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it. Not a word, which was just wrong . Who does that? And I didn’t dare ask, but The Kiss kept getting bigger and bigger in my head and the current security situation meant Blackstone was sending us out together all the time . My dreams were getting interesting again, and his blond mop and chin dimple were getting way too fascinating. Nope, not obsessed.
    I dropped back against the headboard, and Shelly rolled to her knees so she could get a better look. I closed my eyes but she’d seen enough.
    “OMG,” she breathed, whatever else she’d come in here for forgotten. “I’d been wondering — you used to crush at least once a year and it’s been almost that long. But you never had one of them die before.”
    I groaned and grabbed a pillow to hide behind. “Don’t say that. What do I do ?”
    “Kiss him back!”
    The pillow turned my scream into a muffled protest. She grabbed it and pulled. Since she was as strong as Vulcan could make her and I didn’t want feathers everywhere, I let her tug it down.
    “Seriously Hope, you are such a chickenshit. You never make the first move. Or even the second unless they’re stupefyingly obvious. We could pass him a note: ‘Check yes if you want to go out with me.’”
    “Don’t you dare!”
    She rolled her eyes. “Duh — we’re not in middle school anymore. But I’m not letting you do this again, so one of us is going to pin him to a wall and ask what his intentions are.” She slid off the bed.
    “Wait!”
    “One week,” she agreed with a laugh and a wink. “Then if you haven’t, I will. Study if you can...” She was out the door and on her way to her next scene of mischief before I could think of anything that didn’t involve threats of dismemberment. My head hit the headboard again. Thunk, thunk, thunk .
    Vulcan could always put her back together, anyway.
    Geez, what had I done?
    C’mon Hope. You fight godzillas, intercept nuclear missiles, give safety lectures to six year-olds. You literally threw yourself at Atlas. How can you be so scared?
    It didn’t even occur to me to wonder where she was off to.

    Megaton
    Seven showed me my rooms, like he was staff and not Seven . He hadn’t talked much while my parents were here and we listened to Legal Eagle explain everything. Astra hadn’t been lying — nobody was saying what happened had been my fault, thanks to school security cameras that caught the whole thing. But the superhero-lawyer explained what had to happen, now that I was a “known risk.” I had to get trained, and if I couldn’t control my gift , I had to cooperate in finding ways to mitigate it or “go where I wasn’t a danger to anybody.”
    I was all for that; Mom couldn’t stop crying and Dad would barely look at me. They signed a bunch of papers turning me over to the state, then they were gone .
    “Mal,” Seven repeated.
    “What? Sorry.” The guy had been freakishly cool about me all day; everyone else except Astra — who hadn’t come back — had been careful around me. Not that I blamed them. Now he leaned against “my” computer desk, watching me look at my room. Rooms.
    He grinned. “Astra told me it’s the nicest jail she’s ever seen.”
    It took me a moment to catch what he was getting at. “This happened to her?”
    An easy shrug. “In a way. Ask her about the downside of super strength some time.” Tapping the narrow brim of his fedora, he straightened up and headed for the door. “Night, sport. Big day tomorrow.”
    “Say hi to Sammy and Dean for me.” I didn’t know why I said it — sure he’d been watching me like entertainment the whole time, but he’d been friendly about it. He just laughed.
    “I will.” And he was gone.
    “Don’t rob any casinos,” I said to the door. Yeah, that would secure my geek-cred.
    I looked around. Damn but Seven wasn’t lying, either. Entertainment room and kitchen combo, bedroom, bathroom and walk-in closet. The place was a five-star hotel suite, not what the