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“You’re most welcome, Alexandra,” he said, his eyes shining silver in the moonlight. “I look forward to our next encounter.”

“You know you can call me Alex, right?” she told him, ignoring his comment and the promise it seemed to hold. He had a knack for showing up whenever she was in trouble and she didn’t like the idea that she might need his help again soon.

Darrius just smiled at her before saying something—a word she didn’t recognise—and she felt a whooshing of air against her body as the Globe transported her away from the mansion and towards the academy.

Thirty-Two

Alex landed in the antechamberoutside the headmaster’s office and pulled out her ComTCD, wanting to get the conversation with Bear and Jordan over with. As she waited for her Device to connect with Bear’s, she had the presence of mind to scrub away the blood that was still lightly trickling down her neck.

“Alex?” Bear said as he answered her call. Both his anxious face and Jordan’s were projected in the hologram that rose out of her screen. “Are you okay? We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“I’m okay,” she told them. “Sorry I worried you.” She made sure to keep her free hand covering her neck, hoping that they wouldn’t notice her strange body language.

“Where are you? We’ll come to you,” Jordan said, his voice strained with concern.

“Uh—I’m actually not there anymore.”

“You left already?” Bear asked in surprise. “That’s okay. It’s kind of boring here anyway. We’ll come back home now, too.”

“No,” Alex said. Seeing their startled looks, she quickly explained, “I’m actually at the academy. It’s kind of a funny story.”

She left it hanging, realising that it wasn’t funny in the slightest.

“Basically, your directions suck, Jordan.” Alex tried to huff a laugh but she was pretty sure it fell short. “I got a bit—um—lost… and then I sort of ran into Darrius. You remember me telling you guys about him? The man I met in the Library? Up in the clouds?”

“The weird guy who made you jump out of the building?” Jordan asked. “What was he doing here?”

“It’s your party, how should I know?” She hadn’t meant to bring it up, but she was still annoyed that his father had been the one to tell her.

Jordan disappeared from the hologram and she worried that he was upset with her until she heard him ask Bear if he could have a moment. Bear smiled reassuringly at Alex before he too disappeared and then only Jordan came back into view.

“I should have told you,” Jordan said quietly. “I don’t know how you found out, but I’m sorry it wasn’t from me.”

Alex sighed and looked away.

“I didn’t want you to think any less of me,” he whispered, which caused her to turn back to him.

“Why would I think less of you?”

“Because of all this.” He raised his arm and gestured to the opulent ballroom surrounding him. “This isn’t me. I may have grown up here, with these people, but that’s not who I am now. I didn’t—Idon’twant you to think I’m anything like my parents.”

Alex actually snorted. “That will never happen, Jordan. You’renothinglike your parents.” She didn’t want to judge his mother, but she was certain he was nothing like his father.

“I try not to be,” he said, still uncertain. “But I can’t help that there’s a little bit of them in me.”

“And a whole heap of plain, old, boring you,” Alex said. Perhaps quite a bit of his brother Luka too, but she kept that thought to herself. “That’s the part that matters, the part we know and love.”

“All right, all right.” Bear elbowed his way into the projection again. “Enough of the mushy sentimentality. You never explained how you got back to the academy, Alex. That Bubbler should have taken you straight to my house. And why didn’t you come and tell us that you were leaving first?”

“Um… So, like I said, I ran into Darrius. He said he was lost too, also on a mission to find the bathroom.” Alex was trying to keep as close to the truth as possible. “Your house—sorry,chateau—is huge, by the way, Jordan. It took us forever just to reach the staircase again. Then we got so turned around that we somehow ended up out the front in the garden.”

Now she would have to come up with some little white lies.

“I was desperate to go by that stage.” The words were true, even if the meaning was different. “I didn’t want to walk all the way back inside and ask for clearer directions, only to get lost all over again.” That was less true, but not terribly deceitful. “It turned out that Darrius had the headmaster’s Communications Globe with him and when he offered it to me all I could think was that it would be so much easier to find a bathroom when I knew where they were, so I used the Globe to get back here. Silly, I know, but I do feel much better now.”

That was also the truth. But she was really starting to need that bathroom break again.

“What can I say?” She sent them an apologetic grin. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.”