“Easy there,” she said. “I was just coming up to find you. I wanted to hear about your simulation.”

I pushed my wet hair out of my face as I looked up at her. She knew all about my simulation. She’d watched it live, according to Professor Treebaun, but I appreciated that she was pretending she hadn’t. “One second,” I said. “I missed it by one second. One!”

She sighed. “Come on. Let’s hear it.” She turned and led us into her office, where I plopped down on my favorite leather chair.

“What happened?” she asked, taking a seat behind her desk and pulling off the black no-nonsense heels that she always wore when someone important came for dinner. They gave her an extra four inches, not that she really needed them at just under six feet tall, but she liked to wear them anyway. Someone had asked me once what it was like to have your mom be the commander, and I hadn’t really known how to answer them. In some ways it was pretty cool, but in others it really stunk. For one thing, I always felt like I had two moms: the public one who everyone else saw and the private one who took off her heels and replaced them with fuzzy green slippers that were almost worn through at the toe. And I really preferred the fuzzy green slippers version, even if her unrelenting expectations for me often made me feel like I had an elephant sitting on my chest.

“The usual,” I said. “I had no problem spotting the Butterfly, but I couldn’t seal the deal in time. I forgot about the alternate theater entrance, and I was late getting the jump on the Butterfly because of it.” I pressed my lips together and waited. You didn’t interrupt my mom when her brow was furrowed like that, and to be honest, I was grateful for the quiet. Mrs. Ellsworth had lit a fire in the office’s small fireplace, and I pulled my knees up to my chest and reached down to dig one of the blankets out of the basket Mom kept there for this very purpose. Cuddled into the chair, waiting for my mom to pass down whatever verdict or opinion she was working on, the Cocoon and all that it threatened suddenly felt like a distant event that had happened to someone else. Maybe I could just stay here in this chair and life would go on as though Elliot wasn’t holding a ticking time bomb. But the problem with time bombs, I thought gloomily, was that eventually they exploded whether you ignored them or not. Reality fell heavily on my shoulders, and the warm safety of the chair and the blanket and the fire vanished as though someone had thrown me back in that icy shower. I glanced at the clock. I had to wrap this up.