She heard the bed shift. “Because you could have been part of someone else’s power, I guess. Someone better than me.”

“Yeah, but I’m not. So you’ll just have to be good enough.”

Emily snorted. “That’s . . . nice . . . I guess. I don’t think I’ve ever been good at anything before. It’ll be different.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Teddy said. “Now stop talking; it’s late.”

“All right. Good night, Teddy.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Long-Distance Comforts

Mom?”

The line was a tiny bit crackly, not owing to any sort of bad connection or anything like that. The entire city’s phone service had been built by Optimaze years ago; it was hard to find any place where a phone couldn’t connect, or where the internet wasn’t decently fast.

It had been that way since she was twelve or thirteen. She hadn’t really paid all that much attention at the time, but Emily still remembered the superpowered inventor going to court with Ell Telecom because he robbed them of a bunch of customers. His defense had been that their service wasn’t very good to begin with.

No, the reason their line crackled was because Emily’s dad had a thing against buying new stuff when their old stuff still worked fine. They still had a cathode-ray-tube television in the garage that he refused to toss, and the home phone was an old, corded thing that spat and crackled if it wasn’t held just right.

“Sweetie!” Her mother’s voice came over the line. “Oh, I was so worried when you didn’t call yesterday. Why didn’t you call yesterday?”

“Oh, uh, I kind of forgot,” she said. It even had the benefit of being the truth. So many things had happened all at once the day before that Emily was having a hard time keeping track of all of them.

“You’re already having so much fun that you forgot all about your dear old mom?”

Emily smiled and pulled her cell closer to the side of her head as if she could hug the voice coming from within it. “No, Mom,” she said. “It was just a long day.”

“An enjoyably long one? How were your classes? Did you make any friends yet?”

She wondered how she should answer that. “I guess it was okay,” she said. “Um, classes were all right yesterday. Just a lot of explaining and stuff. You know, about homework and tests and credits. It’s nothing I didn’t know. But my professor seems nice.”

“Nice or nice?”

“Mom!” Emily said. “He’s an old man.”

“Your dad is eight years older than me,” her mom rebutted with a singsong lilt to her voice.

Emily felt herself flushing. “Don’t be silly, Mom,” she said. “Um. I guess I made a friend too.”

The line crackled and popped.

“Mom?”

“What sort of friend did you make, sweetie?” her mother asked.