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Nigel groaned. He’d been seeing Dr. Linda every week since he first arrived at the Human Garde Academy. You couldn’t see a woman like Dr. Linda that often for almost a year and not let a few secrets slip.
So, much to his great regret, Nigel had told Dr. Linda about the Pepperpont Young Gentlemen’s Preparatory Academy. “After that fuckin’ helltrap, superhero training school is easy-peasy,” he’d told her at the time. Nigel had recounted the details of his four years at Pepperpont grimly—the uniforms, the stiff professors, the chores, the very particular tie knots. “But you could get all that from Dickens, eh?” He went into the darker details. The rich boys with bad taste in music. The rich boys who wanted to get experimental with him, then pretended like it never happened, then beat the piss out of him every day for months. The endless teasing, name-calling, abuse. The time that they stripped him, shaved him and dropped him out of a second-story window.
“Like prison,” he’d explained, “except instead of knowing how to fix up a shiv from a toothbrush, all these blokes knew the rules of cricket. Future barristers and brokers, the lot.”
When the invasion happened and Nigel discovered he’d developed telekinesis, he released himself from the custody of Pepperpont. He found an open tattoo parlor to push clear the holes in his ears that had started to close, bought an updated wardrobe at a thrift store and pledged to live the rest of his days as the alien-fighting punk rocker that lived inside him, the same badass gorilla the nice people of Pepperpont had tried so hard to tame.
There was a warship over London. That’s where his parents lived, although at the time they were in Zurich on a ski trip with his older sister and her stockbroker fiancé. If they tried to call him during the invasion—“Surely, they tried to locate you; you’re their son,” Dr. Linda had said—Nigel was long gone by the time they rang. He hadn’t seen them since. There were visiting days at the Academy, but Nigel refused to add them to the list. He couldn’t forgive them for Pepperpont.
“Perhaps you have lingering anxieties from your days there,” Dr. Linda said in the present. Nigel had spaced out. “Even though you’re safe here, perhaps you still feel the need to keep a part of yourself walled off.”
“Yeah, you got it in one, Doc,” Nigel replied. “Bloody breakthrough.”
Dr. Linda raised an eyebrow. “How’s it going with your roommate?”
A sudden change of topic. Nigel hated when she pulled that.
“Fine,” he said. “The same. Whatever. Ask him yourself. Captain America’s got his weekly head shrink scheduled right after me, doesn’t he?”
“Have you reached out to him? Last week, you promised you would visit the dining hall with him at least once a week.”
Nigel folded his arms. Any chance of him becoming besties with Caleb went out the window that day on the island, when he helped turn their Chimæra over to the government. Nigel held a grudge, but Dr. Linda was persistent about trying to mend that relationship. “He apologized to you, didn’t he?” Dr. Linda pressed when Nigel remained stubbornly silent.
Nigel grunted. “So?”
“So, I think forgiveness might be a good skill for you to work on, Nigel.”
Nigel scowled. He thought about Caleb and their months spent rooming at the Academy together, surrounded by dozens of other Human Garde. Nigel was popular around campus—his classmates remembered him from the shared vision during the invasion, they knew he’d gone to fight the Mogs. The legend about how he and Ran had taken down a Mogadorian skimmer at Niagara Falls grew and grew—in every telling, they killed more Mogs, battled against greater odds. The other Garde who were there—Fleur and Bertrand, who had died at Patience Creek—were omitted from the story. Nigel didn’t stop the tale from circulating. He liked having a reputation, even though it came at the expense of some real-life pain.
And maybe he’d let slip, when the other Human Garde were first getting to know each other, that Caleb was a government plant who would report their every action to the Earth Garde administrators. So what? It was true, wasn’t it? Caleb spent more and more time alone in his room rather than with his fellow Garde.
Well, alone wasn’t exactly right. Caleb had the duplicates, after all.
“He doesn’t have any friends. Still. After all this time,” Nigel complained.
“Which is why you should reach out to him.”
“What’s that they say about a bloke, huh? A creep who can’t make friends . . .”
“Do you think the boys at Pepperpont thought of you that way, Nigel?”
“Aw, that’s a bloody low blow, Doc. Totally different scenario.”
