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“Don’t you get the feeling that this Sydal guy thinks everything that came from the war—the tech, the blasters, the warships, even us with our Legacies—it’s all just toys for him to play with?”
Daniela shrugged. “What do you want from a nerd like that? He probably reverse engineered a Rubik’s Cube when he was a toddler. And I’m pretty sure Dr. Goode does the same stuff.”
“It’s different,” Caleb replied. “Malcolm is trying to help us.”
“I’m going to go take a nap,” Daniela said. She closed her book, stood up, and gathered her towel. “Try to chill out, okay, Caleb? No one here is out to get you.”
Caleb did not chill out.
A few minutes after Daniela left, Caleb stood up and headed back to the mansion. The gathering on the deck was now a full-fledged cocktail party, none of the guests eager to leave behind Sydal’s hospitality. No one paid Caleb any attention as he skirted around the side of the house and entered through a side door.
During the tour when they first got there, Wade had briefly taken his Garde guests by his workshop. It was on the first floor, right across the hall from the gym. Sydal had laughed sheepishly about his “geek sanctuary,” told Caleb and the others that they’d find his projects boring, and instead guided them into the fitness center where he had elliptical machines hooked up to VR.
Caleb had wanted to poke around the workshop ever since. What better time than now, when everyone else was distracted at the Shepard-1 reception?
Sydal didn’t even keep the room locked. The workshop got plenty of light from its floor-to-ceiling windows, a view of the beach visible beyond. The space was immaculately organized, tools and gears and circuit boards all in their proper places. A half dozen drones of various sizes sat dormant on a workbench. On a nearby easel were a stack of hand-drawn schematics.
Caleb put his hands on his hips. This wasn’t exactly an evil lair. It sort of reminded him of Dr. Goode’s laboratory, although way less chaotic. What had he really been expecting to find?
A familiar shape on the topmost schematic caught his eye. With a curious frown, Caleb approached the easel.
The technical sketch looked at first like a thumbtack combined with a microchip. Caleb recognized the device as the same one they pulled out of that girl Rabiya’s temple when they rescued her from the Harvesters. An Inhibitor. There were handwritten notes in the margins of the sketch, the tidy writing presumably Sydal’s. Easily removed; difficult to attach; painful.
Caleb flipped to the next page. A human skull was sketched there in perfect detail. One of the Inhibitor chips was drawn directly attached to the bone, its little prong penetrating 3.4 millimeters—the exact measurement was scribbled right there, along with a bunch of other calculations that Caleb couldn’t make sense of. There were more notes. Highest possible voltage? How much = too much? Prone to short-circuit.
Grimacing as he imagined having one of those things stuck directly into his head, Caleb went to the next sketch. This one wasn’t nearly as technical as the ones that preceded it. A freehand version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man was jotted on the paper in pencil, squiggles of blue highlighter running through the limbs, coalescing in the chest and head. Columns of impenetrable equations spread out from the figure, some of them running up against the edge of the paper.
Written across the page: Source of Loric energy? Can it be detected? Neutralized?
Caleb wished he had a cell phone or a camera. He wondered what Dr. Goode would make of these designs.
“What are you doing in here?”
Caleb jumped at the sound of a woman’s voice. It was Lucinda, one of the Sydal’s many college-aged interns. She was pretty, in her early twenties, with hair the color of nutmeg, a smattering of freckles, and sharp green eyes. She was dressed professionally, a neat skirt and a high-collared blouse. She had a stack of paperwork under her arm. Caleb swallowed.
“Uh . . . ,” he replied, not sure what to say. “I was just—”
“Those are all out of date,” Wade Sydal said airily, waving at the sketches as he entered the room behind Lucinda. He smiled at Caleb as he set down his tablet, the one that had been monitoring Sherpard-1. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I doodle. Please don’t judge my work based on those.”
“I wasn’t. I mean, I—” Caleb’s eyes cast about desperately, looking for an excuse for him to be in here. He settled on the bench full of robotics. “I was curious about the drones.”
