“I obviously can’t make you join us,” John Smith said. “In a few minutes, you’ll wake up from this meeting back wherever you were before. Where it’s safe, hopefully. And maybe those of us who do fight, maybe the armies of the world, all of us . . . maybe that will be enough. Maybe we can fight off the Mogadorians and save Earth. But if we fail, even if you stay on the sidelines for this battle . . . they will come for you. So I’m asking you all, even though you don’t know me, even though we’ve royally shaken up your lives—stand with us. Help us save the world.”
Kopano cheered. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He was ready!
Suddenly, the evil Setrákus Ra was shouting threats, his black eyes scanning the room, his gaze boring into everyone. People started to disappear, blinking out of the dream. Kopano woke with a start, sweaty, his head aching.
Little Dubem was the only one still awake and he was staring at him. “Kopano,” Dubem whispered. “You were glowing!”
The next day, with his family once again gathered around the television, Kopano made his announcement.
“The Loric visited me in my sleep. John Smith himself asked me to come join them in the defense of Earth. They showed me a map of the world with the locations of stones that I may use to teleport to them. One of them is located at Zuma Rock. I must go there immediately to meet my destiny.”
Dubem nodded along solemnly while the rest of Kopano’s family stared at him. Then his father and uncle broke into laughter, soon joined by his brother Obi.
“Listen to this one!” his father shouted. “Meet his destiny! Shut up now, we can’t hear the news.”
“But I saw him,” Dubem said, his small voice shaky. “Kopano glowed!”
Their mother made the sign of the cross. “A devil has invaded our house.”
Udo regarded his son through eyes narrowed to slits. Kopano stood tall, chest puffed out, hoping to cut a striking figure.
“Okay, Mr. Superhero,” said Udo measuredly. “If you are an alien now, please show us your powers.”
Kopano took a deep breath. He looked down at his hands. He didn’t feel any different than he had yesterday, but that didn’t necessarily mean the great powers of the Loric weren’t lurking within him, right?
With a flourish worthy of a martial arts movie, Kopano thrust his hands towards his father. He hoped that his telekinesis would come rushing forth and knock his old man out of his chair. But while Udo flinched at the sudden move, nothing else happened.
Kopano’s uncle laughed again and slapped Udo on the back. “Your face! You looked like you might crap in your britches!”
Udo scowled, then snorted in Kopano’s direction. “You see? Noth—” His father’s face suddenly contorted in anguish. Udo clutched at his chest, feet kicking out in front of him in spasms. His eyes went wide in panic. “My insides!” he screamed. “My insides are boiling!”
Kopano’s mother screamed.
Kopano and his brothers all rushed to their father’s side. Their uncle took a frightened step back. Kopano grabbed his father’s arm.
“Father, I’m sorry! I don’t know what—”
His father slapped him on the side of the head and grinned. Just like that, he was miraculously recovered and already turning back to the television. A practical joke.
“You stupid boy, I’m fine. Or perhaps my alien powers are just greater than yours, hmm?” He waved Kopano away. “Go on. See to your mother. You scared her bad.”
Kopano slunk away. Had it really all been a dream? What would he have done with Legacies, anyway? A boy from Lagos rushing off to save the world? Even Nollywood didn’t make movies with premises so far-fetched.
Little Dubem clasped his hand.
“I believe you, Kopano,” his youngest brother whispered. “You will show them all.”
At least, for a few days after his embarrassing announcement, Kopano’s family was too glued to the news to mock him. But then the invasion ended, suddenly and brutally, with the nations of Earth coming together to simultaneously attack every Mogadorian warship. Meanwhile, the Garde, the ones who had invaded Kopano’s dreams and promised him bigger things than Lagos, went to the Mogadorians’ secret base in West Virginia and killed Setrákus Ra. Kopano imagined being there, fighting alongside the Garde, and melting Setrákus Ra with his fire-breath.
Fire-breath, Kopano had decided, would be his Legacy.
