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“Down there,” Nine said, pointing to a toolbox on the floor below them.
Kopano sighed and levitated the gear up to them. Professor Nine never missed an opportunity to train them.
No one outside their group knew this place existed. Ever since their run-in with the Foundation, they’d been sneaking down here at least once a week, always when the rest of the campus was asleep. Which didn’t mean that Professor Nine went easy on them. Even after secret meetings, he still woke them up at five a.m. for their training sessions, part of their punishment for sneaking away from the Academy in the first place.
The hatch in the ceiling opened and Ran Takeda climbed down. She’d saved Nigel’s life just as much as Kopano had. At night, often after one of his bad dreams, Nigel found himself rubbing his breastbone, where he could still feel a phantom ache whenever he imagined Ran exploding his heart back to life. He wanted to hug her pretty much every time he saw her.
Ran nodded at Nigel and took the seat beside him. “Did I miss anything?”
“Haven’t started yet,” Nigel said. He waved a hand at slouching Taylor. “Just giving Taylor here lessons on how to be a proper delinquent.”
Taylor snapped her gum in response.
It was all part of their plan.
“I see,” Ran said. She looked down the table. “I think one of the guards on patrol might have spotted me coming in.”
“He didn’t,” a woman’s voice answered from behind an array of laptops. “I saw him, too. Monitored his radio. He didn’t call in.”
That was Lexa.
Nigel had seen the woman around campus a few times before the trouble with the Foundation started. Of course he recognized her. She had been piloting the Loric spacecraft that rescued him and the other Human Garde from Niagara Falls during the invasion of the Mogadorians. He knew she was from Lorien but didn’t have Legacies like the Garde—she was just one of those average extraterrestrials. However, the rest of the students and faculty weren’t aware of Lexa’s origins, and after a brief conversation with Professor Nine, Nigel had no problem keeping that bit of info to himself. To the rest of the Academy, Lexa was simply the school’s cybersecurity expert and one-woman IT department.
Whenever their group called a meeting, Lexa made sure their sneaking around campus wasn’t recorded on any of the cameras mounted around the Academy. She put the security feeds on loop, the process seamless and impossible to detect.
Dr. Malcolm Goode and Caleb Crane were the last two to descend via the ladder. Seeing them enter, Professor Nine and Kopano broke off from their repair work and joined the others around the table.
“Anyone for tea?” Malcolm asked as he ambled over to the small stove and microwave they’d installed down there. Ran raised her hand. Nigel snorted and rolled his eyes. Tea. Such a fussy British thing.
Taylor snorted and rolled her eyes, copying Nigel.
Caleb sat down next to Taylor. Nigel’s duplicator roommate looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes.
“You look straight knackered, mate,” Nigel said.
“Our eyes feel like they’re going to fall out of our heads,” Caleb replied. “I mean—”
“Got it,” Nigel said. “Plural pronoun not intended. So did you find anything?”
Under the guise of an independent study course, Caleb and Dr. Goode had been spending a lot of time going through the online archives of every major news source, dark-web message boards and even conspiracy theory blogs searching for any mention of the Foundation or its mega-dorky full name—the Foundation for a Better World. Caleb was uniquely suited to the task; his team of clones could skim through six times the material in the same amount of time as anyone else.
“We were focused on the Blackstone mercenaries tonight,” Caleb said. “Put a timeline together of their last few years of operations.”
“And?”
“I grew up around the military, but that stuff?” Caleb shuddered. “They’ve basically been one step ahead of international-war-crimes charges for years.”
“They seemed like such nice guys when they were trying to shoot us,” Taylor said.
Caleb smiled in her direction and started to say something else, but then Kopano flopped down in the seat next to Taylor. “I may be a mechanical genius,” he declared, cleaning his hands off on a rag.
Taylor turned in Kopano’s direction and wiped a smudge of grease off his cheek. “Aren’t you the same guy who needed my help printing his literature essay earlier?”
