It isn’t one of the Garde who cautiously steps into my beam of light. It’s a girl. She’s probably about our age, only a couple of inches shorter than me, with a lean sprinter’s body. Her hair is pulled back in tight rows of braids. Her clothes are scuffed up either from the fight or the general chaos, but otherwise she looks unhurt. Tossed over the girl’s left shoulder is a heavy-looking duffel bag. She looks from Sam to me with wide brown eyes, eventually focusing on the light shining from the palm of my hand.

“You’re him,” the girl says, inching forward. “You’re the guy from TV.”

Now that the girl is close enough to see, I shut off my Lumen. Don’t want to be lighting up our location for the Mog reinforcements that are on their way.

“I’m John,” I tell her.

“John Smith. Yeah, I know,” the girl says, nodding eagerly. “I’m Daniela. You really killed the hell out of those aliens.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Was there someone else in there with you?” Sam cuts in, craning his neck to look past her. “A dude with anger issues and a habit of taking off his shirt? A gross one-eyed guy?”

Daniela cocks her head at Sam, eyebrows raised. “No. What? Why?”

“We thought we saw someone attack those Mogs with telekinesis,” I say, looking Daniela over again, feeling equal parts curious and cautious. We’ve been tricked before by potential allies.

“You mean this?” Daniela reaches out her hand and one of the dead Mogs’ blasters floats to her. She plucks it out of the air, resting it against the shoulder not supporting her duffel bag. “Uh-huh. That’s a new development for me.”

“I’m not the only one,” Sam breathes, looking at me with wide eyes.

My mind is cycling through possibilities so quickly that I’m struck speechless. I might not have understood the why of it, but Sam getting Legacies made sense to me on a gut level. He’s spent so much time around us Garde, done so much to help us—if any human was going to suddenly develop Legacies, it would be him. The hours since the invasion have been so crazy that I didn’t really have time to think about it. Didn’t need to, really. Sam with Legacies just seemed logical. When I imagined other humans besides Sam getting Legacies, I’d been thinking of people we know, people who have helped us. I was thinking of Sarah, mostly. Definitely not some random girl. This girl, though, Daniela, her having Legacies means something bigger than I imagined has happened.

Who is she? Why does she have powers? How many more like her are out there?

Meanwhile, Daniela is staring at me with that star-struck look again. “So, um, can I ask why you picked me?”

“Picked you?”