When the news broke that Earth was saved, they celebrated in the streets. His father hugged him close as they danced down the road, fireworks going off overhead. Kopano couldn’t remember the last time Udo had hugged him like that. Not since he was a boy.
But the next day, it started.
Alien son, go down to the market before school and pick up the items I am thinking about right now! Use your telepathy!
Alien son, did you finish your homework?
Alien son, use your telekinesis to get me a beer, eh?
Kopano grinned through it all, but inside he seethed. His unemployed father had nothing better to do than sit home all day and think up ways to humiliate him.
Worse still, his bigmouthed brother, Obi, had spread the word around school. Soon, Kopano’s classmates were teasing him, too. A stall in the marketplace had started selling rubber Mogadorian masks, hideous gray things with empty black eyes and tiny yellow teeth. A group of his older classmates chased Kopano through the halls wearing these masks and, when they caught him, they used rolls of duct tape to bind him to one of the football goals. They took turns kicking balls at him.
Until one day, when Kopano stopped a football in midair. When that happened, they all ran away screaming.
“Finally,” Kopano whispered to himself as he began wriggling free. “Finally.”
It had been three months since the invasion. Kopano, it turned out, was a late bloomer.
That evening, he strode into his family’s apartment to find his father napping on the couch. With his little brothers watching, Kopano used his telekinesis to levitate the couch high above the floor. Then he screamed, “Fire! Fire! Father, get up!”
His father sprung upright, swung his legs off the couch and fell five feet to the floor. As he groaned and picked himself up, staring aghast at the couch still floating above him, Obi and Dubem cackled with laughter. Kopano simply grinned at his father, squaring his shoulders in the same noble way he had on that humiliating morning months ago.
“You see, old man? What did I tell you?”
Udo stumbled over to his son, a smile slowly spreading on his face. He grabbed Kopano’s cheeks and pinched. “My beautiful alien son, you are the answer to all of our problems.”
Many months later, when Kopano finally made it to America, the psychologist Linda Matheson would ask him what life was like back in Lagos, before he came to the Human Garde Academy.
Kopano would think about his answer for a long moment before answering.
“Well,” he said, “I guess for a little while I was a criminal.”
EXCERPT FROM FUGITIVE SIX
ALREADY READ GENERATION ONE? HERE’S A SPECIAL LOOK AT FUGITIVE SIX, BOOK TWO
IN THE LORIEN LEGACIES REBORN SERIES!
CHAPTER ONE
DUANPHEN
BANGKOK, THAILAND
DUANPHEN WATCHED THE BEGGAR AS HE SCURRIED through traffic with his bucket and rag. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve, small, with a mop of greasy black hair. He picked his cars smartly—shiny ones with tinted windows and drunk passengers. He splashed dirty water on windshields and stretched across hoods to ineffectively clean up, mostly smearing around more grime. Drivers rolled down their windows to curse at him but usually relented, shoved a note into his hand to make him go away, and turned on their wipers.
It was after midnight and Royal City Avenue still pulsed with life. Motorcycles weaved through the traffic. Drunk clubbers stumbled into the street. Neon lights flashed in unison with their bars’ competing bass lines.
Duanphen rubbed the handcuff around her wrist, which attached he
r to the executive’s briefcase. The metal irritated her. Just like this place.
Three months since she was last here. She hadn’t missed it.
The beggar spotted Duanphen and her limo. Well, not her limo, precisely—it belonged to the executive; she was only watching over it. The black stretch was double-parked obnoxiously in front of a club where go-go dancers gyrated in the windows. The executive had been so excited when he saw the place that he was practically drooling; they just had to pull over. The rest of the executive’s security had gone in with him, but not Duanphen. She was too young.
“Sweet ride,” the beggar said in Thai as he stopped in front of her. He held out his rag threateningly. “Dirty, though. For a few bucks I’ll wash it for you.”
Duanphen regarded him coldly. “Go away.”