Dr. Linda regarded him evenly. “Is it?”
“I never did anything to those wankers as bad as what Caleb did to me,” Nigel said defensively. As she stared at him, unspeaking, Nigel heard his tone of voice change. This wasn’t his Legacy at work; this was the whiny boarding school aristocrat coming out. “This my therapy hour or Caleb’s? I’m starting to wonder.”
“What else would you like to talk about, Nigel?”
“How about me having to come see you every week?” he replied sharply. “Me and Ran, Caleb—we’re the only ones on campus who see you all the time. People might start to think we’re bloody abnormal.”
“They will not.”
“They definitely already think that about Caleb.”
“You know very well why you’re monitored more closely than the others. Precisely because you’ve been exposed to a life-and-death scenario.”
“It wasn’t even all that traumatic,” Nigel muttered, thinking back to the brutal fight at Patience Creek. “I never think about it.”
“No more nightmares?” Dr. Linda asked him.
Another little fact Nigel should have never let slip; he had a reccurring dream of being pursued down a smoky hallway by the mad Mogadorian woman who’d hunted them.
“No,” he lied.
“Then I suppose you are cured,” Dr. Linda replied. “See you next week.”
In the posh waiting room outside Dr. Linda’s office, Nigel found Caleb waiting for his appointment, seated next to one of his duplicates. The two were huddled close, apparently deep in a whispered conversation that cut off as soon as they noticed Nigel. It looked like Caleb had been scolding his clone.
“He wanted to eavesdrop,” Caleb said sheepishly, gesturing to his duplicate.
“Uh-huh,” Nigel replied, raising an eyebrow. “You’re gonna want to cut that shit out, mate. It’s not couples therapy. Wouldn’t want the doc thinking you’re a freak.”
Caleb nodded in agreement. “Yeah, Linda says I shouldn’t . . .” He trailed off, looking at his clone. “Never mind. He was just leaving.”
The clone kept its gaze on Nigel, even as Caleb began to absorb it. The process still made Nigel’s skin crawl. The clone went transparent, like a ghost, and then slowly flowed back into Caleb. There was always a moment when they were back together but still overlapped slightly that would give Caleb a blurry four-eyed look, like a person coming apart. Nigel suppressed a shudder. He wasn’t the only one on campus who
Caleb unnerved, as evidenced by Dr. Linda pushing Nigel to be friends with the aloof duplicator.
When there was only one of him, Caleb stood up. He patted Nigel companionably on the shoulder—these Americans were always touching, high-fiving, back-patting—then brushed by him, into Dr. Linda’s office. “See you back at home,” Caleb said, as he closed the door.
Nigel wondered, not for the first time, if tonight would be the night that an army of Calebs held him down in bed and smothered him.
CHAPTER NINE
TAYLOR COOK
TURNER COUNTY, SOUTH DAKOTA
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED ON A SATURDAY, THE DAY dry and sunny. “Got lucky with the rain,” Taylor’s dad reported. “Good baling weather.”
The Cooks owned ten acres of hayfield, just enough to feed their own animals every year and maybe sell a few leftover bales to their neighbors. The weekend before, Brian and Silas had cut the field, raked the stalks into rows and left them out to dry. Today, Brian would attach the small baler to the tractor and ride over the rows, while Silas and a couple of other farmhands would trail behind, collecting the freshly made bales and lugging them to the barn. As usual, Taylor’s job would be to direct traffic. Left to their own devices, Silas and the others would stack the bales nonsensically, like the year they’d piled the hay right where the tractor was always parked. Her dad hadn’t realized until after the farmhands had left and he had to move every bale himself before he could get the tractor in the barn.
“You know,” her father mused over breakfast, “we could do this whole thing just you and me. Probably only take us until noon. Nobody’d even break a sweat.”
“Dad.” Taylor rolled her eyes.
“My superpowered farmhand would be the envy of all our neighbors,” he said with a laugh. Brian stroked his chin, suddenly deep in thought. “Probably save us a lot, actually. Could get to some of those projects I’ve been putting off. Well, you could, anyway, and I would supervise.” He winked at Taylor. “This place might actually turn a profit.”
