Everyone seemed to be having a good time. Not as good of a time as Isabela would’ve wanted, but still. A few people shot uneasy looks at Kopano and Ran—those came more from the administrators and soldiers than the other Garde, actually—but the Wolf News video failed to cast a major pall over events. Even Taylor let some of her carefully cultivated bad-girl persona slip for the night. She leaned into Kopano.
“I think everything’s going to be fine,” she told him.
“Really?” he replied.
“Just a feeling I’ve got.” Taylor smiled. “First time I’ve had that feeling in a while, actually.”
After Lisbette finished up with her ice sculptures, a team of duplicates hustled by her. They set to work plugging in guitars and assembling a drum kit.
Kopano rubbed his hands together. “Yes! Here we go!”
Nigel slapped Caleb on the shoulder. “You ready, mate?”
Through the eyes of his duplicates already onstage, Caleb could see the crowd. Altogether, there probably weren’t more than one hundred people out there, but they were the one hundred people who he’d spent nearly every day around for the last year. Normally, it would be pretty embarrassing to flame out in front of them.
“If we bomb, I might not have to see most of these people again,” Caleb replied, thinking about his looming departure from the Academy.
“That’s the spirit,” Nigel said. He grabbed a bottle of water and dumped the entire thing over his face and head, soaking through his white tank top. “Let’s go!”
Nigel jogged out onto the stage and Caleb followed. Caleb, like all his duplicates, wore a black button-down shirt, dark slacks, and a red bow tie. Nigel, of course, had chosen the outfits. A round of applause that Caleb thought sounded skeptical greeted their arrival. Nigel swaggered right up to the mike stand where the lead guitar was propped and slung it on. Meanwhile, Caleb positioned himself behind the keyboard.
There weren’t a lot of keys in the songs they’d chosen, but this spot afforded Caleb the best view of the stage and his duplicates. It helped him multitask the parts if he could oversee his clones rather than have to look through each one’s eyes. There was a clone on bass and one on drums, plus one carrying a megaphone and dancing around, a role Nigel referred to as “hype man.”
Caleb focused. Simultaneously, all the duplicates readied their instruments.
“We are Nigel and the Clones,” Nigel growled. He looked down at the mike, then kicked the stand over and used his Legacy to amplify his voice. “And we’re here to make you shit your britches!”
That was Caleb’s cue. “One, two . . . ,” he said into his mike. “Onetwothreefour!”
“I GET NERVOUS!” Nigel shrieked.
And they were off, beginning with a loud and jangly rendition of “I Get Nervous” by the Lost Sounds, followed by “Vertigo” by the Screamers, and closing with the Sweet’s “Blockbuster.” Nigel played his lead guitar like he was trying to choke it. He writhed across the edge of the stage, kicked wildly at the air, and punctuated every shouted lyric with an appropriately dramatic snarl. At one point during the set, Caleb was pretty sure Nigel lay down on his back and did some hip thrusts.
Caleb couldn’t pay too much attention to Nigel during the performance. He was too busy making sure the duplicates stayed in time with each other, that the messy punk songs didn’t get too incomprehensible. He felt like a conductor almost, flitting between his duplicates, putting the bass guitarist on autopilot so he could slow down the drummer, who had gone out of control. His own fingers stabbed at the keyboard almost without thought. He was in total control, yet it also felt to Caleb like an enormous act of letting go. He wondered, briefly, what his dad and brothers would think if they saw him up here.
Caleb wasn’t the only one up there using his Legacy. Nigel pitched in too, although Caleb could never be sure how much his friend’s sonic manipulation played into their band’s sound. If one of the clones went off-key, Nigel bent their sound until Caleb could fix it. If one of them played too fast or too slow, Nigel lowered the volume on them until they got back in time.
Even though Nigel thought it would be more theatrical if the duplicates performed with stony stoicism, Caleb couldn’t help but let his grin spread onto all of their faces.
It was a team effort. A masterpiece. It was the most in sync Caleb had felt in his entire life.
They rocked it.
