Chapter Sixteen: Insufficient Data

Selena frowned at the screen in front of her, looking for connections.

The display was one of her favorite creations. It looked like an ordinary flat-screen, but it had full computing power behind it: a solid state hard drive of her own design and a full terabyte of RAM. It functioned as a touch screen for her, but to anyone else, it was just a cheap TV.

Across the screen, she’d scattered data of all sorts: news reports, videos, the Lartech files, and pretty much everything she knew or suspected about their powers. She’d created files on her own ability and her friends, recording observations on what they could do, the side effects, when and how they’d discovered their powers. She’d been adding anything that might be related: the lab projects, the Resson field, even Ivy’s superhero research.

Chapter Fifteen: Close Call

Molly stared at her father’s car with dread.

Okay, maybe not dread. But apprehension, at least. She had gone to Carter’s without explicit permission, was home an hour later than she should have been, and had multiple injuries she couldn’t explain. She’d borrowed a long-sleeved shirt from Brennan’s hoard of clothes to cover the scalding on her arms, even though she had to roll the cuffs under twice. She also had a killer bruise on her side, and maybe a cracked rib. It took some effort to walk without wincing.