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  I believed him. It still didn’t quite quiet my nerves about this girl, but the kiss certainly helped. I could’ve stayed there until the spring thaw. After indulging myself in a much-too-short dose of Sal, I said, “We’d better go. Dee’s probably turned into an icicle by now.” When it came to my little sister, I was hyper-responsible. With good reason, I thought to myself.

  Sure enough, when we reached the transit stop, Dee was huddled in the doorway of a nearby store. “Geez, Nina. I could’ve frozen to death. What took you so long?”

  “Why didn’t you go into one of the shops?” I asked.

  “’Cause they’re ultra boutiques, and the salespeople watch me like I’m going to steal something.” She wrinkled her nose. “Just because people are low tier doesn’t mean they’re thieves.”

  “Don’t let it bother you, Deeds.” I sighed, knowing exactly how she felt. “Some people are jerks. Plain old jerks.”

  “Hey, how about some hot cocoa from Rosie’s?” Sal asked. “My treat.”

  ***

  In fifteen minutes, we were cozied up in a booth, sipping steaming hot cocoa and munching on cookies. There were only three other people inside, an older couple and a man at a table by himself.

  Rosie joined us. She’d offered to teach me Cliste Galad martial arts after Holiday break. But right now, after all I’d been through, what with killing Ed, I wasn’t sure I wanted to learn to be a finely tuned murder machine. But then Wei was practically a Cliste Galad master, and she wouldn’t hurt a fly—unless there was no other way. I was still processing my feelings about what I’d done to Ed. I cringed at the thought of learning other ways I could’ve dispatched him.

  “Rosie, about your offer . . .” Rosie’s was DZ, even PAV reception was spotty. But that didn’t stop someone inside from overhearing conversations, so I chose my words carefully. “I want to wait. I’m not ready.”

  “When the time is right, you will know.” She patted my cheek. “You are a wise one.”

  I didn’t feel wise. I did feel relieved.

  “I’ve got more cookies in the oven,” Rosie said. “I’d best get back to them.”

  “Can I help?” Dee was in a love-to-cook phase. My similar phase had been very short. I could find my way around the cook center, but wasn’t a whiz like Gran.

  “Of course. But I might put you to work.”

  “Cool.” Dee followed Rosie into the kitchen.

  Sal and I sipped our cocoa, held hands, and acted exactly like I never imagined I ever would. Even just a few months ago, I’d been so determined not to be a typical sex-teen, falling all over boys, dressing to attract them—and every creepy pervert in the galaxy—that I’d decided never to have a boyfriend. Yet here I was, enjoying the major bright spot in my life—Sal.

  The only thing we ever argued about was his inclination to be overly protective. I understood why he felt that way. After all, it can’t be easy to see your girlfriend threatened by a former B.O.S.S. agent. I shuddered, thinking about Ed. About how he took my mother from me. The power he had wielded over Dee and me. Dee, who still thought Ed was her father . . . But Ed was gone. And I didn’t need protecting.

  If anything, I wanted to be more active in the Resistance. If guys as young as sixteen could be NonCons, why they made girls wait until eighteen made no sense to me. Guys didn’t get tattooed at sixteen; girls did. Every day for a sixteen brought unwanted sexual advances, or worse. And yet the leaders of the Resistance thought Resistance activity was too dangerous. Ridiculous.

  It seemed like guys everywhere—even the NonCons and Resistance fighters, who should know better—bought into at least some of the Media propaganda about women not being as strong or capable as men. I sipped my cocoa, swallowing down the negativity.

  While we were talking, a woman came in and joined the lone man. Her chestnut hair, caught in clips above her temples, cascaded over her shoulders like in a shampoo vert. Her clothes were definitely not Sale-o-rama. They were ultrachic, showing off her perfect figure. She was tall, too, almost Amazonian. At first, I thought she was beautiful. Looking closer, I noticed a hardness to the set of her mouth that didn’t seem so attractive.

  Sal was looking at her, too. I squeezed his hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He frowned slightly before turning his attention back to me. “I should have been thinking about you.” He brushed his lips over my fingertips. I forgot everything except how he made me feel.