When it was over, the crowd clapped politely. A lot of the instructors stuck fingers in their ears to make sure they could still hear, then blew out sighs of relief. The students made faces at each other, laughed, and mimed headbanging.
Isabela took her hands away from her ears. “Is it over?”
Taylor nodded. “They’re done.”
“Thank God,” she said.
“You have to admire their . . . enthusiasm,” Ran said diplomatically.
Taylor snickered, then glanced over at Kopano. He stood a few yards in front of the girls, both hands over his head in the shape of devil horns, bellowing for an encore.
“Well,” she said. “At least they’ve got one groupie.”
With the talent show over, most of the student body broke off into smaller groups, the same cliques that always tended to form up in the dining hall—tweebs, elemental Legacies, fans of the Smiths, the Academy’s fledgling drama club, et cetera. They mingled, played board games, stuffed their faces or watched TV in the student union. They had the New Year’s Eve countdown on. It was the first time that the ball would be dropping in the rebuilt Times Square. New York City still looked bombed-out and emptier than it used to, big gaps in the skyline, like the city had gotten punched in the mouth. But there were crowds and bands and noisemakers and the countdown—the process repeating twice until it was finally the West Coast’s turn.
The Fugitive Six didn’t hang out to watch. None of them would’ve been able to explain exactly why, but it felt weird for them to mingle with the rest of the student body. There was a strange sense after Nigel and the Clones’ performance that this was a special night, a momentous night. The six of them all snuck down to the beach. They didn’t even talk about doing it. They just went.
At some point, Isabela had slipped away and returned with two bottles of champagne and some beers filched from one of the faculty apartments. The popped cork on the first bottle sounded like a gunshot on the empty beach and for a second they all stared at each other, ducked low and stayed still like they were trying to hide, but no one came looking for them.
They passed the bottle around. They tossed smooth rocks into the cold waves, dancing away from the foamy tide. They ran up and down the beach, playing some game of tag that no one was really sure of the rules for.
Distantly, they could hear chanting from the student union. The countdown. They joined in, screaming numbers into the night.
Professor Nine timed his fireworks display to erupt with the New Year. It was as badass as he’d promised—chaotic blooms of red and gold, fizzy bolts of silver, yellow bursts that expanded into the shape of smiley faces. The sand under their toes became like a kaleidoscope.
Nigel tossed his arm around Ran’s shoulder and kissed her wetly on the cheek. She scrunched up her face and laughed.
Taylor and Kopano kissed. A peck on the lips that lingered. Caleb’s mouth fell open when he saw that. Nigel didn’t have the heart to tell him about Kopano’s success over Christmas. Although Caleb’s stomach did a loop, the warm feeling from the champagne softened the blow.
Maybe Isabela saw Caleb staring at Taylor and Kopano and that’s why she flung her arms around his neck and planted a wet kiss on him, all tongue and heat. When it was over, Caleb stammered and Isabela held a finger in his face. “Don’t get any ideas, weirdo. It’s just New Year’s.”
She kissed all the others too after that, but none the way she’d kissed Caleb.
At some point, Nigel climbed up onto a sand dune and got everyone’s attention. He held his beer bottle like a microphone.
“W
ell, since the lad is too shy to tell you lot himself, it’s on me to announce that tonight’s performance of Nigel and the Clones will likely be our last for a while.” Nigel held the bottle out like he was making a toast. “Our friend Caleb here is off to Earth Garde. Ready to protect the world with his legion of basic white-bread meatheads. We’re going to miss you, mate!”
Everyone was surprised, taken aback as a group because partying down on the beach had started to feel like it was a place they would never leave. Kopano hugged Caleb, patting him hard enough on the back to knock the wind out of him. Ran went over to him and held both of his hands, bowing to him in a very traditional Japanese way, made a little wobbly because Ran didn’t have much of a head for champagne. Caleb watched Isabela dance through the waves with her dress hiked up to mid-thigh; she was smirking at him and he wondered if she knew he was thinking about kissing her again. These moments stretched out, the night a blur.
