Hilde knocks on the door. A few seconds later, a petite blond woman with bags under her eyes swings open the door.

"Hi," Hilde says, rather awkwardly. I narrow my eyes at her in confusion.

"Merry Christmas," the woman replies slowly, hugging herself against the cold. "Can I help you?"

"Yes, ma'am. I was wondering if Malcolm Goode lives here?"

The woman face freezes in the cold, devoid of life and emotion. Finally, she asks, "Who are you?"

"I'm a friend of the family," Hilde replies quickly. "I don't mean to intrude; I just wanted to—"

"Jesus, are you one of my husband's…colleagues?" Ms. Goode squints her eyes, rubbing the bridge of her nose in frustration. "What? He didn't give you his percent of the pay before he went off the grid or whatever?"

"Went off the grid?" I ask. "Malcolm's missing?"

"I figured you'd have known," Ms. Goode says. "Left town three years ago, never came back. No calls, nothing at all but…" She steadies herself, asks again, "Why are you here?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I didn't know," Hilde answers. Something in her voice isn't right. It's kind of scary. "Ah, forgive me, but did he happen to leave a note or some sort of—"

"Get the hell off my porch."

Hilde starts to protest, but she receives the message clearly. "Okay, ma'am. Apologies for wasting your time. Merry Christmas."

Ms. Goode fixes Hilde with a curt nod before making to close the door. Before it shuts, I catch a small blond figure rush by the doorway carrying a small toy rocket over his head. The door slam is muffled by the gelid air and the chorus of dogs barking maniacally in the distance.

"Well, now what?" I ask, following Hilde and Wade off the porch. "Where the fuck is this guy?"

"Be quiet," hisses Hilde, not turning back to look at me.

When Wade reaches the passenger's side door, I grab his sleeved arm. "Hey, you mind sitting in the back? I need to talk to Hilde."

"Sure thing," he replies. Hilde gets into the front seat, and Wade asks in a lower voice, "I got some gummies in the glove compartment. You want one?"

"Maybe later," I kiss him and open the door, climbing into the passenger's seat.

Beside me, Hilde sits there, clutching the steering wheel, her face carved with wrinkles of stress. She doesn't speak, doesn't move to turn on the car. After about a minute, I break the silence. "We should get moving before that lady thinks we're casing the place."

Hilde swallows whatever lump in her throat is paralyzing her with fear.

She nods and turns the key in the ignition.

The engine coughs, thick and loud like it has the flu.

Then we're driving away from the house. I see that tuft of blond hair again in the form of a little boy, maybe eight or nine. He pushes the drapes aside to watch us leave, cup of hot chocolate comically massive in his tiny hands.

"He could've left because of you-know-who," I suggest in a low tone. "They might have been closing in."

"Yeah. Maybe." She drives past the other houses, past kids armed with snowballs running through their yards. The smell of bacon and waffles wafts from open doors. "You hungry?"

"Yes!" Wade cheers from the backseat abruptly. I wonder how much he's overheard.

I drive us out of Paradise and find an open auto repair shop. It sits alone on an empty, snowy plot, the Youngstown skyline just a few miles north. In the open garage, I see a bearded heavyset man in a thick coat, cigarette dangling between his lips. Snow glistens on his pink bald head from the fluorescent lights above. I notice a pit bull gnawing on a rawhide bone, and when we park, I see it sit up, noticing us too.

"Wade, you come with me," I order him. "One, you can stay in the van if you want."

"Um…," she replies, glancing between me and Wade, "okay."

"It'll just be a minute," I tell her and throw my coat on. "Come on, Wade."

Wade climbs out of the side door and joins me, shivering in the cold. He's wearing a tan parka jacket much too thin for this weather, curly dark hair tied back. "I thought you said we were going to get breakfast."

"We will after this."

"Okay. I've never had maintenance on my camper before."

"No kidding. You realize that the engine might seize if that oil wasn't changed. We could have been stranded nine times over between LA and here."

"I guess. The only one who ever worked on it was my mom. She was into this mechanic stuff. My dad said he never had time for it."

Talking of his parents is a bit of a surprise. The only times he'd mention them on our way to Paradise would only be to complain about their cushy lifestyle that Wade felt like he needed to flee. I can't say I'm pleased by that attitude—I would take living in a McMansion and relaxing any day over our current nomadic lifestyle. Add that to the lack of constantly being hunted by barbarous alien mercenaries, I would die for such an opportunity. I know One would kill for it.

I hope she would, at least.

"Can I help you?" the mechanic grumbles, his breath materializing before his mouth in a mix of smoke and condensation. His dog watches me in the corner, occasionally sniffing in my direction like he's trying to figure out what I am.

I pat Wade on the shoulder and step behind him. "This young gentleman needs an oil change."

The mechanic drops the cigarette, snuffs it out beneath his boot. "That van under your name, kid?"

"Yeah, got my license right here." Wade reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a tattered fabric wallet.

The mechanic takes the card from Wade and holds it up to the fluorescent light, squinting hard at it with his beady blue eyes. I will never grow accustomed to the humans' distrust of one another. They're all the same species, but the wrong concentration of melanin is all it takes for some of them to think negatively. Back on Lorien, where there were indeed two different breeds of people, all we needed to do was scan ID bands. Quick and easy, no distrust, and the only time anyone would try to swindle the scanners would be if they were Garde kids from the Academy trying to sneak into a bar on a break night.

