Sophia Jackson
Stories
11
Chapters
5,834
Words
1.6 M
Comments
0
Reading
5 d, 14 h
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The party did pick up pace after that. The sun set. More guests arrived. Delivery people and drones brought snacks. The projection screen in the middle of the living room switched to famous superhero fight footage, and music started to play. Kon put caution tape over two of the bedroom doors, but he gave everyone free access to the rest of the apartment. He might have been regretting that decision, since his parents’ king sized mattress was being used for random power demonstrations in the living room.…-
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90 “I don’t have to count Lute Velra, right?” It was Friday. Alden was packing a suitcase with all the possessions he’d acquired over the past couple of months, while Boe sat on the bed with a notebook, writing down potential good deed schemes for when he got back home. Over the past forty-eight hours, Alden had gone from panicking about his friend’s new “Hero Type”, to being absolutely furious about it, to… now. Now he felt an inexplicable desire to simultaneously hug and strangle the…
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89 Alden’s remaining days with Boe were much too brief, and they threw into stark relief one inconvenient fact about his new life. “I can’t get approval to go back home for Christmas or New Year,” he told his friend on Wednesday night, slamming the door to his bedroom and stalking into the kitchen. “All the requests I put in this morning were denied. I got the notices while I was in the shower.” “Well…” Boe glanced up from his perusal of the enormous stack of coupons Alden had…
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88 Alden stood on the packed train, staring at the name of the approaching station as it scrolled over the door across from him. He watched the words. He'd research Manon a little more in Engaging with the Unexpected. People had been talking about what "goodness" was--a fairly common discussion point, he assumed, given the number of groans it had elicited. And typing her name into a search bar had suddenly seemed like a chore that had to be completed. He'd learned that the boater's leader had an…
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87 Boe Lupescu sat on the floor in a bedroom on Anesidora, staring out the window toward the ocean. Through his interface there was a live feed of his apartment in Chicago, provided by the hidden nanny cams he’d installed. The images alternated between living room and kitchen. His parents weren’t there right now. It was a good sign at this time of day. They didn’t have friends or hobbies, so they could only be at their latest jobs. Neither of them had gotten fired or just stopped going in. In…
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86 Alden slept like a baby. Going to bed physically tired and emotionally drained on the night you’d found out your missing friend was okay turned out to be the perfect recipe for rest. When his alarm woke him early in the morning, he turned it off and hugged his pillow tighter. He was on his way to doing it, too, when someone turned on all his lights and yanked his blankets off with a businesslike brusqueness that was almost as cold as the air in his room. “ “Because you have school. You ran…
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85 The thoughts flowed through his head again as he dashed toward a wall made of the tough, rubbery material that formed all the impediments on the North of North gym’s morphable obstacle course. The course was popular, and even at Alden’s level, they never let more than three people use the room at the same time. So this slot had been booked days ago. The trainer was standing off to the side, adjusting the obstacles ahead of him slightly every time he ran it. The blocks and bars were never quite…
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“Alden…you’re…I just knew you were gone forever,” Boe said. “I handled it about as well as you’d expec— Alden was crushing him in a hug before he even realized it. He was solid. He was real. “You weren’t here when I got back home!” Alden shouted in his ear. “I thought you were dead, too!” “Didn’t Jeremy tell you—?” “Of course. And I believed him. Mostly. But so much had already gone wrong, and sometimes I thought…you know it’s not the same as seeing you with my…
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83 Alden breathed a huge sigh of relief when conversation class was over. Lute had refused to talk about the weather and had insisted on playing, “Guess how I lost my eye?” It was a game that was not improved by Alden’s embarrassment over assuming the eye patch was a costume, nor by Lute’s limited Artonan vocabulary. “Something is wrong with all the Velras,” Alden said as he took the stairs down to the ground floor. By the end of the period, Lute had been in hysterics, and Alden wasn’t…
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It took them an hour to get to campus. On the way there, Alden managed to shove his uncertainty about the meeting on the train down and bury it. He had a busy morning to focus on. He alternated between texting Aunt Connie and chatting with Natalie about their different educational tracks. Their core academic curriculum would be similar, and they might even meet each other in some classes. But while he was enduring super P.E. and lectures on Avowed-caused catastrophes, she would be taking molecular…
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