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Einar sat down in a plush armchair and stretched out his legs. He smiled at the executive. “You aren’t the only one with a bodyguard. Shall we see how this plays out?”
Duanphen snapped back to her feet, facing down the looming figure in the sweat suit. He was big, but she’d fought bigger. She triggered her Legacy. A field of electricity crackled across Duanphen’s body. One Taser-like blow from her packed enough voltage to put down an ox.
She had longer reach than the brute in the sweat suit and threw a series of quick strikes at his face—a jab followed by a vicious swing of the briefcase. He bobbed backwards on his heels, keeping his distance as Duanphen’s lightning-charged punches crackled right in front of his nose. Duanphen was merely testing him though, gauging her range.
“Ha!” She unleashed a vicious arcing roundhouse kick. The sweat suit barely managed to get his forearm raised in a haphazard block.
Duanphen screamed and flopped to the ground, her shin bent at an impossible angle. She’d broken her leg on her attacker’s forearm. It was like hitting a brick wall.
The pain caused her to lose control of her Legacy. The sweat suit was on her fast. He grabbed Duanphen around the neck and lifted her off the ground with ease, his fist cocked back.
“Stop!” Einar yelled. “Don’t kill her! You weren’t even supposed to break her!”
As ordered, the sweat suit dropped Duanphen. She writhed on the floor, whimpering, body curled around her broken leg.
Einar looked at the executive. “Him, on the other hand . . .”
Duanphen saw it happen. The executive managed, at last, to turn and run. But it was too late. Sweat suit grabbed him by the back of his neck, lifted him up and then—crack—down, slamming the executive spine-first over his knee like a dead branch.
There was a moment that Duanphen knew from her many losing fights, that sensation right before a knockout, when all the pain was erased by welcoming blackness. The pain in her leg was shrieking and intense. Too much to bear. She let herself slip . . .
And then she was being not so gently slapped awake. How long was she out? Seconds? Minutes? She was still in the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window somehow chilling her despite the humidity. With every slight shift of her body, new shards of pain broke free in her shattered leg. Duanphen wanted to retreat from the agony, but she sensed that if she passed out again she might never wake up.
Einar crouched over her. He stopped slapping her once her eyes focused.
“Hello again,” he said. He held up the executive’s tablet. “How do I access this?”
Shakily, she pointed at the executive’s body. “Fingerprint.”
Duanphen felt a sticky heat beneath her, warm and spreading. Was that . . . ?
“Yes, I know fingerprint. We already took care of that.” Einar held up the executive’s severed hand.
Duanphen gagged. She was lying in a puddle of blood swiftly spreading from the executive’s body. In a moment of panic, she checked her own wrists, was relieved to find them intact. They’d simply ripped open the briefcase with telekinesis.
Behind Einar, the sweat suit wiped his gore-stained hands on a bedsheet. There was something wrong with his skin. Duanphen squinted, but Einar snapped his fingers in her face.
“Do you know the code?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Only he did.”
Einar frowned. “Well. Got a bit overzealous, didn’t we?” He stood up. “So here is the situation, Duanphen. Did I say that right?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“We’re like you. Garde. I’m sure you noticed how your coworkers suddenly started behaving strangely out in the hallway. That was me. I can control emotions.” Duanphen flinched as Einar reached out, but all he did was touch her gently on the nose. “But I’m not doing that to you, dear.”
“Wh-why?”
“My new policy is that I don’t use my Legacy against our own kind unless absolutely necessary. I don’t kill them either. Good news for you, yes? But you still have a choice to make. Option one: you deliver a message for me. Tell the Foundation I know who they are and that I’m coming for them. We leave you here, the guards will likely be back soon, they take you to a hospital, fix your leg, and then you find out what the Foundation does to assets who fail at their jobs.”
Duanphen glanced at the executive’s mangled body. This failure was not something the Foundation would forgive. “Option two?”
“Option two,” Einar continued, “is you come with me. Help me out with what I’m doing.”
Duanphen already knew which option she would choose, but she still had to ask.
“What . . . what are you doing?”
