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“But how will I get there?” she asked. “I’m nine.”
Her mom smiled. “You’ll see one day, Tay. A person can’t stay in Turner County forever. Even if it hurts now, you’ll come to understand.”
Minneapolis was just Taylor’s mom’s first stop in her flight from South Dakota. She kept going farther and farther east—after Minneapolis was Madison, then Chicago, and the last Taylor heard it was Philadelphia. Taylor never ended up visiting any of those places. Her mom promised that one day Taylor would understand, but she didn’t want that day to come because it’d mean she was like her mother. She’d take over the farm from her daddy, just like he’d taken it over from his daddy.
Her dad made patty melts and French fries for dinner that night. She got the feeling that he had noticed her hasty departure that morning and thought maybe she was mad at him, so he cooked one of her favorite meals. Taylor hugged him while he was frying up the burgers.
“There’s my girl,” her dad said, sounding relieved.
Over dinner, Taylor studied her dad. He was a handsome man with his half day’s growth of beard, brown hair graying at the temples, lean and tan from all the work around the farm. He’d never remarried after Taylor’s mom, not even a girlfriend as far as Taylor knew, although the single ladies in the county still sent over cookies and pies on a regular basis. She got teary-eyed while picturing a scenario where she’d have to say good-bye and leave him here all by himself.
Brian caught Taylor looking at him and rubbed a hand across his cheek. “What is it? I got slop on me?”
She laughed. “No, you’re all good, Daddy.”
“If you say so.” He kept looking at her. “What about you? You all good?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just tired.”
Then, Taylor reached for the salt and the little glass shaker slid across the table right into her waiting palm.
They looked at each other.
After a long silence, Brian said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Finally, Taylor started to cry, big heaving panicked sobs, and her dad came around the table to hold her. “Come on, now. I always knew you were a special one and this just proves it.”
“I don’t—I don’t want to be special!” Taylor replied through her tears. “I like our life here! I don’t want anything else!”
Taylor’s dad rubbed her back. “Come on, now,” he said quietly. “I saw them say on TV that the ones who get powers are the best among us. That they’re destined to be important people.”
“I saw that same show, Dad! The one lady said all that flowery bullcrap, and the other guy said it was all random. An alien lottery. And I didn’t want to win!”
“Well,” her dad said calmly, “I choose to believe the bit about destiny.”
“Are you not listening? I don’t want a great destiny. I like it here. With you. I don’t want to go to their dumb Academy.”
“Then you won’t have to.” Her dad nodded once, like he’d just come to this decision. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“But it’s a law now. You’re supposed to . . .” She swallowed. “You’re supposed to turn me in.”
Brian shook his head. “Not in a million years.”
“But someone else could see,” Taylor said. “You don’t know how hard it was today at school to control myself. All day, I wanted to use it. I’ll slip up.”
Brian considered this for a moment, studying Taylor, who was studying her hands like they’d suddenly become foreign.
“Just us and the hogs out here, most times,” her dad said slowly. “Maybe if you practice doing your alien-thing around the house, it’ll be easier when you’re out in public.”
“Ugh. Please don’t call it my alien-thing.”
“Sorry. Your Legacy.”
Taylor frowned. All day, she’d been thinking about ways to suppress her telekinesis. Maybe her dad was onto something. Maybe instead of ignoring her power, she could exhaust it in the moments when it was safe to use, get it out of her system.
“It’s worth a try,” she admitted.
“Besides,” her dad said, picking up the saltshaker and wiggling it through the air, “I think it’s pretty cool to watch.”
For a month, Brian’s plan worked. Taylor used her telekinesis around the house—she floated her homework books out in front of her while she studied, poured herself glasses of water in the kitchen while standing in the living room and spooned sugar into her dad’s morning coffee while flipping eggs. Her control began to get more precise, the tasks she could complete more complicated, the objects she could lift heavier. And while it felt like a part of her was asleep whenever she went to school or when Silas and the other farmhands were around, Taylor found it easier and easier to keep from slipping up in public.