“You’re a nervous guy, Caleb. I’ve noticed that about you,” Sydal said, coming over to stand before him. He jerked his thumb in Lucinda’s direction and lowered his voice. “All my assistants are trained to keep an eye out for intellectual piracy, but don’t let her intimidate you. I’m sure we’ve got nothing to fear from a member of Earth Garde. Right, Lucinda?”
“Right,” Lucinda replied, barely even looking at Caleb anymore. She was on her phone, answering emails.
“Piracy, uh, no, I was just, uh—” Caleb took a deep breath. Infiltration wasn’t really his strong suit, apparently. “I was just bored, I guess.”
“Hey, mi casa es su casa,” Sydal replied. His eyes lit up and he considered Caleb anew. “I’m a little busy right now with the whole groundbreaking spaceflight thing—”
“Oh, yeah, congratulations,” Caleb said hurriedly.
“Thanks,” Sydal replied. “But hey, next time you’re bored, I’d love to take a look at those Legacies of yours. Maybe run a few tests. See what we can figure out. Duplication pretty much defies all known physics, right? I live for that stuff.”
“Oh, um . . .”
Caleb let his gaze slide to Sydal’s sketches. The man seemed intent on figuring out how the Loric ticked and how to stop them. Should Caleb really submit to some kind of tests? He couldn’t think of a polite way to say no and, as the awkwardness between him and grinning Wade stretched on, he felt one of his duplicates nearly pop out from the anxiety. Caleb took a breath, steadied himself, and nodded in a way he hoped was casual.
“Yeah, sure,” Caleb said. “Cool.”
“Cool!” Sydal repeated, slapping Caleb on the shoulder. “Lucinda, get something with my young friend here on the calendar.” Just like that, Sydal was leaving the room again, returning to his cocktail party. He shouted over his shoulder. “The people in this house are going to change human existence! What a time to be alive!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
TAYLOR COOK
BAYAN-ÖLGII PROVINCE, MONGOLIA
“YOU KNOW, I WAS LED TO BELIEVE THAT LIFE with the Foundation didn’t suck,” Taylor said, trying and failing to keep her teeth from chattering. “There wasn’t anything in the brochures about freezing my ass off in Russia.”
“Mongolia,” the woman on the video chat corrected.
“Whatever,” Taylor replied. She burrowed deeper into her parka, clutching the tablet with numb fingers despite a pair of thick wool gloves. “It’s negative thirty degrees here.”
“I sincerely apologize for rushing you into your first assignment,” the woman said. She was the middle-aged lady with the chopped blond hair who Taylor had caught a brief glimpse of talking to Einar back in Iceland. Her name was Bea, allegedly. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but Taylor couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Seeing the cozy fire and steaming mug of tea at Bea’s location did little to improve Taylor’s mood. “Normally, we let our recruits enjoy the lifestyle the Foundation provides before asking them to fulfill a task, but you were needed urgently.”
“Needed,” Taylor repeated. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.”
“Healing. That’s all we’ll ever ask you to do, Taylor. Save lives, make them better.”
Always the same Foundation propaganda, Taylor thought. The lady was like a broken record.
“Would you mind taking me through the events that led you to leave the Academy?” Bea asked. “In your own words.”
Taylor raised an eyebrow. “I already told your people everything.”
&
nbsp; “Indulge me.”
So Taylor went through it all again. It helped that she didn’t have to lie. She told Bea how Earth Garde had taken Ran and Kopano, arrested them without charges for crimes that were actually self-defense. She talked about how Nigel had disappeared in London and how Earth Garde was keeping that information from them. She said she didn’t trust the administration to keep her safe or look out for her best interests.
“Thank you, Taylor. Very enlightening,” Bea said when Taylor was finished. She glanced over her shoulder—someone else was in the room with her, listening in—and flashed a self-satisfied smile in their direction. “We’ll be in touch soon.”
The connection went dead. Immediately, the soldier standing watch over Taylor reached out and took the tablet away from her. They were even more strict here than at the Academy about communication with the outside world. That shouldn’t have surprised her—she was part of an international conspiracy now.
