Page 17 of Legacy Found

I fall asleep still grinning about a giant wheel of cheese I know for a fact does not exist.

Chapter eight

Jessica

The last breakfast is the loudest one yet, and I hate that it's the last.

"It went too fast," Sophia is saying, for the third time, stabbing a piece of fruit. "That's illegal. Somebody should be arrested. A whole week? We need at least two."

"It's the mountains," Freya says. "Time moves differently up here."

"That's very poetic, and also I want my days back."

I'm only half in the conversation, because I'm busy being quietly, stupidly sad. A week ago I got on a plane certain this was a free vacation I'd endure politely and then leave. Now I'm sitting at a scarred wooden table with five people I'd genuinely miss, in a castle I've fallen in love with, seriously — actually seriously — thinking I could do this. That I could make it at this academy.

I catch Torres watching me over his coffee, that quick read of his, and he tips his head like you good? and I make a face like shut up and he grins into his cup.

Jon comes in near the end, and something's different about him this morning — not bad, just… weightier. He waits for us to finish, then says, "Before the van takes you down to the main academy this afternoon, there's one last session. The most important one of the week, actually." A pause. "Finish your coffee. Meet me in the east meeting room in twenty minutes."

"Ominous," Renzo says cheerfully.

Jon doesn't smile the way he usually does. "A little," he admits, and leaves.

Jon's already there when we file in, and he's not leaning against anything this time. He's standing in the open space in the middle of the room, hands loose at his sides, and there's a stillness to him that puts a small, animal part of my brain quietly on alert.

We sit. He looks at us for a long moment, and then he answers the question we've been asking since the very first cream envelope.

"You've all wanted to know why you," he says. "Why the six of you. Today I'm going to tell you, and then I'm going to prove it, and I need you to try — as hard as you can — to stay in your seats while I do."

That lands strangely. Nobody laughs.

"It starts with a blood test," Jon says. "Every one of you had one, in the last few months. Some of you at a hospital, some at a clinic, one of you—" a glance at me "—after a fall on a mountain." My stomach does a slow, cold turn. The routine blood draw. The nurse. Barely takes a second. "Those samples run through a panel most people never think about. And every one of you came back carrying an extremely rare genetic marker."

For a second nobody says anything. Then my brain, which likes problems it can solve, latches onto the obvious one.

"So it's medical," I say. "This is a research thing. You found some marker and you're studying us."

"Are we dying?" Sophia blurts, and her voice cracks on it, and suddenly it's not funny at all. "Like — is that what this is? Six people with the same rare thing, flown to a mountain to be told gently — are we dying?"

"No," Jon says, and he says it fast and firm, no hesitation, and I watch the relief hit her like a wave. "No. You're not sick. None of you is sick. I promise you that."

Renzo raises a hand, visibly reaching for the joke, because that's how Renzo survives things. "Do we get superpowers?"

A couple of us laugh, on reflex, grateful for it.

Jon doesn't. "No," he says quietly.

And the laugh dies in the room, because that flat, serious no is somehow more unnerving than a yes would have been.

I lean forward. "Then what does it mean? You keep saying rare, different, important. What is the marker actually for?"

Jon looks at me gently. "It means each of you is different," he says, "in a way you don't have any framework to understand yet. And there's no sentence I can say that will make the next part any easier." He slowly shrugs out of his jacket, folds it over the back of a chair. "I could spend the next hour explaining."

He steps back into the open center of the room.

"Or I could show you." He looks around at all of us, and his voice drops. "I need you to stay where you are. This isn't going to hurt you. I am not going to hurt you. “Whatever you feel in that moment, remember—it’s instinct. And it’s going to tell you to run. Don’t.”

"Jon," I start, "what are you—"