“Have you seen the size of those spaceships?” she asked, meeting Silas’s gaze. “What’re your hunting rifles going to do against that? Jesus, they’ve got guys who can fly.”
“The flying guy’s on our side,” Silas responded.
“Whatever,” Taylor said. “I’m sure he’s waiting for you to come save him, Silas.”
“Better than sitting around doing nothing, anyway,” he muttered.
“Running off to get killed, that’s what you’re doing,” Taylor said. “You’ll probably fall out of the back of that truck before you even hit the state line.”
Some of the other boys in the back of the truck snickered. Silas seethed and fell silent.
“Folks on the news say we ought to stay in our homes,” Brian stated coolly, sparing Taylor a glance over his shoulder. “Go home to your families for Pete’s sake. It’s a ten-hour drive to Chicago and who-knows-what. Safer to wait this out.”
“It’s the end of the world,” Dale countered, his meaty arm hanging out the window. “We at least gotta go down swinging. Figured it wouldn’t be neighborly if we didn’t stop by and ask you to join us.”
“Well,” Brian replied with a sigh, “you asked. I’m staying right here, with my daughter. If you fellas insist on rushing off to do something dangerous, hell, you’ll be in my prayers. I hope to see you again.”
“Good knowing you, Brian,” Dale said, throwing the truck into drive.
“I won’t be in to work tomorrow, Mr. Cook,” Silas yelled out as the truck started to pull away.
“Wouldn’t expect you to be, son,” Brian replied.
Taylor and her dad stood in silence, watching the truck careen up their dirt driveway and back the way it had come. When it was out of sight, their land was peaceful again. A butterfly floated by. The hogs squealed rambunctiously in the barn. To Taylor, it didn’t look like the planet was in jeopardy.
“You don’t think it’s really the end of the world, do you?” she asked her dad.
“Don’t know, sweetheart,” Brian said calmly. Nothing shook her father, not even these so-called Mogadorians. “You want some ice cream? Might as well eat it, just in case the power goes out.”
So, Taylor and her dad spent the invasion in front of their television, glued to news reports from the major cities. When the cable feeds occasionally cut out, they played tense games of Connect Four and Scrabble. Except for feeding the animals, they let their chores go and instead ate all the junk food in the house. Taylor tried to call and message some of her friends to see how they were doing, but the cellular networks were down. The farm started to feel like an island far removed from the battles taking place all over the world.
And then, just like that, it was over. The Mogadorian leader was killed, the warships went down and the Loric were hailed as heroes. The death toll was high, especially in the major cities, but those numbers seemed almost made-up to Taylor, like the entire invasion had taken place in a different universe. No one from Turner County died. When Silas slunk back to the farm a week after the invasion, she learned that he and the morons who took off to Chicago in their pickup truck had been turned back by the National Guard at a gas station on the Minnesota border. They spent the invasion getting drunk.
Within weeks, things were pretty much back to normal, at least in Taylor’s part of the world. She saw the stories about human teenagers getting Legacies, about Mogadorians waging guerrilla warfare in Russia, about new laws that would apply to how extraterrestrials like the Loric would have to behave on Earth. None of this changed her daily grind. A war with her alarm clock, a few quick chores, school, dinner, homework, repeat.
At school, they called an assembly—all 158 students at the high school packed into the gymnasium—to talk about Earth Garde. It was a law now that anyone who developed Legacies needed to report them to their local authorities. Taylor had read about the Academy they were constructing for Human Garde in California. She didn’t understand why the UN had to build that in America, or why the president and other politicians had pushed so hard to host. Anyone with Legacies was getting pulled out of their regular schools and sent there.
The guidance counselor asked if any of the students had experienced “visions” or “out-of-body experiences” because apparently those were things now. Taylor couldn’t believe that the teachers were talking about this stuff so casually, like they’d just been plucked out of a comic book.
In the hall after, some boys joked about their “night visions” and Taylor groaned and rolled her eyes, secretly feeling relief that everyone at her school was normal.
“We’re taking a road trip to Chicago this weekend to see the crashed warship,” Taylor’s friend Claire told her on the bus one day, a few months after the invasion.
“What?” Taylor replied. “Really?”
“I saw some girls on Insta, they got so close, that ugly-ass ship is like right behind them. So many likes,” Claire continued. “Maybe if I get close enough, I’ll score some Legacies.”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
“They’re alien powers! No one knows how it works!” Claire laughed and nudged Taylor’s ribs. “Come on. Like you don’t want telekinesis or whatever.”
“And get sent away to their weird alien Academy?” Taylor snorted. “No thanks.”
“You’d probably get to meet John Smith,” Claire replied. “He’s so hot.”
“Really? He always looks like he’s about to cry in all those pictures.”
“He’s soulful! You’re such a downer,” Claire said without any malice. “So, do you want to come with us this weekend or what?”
Taylor didn’t know how to explain to Claire that she liked their peaceful bubble of Turner County without sounding lame. So she lied about having too much work due and how her dad needed her help. She didn’t need an up-close-and-personal view of an alien warship. Too real.
“It’s like, everyone’s already treating what happened like it’s totally normal,” Taylor said to her dad over dinner that night.
Her dad shrugged. “That’s just people, hon. Given enough time, they can adjust to damn near anything. A few hundred years ago, if you’d shown folks an airplane or a cell phone, their heads would’ve exploded. I thought getting wireless internet out here on the farm would be the most awe-inspiring thing I saw in my lifetime. Pretty cool to be wrong.”
“Wasn’t so cool for all the people who died,” Taylor said, pushing some corn around on her plate.
“No, that’s true,” her dad replied gently. “It can be a lot to wrap your head around. But we’re safe here. You know that, right? Ain’t nobody bothering little old Turner County.”
Her dad was right. Taylor was comforted that Turner County remained pretty much unchanged in this brave new world. The articles she read about teenagers with Legacies speculated that everyone who was going to get the enhanced abilities had already gotten them—that it was a side effect of the war triggered by the Loric and that now it would stop.
They were wrong about that.