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wrestling team got when we traveled for matches. The bag Mom had packed sat on the bed with my plastic-wrapped varsity jacket. Somebody’d stitched and dry cleaned it.
    Kill somebody and you got service .
    I was getting warm. Shit.
    Someone “knocked” on the door, which meant they touched the screen outside and the door gave a musical two-note bell chime. Seven? Astra? That Willis guy? The main room was big as our living room back home, and they had chimed twice by the time I got there.
    Not Astra. “Hey there!” A redheaded girl pushed her way in, followed by a black kid less certain of his welcome. They looked close to my age, and I tried to guess who they were in costume. The black kid had to be Crash, but the girl I had no idea.
    “’Sup?” He bumped my fist while the girl claimed the center of the room and spun around to check everything out. She wore a baggy off-the-shoulder t-shirt that said I died origin chasing and all I got was an extended warranty.
    What?
    “It needs posters, but it’ll do,” she said. “And we’ve got to upgrade the game system.”
    What?
    Crash put his hoodie down to look around, shrugged. “Go with it, dude. It’s easier if you don’t fight her.” He stuck out his hand. “Guess we ought to, you know, introduce. Jamal. This one’s Shelly, or as I like to call her, The Ghost in the Machine.”
    “Hey!”
    Jamal ignored her.
    Okay... We shook. “Mal,” I said. “Where’s the machine?”
    He grinned like I’d passed a test. “You’re looking at her. Cutting-edge autonomous transformable gynoid unit — the best Vulcan can make. I’ve got a bet with Astra over how long it takes her to break this one.”
    It just kept getting weirder. She stuck out her tongue at him. “Says someone named Crash . In public I’m Galatea, and lots shinier. Did they stock your fridge? Woohoo!” She double-fisted some soda bottles by their necks, tossed a Dew to Jamal, a Coke to me, and hopped onto the couch to land cross-legged.
    “So.” She popped the top of her Coke. “Do we get to keep you?”
    Jamal dropped to the floor. The kid was track-and-field lean, even his tight cornrows streamlined front to back, but compared to the hyper redhead he moved like he had all day to get anywhere.
    “What the girl is trying to say is, are you going to train here? Or are you going to the Academy?” He said it like there was only one.
    And there really was, at least for me now. Legal Eagle had dropped the news on me; the Illinois Legislature had just passed the School Safety Bill, which meant that known breakthroughs couldn’t stay in the public school system — they were too scared someone like me might go nuts and start popping bully’s heads off or something. Even if I hadn’t blown up a bus driver, for me it was Hillwood Academy, the boarding school that took in the juvenile breakthroughs for half the Midwestern states.
    After all that work to get on the wrestling team...
    I thought about how weird it had been to walk into the Sentinels’ Assembly Room today. How would it feel to go to Hillwood? Hillwood the show was in its fifth season, the student council had saved the world twice, and a secret society of student-villains was plotting to take over the school.
    And then there were the news exposés that said it was really half boarding school and half military academy, that really half the student body had serious breakthrough-related trauma and mental problems.
    I couldn’t taste my Coke. “Maybe I belong there. I kill people.”
    Shelly blew a raspberry. “You killed one person, by accident. Sucks, but that’s like... I don’t know what that’s like, but you make it sound like a lifestyle choice! Do you want to run out and kill everyone now?”
    “No!”
    “There you go. Besides if you’d, you know, really had it in for that bus driver, you wouldn’t go to Hillwood — you’d go straight to the juvie breakthrough wing of Detroit Supermax.”
    Suddenly I was burning