she floated a paper towel to herself from the dispenser, screamed in frustration and stomped her feet.
Sooner or later, she would screw up and someone would see her. Unless she learned how to bury this power deep inside her, make like it never existed. But already that felt like keeping an arm tied behind her back.
On the bus ride home from school, Taylor stared mutely out the window while Claire rambled on about some boy. She watched Turner County glide by and then imagined the bus carrying her onwards, all the way to California and that bizarre Academy for Human Garde. If they caught her, that’s where she’d end up.
She had promised herself that she would never leave Turner County.
Inevitably, this led Taylor to remembering the last time she’d seen her mom. She was nine years old and they were at the bus station in Ashburn. Her mom wore jeans that Taylor thought were too tight, a tied-off plaid shirt and a red bandanna in her hair. All the rest of her clothes were stuffed into the backpack she carried on her shoulder.
“You’re coming back, right? This isn’t forever,” Taylor had said to her mom.
“Oh, honey,” Taylor’s mom said, and touched her gently on the cheek. “You can come visit me whenever you want. Minneapolis is only a couple of hours away.”
Young Taylor glanced over her shoulder to where her father sat in their truck, watching them, a baseball cap pulled low to hide his eyes. She looked back to her mom.
