IN A DISTANT GALAXY, THE PEACEFUL PLANET LORIEN WAS DECIMATED BY THE BRUTAL MOGADORIANS.
The last survivors of Lorien—the Garde—were sent to Earth as children. Scattered across the continents, they developed their Legacies and readied themselves to defend their adopted home world.
The Garde thwarted the Mogadorian invasion of Earth.
In the process, the Garde changed the very nature of Earth. Legacies, the extraordinary powers from the planet Lorien, began to manifest in human beings.
These new Legacies frighten some humans, while others look for ways to manipulate the new Garde to their benefit.
And while the Legacies are meant to protect Earth, not every Garde will use their powers for good.
I AM PITTACUS LORE.
RECORDER OF THE FATES, CHRONICLER OF THE LEGACIES.
I TELL THE TALES OF THOSE WHO WOULD SHAPE WORLDS.
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 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 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.