"You're good," the mechanic finally says, handing Wade his ID band. He keeps his hand out as he says, "That'll be seventy-five dollars and sixteen cents. You paying in cash or—"

I answer by tugging my wallet from my back pocket and pulling free a pair of hundred-dollar bills, placing them unfolded in his meaty hand. He stares at the cash for a minute, counts the bills twice more than necessary, rubs his fingers over them. The mechanic's eyes go wide at me and he opens his bearded mouth to say something.

"You can keep the change," I say before he can speak. "We'll be back in an hour."

"God bless you, ma'am!" He breathes, voice devoid of that tired brusque from earlier. "Merry Christmas to you both!"

I nod and turn back toward the van. After driving it into the garage and gathering our bags, Wade, One, and I leave the repair shop behind and walk toward the city. Most of the stores on the edge of town are closed for Christmas Day, but we eventually find one that's actually opened; an antique diner with a neon sign blinking Kolby's Eatery!

We sit down at a booth near the door, order enough food to feed a pack of jærfrøj, and right when I prepare to let my guard down, Wade asks, "So, what's up with the 'one' thing?"

I nearly choke on my third cup of coffee, and I raise my eyebrows at him with fixed confusion. "What?"

"Nothing, I just noticed that every once in a while, you call Raven 'one' or something like that."

"You mean 'Wanda'?" One says before I can reply. "That's my middle name. Sometimes we shorten it to just 'Wan.'"

"Oh, okay, that makes sense," Wade replies. "You never told me your middle name before, is all."

"It's not something I'm proud of, I guess. Seems like something my parents just kinda tacked on."

"Where are your parents," Wade asks with a mouthful of bacon, "by the way?"

"My parents? Oh, they died."

"Oh, jeez, Ray. I'm really sorry about that."

"Yeah," her voice goes hoarse. "It's…it's fucked up, I know that for damn sure."

I glance over at her and see One clench and unclench her fists. She's taking calm, measured breaths as if she's trying to meditate, but I can see the sadness fall over her face like a veil.

The floor starts to vibrate after a moment.

Soft and unnoticeable at first, but then it picks up intensity to where it nearly reaches a tremor.

Like a train rumbling through the earth.

I grab One's hand, push my fingers through her fist and squeeze. The Legacy roils in her body and tries to escape into mine. But I know that if the Terric can't find a suitable medium to spread through, it'll burst. Just like in LA.

"Excuse us for a moment," I say to Wade, leaving him in the booth as I let go of One to sling my bag over my shoulder. She follows close behind me, hugging herself. Every step she takes causes the floor to rumble. All that power locked away inside this little girl is trying to escape, and watching her go through it breaks me all the more.

I hold open the bathroom door for her and she stumbles in, her hand pushing against the doorframe and leaving a depression in the structure. At least she didn't blow the wall over. I close the door behind us and drop my bag to the dirty floor, pull the Chest out and set it on the diaper changing station.

"One, give me a hand with this." But she's not listening. She leans over the sink with her hands pressed against either side of the bowl. Veins protrude from her hands and tendons ripple on her slender neck. "One, I need you to calm down."

"I am calm!" she snarls, misty eyes irate. "I don't know what the fuck is happening!"

The sink cracks and steel splinters off against her Legacy. The pipes break and water sprays on the floor, dampening One's jeans. She turns away from me and stares at herself in the mirror, just as shocked by the Legacy surging through her body.

"What's happening to me?"

"You thought about your parents' deaths, girl. That must have triggered something."

"I think about them all the fucking time, though," she replies, finally stepping back from the sink until she runs into the door. The wood cracks and the earth shakes with such an intensity I worry that the floor is going to open up beneath us. "Why is this happening?"

I grab her arm and turn her toward the toilet. "Sit down, now, before you hurt yourself!"

She obeys, pushing the seat closed to sit. One pushes up her sleeves before placing her head in her hands as the world quakes and quivers around us. I hoist the Chest in front of her and put my hand on her wrist, coaxing her into helping me open the Inheritance.

"It's the Legacy," I explain as the lock clicks open between our interlocked fingers. I flip it open and retrieve the roll of kelp. "The Terric has been held in for a while, so it's feeding off your rage, finding any way it can to ease the tension it's placing on your body."

"Well, it feels like my head's about to split the fuck open."

"Give me your arm." She reaches both her arms out for me to remove the previous kelp wrap. As I cut them free, the tremors increase and the restroom shakes like a giant stone hand is about to throw it. Once I apply the new wrap to her arms, the quakes recede. She finally calms down when I start working on her legs, wrapping the kelp from above her ankle to just below her knee.

"So, I guess this Legacy was a bitch to deal with back home, huh?"

"Every Legacy was. Sometimes Garde grandparents wouldn't send their kids to the Academies we'd have set up. People would get hurt because they failed to diagnose the Legacies of children way too young to control them."

"Did anybody die?"

"Nearly four million Garde children died per year because of untrained Legacies."

The quaking stops when I finally tie off her legs. One rubs her bound wrists and brushes loose blond strands of hair out of her sepia face. Tears rim her eyelids, but otherwise she appears to be okay.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," she chokes. "I'm fine."

"Come here." I pull her into my arms and she sobs quietly against my shoulder. Tears try to escape through the cracks in my composure, but I hold them back. We still have a long way to go before we're safe from being discovered. I pull away from One, tell her, "We need to go."

"Okay," she replies, turning away from me to look back at the mirror; it must have cracked during the earthquake while I was binding One's Terric into her body. She pulls her hair back and removes a hair tie from her pocket to make a ponytail. "Let's go."