At one point, Taylor stood next to Caleb. Everyone else was down the beach. It was quiet.
“I’m sorry you’re going,” Taylor said, realizing it was true only as she spoke the words. “I wish we’d gotten to know each other better.”
“Yeah,” Caleb replied. “Sorry I was so weird at first.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Taylor looked around. “I think we’re all a little weird.”
They didn’t talk about the Foundation, or Einar, or any of the crap they’d been through. They just celebrated. Only Taylor had ever actually been to summer camp, but that’s what it felt like. The end of summer camp.
Until Dr. Linda appeared.
Ran was the first to see the diminutive psychiatrist as she waddled up the beach with a flashlight held out in front of her. At first, Ran thought that maybe she was seeing things, so she pulled on Nigel’s sleeve and pointed at Dr. Linda.
“Is she real?” Ran asked.
“What the shit . . . ?” Nigel replied quietly.
Dr. Linda paused when she saw their little group and let out a sigh of relief. She plucked a walkie-talkie off her belt and spoke into it.
“I found him down on the beach,” Linda said. “It’s okay.”
The moment was surreal. The Garde stood in a loose semicircle, facing Dr. Linda, their good mood dashed, uncertain what would happen next. Some of them—like Nigel and Taylor—had spent too much time staring at Linda’s picture on the bulletin board in their secret lair under the training center. They were paranoid. Was this the night the Foundation made their move? What else could she be doing here? Others, like Isabela, had more grounded concerns. Were they going to get in trouble again? Technically, the beach wasn’t off-limits.
Caleb discreetly kicked a spent champagne bottle behind a piece of driftwood.
Finally, Dr. Linda spoke. She didn’t seem mad. Or villainous. She seemed . . . oddly somber.
“Nigel,” she said. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“Me?” Nigel replied, squinting at her. “Looking for me?”
“Yes. You need to come with me.”
The Garde all tensed up, tightening their ranks around Nigel. Dr. Linda stared at them like she couldn’t comprehend.
“The hell would I go anywhere with you, Linda?” Nigel replied.
But before Dr. Linda could reply, more flashlights appeared on the beach. There were a couple of Peacekeepers, Malcolm Goode, and Professor Nine in the lead. He bounded ahead of the others, almost as if he’d anticipated this particular crew of Garde might have an adverse reaction to being confronted by Dr. Linda.
“Nigel,” Nine said breathlessly. “Damn, dude. We’ve been looking for you.”
Now, seeing Nine acting weird, was the first time Nigel actually felt worried. Ran put a hand on his shoulder.
“That’s what she said,” Nigel replied, waving a hand at Dr. Linda. He put on a cavalier smile. “What’s the hubbub, then? People clamoring for an encore?”
“Nigel . . .” Nine frowned, he looked over his shoulder at the other administrators as if for help. When Dr. Linda opened her mouth to say something, Nine cut her off and plowed ahead. “There’s no easy way to say this, buddy.”
“Spit it out, Nine.”
“Nigel, your dad died.”
Chapter Fourteen
NIGEL BARNABY
LONDON, ENGLAND
NIGEL PUT HIS HAND ON THE WROUGHT-IRON GATE of the Saint John’s Wood house but couldn’t bring himself to push it open. Instead, he stood on the sidewalk in the damp English weather and pulled the collar of his coat tighter against a sudden chill.
This was the house where he grew up. Two stories of white brick with twice that many chimneys for the home’s multiple fireplaces. It looked like a country manor plunked down in northern London, but then most of the houses around here looked that way. The buildings were tightly packed together—this was still the city, after all—but what one couldn’t see from the sidewalk was the sprawling backyard that looked like a polo ground, lined with immaculate rows of oak trees to provide total privacy from the neighbors. From the sidewalk, people couldn’t see the basement addition, the pool and billiards table, the home theater. From the sidewalk, they couldn’t see the years of misery Nigel had spent there, thinking that things couldn’t get worse.
Until they did.
