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“Nine’s not totally neutered yet,” Taylor replied. She held up an access card with the faculty emblem on it, the kind that would unlock any door in the Academy. “He slipped me this.”
“Aha. Good boy.”
“Way I see it, we’ve only got one lead to the Foundation. I know we’ve spent the last couple of months trying to set her up, to get her to recruit me, but . . . the situation has changed.”
“Dr. Linda,” Isabela said quietly, a predatory smile spreading across her face. “You want to confront her.”
“I’m going to wake her up and get answers out of her,” Taylor answered darkly. “One way or another.”
The two of them slipped between cabins, the windows all dark, everyone asleep. They closed in on the one where Dr. Linda lived. She had a few flowerpots on her doorstep and a peace sign pinwheel that turned lazily in the night air. Not exactly the lair of a blackhearted spy. That’s what makes her so dangerous, Taylor reminded herself.
“You are thinking of beating answers out of her, yes?” Isabela whispered, reading her mind. “Torture, maybe?”
Taylor frowned. “If that’s what I have to do . . .”
“I think . . . ,” Isabela replied, smirking now. “I think I know a better way.”
Chapter Seventeen
CALEB CRANE
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD, A TEAM OF Calebs hefted a steel beam onto their shoulders and marched forward. The duplicates were sweating, their light blue Earth Garde T-shirts stuck to their backs. Caleb wiped his face, sweating too—he wasn’t sure if the clones were perspiring because he was, or because they actually had sweat glands of their own. He tried not to ponder weird questions like that anymore. He cringed as the thought called to mind that time in class when he suggested harvesting organs from his duplicates.
Still couldn’t believe he said that one out loud.
The clones were a silent centipede, carrying the girder down the rocky slope of the construction site and stacking it with the others. Caleb was in control. There were no stragglers mouthing off, voicing Caleb’s private thoughts. They all moved as one.
Ever since the trip home for Christmas, Caleb had felt more relaxed, more centered. Nigel would have been proud of him, Caleb thought. Bloody zen-like, Caleb could imagine him saying. He hoped his friend was all right.
He also hoped that feeling would last.
Caleb stood on the edge of the pit, supervising his duplicates from there. His muscles ached, but not from lifting anything. It was the dull throb that happened whenever he had a lot of duplicates active for a protracted period of time. They’d been out here all afternoon, Caleb and the others doing the work of a whole construction crew all on their own.
He stood on the edge of what used to be the Sydney Opera House. Caleb had seen pictures of the place, the overlapping concrete shells that looked like shark mouths popping out of the ocean. It had been a cool place, at least until a Mogadorian warship turned it into a crater.
And now they were here to rebuild. That was Caleb’s first assignment as a member of Earth Garde—to travel the world and help areas still recovering from the Mog invasion.
Caleb turned to look out over the water, smiling as a cool breeze prickled his skin with mist. Uncle Clarence had warned him to keep an eye out for anything suspicious while on assignment, but there wasn’t any of that here.
They were doing good work. Helping actual people.
“Uh, excuse me,” piped up a voice at Caleb’s elbow. “Are you . . . the one in control?”
Caleb turned to find a short, middle-aged man at his side, a laminate badge around his neck identifying him as press. Five vans full of them had shown up an hour ago, there for a preplanned photo op and to write some positive coverage about Earth Garde’s humanitarian efforts. None of them had paid much attention to Caleb until now.
“In control of . . . ?” Caleb asked.
“Them,” the reporter said, motioning at the mass of clones currently carrying another steel beam into the pit.
“Yeah,” Caleb said. He smiled and extended a hand. “I’m Caleb Crane, sir. Duplicator. What can I do for you?”
“Yeah, uh, nice to meet you.” The reporter quickly shook his hand. “Would you mind getting your duplicates out of the way for a bit? They’re visually confusing and a little, um, creepy.”
“Oh,” Caleb replied. “Yeah. Sorry.”
Caleb tried not to take the request personally. He already knew that he wasn’t the main attraction here. That honor belonged to Melanie Jackson, the blond-haired and blue-eyed daughter of President Jackson who had shepherded the United States through the Mogadorian invasion. Through the eyes of his duplicates, Caleb saw her in the center of the construction site, flowing hair pulled back by a bandanna, wearing a cutoff T-shirt that showed off her tan arms. She carried a broken chunk of pipe on her shoulder—part of the works they were clearing out—the five-hundred-pound burden held with an impossible ease as she casually chatted with reporters.
