“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 purring 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.