But then came the day of the accident.
CHAPTER EIGHT
NIGEL BARNABY
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
SHE WAS PLAYING THE CLASSICAL MUSIC AGAIN. Nigel heard it as soon as he walked into Dr. Linda’s office. Daintily plucked violin strings, whistling woodwinds . . . and was that a bloody oboe? Nigel couldn’t tolerate that, so he reached out with his Legacy, grabbed hold of the sound waves rolling out of Dr. Linda’s stereo and bent them until they were a jangling mess of out-of-tune squeals.
Dr. Linda narrowed her eyes at him and turned off her stereo. “Nigel, we’ve talked about this. If you don’t like the music, you can ask me to change it.”
“Where’s the fun in that, love?” Nigel replied as he flopped down on Dr. Linda’s comfortable couch, hugged a pillow to his chest and put his combat boots up on the armrest.
Dr. Linda’s office was on the top floor of the administration building, the windows south-facing with a captivating view of the blue-glass bay. She kept the room open and bright, the walls covered in splotchy abstract paintings meant to evoke reactions from her patients. Her degrees, one each in psychiatry and developmental psychology, both from Stanford, hung over her neatly kept desk.
“We’ve also discussed respect for my space,” Dr. Linda admonished, eyeing his boots. She was a short woman, barely five feet tall, with a cherubic face, graying brown hair cut in a bob and thick-framed lavender glasses that made her look like a naughty librarian. Nigel liked her, which was why he went out of his way to get on her nerves.
“What shall we talk about this week?” Nigel asked as he swung his feet to the floor. He slouched low, his long legs reaching across the space so he could almost play footsie with Dr. Linda. Not that he would. He idly flicked the barbell in his septum—his newest piercing, the thirteenth in his head alone. “Perhaps your love life for a change, eh, Doc? I’m bored talking about me, me, me, all the time.”
Dr. Linda regarded him levelly. “You know I record these sessions, right, Nigel?”
“Sure. So you can keep it all straight for that bestseller you’re gonna write, yeah?” Nigel used his Legacy, changing the pitch and timbre of his voice so that he sounded almost exactly like Dr. Linda. “I forced two hundred teenaged Garde to discuss their wet dreams. Here are my findings.”
Dr. Linda was, as usual, unperturbed by his sonic manipulation. “I do not make you or any of the others discuss their quote-unquote wet dreams,” she said dourly. “We could, though, if you’d like.”
“Well, you certainly called my bluff,” Nigel said, smirking as he worked a finger around the collar of his moth-eaten Suicide tank top.
“When I attempted to listen back to our session from last week, I couldn’t hear anything on the recording,” Dr. Linda pressed on as if he’d never interrupted. “Was that your doing, Nigel?”
Nigel tugged on his lip ring, not sure whether to fess up or lie. Eventually, he threw on his customary devil-may-care grin and nodded. “Sorry about that, Doc. Didn’t realize my powers would flummox your recorder.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“Neat bit of business, actually. I put us in a sound bubble.” Nigel was
unable to keep the pride out of his voice; this was a new application of his sonic manipulation Legacy. “Made it so nobody outside our little circle of trust could hear.”
Dr. Linda tilted her head. “Are you worried people might be listening to our sessions? I assure you, these are kept completely confidential.”
Nigel tucked his chin down and looked at the therapist skeptically. “If you say so, Doc. You live on campus, right? Over in the little faculty village?” He knew she did, so he kept going. “And you don’t ever get the feeling you’re being watched? Like every mirror’s got a bloke with a clipboard hiding on the other side?”
“That’s an interesting observation,” Dr. Linda responded. That was the token neutral statement she deployed whenever Nigel set off one of her therapy alarm bells. He kicked himself for giving her something to work with. “Do you think those feelings of paranoia might be rooted in your time at the boarding school?”