  ***

  After Dee returned from helping Rosie, we bundled up to go. We were nearly to the door when a voice called, “Miss Oberon.” Dee and I turned simultaneously. “You might need this.” The chestnut-haired woman was holding up one of Dee’s mittens. “It’s awfully cold outside.”

  “Miss Maldovar!” Dee hurried over to the table. “Thank you! Mom gave these to me last Holiday. I’d hate myself if I lost one.” She snugged her hand into the errant mitten.

  “I can imagine. So sad about your mother.” She laid a hand on Dee’s shoulder. “Be careful with them.” She glanced up, scrutinizing me. “You’d better run back to your sister now.”

  Sal held open the door and asked Dee exactly what I was wondering. “Who’s that?”

  “My new teacher, Miss Maldovar. She’s so ultra.”

  I glanced in the window at the same moment the woman’s eyes met mine. The hairs on my neck involuntarily prickled. I buttoned my coat. It was icy cold out.

  III

  When Dee and I got home, Pops was sitting in his favorite chair, his prosthetic leg propped up against the side table, his crutch lying on the floor next to it.

  Dee flung herself into his arms, planting a big kiss on his cheek. “Tons of homework right before Holiday. Can you believe it?” She straightened up. “Will you help me with my math later?”

  “Sure enough, Deedles.” He chucked her under the chin. “Try ’em yourself first, though. I’ll check your answers.”

  Dee bounded off to her room.

  “How about you, Little Bit? School okay today?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.” I wasn’t going to tell him about my visit to Mrs. Marchant. He’d only get worked up and frustrated because he couldn’t help me. In the few months since Dee and I had moved in with Gran and Pops, Pops’s health had gotten worse, and he was growing more forgetful. Not wanting to dwell on depressing subjects, I asked, “Anything exciting happen here?”

  “Checkerheads came by again.”

  So much for changing the subject. A stranglehold of anxiety knotted my gut. The same anxiety that had been my constant companion since my mom’s murder, but which had subsided somewhat since Ed’s death. I wrapped my arms about me, not even bothering to chide him about the derogatory slang for the police. “What did they want?” As if I didn’t know.

  “Had a couple of Bureau agents with ’em this time.” He rubbed the day’s worth of stubble on his chin. “Still looking for that no-good, worthless, piece-of-crap Ed. I told ’em he’d never been to see Dee, didn’t care a whit that she was his daughter, and I didn’t give a damn about him or where he was. Probably out cheating on his wife with some other woman now that Ginnie’s dead.”

  “Pops!” There was no reasoning with my grandfather about the government. I understood his contempt perfectly, but—old and disabled or not—I was terrified he’d get himself into some kind of trouble he couldn’t get out of. “You probably should have been a little . . . nicer.”

  “Nicer?” He snorted. “Like anything the government’s ever done to me was nice?” He patted his stump, a reminder of the shoddy treatment he’d received when he’d lost his leg in an accident while working on a government project years earlier.

  I tried logic. “They’re B.O.S.S. They can, you know . . . reassimilate you.”

  “I ain’t scared of reassimilation, Little Bit. It’ll take more than some warped technology to turn this old geezer into a pile of mush.”

  I doubted Pops knew how zombified reassimilated people were. Like the teacher I’d had who�
��d strayed from GC-mandated texts. He was never the same after he came back. But it took more than vague threats to scare Pops. “Did they say anything?” I asked. “What leads do they have?”

  “Same as before. His last PAV signal was from around Lincoln and Wells. Said it might have come from the old Robin’s Roost hotel.” His eyes flashed, and he straightened up. “That’s where your father and his friends hung out. Been deserted for years. What business would Ed have had to be there?”

  I shrugged, as if I hadn’t a clue that Ed had been there, looking for me, while I’d been there looking for evidence my mom had hidden. I had found the evidence. And Ed had found me.

  Pops sighed, and slumped back into his chair. “Alan and Ginnie’s wedding reception was there. Place all done up in silver and Neptune green. Fairyland. That’s what it was like. A magical fairyland.”

  His eyes lost focus, clouded by what was becoming a much too frequent faraway look. I needed Pops to stay present. I perched on the arm of his chair. “Did they say anything else?”