Nigel was in no rush to get inside. He shifted his backpack around on his tired shoulders. His eyes were dry and heavy, his limbs felt fuzzy. He hadn’t slept in . . . well, with the time difference, Nigel supposed that he technically hadn’t slept since the day before yesterday. He felt a little bit like he was dreaming.
The block was quiet now. In the early morning, it usually was. Clean and tree-lined with no pedestrians.
There was a black limousine parked at the curb. He supposed that would be their transportation to the funeral. Behind that was parked an unassuming brown van, which, at that very moment, rolled down its window so the driver could call to Nigel.
“Everything okay?”
The driver’s name was Ken Colton, an American, a UN Peacekeeper. He was in charge of the four-man detail assigned to accompany Nigel on his visit home. He had square features, salt-and-pepper hair, and reminded Nigel of a TV dad from some sitcom. Or maybe Nigel was just feeling sentimental. Nigel’s hesitation to go inside had raised an alarm with the Peacekeepers, but Nigel waved them off.
“It’s fine . . . ,” he said. “Just bracing myself, y’know?”
Colton nodded like he understood, gave Nigel that tight-lipped sympathetic smile that he’d been seeing a lot of lately, and rolled the window back up.
With a sigh, Nigel pushed open the creaky gate and trudged towards his home.
“I vowed never to go back there,” he had told Ran. “Those people are toxic. All of ’em. I’d like to forget they ever existed.”
“I know,” she replied softly.
“So you agree, then,” Nigel concluded. “I shouldn’t go. Tell Mum to piss off and be done with it, once and for all.”
“I didn’t say that.”
This was early morning on New Year’s Day. The two of them sat on a bench outside the student union, the campus quiet, everybody sleeping in or otherwise cozied up in the dorms. Nigel’s mouth still felt sticky and tasted bitter, even after he’d brushed his teeth three times. He had thrown up that morning. Nigel told himself it was from the drinking, but he hadn’t had that much. He tried to ignore the growing knot in his belly.
That old anxiety. Like he used to feel at his boarding school. Like he used to feel at home.
It hadn’t started right away. When Dr. Linda and Nine interrupted their beach party to break the news, Nigel had basically felt numb. The whole night seemed surreal, like it was happening to someone else. For months, Nigel had barely thought about his dad and he assumed the reverse was true as well. Hearing about his death was like learning that the dictator of some distant despotic nation had died—all Nigel could think was Oh, good.
The mounting sense of dread hadn’t really kicked in until Dr. Linda and
Nine ushered him to a private room where his mom waited on the phone. Nigel had never known Bea Barnaby to tolerate being placed on hold, so she truly must have wanted to talk to him.
The conversation seemed like part of a dream now. A hazy memory. Nigel could remember only snatches of what his mom said. Her voice sounded brittle on the phone, tinny and far away.
“You must come home, love,” she told him. “You absolutely must. I know it hasn’t seemed like it of late, but we are a family. We need each other more than you know.”
Nigel recounted those details to Ran later that morning. He was already packed. The Academy had lined up a helicopter to fly him off campus and then a private plane to whisk him off to London. They had a security detail arranged for him. Now that it was all sorted—now that he had time to think about it—Nigel didn’t want to go.
“She didn’t even sound sad on the phone, not really,” Nigel told Ran. “More like desperate. Like I was the last caterer available on short notice. The funeral is sure to be a scene, all their colleagues and business partners and quote-unquote friends. Wouldn’t look proper if I wasn’t there.”
Nigel paused. Ran waited, not pressing him.
“Dad actually told me once that they only had kids to keep up appearances,” Nigel continued eventually. “Like they needed ‘parenting’ for a cocktail party conversation topic. In their circles, leaders of industry and all that—he said it looked strange not to have a family. Wouldn’t want people thinking we’re queers, eh? He said that to me. I think I was twelve.”
Ran put her hand on Nigel’s forearm. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Thing that eats me up the most is that he didn’t live long enough for me to tell him what a shit dad and a wanker he was,” Nigel replied. “Now I’m supposed to go over there and pretend he meant something to me.”
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