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“That feel okay?” Nine asked.
“Yeah. Just . . . weird, I guess.”
Nine flexed his metal arm. “You’ll get used to it.”
Some movement on the road leading into the barracks drew Taylor’s attention. It was beyond strange to see her dad’s dented brown pickup truck rolling through a security checkpoint. The context was all wrong.
Taylor stood up, feeling a little dazed.
“I’ll be over here if you need me to, uh, hop in and be all official or whatever,” Nine said.
“I’m good, thanks,” Taylor replied over her shoulder, crossing the grass to where her dad had parked.
There he was. Her dad looked a little road weary, his beard grown in, his hair messy, but he grinned when he saw Taylor. She ran the last few steps to him and he wrapped her in a hug, smoothed her hair down, and kissed her forehead. For a minute, Taylor felt like a little girl again.
Her dad held her out at arm’s length. “Look at you. Wow.”
“Come on, Dad,” she said. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“I know, I know. But you’ve changed,” he replied, studying her. “Can’t quite say how, exactly. It’s good, though. You look like . . . well, like a young lady I’d choose to protect the planet, I suppose.”
“Oh, stop,” Taylor said. She took her dad by the elbow. “You hungry? All these cabins have food. I could make you something.”
Her dad took a deep breath and puffed out his chest. “Feels good to stretch my legs, actually. Air is nice out here. I’ve never been to California.”
So they walked around the grounds. The Academy and the surrounding barracks and visitors’ center were built on a former nature preserve, so there were plenty of woodsy trails for them to hike along.
She told him about her classes, her training of her powers at the hospital, and about her friends. All things that they’d covered before on her phone calls, back when they were more regular. In turn, he brought her up to speed on the dreadfully mundane lives of her cousins, on the TV shows they used to watch together, and on the condition of the farm.
“Those Harvesters really tore up the fields,” he said. “Kind of ironic. They’d make terrible farmers.” He shook his head. “The government was nice enough to clear away all the wreckage they left behind, but they still set me back some. Figure if I tighten my belt and subsist on microwave dinners for the winter, I should get through well enough.”
“You’re already hurting for money,” Taylor mumbled, half in thought.
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’m hurting. Just going to be a lean season—”
“No, Dad, it’s okay. In fact, it’s great.”
Her dad raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”
By then, the two of them had done a full circuit of a trail and returned to the main visitors’ area. Nine was still hanging out by the picnic tables. He gave Taylor a discreet nod when she glanced in his direction—everything was all set.
Taylor took her dad by the elbow and led him towards one of the cabins.
“Come on, I’ll explain in here,” she said. “Where it’s private.”
“Don’t seem any more private in here than out there,” her dad observed once they were inside. The cabin was simple and cozy—a sofa and some chairs, a dining table, a selection of movies, none of which were rated higher than PG-13 or had anything to do with aliens. And, of course, there was a security camera in one corner. That’s what her dad was focused on, his hands on his hips. The setup reminded Taylor of Einar’s cabin in Iceland; perfectly comfortable and seemingly normal, but never unobserved.
“Yeah, those things are everywhere,” Taylor said, looking at the camera, too. She covered her mouth as if she were yawning and whispered. “Just act normal for a second.”
“Normal?” her dad replied. “I thought I was acting normal.”
Taylor grimaced as her dad failed to follow her lead on the secretive whispering, but just then the red recording light on the security camera blinked twice. That was the signal.
She exhaled and turn to her dad. “Okay, we aren’t being watched anymore.”
Taylor’s dad glanced from her, to the camera, and back. Taylor expected total bafflement, but instead she got her dad’s bemused squint, the same one he used on a farmhand that tried to cut corners.
“So,” he said, “now you’re going to tell me what’s going on with you, right?”
“You could tell, huh?”
“Of course I could tell. I’m your dad. You might be a Garde now with problems that I can’t even begin to understand, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know when something’s gnawing at you.”
Taylor bit the inside of her cheek. “The thing is . . . there’s only so much I can tell you. Um, for your own good.”
“For my own good,” he repeated, then lowered himself into one of the kitchen chairs. “Gosh, I better sit down for this. My daughter’s gone and become a secret agent.”
Taylor couldn’t help but smile at that. If he only knew. The truth was, there was only so much Taylor wanted to tell her dad. It was probably better that he didn’t know she’d been kidnapped, or that she was trying to return to those same kidnappers.
“There are some bad people outside the Academy, worse than the Harvesters, even . . . ,” Taylor began slowly. She had rehearsed this speech earlier but was still carefully choosing her words. “They see people like me—Garde—as commodities. It’s like, they want to get a monopoly on us and then charge high prices for our services. And they don’t care who gets hurt in the process.”
A deep frown set in across her dad’s face. “Always comes down to money in this world, don’t it? I imagine you’d be in high demand, being a healer and all. Some people see the miraculous and are like—hell, how can I turn a buck off this?”
“Yeah. Exactly,” Taylor replied. “My professor, you saw him out there—”
“Number Nine. ’Course I saw him.” Taylor raised an eyebrow, so her dad explained. “I’ve been doing my research on the people taking care of my daughter. Nine, he’s the wild one.”
“He’s chilled out a lot,” Taylor said with a shrug. “Anyway, he thinks these people are going to try to recruit me to their organization. He thinks they might even have spies in the Academy. We want one of their people to approach me so that we can expose them.”
Her dad rubbed his jaw. “These people sound dangerous, Taylor.”
“I know, but—”
“I’m sorry, you don’t need to explain,” her dad said, interrupting her. “I just broke a promise to myself.”
“You what?”
“I promised myself that—no matter what you told me, because I knew it was going to be something—I promised myself that I wouldn’t go on about how dangerous it might be. Your life is dangerous now. I saw that firsthand, when those nuts showed up on our doorstep. You’ll always be my little girl, and so there’s obviously a part of me that’d like noth
ing better than to drag you back to Turner County, government contracts be damned, lock you up on the farm, and keep you safe forever.”
Taylor smiled sadly. “There’s a part of me that’d like to go.”
Her dad wagged a finger at her. “Maybe, but I don’t think it’s a very big part anymore. And that’s okay. I hear it in your voice. You want to get these people.”
“What they’re doing is wrong, Dad,” Taylor said, her voice steely. “It’s disgusting.”
“Well, I’d hate to be them, on the wrong side of my daughter with her mind made up. You just promise me that you and the other heroes are watching each other’s backs.”
“We’re not heroes, Dad, but . . . yeah. I promise.”
“Good,” her dad said. “So, what do you need from me? How can I help?”
Taylor looked down at her feet, scuffing the wood floor. “I’m not sure you’re going to like it. You can say no.”
“Lay it on me.”
“So the thing is, we need to give these people an in. A reason to approach me. Something they can try to bribe me with . . .”
Her dad tilted his head. “Aha. I see. Your poor dad subsisting on Hot Pockets is something these folks might use as leverage.”
“Yeah,” Taylor replied. “Well, it’s a start, anyway . . .”
One week later in Turner County, South Dakota, two watchers waited for Brian Cook to drive his junker of a pickup truck down the country road. They were parked on the shoulder, in a nondescript wood-paneled station wagon. Nothing that would stand out. These two were pretty used to hiding in plain sight.
“There he is,” said the guy in the passenger seat, pointing at Brian’s passing truck.
“Right on time,” his partner answered. She sat behind the steering wheel, her blond hair bundled under a thick woolen hat. If Mr. Cook noticed them there, waiting for him to leave his farm, he didn’t acknowledge the fact. She waited until Cook’s truck was out of sight, then opened her door. “Come on. Let’s go on foot, just in case someone’s watching.”