  “Huh?” He cocked his head to the right, his eyes a muddled mix of long-past memories and current events.

  “The Bureau of Safety and Security agents, Pops. What else did they say?” I held his gaze. His vision cleared, and he sat upright.

  “Oh, yeah, those S.O.B.’s. You ever notice that, Little Bit? B.O.S.S., kind of like S.O.B. backward.” He patted my leg, chuckling.

  “Yes, Pops.” I hid the impatience from my voice as best I could.

  “Well, the city demolished Robin’s Roost on your birthday. Fine old building once upon a time. Flat as one of Edith’s flapjacks now.” He shook his head. “Tell me, Nina, if Ed were in the city to see Dee, what would he have been doing in an abandoned hotel? Doesn’t make any sense, does it?” He didn’t wait for a response from me. “I told ’em they were crazy.” He waved like he was pushing the whole lot of them out of our lives. “They won’t be back.”

  “I hope you’re right, Pops.” I threw my arms around him, squeezing hard, but not hard enough to dispel my fears. “I’d better go do my homework, too.”

  As soon as I got to my room, I messaged Wei on my PAV. I couldn’t risk a conversation being overheard by the audio surveillance I was sure was trained on our apartment. Especially with B.O.S.S. looking for Ed, and with the entire world thinking Dee was his daughter, we had to be somehow suspect. The fact that I had actually killed him, and Dee wasn’t Ed’s daughter, and Alan Oberon was alive––skivs! It was a good thing they didn’t have thought surveillance yet, or I’d be dead already.

  “Meet you in Lincoln Park. You know the place,” Wei messaged back.

  There was a tech tower in the park that caused a lot of satellite and radio frequency interference. It wasn’t as good as a full-on dead zone, but almost.

  “Twenty minutes,” I replied.

  Bundling back into my coat, I stopped by the kitchen and told Gran I’d be late for dinner.

  ***

  “Wei, what am I going to do? B.O.S.S. was at our apartment today.” I paced back and forth. “They’re going to find out, aren’t they? And when they do, I’ll be reassimilated. Or they’ll send me to Mars.”

  “Stop. You’re making me dizzy.” Wei held up her hand. “They aren’t going to find out anything. And they only send guys to the prison on Mars.”

  I came to a halt. “What am I going to do?”

  “Seriously, Nina. They are not going to arrest you, because there is no evidence of anything. Trust me. I know what happened afterward, the cleanup. You have nothing to worry about. Nothing. Besides, I’ve got some friends. I’ll ask them to check and see if anything about you is making the rounds.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This.” Wei pointed to the thistle tattoo on the back of her hand. “There are a few of us . . .”

  “Creatives? What can they do?”

  “Not just Creatives.” Wei pulled me close. “We’re the Sisterhood. Kind of like . . .” She glanced around. “Like NonCons, but girls,” she whispered.

  My eyes widened. “Are you serious?”

  “Uh-huh.” She kept scanning the area around us as she softly said, “The NonCons, well, you know the guys won’t let us do much. But we do Rogue Radio and the tech for vert and vid interruptions. We see things, hear things, and then supply the NonCons with intelligence that they pass along to the Resistance. The only problem is, we don’t get to do any of the more dangerous things they do. Like guarding high-level Resistance members when they come through town, saving FeLS girls—even before your mother found out the whole truth about FeLS—or stopping a convoy of political prisoners heading to Mars.”

  “Really?” My heart quickened, and I latched onto her arm. “I want to join. How? I’ll do anything.”

  “Whoa. Slow down. I need to talk to the others before I say anything else. Although, you saved my life and you’re Alan Oberon’s daughter . . . How could they not—”

  “You can’t tell them that. At least not what I did—no one can know what happened with Ed. No one except you, Sal, Derek, and Mike—and whoever did the cleanup—can ever know. Promise!”

  “I won’t say a word. But, Nina, you can’t tell Sal anything about the Sisterhood. I know he doesn’t want you doing anything that might put you in danger again. When Ed was . . . well, I shouldn’t—” She shook her head.

  “Shouldn’t what? Spill.”

