Fate of the Legacies

Chapter One

Yura Kallik sat huddled in the corner of her cell, wearing little more than a light jacket and thin pants in an abandoned prison with no heating. She had been there for a few days now, and she was sure she had already forgotten what it was like to be warm. Teeth chattering and rocking back and forth, she looked between the bars with baleful eyes at the chuckling woman sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the hall, a rifle on her lap and the remote to control Yura's shock collar twirling in her hands. It wasn't quite one of those inhibitors that Yura had heard about being used against Garde, but it was strong enough to stop her whenever she lashed out. And there was another controller out there, somewhere—the one time she had tried to rip the controller away from one of her guards with the only Legacy she had—telekinesis—they had quickly shouted something across the room, and somebody else turned on the collar, shocking her until she was screaming and writhing on the floor for far longer than what she was sure was safe—until she was so broken that she couldn't put up any fight whatsoever when someone came into the cell and took the stolen remote back.

She tried the opposite route, too—taking off the collar first. She managed to get it off, but they didn't like that. The guard at the time—a man—called for backup and came into the cell. She still wasn't good enough with her telekinesis to put up much of a fight. There was a gash on her head from where she had been cracked with the butt of a rifle, and, while it had stopped bleeding, she wasn't sure if it was healing.

Yura had been cautiously optimistic when she first developed telekinesis. She had been helping her dad gut fish out behind their house when she reached over to grab one but hadn't reached far enough. Before she could think to simply reach further, something stirred deep inside her, and the fish had raced through the air to her hand—like magic.

She couldn't believe what had happened. She tested it several more times, her father standing mouth agape as he watched his daughter lift fish and their tools and twirl them in the air. She wasn't very strong or very good at it—she was constantly dropping or accidentally throwing stuff—but she had it. That was a fact. There was no weird coincidence, no unexplained miracle.

She had telekinesis.

She was Garde.

Yura didn't have any particular interest in getting away from the small town she grew up in, but she had still always been curious about other places, devouring all the news she could about places she would never go. She often spent hours devouring books and documentaries about far-off places or scouring the internet for interesting stories.

When the invasion began, she knew about it almost immediately. Most of the people in her town didn't believe her until she practically dragged them in front of the TV to watch the reports on it, and even then it was hard for any of them—even her—to truly believe. The invasion hadn't affected them at all, and it probably never would—unless the Mogs won.

The whole town was glued to the news until well after the invasion ended, devouring everything they could about the Loric, the Mogs, the war, the new human Garde, the ways that the world would be forever changed going forward—not that they were likely to ever see many—if any—of those high in the remote northern reaches of Canada.

Yura often dreamed that she would get powers. She was sure everybody did.

She never imagined she would really get them.

Now that she had them—now that they led her to be kidnapped and trapped in some derelict prison god-knows-where by a band of tight-lipped thugs that put a shock collar on her like a dog to keep her from acting up—now she wished she never got them.

She had been worried that something bad was going to happen to her as soon as the excitement of having telekinesis died down. She had been watching the news. After humanity's thankfulness for the Loric saving them from the invasion had died down and especially after the Garde had holed themselves in their new mountain base in the Himalayas, people started to get suspicious of them, wondering if it was really okay to keep people with power like that unchecked. It seemed that public opinion had started to turn against the Garde.