Ran grunted, focusing on her work. She gritted her teeth. “I will . . . pull it back . . . now.”
“Be careful.”
Ran nodded. A dark strand of her chopped black hair stuck to her sweaty cheek. This was the hard part.
She pulled her energy back into herself. It didn’t want to return; it wanted release. This part didn’t tickle—it burned. Like swallowing back a mouthful of vomit with her entire body.
If she put just enough energy into an egg and then yanked it back, she’d have a hard-boiled egg. She got tired of eating those things weeks ago.
If she desperately poured her energy into a British guy with a stopped heart, Ran had learned, then yanked it back, she had a best friend who was alive again. She’d learned that trick back in Iceland. But that wasn’t a trick anyone wanted her to do on the regular, not after seeing the bruises on Nigel’s sternum. She wasn’t going to be replacing a defibrillator anytime soon.
So if she poured her energy into concrete, what would happen then? Something useful? She was about to find out.
The only problem was that her energy—her inner chaos—it still needed release. All that violence had to go somewhere.
The glow dimmed. The concrete was drained. Ran’s hands trembled and she braced herself.
It felt like a great hand made of fizzy bubbles reached down and slapped her. Ran was thrown off her feet, her body jerking and twitching. They’d done this experiment before with different inanimate objects, so they knew what would happen and had positioned a net behind Ran to catch her. That didn’t mean exploding didn’t hurt like hell.
Like every previous time, Malcolm rushed out of his safe area and came to her side. “Ran! You okay?”
Her clothes prickled with static electricity, and when she opened her mouth to answer, a plume of smoke rolled off her tongue. Her hands—where the energy had come and gone—were badly bruised, already turning purple and swollen, like she’d slammed them in a door over and over. She’d have to go see Taylor.
Ran nodded as Malcolm helped her up. “I’m fine.”
“That was more—you expended more energy than we talked about.”
“I wanted to see what would happen,” Ran said.
Malcolm adjusted his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I know Nine likes to teach that pushing your limits is the best way to grow your Legacies, but in your case . . . we ought to be cautious, is all I’m saying.”
Ran looked down at her hands—slender and long-fingered; she had taken piano lessons in Japan when she was younger. The veins stood out now, dark and angry. She wondered, not for the first time, what would happen if she completely unleashed. She’d never come close to reaching this “limit” Malcolm described. How much energy was within her? How much destruction was she truly capable of?
She forced this thought aside. She didn’t want to find out.
Lexa poked her head out of the safe room. “You good, Ran?”
“Fine,” she repeated.
Shaking out her aching hands, Ran approached the concrete block. She prodded it with her toe. A puff of brick dust shook loose, but otherwise the stone still felt solid.
“Any change?” she asked, turning to Malcolm.
The scientist produced a hammer and approached the block himself, striking the stone with a few sharp blows. He knocked loose a few chips, then glanced down at a tablet held in his other hand.
“Not really,” he told her. “You charged the atoms, as usual, but when you withdrew the energy, the concrete settled back to its inert state. Apparently, your Legacy only has a transformative effect on organic tissue and even that is . . . hard to quantify.”
The corner of Ran’s mouth twitched. “Useless.”
“Well, we know that’s not entirely true,” Malcolm attempted to console her.
“I can cook an egg. I can jump-start a heart as an absolutely last resort. These things are not . . . they aren’t valuable, Dr. Goode. How am I supposed to help people with this Legacy? I’m essentially a bomb with a brain.”
“Hmm.” Malcolm swiped through some readouts on his tablet, then came to stand beside Ran. “There’s this.”
The tablet displayed an infrared image of the concrete block, recorded by one of the many lenses Malcolm had trained on the test area. It looked like nothing more than a glowing blob to Ran, at least until Malcolm traced his finger across a dark slash in the cube’s middle.
“You see this? Where there’s none of your energy accumulating?”
“Yes?”
“It’s a crack,” he explained. Malcolm led her in a circle around the concrete, where there were no visible flaws in the rock. “It’s a crack inside the concrete. That happens sometimes, when air gets inside the pour. If we were to exert enough pressure on the stone—a lot of pressure, mind you—that’s the fault along which the concrete would break.”
Ran studied the thin shadow in the image with her lips pursed. “Earthquakes in Japan were always a worry. My father is—” She cleared her throat. “My father was an engineer, in charge of checking buildings to make sure they would stand. Maybe . . .”
“Maybe that’s something you could use your Legacy for,” Malcolm finished her thought, brightening. “Your energy—or the absence thereof—could potentially be used to highlight structural weaknesses that can’t be detected by more traditional means.”
Ran’s expression soured as Malcolm grasped for a silver lining. “And if I should make a mistake . . . what? I destroy a building? Blow it up?”
Malcolm’s smile disappeared. “Well, of course, we would have to approach the process with caution . . .”
“The safest course of action is to just not use my power at all,” Ran replied.
“Safe? Or selfish?”
Ran and Malcolm turned towards the voice. Greger Karlsson leaned into the training center’s entryway, an insufferably smug smile on his face. As usual, the Earth Garde liaison wore a designer suit, his hair brushed meticulously, everything about him exuding a confidence that bordered on arrogance. Ran had been so wrapped up in her testing, she hadn’t noticed him standing there.
Greger often came to watch Ran train. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Lexa disappear back behind her laptop.
“Excuse me?” Ran replied to Greger.
“Greger, maybe this isn’t the best time . . . ,” Malcolm said diplomatically.
Greger waved this objection away as he walked farther into the room, approaching Ran.
“I’ll admit that there’s something admirable about your insistence on pacifism, Ms. Takeda, but I do think you’re being somewhat obtuse.”
Ran’s lip curled—admirable and obtuse. A compliment followed by an insult.
“You needn’t strain yourself in here or deny what you are. There’s much good that could be done using your Legacies as they were intended.”
“Hmm. I hardly think we can know what the Lorien entity intended for these Legacies, Greger,” Malcolm replied.
Ran didn’t feel like approaching the issue as some kind of intellectual debate. Before Greger could get too close, she snatched the hammer away from Malcolm, charged it, and thrust it in the liaison’s direction.