  “It’s not a huge thing. But when Ed was harassing you and Dee, Sal would borrow John’s trannie and go sit outside your apartment building, watching for Ed. Keeping an eye on you and Dee. He loves you so much, Nina. He’d do anything to protect you.”

  “He did what?” I barely heard anything past “keeping an eye on you.” Sal had been guarding me without telling me? Part of me was touched, and part of me was mad. While I appreciated his concern, so far, I’d been able to take care of myself—and Dee.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.” Wei bit her lip. “Don’t tell him. Okay?”

  I tamped down my rising anger. It was already done. No sense fighting after the fact. I sighed. “I love him, too, but . . . this issue of what girls can and can’t do is something we completely disagree on.”

  “Oh, yeah, I argue about it with Sal and with my dad. They think we have enough to deal with, just running the gauntlet of being sixteen every day. They don’t get that we need to be able to do things that prove to us how powerful we really are.”

  “What about your brother, Chris? Does he give you a hard time, too?”

  “Not really. We haven’t talked about it much. He’s always been my sparring partner in Cliste Galad, and he knows what I’m capable of. I don’t think he has the same hangups my dad has.”

  “I bet Derek doesn’t worry about you either.” I knew all about Derek’s admiration for strong girls.

  Wei actually blushed. “He doesn’t.” She looked up at me from under her lashes. “Actually . . . I decked him one night.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. We were goofing around. He grabbed me, I reacted without thinking. Bam! Flat on his back.”

  “Derek? Really?” I unsuccessfully tried to stifle a laugh. Wei was tiny, and Derek was, well, he wasn’t huge, but he was definitely bigger than Wei.

  “At least some guys have a little faith in girls. Even if they have to find out the hard way. So to speak.” She chuckled. “Of course, we did kiss and make up.”

  “So do the other girls in the Sisterhood want to do more, too?”

  “Uh-huh. We’re waiting for the right time to do something, or to help someone, outside of our regular activities. Something that will prove our capabilities.”

  My mind flashed on Joan, Mike’s sister, who was an escapee from the FeLS program. She’d been rescued and brought back to Earth from the training station. Based on what Wei’d just said, it must’ve been NonCons who’d saved her. She was living with a group of homeless women. I wondered . . . would the Sisterhood . . . No. I didn’t know enough abo
ut it. And I wasn’t even a part of the Sisterhood yet. I’d talk to Wei some other time about Joan.

  “Has your dad said anything about what’s taking so long to expose FeLS?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Wei said. “I know he gave that information to your father weeks ago. I’m sure they are waiting for just the right moment.”

  “They need to get it out there, and the sooner the better.” When FeLS was exposed, people like Joan would be helped. Even though I couldn’t do anything for her right then, maybe joining Wei’s group would give me some ideas. “Listen, is there some sort of initiation for the Sisterhood? I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “You are the last person in the universe who needs to prove anything,” Wei said. “I’ll talk to them tonight and let you know the outcome tomorrow.” She smiled at me. “They’re going to want you. I know it.”

  “I hope so. I really hope so.”

  IV

  It was the last day of school before Holiday break. No one wanted to be there, not even the teachers. Mr. Haldewick had propped his pointer in the corner and stopped lecturing for once. The entire class was having an actual discussion of Holiday traditions through the centuries. I was anxiously awaiting the last bell so Wei and I could talk, but during my second-to-last period, Hal showed up for me. I was going to the principal’s office, again. I scuffled along behind him, going as slowly as I could, all the while imagining numerous things that could be wrong. Along the way I saw Sal and Paulette sneaking out a side door together. Fortunately, Hal didn’t notice them. No matter what Mrs. Marchant wanted with me, it couldn’t possibly be worse than seeing the two of them together.

  “Sit down, Miss Oberon.” Mrs. Marchant pointed opposite her. “Your grandmother has called . . .”

  Oh, no. “Pops . . .” It had to be. I clutched the arm of the chair “Is he okay?”

  “It’s not your grandfather.” She inclined her head slightly to the right.

  That was when I noticed the two women, both in black, perched like giant crows on the bench that sat under the AV screens.