“Simple. I’m remaking the world.”
Chapter Two
NIGEL BARNABY
UNDERGROUND
THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA
“WHAT YOU WANT TO DO IS GET A PROPER SLOUCH on,” Nigel said, demonstrating as he scrunched down in his metal folding chair. “Like your balls are too big for your trousers.”
Opposite him, Taylor Cook raised an eyebrow. “Not your most relatable advice, Nigel.”
“Ah, don’t get all hung up on the equipment, love,” Nigel replied. “It’s more a state of mind.”
Taylor tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear and then did her best to copy Nigel’s disaffected posture, one arm slung over the back of her chair, legs spread out obnoxiously.
“Not bad,” Nigel said. He reached into his vest pocket and tossed Taylor a pack of sour-apple gum. “Now, chew a couple of pieces of that with your mouth open. Do it like you kinda hate the gum.”
Taylor did as instructed, sneering at Nigel around a glob of neon green. He laughed.
“Brilliant, that’s brilliant,” he said. “Looking at you, I’m not sure if I want to slap your face or be your best friend.”
“Thanks?” Taylor replied, sitting up a little.
“Back at my prep school, I had a prof who used to hate when I’d do the gum thing. Drove him up the wall. Called me insouciant.”
Down the table from them, Isabela Silva looked up from her English flash cards. “Insouciant,” she repeated, enunciating. “What does that mean?”
“It means ya don’t give a shit about nothing,” Nigel answered.
Isabela studied Nigel for a moment, then yawned. “Yes. A good word for you. Especially in matters of clothes and hygiene.”
Nigel smirked and flattened out some wrinkles in his moth-eaten Misfits shirt. Maybe he wasn’t the most polished guy at the Academy, but he didn’t think of himself as insouciant, not anymore. He cared.
He cared about being Garde.
Back during the Mogadorian invasion, Nigel had been the first human to answer the Loric’s call for help. After the war was won, Nigel had been one of the first students enrolled at the Academy. It hadn’t all been fun and games. There were boring classes to endure, exhausting training, a lot of sitting around. Oh, and also new friends slaughtered by evil aliens, religious zealots who wanted to burn them at the stake, and a psychotic fellow Garde who nearly caused Nigel to drown himself.
He’d been through some crap, that was for sure. And he had the nightmares to prove it.
But he wouldn’t trade it. Especially not now that he and his friends had their first real mission: secretly plotting the takedown of an über-rich cabal devoted to kidnapping and exploiting the talents of Human Garde. That was something he could get behind.
Not to mention, as secret hideouts went, theirs was pretty badass.
They were underneath the training center, down among the inner workings of the sadistic obstacle course Professor Nine had constructed. They accessed the place via a hatch hidden in the back of the rock wall. Above them, the ceiling was all a massive gear-work of shining titanium, the pulleys and belts and racks and pinions that drove the various death traps that waited on the floor above. There was an array of glowing control panels and fuse boxes, nests of wires and cords, and a few pur
ring engines.
Also, Kopano’s legs. They were sticking right out of the ceiling. That gave Nigel a pause and he had to blink his eyes.
Kopano was using his Legacy up there, distorting his physical mass or whatever. Nigel still couldn’t quite wrap his head around how it worked, even after watching the high-powered-microscope images that Malcolm Goode—their science teacher and adviser—had recorded. The footage showed how Kopano could separate his atomic particles to glide through solid matter or, alternatively, tense up those same particles so that his skin was basically impenetrable. Kopano had saved Nigel’s life with that power.
He’d also entirely stopped using the door to their suite, instead opting to pass right through it.
“You find it?” Professor Nine asked Kopano. He was on the ceiling too, using his antigravity Legacy to hang from there, holding on to Kopano by the ankle. That was something Nigel knew Kopano had been working on—keeping some of his body solid while the rest of him went intangible.
A second later, Kopano popped his top half out of the machinery, breathing hard and sweating. He held up a twisted piece of metal—a broken gear.
“Found the blockage,” he said, and let the scrap clatter to the floor below. “You got a replacement?”
