Fugitive Six

  Einar sat down in a plush armchair and stretched out his legs. He smiled at the executive. “You aren’t the only one with a bodyguard. Shall we see how this plays out?”

  Duanphen snapped back to her feet, facing down the looming figure in the sweat suit. He was big, but she’d fought bigger. She triggered her Legacy. A field of electricity crackled across Duanphen’s body. One Taser-like blow from her packed enough voltage to put down an ox.

  She had longer reach than the brute in the sweat suit and threw a series of quick strikes at his face—a jab followed by a vicious swing of the briefcase. He bobbed backwards on his heels, keeping his distance as Duanphen’s lightning-charged punches crackled right in front of his nose. Duanphen was merely testing him though, gauging her range.

  “Ha!” She unleashed a vicious arcing roundhouse kick. The sweat suit barely managed to get his forearm raised in a haphazard block.

  Duanphen screamed and flopped to the ground, her shin bent at an impossible angle. She’d broken her leg on her attacker’s forearm. It was like hitting a brick wall.

  The pain caused her to lose control of her Legacy. The sweat suit was on her fast. He grabbed Duanphen around the neck and lifted her off the ground with ease, his fist cocked back.

  “Stop!” Einar yelled. “Don’t kill her! You weren’t even supposed to break her!”

  As ordered, the sweat suit dropped Duanphen. She writhed on the floor, whimpering, body curled around her broken leg.

  Einar looked at the executive. “Him, on the other hand . . .”

  Duanphen saw it happen. The executive managed, at last, to turn and run. But it was too late. Sweat suit grabbed him by the back of his neck, lifted him up and then—crack—down, slamming the executive spine-first over his knee like a dead branch.

  There was a moment that Duanphen knew from her many losing fights, that sensation right before a knockout, when all the pain was erased by welcoming blackness. The pain in her leg was shrieking and intense. Too much to bear. She let herself slip . . .

  And then she was being not so gently slapped awake. How long was she out? Seconds? Minutes? She was still in the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window somehow chilling her despite the humidity. With every slight shift of her body, new shards of pain broke free in her shattered leg. Duanphen wanted to retreat from the agony, but she sensed that if she passed out again she might never wake up.

  Einar crouched over her. He stopped slapping her once her eyes focused.

  “Hello again,” he said. He held up the executive’s tablet. “How do I access this?”

  Shakily, she pointed at the executive’s body. “Fingerprint.”

  Duanphen felt a sticky heat beneath her, warm and spreading. Was that . . . ?

  “Yes, I know fingerprint. We already took care of that.” Einar held up the executive’s severed hand.

  Duanphen gagged. She was lying in a puddle of blood swiftly spreading from the executive’s body. In a moment of panic, she checked her own wrists, was relieved to find them intact. They’d simply ripped open the briefcase with telekinesis.

  Behind Einar, the sweat suit wiped his gore-stained hands on a bedsheet. There was something wrong with his skin. Duanphen squinted, but Einar snapped his fingers in her face.

  “Do you know the code?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Only he did.”

  Einar frowned. “Well. Got a bit overzealous, didn’t we?” He stood up. “So here is the situation, Duanphen. Did I say that right?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “We’re like you. Garde. I’m sure you noticed how your coworkers suddenly started behaving strangely out in the hallway. That was me. I can control emotions.” Duanphen flinched as Einar reached out, but all he did was touch her gently on the nose. “But I’m not doing that to you, dear.”

  “Wh-why?”

  “My new policy is that I don’t use my Legacy against our own kind unless absolutely necessary. I don’t kill them either. Good news for you, yes? But you still have a choice to make. Option one: you deliver a message for me. Tell the Foundation I know who they are and that I’m coming for them. We leave you here, the guards will likely be back soon, they take you to a hospital, fix your leg, and then you find out what the Foundation does to assets who fail at their jobs.”

  Duanphen glanced at the executive’s mangled body. This failure was not something the Foundation would forgive. “Option two?”

  “Option two,” Einar continued, “is you come with me. Help me out with what I’m doing.”

  Duanphen already knew which option she would choose, but she still had to ask.

  “What . . . what are you doing?”

  “Simple. I’m remaking the world.”

