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Humongous Living Room.
    I did a fast head count. I hadn’t been wrong before—everyone in any position of power within Centaurion Division was here. It was a good thing the rooms in our penthouse were huge, because otherwise we’d have had to use video conferencing to talk to each other.
    Alpha Team currently consisted of Reader, Tim, Serene—who was now the Head of Imageering—Gower, and, technically, me. I hadn’t gotten a lot of time with the team over the past three months, but I held onto my Head of Recruitment title with both hands and at least one foot. White, as my now-partner and the former Pontifex, was still considered a part of Alpha, too, albeit a very nonpublicized part.
    The rest of Airborne, also known as my five flyboys, were here as well, as was Tito Hernandez, though he’d been sidelined into Embassy life, too, as our official Doctor in Residence. He seemed to mind it the least, possibly because he was doing what he loved every day.
    Lorraine and Claudia were both my best A-C girlfriends and had also assumed the positions Reader and Tim had vacated when they’d been promoted, so they were now Captains. They were also both extremely pregnant—we expected their babies to arrive, at most, days apart. It was fitting. They were besties, they’d married Joe Billings and Randy Muir, respectively, who were two of said flyboys and also best friends. That they were going to have their babies at the same time seemed right.
    In addition to Alpha and Airborne teams, we also had several others represented. Brian Dwyer, my old high school boyfriend and now Serene’s husband, was in attendance. Chuckie, Len, and Kyle had joined the crowd. And Kevin Lewis, my mom’s right-hand man and another human giving the A-Cs a run in the looks department, was with us as well.
    “Wow, the heck with the President’s Ball. If someone wants to take us down, all they’d have to do is blow up the Embassy right now, and Centaurion Division would lose everyone who controls its protection.” I got a lot of dirty looks. “I guess you’re all hungry. We need to call Subway or something for a Party Platter.”
    I was saved from snide comments by a knock; Tito went to get the door. In came Doreen and Irving Weisman. Doreen was thedaughter of the former head diplomatic couple and Irving was her human husband. She was handling her parents’ “disappearance” remarkably well, probably because she’d come to loathe her parents by the time Operation Confusion went down. I couldn’t blame her—I’d loathed them from my first minutes of meeting them, her late mother, Barbara, in particular.
    “Geez, where’s Walter? I think we have everyone else conceivable in here.”
    Brian shook his head. “Actually not. Michael, Naomi, and Abigail are on their way.” These were Gower’s younger siblings. Michael, like Brian, was an astronaut. Naomi and Abigail, like Jamie, were not only hybrids with an A-C and a human parent, but they also had stronger, mutated talents, which was something female hybrids had over the male ones. It made a lot of sense to have the girls here, and when we needed extra muscle we could trust, if he was on the planet, Michael was our go-to guy.
    We’d originally thought Serene was a hybrid, but during Operation Confusion we had discovered she was another one of Ronald Yates’ illegitimate children. She’d handled this news pretty well, mostly because it meant that White was her older brother and Christopher, therefore, her nephew, meaning she actually had family that cared about her.
    That Ronaldo Al Dejahl was also her older brother was something we all did our best not to talk about too much. The rest of us were too busy trying not to worry about how many other illegitimate offspring, either hybrid or mutant-level talented, Yates had left around. Sadly, we had to figure there were a lot; when he’d been alive, he’d made Hugh Hefner look like a fuddy-duddy.
    “And your mom and dad are with the