Vika gasped. “Does that mean…?”

Her voice choked off when Emery cleared his throat.

“I’ll explain what it means in a moment,” he told her. “But first, we must verify something.” His gaze turned to Sophie. “Is it safe to assume, Miss Foster, that your father has explained his reason for bringing you here?”

Sophie nodded, fighting the urge to duck behind Grady.

“And will you be accepting our offer?” Emery asked.

Every single bit of moisture in Sophie’s mouth evaporated. “I… thought you guys were going to give me more information about what you need me to do before I had to decide.”

“We will be happy to answer your questions. But certain things have changed, and we need to know if you’re interested before we continue.”

Sophie glanced at Grady for help.

“No one has ever had to make an oath with so little information,” he reminded the Councillors.

“We’re not asking for her oath. We’re asking if she’s willing,” Emery clarified, which… didn’t actually sound all that different to Sophie. “And we’re asking now, because if she isn’t, there’s no point in continuing with any of this.”

“Any of what?” Tiergan demanded.

Emery reached up to rub his temples, moderating the other Councillors telepathically.

“Very well,” he said after a painful beat of silence. “I’d hoped to avoid an interruption-filled discussion. But it seems we must do this out of order.” He cleared his throat. “Yesterday, in light of several serious developments that Lord Grady brought to our attention, we decided to redefine the qualifications for the nobility in order to extend an invitation to Miss Foster. Our plan was to appoint her as a Regent today, so that she can pair her unique talents with the resources available to our nobles, and assist us with these pressing challenges more fully.” He paused to let that sink in before he added, “But upon further discussion, we discovered that we’d made one crucial miscalculation. Miss Foster’s greatest successes are rarely hers alone. She’s most valuable when working in tandem with others—which is not an insult to you, Miss Foster. As Councillors, we are far better as a united group of twelve than we could ever be as individuals. But because of that, we realized the best way to utilize you would be to place you with a team—one carefully selected, arranged, and monitored by us, to ensure maximum efficiency.”

Dex, Biana, Wylie, and Sophie all looked at each other.

Then they looked at Stina Heks.

And Stina summed it up for them. “You have to be kidding me.”

“We’re not,” Councillor Emery assured her. “We’ve invited the five of you here today because you’ve each been chosen for this revolutionary new approach to the Regency—but the arrangement hinges on Miss Foster’s willingness to accept the position of leader.”

“Leader,” Sophie repeated, liking that term even less when the Council was the one assigning it to her.

“Yes,” Councillor Emery said, pausing to glance at each of the other Councillors before he added. “The leader of Team Prodigious.”

 

 

SEVEN

SO, QUESTION,” DEX SAID, BREAKING the uncomfortable silence. “Can we get a cooler name? Because ‘Team Prodigious’ is an epic fail.”

“I’m not even a prodigy anymore,” Wylie added.

Sophie knew she should probably worry that Wylie would be annoyed that he wasn’t being put in charge, given that he was the eldest of their group, and the only one of them who’d actually taken the elite levels—and was therefore the only one legitimately qualified to be a Regent. But her brain was too stuck on the fact that she was expected to officially be the leader.

Of Team Prodigious.

Her nose crinkled.

Dex was right. That name had to go.

“It’s not a reference to prodigies,” Councillor Emery tried to explain. “ ‘Prodigious’ means ‘extraordinary.’ ”

“It also means ‘abnormal,’ ” Councillor Bronte informed them, with the closest thing to a smile that his sharp-featured face was capable of making.

“Yeah, well, whatever your boring reasons are,” Dex said through a feigned yawn, “the name’s still a deal-breaker for me.”

“Me too,” Biana agreed. “I think we should be Team Sparkles, because we’ll make everything better!”

Dex snort-laughed—then frowned. “Wait, was that a serious suggestion?”

Biana’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t hear you coming up with any better ideas.”

“I was getting to that!” Dex scratched his chin and tapped his foot for several beats. “Okay. What if we went with something cool and space-y, like… Team Nebula?”

“You realize that would technically make us Team Swirling-Cloud-of-Gas, right?” Biana asked, earning a choked laugh from Grady.

Even with his green spotlight, Sophie could see Dex’s blush spread all the way to the tips of his ears. “Is that what ‘nebula’ means?” he mumbled. “I always get it confused with ‘galaxy.’ But hey… nothing wrong with a little gas, am I right?”

“Everyone has it,” Wylie agreed.

Stina groaned. “Are you hearing this?” she asked the Councillors. “Why would you pick these losers for something so important?”

“Uh, because these losers have taken on the Neverseen how many times now?” Dex snapped back.

“And lost how many times?” Stina countered. “Oh, that’s right—all of them.”

“We haven’t lost,” Biana argued.

“Well, you certainly haven’t won.” She pointed to Biana’s scars, and Biana—to her credit—didn’t flinch.

Della, on the other hand, looked like she’d gone into full mama-bear mode and was imagining the many ways she could use her fancy defense training to drop-kick Stina across the room and then step on her with the spikes of her heels.

“Yeah, well, what have you done?” Dex asked, stepping into Stina’s personal space. He was still shorter than her. But almost everyone was.

Stina got even taller when she straightened to her full height and said, “Uh, how about I saved the alicorn babies and reset the Timeline to Extinction?”

“Um, the people who saved those babies were Sophie, my brother, and the trolls,” Biana corrected.

“Do not underestimate the role my daughter and I played that day!” Vika snapped.

“Maybe you did important stuff,” Dex told her. “But I heard Stina put out some blankets or something? Good job! No one else could’ve done that.”

“There was a lot more to it,” Stina argued. “And what was the last gadget you made that actually worked right? Because I heard a bunch of things failed at the Celestial Festival.”

“That wasn’t Dex’s fault,” Sophie mumbled. “The null that Tinker designed for me interfered.”

“And a Technopath couldn’t tell that was going to happen?” Stina asked, clicking her tongue. “If Dex was any good, he would’ve been prepared.”