The kid stared up at her, as if trying to decide if he should press his luck. At seventeen, Duanphen wasn’t that much older than him, although her steely gaze made her seem it. She stood a shade over six feet tall, her long-limbed body like a switchblade. She kept her hair buzzed and wore no makeup except for some extra-dark eyeliner. Her petite nose was a crooked zigzag; it looked like it’d been erased and redrawn.
“I know you,” he said.
“No.”
“You’re a hooker,” he said with a laugh. “No! That’s not right. Where have I seen you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Duanphen said. “Get lost.”
The beggar hopped in the air as the realization hit him. “You’re a fighter!” he said, shaking his rag at her. “I know you! You’re the one who cheats. The one—”
As if by magic, the boy’s bucket tipped towards him and spilled water down the front of his pants. He gasped and shut up, staring at Duanphen.
Not magic. Telekinesis.
“If you do know me,” Duanphen said, “then you know what I will do when I run out of patience.”
The beggar looked at her wide-eyed, then took off into the crowd with a yelp. Duanphen pursed her lips. Calling her a cheater. What did that little idiot know about anything?
Duanphen had been doing Muay Thai fights since she was fourteen, a necessity to supplement the pittance she got working sixty hours a week at the garment factory, all to pay her rent at a roach-infested boardinghouse. Before her Legacies kicked in, Duanphen had lost more fights than she won, often getting her face smashed to a bloody pulp by girls twice her age.
Telekinesis, she discovered after the invasion, made the fights easier. An assisted leg-trip here. A deflected punch there. She went on a winning streak. She began to bet on herself. The competition got tougher, but her telekinesis got stronger, too.
It wasn’t until an opponent managed to get her in a choke hold and Duanphen’s electrified skin unexpectedly triggered that the fight promoters got wise. They called what she’d been doing “stealing” and gave her a choice: work off the debt or die. She considered fighting her way out, but they had a lot of guns, and blocking punches wasn’t the same as stopping bullets.
Word soon got out that the local mob had a Garde for hire. That was how the executive found her. He knew a lot of people. He was a talker. An excellent negotiator.
That’s what made him so valuable to the Foundation.
The Foundation paid off her debt and gave Duanphen a fresh start. They gave her more money than she could hope to earn in a thousand fights, plus clothes and a splashy apartment in Hong Kong. All she needed to do in exchange was watch over this smarmy executive and carry around his briefcase.
Not a bad deal at all, she’d thought. At least until she got to know the executive better. Men liked him, of course, because he was always making gross jokes and buying drinks. But, to Duanphen, he was a middle-aged creep, the kind of tourist she’d encountered a million times in Bangkok. He was always complaining about his cold wife and his kids who didn’t talk to him.
The executive sauntered out of the club surrounded by a phalanx of brutish bodyguards. He had a lot of security—more added in the last few weeks, for reasons no one explained to Duanphen. The muscle cleared a path on the sidewalk, shoving aside gaudily dressed revelers as they escorted the executive to his armored limo. People craned their necks to catch a glimpse of what kind of man commanded such an entourage. The executive didn’t look like much—a thatch of thinning blond hair, short, a potbelly, his designer suit wrinkled from the humidity, his salmon-colored shirt damp with sweat. Not famous, the onlookers probably thought, disappointed. Just some rich jerk. Bangkok was full of them.
Duanphen opened the car door for her rich jerk. He pinched her cheek affectionately and she died a little inside.
“Missed a banging good time, Dawn,” he said, his words slurred from too much champagne.
“Mm,” Duanphen offered noncommittally. She despised his butchered farang version of her name.
The executive interpreted Duanphen’s murmur as encouragement. “One of these days you’ll be old enough to make a proper piece of arm candy,” he told her.
Duanphen smiled mirthlessly and clenched her fist. She slid into the backseat beside the executive, one of the other bodyguards taking the wheel.
“Meant to ask you,” the executive said. “Happy to be back home?”
“No,” she replied. “I hate this place.”
“Really? I’ve always loved Bangkok.” He waved his hand airily out the window. “Although it’s more fun when you aren’t bloody surrounded.”