  Chapter Two

  NIGEL BARNABY

  UNDERGROUND

  THE HUMAN GARDE ACADEMY—POINT REYES, CALIFORNIA

  “WHAT YOU WANT TO DO IS GET A PROPER SLOUCH on,” Nigel said, demonstrating as he scrunched down in his metal folding chair. “Like your balls are too big for your trousers.”

  Opposite him, Taylor Cook raised an eyebrow. “Not your most relatable advice, Nigel.”

  “Ah, don’t get all hung up on the equipment, love,” Nigel replied. “It’s more a state of mind.”

  Taylor tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear and then did her best to copy Nigel’s disaffected posture, one arm slung over the back of her chair, legs spread out obnoxiously.

  “Not bad,” Nigel said. He reached into his vest pocket and tossed Taylor a pack of sour-apple gum. “Now, chew a couple of pieces of that with your mouth open. Do it like you kinda hate the gum.”

  Taylor did as instructed, sneering at Nigel around a glob of neon green. He laughed.

  “Brilliant, that’s brilliant,” he said. “Looking at you, I’m not sure if I want to slap your face or be your best friend.”

  “Thanks?” Taylor replied, sitting up a little.

  “Back at my prep school, I had a prof who used to hate when I’d do the gum thing. Drove him up the wall. Called me insouciant.”

  Down the table from them, Isabela Silva looked up from her English flash cards. “Insouciant,” she repeated, enunciating. “What does that mean?”

  “It means ya don’t give a shit about nothing,” Nigel answered.

  Isabela studied Nigel for a moment, then yawned. “Yes. A good word for you. Especially in matters of clothes and hygiene.”

  Nigel smirked and flattened out some wrinkles in his moth-eaten Misfits shirt. Maybe he wasn’t the most polished guy at the Academy, but he didn’t think of himself as insouciant, not anymore. He cared.

  He cared about being Garde.

  Back during the Mogadorian invasion, Nigel had been the first human to answer the Loric’s call for help. After the war was won, Nigel had been one of the first students enrolled at the Academy. It hadn’t all been fun and games. There were boring classes to endure, exhausting training, a lot of sitting around. Oh, and also new friends slaughtered by evil aliens, religious zealots who wanted to burn them at the stake, and a psychotic fellow Garde who nearly caused Nigel to drown himself.

  He’d been through some crap, that was for sure. And he had the nightmares to prove it.

  But he wouldn’t trade it. Especially not now that he and his friends had their first real mission: secretly plotting the takedown of an über-rich cabal devoted to kidnapping and exploiting the talents of Human Garde. That was something he could get behind.

  Not to mention, as secret hideouts went, theirs was pretty badass.

  They were underneath the training center, down among the inner workings of the sadistic obstacle course Professor Nine had constructed. They accessed the place via a hatch hidden in the back of the rock wall. Above them, the ceiling was all a massive gear-work of shining titanium, the pulleys and belts and racks and pinions that drove the various death traps that waited on the floor above. There was an array of glowing control panels and fuse boxes, nests of wires and cords, and a few pur
ring engines.

  Also, Kopano’s legs. They were sticking right out of the ceiling. That gave Nigel a pause and he had to blink his eyes.

  Kopano was using his Legacy up there, distorting his physical mass or whatever. Nigel still couldn’t quite wrap his head around how it worked, even after watching the high-powered-microscope images that Malcolm Goode—their science teacher and adviser—had recorded. The footage showed how Kopano could separate his atomic particles to glide through solid matter or, alternatively, tense up those same particles so that his skin was basically impenetrable. Kopano had saved Nigel’s life with that power.

  He’d also entirely stopped using the door to their suite, instead opting to pass right through it.

  “You find it?” Professor Nine asked Kopano. He was on the ceiling too, using his antigravity Legacy to hang from there, holding on to Kopano by the ankle. That was something Nigel knew Kopano had been working on—keeping some of his body solid while the rest of him went intangible.

  A second later, Kopano popped his top half out of the machinery, breathing hard and sweating. He held up a twisted piece of metal—a broken gear.

  “Found the blockage,” he said, and let the scrap clatter to the floor below. “You got a replacement?”

  “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.”