“They never covered paper jams in our training,” Kopano said.
Nigel couldn’t help but notice the way Kopano looked at Taylor. It was the same way Caleb looked at Taylor. Both of them staring at her with those smitten googly eyes. Straight guys. So obvious.
“All right,” Professor Nine said. He clapped his hands, which sounded vaguely cymbal-like on account of his metallic arm. “We all here? Let’s get started.”
Dr. Goode returned with his tea, pushing over the whiteboard with his free hand. All the information they’d managed to gather about the Foundation was taped up there. Nigel had seen it all before—had practically memorized it—and still his eyes devoured the mystery, seeking something he might have missed.
There was a grainy picture of Einar—the mind-controlling Garde who nearly murdered Nigel—taken by a red-light camera in Los Angeles just days before he orchestrated an attack by the Harvesters to kidnap Taylor. Written on a Post-it note next to Einar’s head: Emotional manipulation. Gone rogue? Douchebag.
Einar wasn’t alone in the photo. Next to him in the car was Rabiya. She’d been ditched by Einar, abducted and beaten by those Harvester loons and then taken by Einar again. Written next to her: Teleporter. Location unknown. Brother = Prince?
Attached to that last note was a picture of a handsome young Arab prince and a news story about his miraculous recovery from leukemia. Taylor was pretty sure that was the guy she’d helped heal in Abu Dhabi.
There was a photo of Vincent Iabruzzi, the healer who the Foundation had kidnapped while he was on a mission with Earth Garde in the Philippines.
Some players they didn’t have images of, so those names went on the board as index cards. Taylor had identified two other healers working for the Foundation—Jiao, a Chinese girl who seemed to be a willing asset, and a nameless disabled boy who the Foundation appeared to have tortured into compliance. And then there was the mysterious “B” who had reprimanded Einar via video chat and, in all probability, sent Taylor the thank-you note she received after she escaped from Iceland. The note was pinned to the board, too. According to Taylor, who had heard her voice, she sounded British.
Figured. Most of the Brits Nigel knew were total wankers.
“We’ve actually got go
od news for once,” Professor Nine said. “Well, if you consider us having a Foundation rat living close by good news. Lexa? You want to tell them?”
Lexa looked up from her laptops. “At the most recent meeting of the Academy administrators, I mentioned how because of a recent hack attempt we were relocating all of our student data to a new secure server.”
“Thrilling,” Isabela said, shuffling her flash cards.
“This hack—did they get anything?” Kopano asked.
“There wasn’t actually a hack,” Lexa said. “Not a new one, anyway. I only gave the info about the new server out to the other administrators.”
Nigel could see where this was going. He grinned. “Bloody cookie jar. Tell me that worked.”
Lexa winked at him. “Oh, it worked.”
Malcolm set down his tea and began to tape a new set of pictures to the board.
“Sorry,” Caleb said, raising his hand. “I’m lost.”
“It was a test,” Lexa said. “A trap. We wanted to see if someone would try to hack this new server—which didn’t contain any actual info. They didn’t even wait twenty-four hours.”
“The mole is an administrator,” Ran said.
Taylor looked at Nine. “I thought you said this was good news? You think it’s good that the Foundation corrupted someone so high up at the Academy?”
Nine shrugged. “It’s good that now we can bust their dumb ass.”
Malcolm had finished taping four images to the board. All mug shot–style photos from Academy staff IDs.
DR. SUSAN CHEN. DEAN OF ACADEMICS.
COLONEL RAY ARCHIBALD. HEAD OF SECURITY.
DR. LINDA MATHESON. HEAD OF HEALTH AND WELL-BEING.
GREGER KARLSSON. EARTH GARDE LIAISON.
“One of those people,” Lexa said, “is working for the Foundation.”
“We just need to find out which one,” Nine said. He glanced at Taylor. “And then we spring our trap.”
Nigel rubbed his hands together. “Hell yes,” he said. “Let’s go hunting.”
