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“What the shit . . . ?” Nigel replied quietly.
Dr. Linda paused when she saw their little group and let out a sigh of relief. She plucked a walkie-talkie off her belt and spoke into it.
“I found him down on the beach,” Linda said. “It’s okay.”
The moment was surreal. The Garde stood in a loose semicircle, facing Dr. Linda, their good mood dashed, uncertain what would happen next. Some of them—like Nigel and Taylor—had spent too much time staring at Linda’s picture on the bulletin board in their secret lair under the training center. They were paranoid. Was this the night the Foundation made their move? What else could she be doing here? Others, like Isabela, had more grounded concerns. Were they going to get in trouble again? Technically, the beach wasn’t off-limits.
Caleb discreetly kicked a spent champagne bottle behind a piece of driftwood.
Finally, Dr. Linda spoke. She didn’t seem mad. Or villainous. She seemed . . . oddly somber.
“Nigel,” she said. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“Me?” Nigel replied, squinting at her. “Looking for me?”
“Yes. You need to come with me.”
The Garde all tensed up, tightening their ranks around Nigel. Dr. Linda stared at them like she couldn’t comprehend.
“The hell would I go anywhere with you, Linda?” Nigel replied.
But before Dr. Linda could reply, more flashlights appeared on the beach. There were a couple of Peacekeepers, Malcolm Goode, and Professor Nine in the lead. He bounded ahead of the others, almost as if he’d anticipated this particular crew of Garde might have an adverse reaction to being confronted by Dr. Linda.
“Nigel,” Nine said breathlessly. “Damn, dude. We’ve been looking for you.”
Now, seeing Nine acting weird, was the first time Nigel actually felt worried. Ran put a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s what she said,” Nigel replied, waving a hand at Dr. Linda. He put on a cavalier smile. “What’s the hubbub, then? People clamoring for an encore?”
“Nigel . . .” Nine frowned, he looked over his shoulder at the other administrators as if for help. When Dr. Linda opened her mouth to say something, Nine cut her off and plowed ahead. “There’s no easy way to say this, buddy.”
“Spit it out, Nine.”
“Nigel, your dad died.”
Chapter Fourteen
NIGEL BARNABY
LONDON, ENGLAND
NIGEL PUT HIS HAND ON THE WROUGHT-IRON GATE of the Saint John’s Wood house but couldn’t bring himself to push it open. Instead, he stood on the sidewalk in the damp English weather and pulled the collar of his coat tighter against a sudden chill.
This was the house where he grew up. Two stories of white brick with twice that many chimneys for the home’s multiple fireplaces. It looked like a country manor plunked down in northern London, but then most of the houses around here looked that way. The buildings were tightly packed together—this was still the city, after all—but what one couldn’t see from the sidewalk was the sprawling backyard that looked like a polo ground, lined with immaculate rows of oak trees to provide total privacy from the neighbors. From the sidewalk, people couldn’t see the basement addition, the pool and billiards table, the home theater. From the sidewalk, they couldn’t see the years of misery Nigel had spent there, thinking that things couldn’t get worse.
Until they did.
Nigel was in no rush to get inside. He shifted his backpack around on his tired shoulders. His eyes were dry and heavy, his limbs felt fuzzy. He hadn’t slept in . . . well, with the time difference, Nigel supposed that he technically hadn’t slept since the day before yesterday. He felt a little bit like he was dreaming.
The block was quiet now. In the early morning, it usually was. Clean and tree-lined with no pedestrians.
There was a black limousine parked at the curb. He supposed that would be their transportation to the funeral. Behind that was parked an unassuming brown van, which, at that very moment, rolled down its window so the driver could call to Nigel.
“Everything okay?”
The driver’s name was Ken Colton, an American, a UN Peacekeeper. He was in charge of the four-man detail assigned to accompany Nigel on his visit home. He had square features, salt-and-pepper hair, and reminded Nigel of a TV dad from some sitcom. Or maybe Nigel was just feeling sentimental. Nigel’s hesitation to go inside had raised an alarm with the Peacekeepers, but Nigel waved them off.
“It’s fine . . . ,” he said. “Just bracing myself, y’know?”
Colton nodded like he understood, gave Nigel that tight-lipped sympathetic smile that he’d been seeing a lot of lately, and rolled the window back up.
With a sigh, Nigel pushed open the creaky gate and trudged towards his home.
“I vowed never to go back there,” he had told Ran. “Those people are toxic. All of ’em. I’d like to forget they ever existed.”
“I know,” she replied softly.
“So you agree, then,” Nigel concluded. “I shouldn’t go. Tell Mum to piss off and be done with it, once and for all.”
“I didn’t say that.”
This was early morning on New Year’s Day. The two of them sat on a bench outside the student union, the campus quiet, everybody sleeping in or otherwise cozied up in the dorms. Nigel’s mouth still felt sticky and tasted bitter, even after he’d brushed his teeth three times. He had thrown up that morning. Nigel told himself it was from the drinking, but he hadn’t had that much. He tried to ignore the growing knot in his belly.
That old anxiety. Like he used to feel at his boarding school. Like he used to feel at home.
It hadn’t started right away. When Dr. Linda and Nine interrupted their beach party to break the news, Nigel had basically felt numb. The whole night seemed surreal, like it was happening to someone else. For months, Nigel had barely thought about his dad and he assumed the reverse was true as well. Hearing about his death was like learning that the dictator of some distant despotic nation had died—all Nigel could think was Oh, good.
The mounting sense of dread hadn’t really kicked in until Dr. Linda and
Nine ushered him to a private room where his mom waited on the phone. Nigel had never known Bea Barnaby to tolerate being placed on hold, so she truly must have wanted to talk to him.
The conversation seemed like part of a dream now. A hazy memory. Nigel could remember only snatches of what his mom said. Her voice sounded brittle on the phone, tinny and far away.
“You must come home, love,” she told him. “You absolutely must. I know it hasn’t seemed like it of late, but we are a family. We need each other more than you know.”
Nigel recounted those details to Ran later that morning. He was already packed. The Academy had lined up a helicopter to fly him off campus and then a private plane to whisk him off to London. They had a security detail arranged for him. Now that it was all sorted—now that he had time to think about it—Nigel didn’t want to go.
“She didn’t even sound sad on the phone, not really,” Nigel told Ran. “More like desperate. Like I was the last caterer available on short notice. The funeral is sure to be a scene, all their colleagues and business partners and quote-unquote friends. Wouldn’t look proper if I wasn’t there.”
Nigel paused. Ran waited, not pressing him.
“Dad actually told me once that they only had kids to keep up appearances,” Nigel continued eventually. “Like they needed ‘parenting’ for a cocktail party conversation topic. In their circles, leaders of industry and all that—he said it looked strange not to have a family. Wouldn’t want people thinking we’re queers, eh? He said that to me. I think I was twelve.”
Ran put her hand on Nigel’s forearm. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thing that eats me up the most is that he didn’t live long enough for me to tell him what a shit dad and a wanker he was,” Nigel replied. “Now I’m supposed to go over there and pretend he meant something to me.”
