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Attached to the record player was a short note in his mom’s elegant cursive. The walls are soundproof. No need to be considerate.
So after yesterday’s demonstration of dominance, this was the soft touch. Butter him up. Show him that life with the Foundation wasn’t so bad. They had tried the same thing with Taylor.
Also on the nightstand was a copy of the Guardian. The paper was folded to one of the interior sections, where Nigel immediately recognized a black-and-white photograph of the charred remnants of his family’s London home. Nigel skimmed the article—grieving family, wealthy philanthropists, accidental blaze, surviving daughter unavailable for comment—no mention of their names, Earth Garde, or any details that seemed indicative of foul play. It was as if his mother had written the article herself. He tossed the newspaper aside.
Across the room, a desk had been added and, on top of that, a tray of breakfast food. Pancakes and sausage, fruit, doughnuts, a carafe of juice and a kettle of tea. Nigel’s stomach growled. When was the last time he’d eaten? He had to remind himself that his mother was surely watching or else he would’ve lunged right for the food. He casually poured himself some tea and sipped.
On the table, there was a remote control for the TV. He turned it on, half expecting Bea’s face to pop up. Instead, the screen filled with icons—pretty much every streaming video service one could ask for.
Nigel looked up at the camera watching over him. “All the comforts don’t mean this isn’t a prison,” he said.
There was no response.
At first he thought he might resist and be Gandhi-like in his abstention, but Nigel was too hungry and too bored. He spent the day stuffing his face and listening to music.
He let himself smile and look content.
He knew his mother was watching. Let her go ahead and think it was this easy to break him down.
They’d wanted to get someone inside the Foundation. Here was their opportunity.
On the third day of his captivity, a strange glow woke Nigel in the middle of the night. He rolled over in bed and found his TV on. Bea was on-screen, a half-empty wineglass clutched in one hand, a nearly empty bottle visible in the foreground.
“Ah,” she said. “You’re awake.”
“I am now,” Nigel grunted. He worked himself up onto his elbows. “Were you watching me sleep?”
“Used to do that when you were a little boy,” Bea responded.
Was she drunk? Was this part of her manipulation? Nigel didn’t know what to think. He stayed quiet, waiting for her to speak.
“Your father’s greatest love was money,” his mom said wistfully. “Money or Asian call girls. One of the two.”
Nigel raised an eyebrow. “Okay.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I liked the money, too,” Bea continued. “But I also wanted to make the world a better place. I truly believed in what he told us.”
“What who told you?”
“Setrákus Ra.”
Nigel sat up straighter, eyes wide. His mom had just casually mentioned the leader of the Mogadorians, the tyrant who had driven the Loric to extinction and then, when that wasn’t good enough, invaded the Earth.
“You picked a real wanker for a role model, Mum.”
“He promised us a world without sickness or hunger,” she continued like she didn’t hear him. “All we had to do was make ready for his arrival.”
“You were MogPro,” Nigel said quietly. “You were bloody MogPro.”
“Many of us in the Foundation were.” She sipped her wine. “We learned the error of our ways, believe me. No one wanted to follow Setrákus Ra once we learned what he really was. The US did a thorough job of exterminating our American counterparts, but once the invasion was over, we here in Europe slipped through the cracks. Some of us formed the Foundation as a way to deal with our changing world.”
“Out with one evil organization, in with another,” Nigel replied.
“We’ve since expanded, blossoming into a better network than MogPro ever was. With Setrákus Ra, it was all lofty promises to pave the way for tyranny. Not with us. Thanks to our carefully cultivated relationships with your kind, we can actually deliver results. Miracles, even. We’re in more countries than Earth Garde now. We turn a profit.”
“Carefully cultivated relationships,” Nigel repeated with a snort. “Why are you telling me all this?”
She raised her glass to him. “I don’t know, darling. I suppose it’s like you said. The family business.”
It would be too easy if Nigel just said, “Sure, great, I’m in,” and tried to join up with the Foundation. His mom would see through that. No, if she was going to believe he’d been won over, he needed to live up to his stubborn reputation.
So, Nigel made a wanking motion. “You really think I’m going to buy into this? A little drunken chat, some mild imprisonment, and we’re on the same team? Piss off.”
“Setrákus Ra told us the history of the Loric and why he overthrew them,” Bea continued. “How those with Legacies reigned over those without, a council of elders composed of the planet’s nine most powerful Garde. Did you know that’s how their society worked? Like something out of Nietzsche.”
Nigel could guess what the Mogadorian tyrant probably told his mother. The old bastard wrote an entire book of propaganda. But, on the day he first got his Legacies, Nigel had been sucked into a vision of Lorien’s past, just like all the first generation of Human Garde. He’d seen firsthand the truth of Setrákus Ra’s motivations. He wasn’t a liberator; he was petty and power-hungry.
“Setrákus Ra was a liar,” Nigel said simply.
“Perhaps. But then, history is written by the winners,” Bea countered. “True or not, there are lessons to be learned from what happened on Lorien.”
“Like?”
“Like how your Academy is destined to fall apart. It was formed during a time of unprecedented goodwill, the world’s nations bound together after confronting a common enemy.” She drained the last of her wine and poured herself another. “That goodwill’s all dried up now. Training teenagers to serve some nebulous global entity? Please. Countries will abandon Earth Garde—it’s already happening—and hoard their Garde like nuclear weapons.”
Nigel grimaced. What his mother said appealed to his cynical side, the anarchist side, the part of him that had lived through Pepperpont and that assumed all people were basically shit. But then he thought of Kopano and Ran, the heroic ones, how hard they tried to do good in the world. He thought about how he himself had run away from a bad situation—one caused by his parents, as it happened—to go fight an alien invasion.
“You’re wrong,” he replied, wishing he sounded more certain. “People are better than you give them credit for.”
She smiled, almost like she was proud that her offspring was capable of such optimistic thought. Her teeth were stained with wine.
“And then what will happen,” Bea continued, “is war. A war between those with powers and those without. The end result being either the extinction of Legacies—a great loss to humanity—or the subjugation of the nonpowered, which, well . . . not so rosy either way, is it? We in the Foundation believe we can head off these eventualities but, unfortunately, the first battles are already being fought and soon it will be too late to reverse course.”
Nigel squinted at the screen. “What first battles? What are you on about?”
“One of yours has already broken the Garde Declaration. He’s killed humans in cold blood. Colleagues of mine in the Foundation, their security, anyone who gets in his way.”
A cold feeling took hold of Nigel. He sensed where this conversation was going.
“He killed your father,” Bea continued. “He almost killed you.”
Nigel gritted his teeth. “Einar.”
A shadow crossed Bea’s face, as if the boy’s very name frightened her. She nodded once.
“He’ll come for me, eventually,” she said simply. “The security I have here won’t be enough to st
op him.”
Nigel looked away. He said nothing.
“Will you let me die, Nigel? Your own mother?”
Nigel didn’t sleep that night. Bea’s words rattled around in his brain.
His parents were bad people. MogPro rejects, bloodthirsty capitalists, murderers. When Nigel was a boy, his father had sent him away as soon as his presence had become inconvenient. After Nigel fled Pepperpont, the old man had never even tried seeking him out. Too busy with the Foundation, probably. He didn’t love the bastard.
So why did he feel the cold yearning for revenge?
Well, he told himself, Einar did try to drown me. He owed him for that.
Now, his mother only wanted him around to save herself. Or did she still have some repressed maternal affection? She’d been happy to have him saved in Iceland. She’d been watching him sleep . . .