To Caleb, Melanie seemed nearly as alien as the Mogadorians. She was a celebrity. The face of Earth Garde. Always so cool and self-possessed. She even sweated in the perfect amount. With the press around, she was smiling and gregarious, but at the hotel they were staying in, she mostly kept to herself. Caleb was pretty sure she had already forgotten his name.
Caleb sent a mental instruction to his duplicates to set down the steel beam they were lugging around and clear out of Melanie’s background. Maybe he was distracted or maybe the reporter’s request annoyed him more than he realized. Either way, instead of gently laying down the beam, his clones simply dropped it on the stack.
The resulting noise was sharp and loud, like a massive hammer being struck. Pretty much everyone around the construction site flinched.
Melanie did more than that. She flung the section of pipe off her shoulder and lunged for cover behind a pile of debris. It was as if she’d come under attack.
Everything suddenly felt slow motion to Caleb. The section of pipe fell towards a pair of slow-moving reporters, big enough to crush them. They shielded their faces and shouted.
The pipe stopped. Suspended in midair. Telekinesis, but not Caleb’s. And definitely not Melanie’s.
“Got it!” Daniela Morales cried with a daring smile. “Just a little teamwork demonstration for you guys.”
Daniela. Caleb had been relieved to see her on his first day, even if the last time they ran into each other she’d been turning his feet to stone. He was even more relieved to see her now. She’d been down in the pit using her stone-vision to shore up a salvageable section of foundation, another background sidekick for Melanie. But, a more useful one than Caleb. With her telekinesis, she set the pipe down in a nearby scrap heap. Danger averted, Daniela was quick to take a flamboyant bow for the camera, eliciting relieved laughter from the reporters and a smattering of applause. She made it look like the entire incident was intentional.
Caleb blew out a relieved sigh.
A Peacekeeper-assigned press secretary was soon on the scene, telling the reporters that Melanie and the other Garde were tired and that it was time to call it a day. Melanie, no longer hiding behind the rubble, waved shakily to her audience as she was escorted away by a half dozen armed Peacekeepers. Daniela dusted off her hands and climbed up the rocky slope to where Caleb awkwardly stood
around. None of the lingering reporters paid them any attention.
Even though she was the same age as Caleb, he felt like she was older—Daniela acted like she’d seen it all. Well, she once battled a fifty-foot-tall Mogadorian monster specifically engineered to kill Garde so, Caleb supposed, in a way she had. Daniela was one of the first Human Garde to make contact with the Loric. She had fought alongside John Smith in the battle of New York City. There were stories that she’d even saved his life. Because of her friendship with John and experience in the field—even if that experience was really only a couple of crazy days—Daniela had been allowed to skip the Academy and go directly to Earth Garde.
As she approached, Daniela worked a finger in and out of her ear and smiled playfully at Caleb.
“Busted my eardrum with that shit, man,” she complained. “Your clones got butterfingers.”
“Sorry,” Caleb replied, rubbing the back of his neck. “I got distracted.”
“I’m messing with you. Relax.”
They stood next to each other on the edge of the site. On the other side of the pit, Melanie and her entourage had already made it to where the armored cars were parked. They drove away, leaving a handful of Peacekeepers and a couple of cars behind for Caleb and Daniela.
“I didn’t mean to scare her,” Caleb said quietly.
Daniela snorted. “Not your fault. Girl is jumpy as hell. Last week she about punched a hole through some poor guy’s chest because he happened to be standing close by when a car backfired.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. They won’t be putting that shit in any of the press releases, though.”
The two of them started around the edge of construction site, taking their time.
“Why is she like that?” Caleb asked, looking around. “I know I’ve only been here a couple of days, but this doesn’t seem like a very stressful job.”
Daniela tucked a stray braid behind her ear, her face turning somber. “They didn’t tell you what happened last year?”
Caleb shook his head.
“She was doing relief work in the Philippines. Some crazies attacked her. Kidnapped the kid she was working with, even. Some Italian. A healer.”
