Ran gazed out at the waves, thinking.
“I did not think I would survive the invasion,” she said at last. “All I wanted to do was fight. There was no point to talking, to making friends.” She paused. “After we came here, I kept it up so that General Lawson and those watching over us would speak freely around me. Our situation is a strange one, as you said. We need to know who we can trust, nakama.”
The four of them spent weeks on that island in a weird limbo while the rest of the world shakily recovered from the invasion.
Then, finally, they watched from the beach as a squadron of black helicopters arrived at the base. The choppers carried military personnel and posh people in suits and bookish-looking types with crates of high-tech equipment.
“The unholy triumvirate,” Nigel observed. “Soldiers, senators and scientists.”
“Something’s going to happen today,” Caleb said.
“No shit,” replied Daniela.
General Lawson spent his entire day in meetings with these new arrivals. The Garde twiddled their thumbs until almost sunset, when Lawson finally called them into one of the base’s dull conference rooms. Arranged on the table were a bunch of glossy brochures, all of them depicting a beautiful blond teenager in the process of lifting a chunk of brick wall over her head, freeing a family that had been trapped underneath. The caption read: OUR PLANET—OUR PROTECTORS—EARTH GARDE.
“A delegation from the United Nations arrived today,” General Lawson began without fanfare. “A decision has been made regarding—”
“Hold up,” Daniela interrupted, tapping one of the brochures. “Why does this bougie girl look so familiar?”
“That’s Melanie Jackson,” Caleb answered.
Daniela stared at him blankly.
“The first daughter? You know, of our president?”
“Oh yeah,” Daniela said. “She’s strong, huh?”
Nigel squinted at his copy of the Earth Garde pamphlet. “Lotta makeup for a spontaneous act of heroism.”
General Lawson pinched the bridge of his nose and pressed on. “Ms. Jackson is the first enrollee in the Earth Garde program, a UN-administered initiative to train and deploy you LANEs—excuse me, you Human Garde.”
LANE was a term first coined by the US military, possibly by Lawson himself. Depending on who one asked, it meant either Legacy-Augmented Native Earthling or Legacy-Afflicted Native Earthling.
Daniela smirked. “That what they’re calling us now? Human Garde?”
Lawson sighed. “It’s simple and less . . . offensive than LANE, apparently. There are PR gurus involved. Not my area of expertise.”
“Oi,” Nigel broke in. “Did you say deploy? As in, like, stormtroopers?”
Lawson began again. His patience for being interrupted had grown exponentially since he started working with Garde. “Participating countries, which include England and Japan—” He looked in Ran’s direction. “Ah, damn. Forgot to get the interpreter in here for this.”
“Not necessary,” Ran said. “Please. Continue.”
Everyone stared at her except for Nigel, who belted out a laugh. General Lawson puffed out his cheeks and shook his head, taking Ran’s revelation in stride.
“As I was saying, the Earth Garde program has been agreed upon by most UN member nations. All Human Garde from participating nations will be required to register with Earth Garde and undergo training and observation at the Human Garde Academy, which is currently under construction in California.” Lawson slid packets across the table, filled with forms and dense contracts. “The legal details are in here. If you want, we can have your parents flown in before you sign anything.”
“Bollocks to that,” Nigel said with a snort, thumbing through the pages.
Caleb exchanged a look with his uncle, then shook his head. “That’s okay.”
Ran and Daniela said nothing, both their families unaccounted for since the invasion.
“Once you’ve undergone training at the Academy and proven you won’t be a danger to society, you’ll be deployed to an Earth Garde unit. Not as stormtroopers,” Lawson said, with a glance in Nigel’s direction. “No one faces a combat situation until they’re at least eighteen years old and hopefully by then the remaining Mogadorians are routed and the world’s a goddamn utopia.” The old military man smirked. “As outlined, your time with Earth Garde will be spent doing humanitarian work. Currently, Melanie Jackson is assisting with the cleanup efforts in New York. Daniela, I know you’re from there and you’ve already demonstrated excellent control of your powers. I’ve arranged for you to skip the Academy and go straight to Earth Garde. Help rebuild your city.”
Daniela’s eyes widened. Although she didn’t talk about it much, they all knew she was still holding out hope that her mom would be found somewhere in the rubble of Manhattan. The hospitals there were overwhelmed, many neighborhoods didn’t yet have power restored and survivors were still being found. It was possible.
She looked at the other three Garde. Back at Patience Creek, she had promised John Smith she would protect them. But the invasion was over. She’d kept her word. Nigel grinned at her, and Ran nodded once.
Daniela reached across the table for a pen. “Where do I sign?”
Nigel leaned back in his chair and studied Lawson. “Right, then. Who’s going to be in charge of this Academy thing? You?”
Lawson shook his head. “No. My job was the war, and the war is over. The UN has appointed someone better suited to training people of your unique abilities.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
The Americans lobbied hard to host the Academy. With everything the United States had done to coordinate the counterattack against the Mogadorian warships, none of the other world leaders were in a position to push back. The Academy would technically be on international soil, the entire thing UN-funded, with Peacekeepers handling the security.
Fifty miles north of San Francisco, the secluded Point Reyes was chosen as the location for the Academy, the people of California and the National Park Service generously gifting the land to the United Nations. With a promise to be as eco-friendly as possible, building began immediately on the coastal cliffs of the former nature preserve.
“Damn, dude. Place is going to be huge,” said the young man as he surveyed the construction, hundreds of workers already clearing earth and laying foundations, bulldozers and cranes rumbling across the landscape. “How many students we expecting?”
The older man standing next to him glanced up from his tablet. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Last count they’d registered more than one hundred Human Garde. Finding new ones every day.”
The young man whistled. His long black hair was tied back in a sloppy man-bun. It was windy here and he kept having to push rebellious strands of hair out of his eyes. He’d seen the blueprints and now, looking at the land, he tried to picture what the Academy would look like. Two dormitories each capable of housing five hundred students, a cul-de-sac of town houses erected for faculty housing, a school building equipped with state-of-the-art computers and laboratories, a recreation center, a training complex designed by the military, a sports fieldhouse, solar power and a tide-power generator. All that nestled between the fir trees of the valley and the rocky cliffs of Drake’s Bay. Not so unusual, a private school in the middle of nowhere, albeit this one would be surrounded by miles of electrified razor-wire fence, its perimeter patrolled by round-the-clock security.
“What are you thinking, Professor?” Dr. Malcolm Goode asked, emphasizing the title that his young friend had negotiated for, despite never actually finishing high school.
The young man rubbed the spot where his prosthetic arm joined his shoulder. The thing still itched him like crazy.
“It’s no penthouse,” Nine said. “But I guess it’ll do.”
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 that attached her 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 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 that 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 amid the icons. That represented the executive himself. Tha
t 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.”
The Legacy Chronicles_Up in Smoke Page 12