Duanphen knew the executive chafed at the extra security. His bodyguards weren’t just the average bruisers anyone could hire around Bangkok; they were highly trained mercenaries. The Blackstone Group detachment had been his wife’s idea—or, rather, his wife’s command. She was in the Foundation too and seemed to wield more power than her husband. That, at least, cheered Duanphen.
The rest of the executive’s security piled into two cars, one behind and one in front. The executive sighed as his ungainly security force began the journey through the crowded streets back to his hotel.
The executive checked his watch. “Ah, running a bit late.” He wiggled his fingers at Duanphen. “Let’s get to business, shall we?”
Ostensibly, the executive was in Bangkok to sign some paperwork on a hotel he’d invested in. But while that work had made the executive rich, it was no longer his true occupation.
Duanphen offered him the briefcase. The executive unlocked it with his thumbprint, then lifted out its contents—a sleek tablet computer. This, too, the executive unlocked with his fingerprint, followed by a nine-digit code that he kept hidden from Duanphen. The tablet connected to a secure server via satellite uplink. The executive settled back, waiting to connect.
“A good turnout,” the executive said approvingly. He liked showing off, so he didn’t mind if Duanphen peeked at the tablet.
There were twenty people waiting for the executive in the e-conference. They were represented by icons—an infinity symbol, a snarling fox, a silver-and-blue star that Duanphen thought was the logo for an American football team. The mundane avatars of the very rich people in the executive’s club.
A slithering blob of shadows appeared among the icons. That represented the executive himself. That was always how the auctioneer looked during one of these Foundation events.
“Good evening, all,” the executive said, after unmuting his side of the conference and activating his voice modulator. “On the block tonight, we have the services of Salma G., for the weekend of January third through the fifth.”
The executive called up Salma’s picture and sent it out to the bidders. The girl had wavy brown hair that was long and unruly, plus a thick unibrow that made her look like she was deep in thought. In the image, Salma wore a tangle of scarves that were nearly indistinguishable from her billowy dress, patterns upon patterns. She sat cross-legged, fingers pinched together like she was meditating, her eyes gazing into the middle distance.
He muted the conference so he could smirk at Duanphen. “Nice costume on her, eh? The lads in marketing thought it’
d be clever to give her a sort of gypsy fortune-teller vibe.”
“I see,” Duanphen replied.
“Don’t need any of that when you’re on the block, eh? Your face conveys exactly what you’re for.”
Duanphen touched her crooked nose but didn’t reply. The executive had already unmuted the video conference and was again speaking to his international audience.
“The following specs were included in your dossier, but I’ll summarize. Salma is sixteen years old. Moroccan. Speaks fluent Arabic, passable French and passable English. No health concerns. Buyer must provide a halal diet. Salma’s telekinetic control remains middling at best, so, if that’s what you’re interested in, we’ve got better assets available. Her real allure is her precognitive ability. She’s perfect for a visit to the track or the casino, although we don’t recommend attempting to use her Legacies to choose stocks or other long-term investments. Salma is geo-restricted; you’ve already been provided with lists of approved locations. Bidders are also reminded that you are purchasing only the use of Salma’s Legacies and that any behavior viewed by the Foundation as untoward or detrimental to the asset will result in swift expulsion from the organization.”
Duanphen knew that expulsion, in this case, meant death. It didn’t matter how wealthy and powerful the Foundation’s members were; if they broke the rules, they’d be punished.
“Righto.” The executive cleared his throat. “As there’s a great amount of interest in dear Salma, I believe we shall start the bidding at five million euros. Do I hear five million?”
Immediately, a handful of the icons logged out of the conference. The price was too high for some, but not all. The bidding went back and forth. Each time one of the icons pulsed, a little beep sounded and the bid increased by 250,000 euros.
Five minutes later, the auction was over. A weekend with Salma had gone for 10.6 million euros. The executive checked his account. The payment had already come through.
The Legacy Chronicles: Raising Monsters Page 12
