He meets my eyes for just a moment. Then he hands my mother my cell and makes his way past my bedside fan club.

– 7 –

I wake up hours later, clawing my way out of the Vicodin haze. It’s dark, but my room is lit with soft yellow light. If I squint just right, I could be in a romantic restaurant. On a really bad date.

The first thing I see is Solo, looking with intense focus at the iPad they use in lieu of an old-fashioned clipboard medical chart. It’s not the concentration of someone trying to make sense of something he doesn’t understand. It’s the concentration of a guy confirming something he’s already suspected.

He hears me moving. The iPad is back in the slot at the foot of my bed and he’s smiling at me. Covering up. Looking innocent.

I think: Strange boy I really don’t know, don’t you realize nothing is more suspicious than an innocent look?

Before I can say anything, Solo slips out the door. Seconds later, a nurse arrives. I haven’t seen her before, so I figure she must be part of the evening shift.

I close my eyes, pretending to sleep. I’m not in the mood to chat.

She checks the bandage on my leg. It’s one hell of a bandage. Gently she begins to cut away the tape and gauze and pressure mesh. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t make me happy, either.

“Oh my God!” she says.

She has laid the flesh bare and her first thought is to call up a deity.

I risk a slit eye to see what horror she’s witnessed.

She’s not looking at my face. She’s staring down at my leg. And she’s not horrified, exactly.

She’s amazed. She’s moved. She’s seeing something she never expected to see and can’t quite believe is real.

I’m afraid to look, because I know that something must be very wrong.

Or, just possibly, very right.

– 8 –

SOLO

The Spiker complex has an amazing gym. Everyone is constantly nagged to stay in shape. I don’t need to be nagged and I don’t need to be coached. I need to be left alone.

I run on the inside track. I run barefoot; I prefer it. The soles of my feet make a different sound, nothing like those three-hundred-dollar running shoes, groaning as all that shock-absorbing rubber takes the impact. My feet are almost silent.

I run and then I hit the weights, the crunches, all that. I like weights—they’re specific. There’s no bull in weight lifting; you either get that seventy-pound dumbbell up to your chest or you don’t. Yes or no, no kind-of.

After weights I go into the dark, smelly side room where the speed bags and heavy bags are. The rest of the massive gym complex is spotless and bright and gazed-down-upon by screens.

The boxing room—well, there’s just something seedy about the sport that comes through, even if the designer you hired insisted on a lovely shade of teal for the ring ropes.

Pete’s there, all ready to go.

Sometimes I go rounds with Pete. Pete’s older than me, maybe twenty-five. I’ve never asked. But he’s one of the geeks so we tend to get along well. We speak geek, or we would if we didn’t have slobbery mouthpieces in and weren’t beating on each other.

Pete’s not as quick as I am, and he looks softer and spongier than I do. But damn, when he connects you know you’ve been hit. You know it and you have to acknowledge it as your brain spins inside its bone cradle trying to reconnect all the switches.

I kind of love it.

It’s obviously crazy that I enjoy getting punched. But I do. You take a hard one to the side of your head, a shot that makes you feel as if you aren’t wearing sparring headgear at all, one that rings the bells in your ear, and then you come back from it, still swinging? To me that’s one of life’s finest moments.

Hit me. No, I mean hit me hard. Turn my knees to overcooked linguine.

And I take it and come back with a combination? Prodigious.

I’m done and covered in sweat. From the hair on my head down to my feet, wet, shiny, panting, grinning, wondering if I’m going to get feeling back in the left side of my face.

“Wimp,” Pete says.

“Weakling,” I respond.

“I don’t feel right beating up on a little girl.”

“Don’t feel bad, Pete. Keep at it and you may learn to throw a punch that actually connects some day.”

With our ritual abuse concluded, we make an appointment for the day after tomorrow. Pete heads for the gym’s showers; I head for my quarters.

My quarters, my place, my space. It’s on Level Four, where Spiker maintains rooms for visiting scientists and dignitaries. Some of those rooms are amazing. My quarters do not justify the word “amazing,” but they aren’t bad.

In any case, this place is a major improvement over the boarding school in Montana that Terra shipped me off to after my parents died. Some kind of tough-love dude-ranch high school for troubled kids called Distant Drummer Academy. I wasn’t troubled—unless you count being orphaned overnight—and I wasn’t in high school, but Terra provided them with a nice diagnosis of severe ODD. And a hefty donation.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Yeah, I can do that.

I lasted eight days.

After they kicked me out, Terra gave me two options: I could live at her place, or I could live at Spiker.

We both knew which one I’d choose.

I have a single room, but it’s big enough for a queen-sized bed and a sofa, TV, desk, beanbag chair, and mini kitchen. Except for the two framed photos on my desk, it’s as sterile as a hotel room. I like it that way.