"I think I'm going to start bringing my lunch," I said, and bussed my tray.

PE improved immensely since Caffeine was now spending that period in the resource study center until her wrist healed. I learned that it was a bad sprain, not a break, so she would probably be back in PE in a matter of weeks, not months.

Too bad.

My basketball skills had improved to the point that I could actually play in the games, but Coach blew the whistle at me so many times the first game that I went home and looked up the rules. My big sin was traveling, apparently, and something called the backcourt violation. Basketball also does something called a "jump" shot but it wasn't my kind of jump. Tempting. I could really show them "traveling."

On Friday it started snowing midmorning and came down so thick and heavy that they dismissed school two hours early. It was chaotic as parents arrived or didn't arrive to pick up kids. I looked for Jade and Tara but I couldn't find either of them, so I started walking home. It seemed like the school vanished before I'd made it halfway across the field, shrouded from my view in the falling flakes. I could just barely make out the bleachers, but the woods and the town were completely invisible, so I just jumped directly to the house.

No one was home, which surprised me for a moment. Someone had been there when I'd called home after school each of the previous three days, letting them know I was going off to Krakatoa for homework. When I'd get home when promised, they'd both be there, eager-perhaps too eager-to hear how my day had gone.

But then I realized that they didn't know school had gotten out early. I laughed at myself for thinking they just hung around waiting for my every appearance. That wasn't how they'd behaved before this school thing, after all. They must have been making sure one of them was at the house just before school got out.

I jumped to the cabin. Neither of them was there, either. I wandered up and down the stairs. Buzz was working again, thankfully. I could hear the distant humming from the top of the basement stair, which was reassuring. But it still felt weird that Mom and Dad weren't around. Sure, I'd been left alone before, many times, but this was not the same.

It was snowing in the valley, too, but lightly, nothing like New Prospect's blizzard. I thought about snowboarding, but it was too cold here.

I jumped back to the house in New Prospect. Tara or Jade could call. They might go to the coffee shop. Perhaps I should jump there to find out.

I slapped my forehead. Sure, I'd hardly ever used a phone but that was no excuse. I'd been watching movies all my life. I got Tara's number out of my backpack.

She answered after one ring. "Can you believe this snow?"

Sure, it was heavy-but she hadn't lived in the Yukon in winter.

"Fluffy," I said. "Did you go home?"

"Yeah, Mom said I had to go straight home. She didn't want me out if it got worse. Jade's Dad pulled the same thing when she called to see if she could go home with me." She sighed. "They're not that far away. I don't think her parents approve of me."

"Oh? Why?"

I could hear her breathing but it took her a while before she said, "Did you do the worksheet on protein synthesis yet?"

"Don't want to talk about it, eh? Yes, I did it in class."

"You finished it? He gave it to us at the end of class."

"Ten minutes before the end of class. I'd already read the chapter."

"Which wasn't assigned until he handed out the worksheet."

"You don't read ahead? Why don't you want to talk about Jade's parents?"

She ignored me, saying instead, "What is the bit with the difference between the intron and the extron?"

"That's exon. Not extron."

"Exxon is an oil company."

"Do you want an answer? One 'X' not two. The introns are not coded into proteins. The exons are."

"It should be extron. A little robot that makes proteins."

"Well, the introns have something to do with regulating the expression of the genes, if that makes you feel any better. But it's exons that get translated into proteins."

"I don't think they like my skin color."

"Seriously?"

"Well, we're not rich, either. Jade's mom is an orthopedic surgeon. Her dad is an engineer. They have a huge house. Someone comes in to clean."

I thought about the house in the Yukon and this one, which wasn't exactly small. On the other hand, Tara wasn't crowded into a refugee camp on the Pakistani border, either. I wondered who was really doing the comparing, Jade's parents or Tara?

"Well, if that's true, it's totally lame."

"It's just-hang on a second. Jade's calling." I thought for a second she'd hung up, but there was no dial tone. Then her voice came back. "Call you later? Jade wants to watch Tenchi Muyo! together."

"I didn't know you guys were otaku."

"Hell, yes! You?"

"Yes. But I thought you were stuck at home. Both of you."

"Oh, yeah. We watch it separately, the DVDs, but we stay on the phone."

"Now that's just weird. What season?"

"We're watching Tenchi Muyo! GXP."

"Sick," I said. "Seina beats up the Daluma Pirate Guild."

"You are otaku!"

"Sure. I even have the manga."

"No way!"

"Well, I do. I'll lend them to you, if you want."

"Where did you get them? I saw an issue, once, at the anime con in Phoenix, but it was the only copy and someone was buying it when I saw it. It was the second season, Shin Tenchi Muyo! The manga came after, right?"

"Yeah. They're not really canon so don't get upset when you see stuff that wasn't in the anime."

"What kind of-shit! That's Jade. We'll talk, yeah?"

"Sure."

I jumped back to New York, to Washington Square Park. It was cold, windy, late, even dark, afternoon, and something smelled really bad. The smell was coming from a person wearing so many layers of clothing that I couldn't make out a gender, sitting against one of the two trees that bracketed my jump spot.

"Oh, excuse me," I said.

The person, man?, yelled-a deep, hoarse voice-and scrambled out onto the sidewalk, climbing awkwardly to his feet and hurrying away from me, his face peering fearfully over his shoulder.

Damn. I walked the other way. I really needed to get a different jump site in New York City.

I walked under the arch and up Fifth Avenue. The sidewalks were crowded and people brushed against me, edging around, walking much faster than I was. I worked at it, increasing my pace, avoiding elbows and shoulders, trying to create more of a presence. Fear me! I thought fiercely. It didn't seem to help. They didn't even seem to see me.

It was just like the school hallways.

Well, it was just like the school halls before they thought I'd broken Caffeine's arm.

I passed what I thought of as the pie-wedge building, the odd-shaped skyscraper between 22nd and 23rd streets, where Broadway crossed Fifth Avenue, then took the crosswalk to Madison Square Park.

It was less crowded over here. I sat down on one of the benches. Hundreds of people passed by but it didn't make me feel any less alone.

Shit. Was that what I'd been trying to do? Feel less lonely?

I walked back down Fifth Avenue to the big Barnes & Noble at 18th street. I spent some time looking through the manga but it only reminded me of Jade and Tara. I moved over to the YA section, checking favorite authors for new books. Though there wasn't anything that grabbed me, I saw several old friends on the shelves. But I didn't need to buy any of them, they were waiting for me at home.

I jumped away from the revolving door, half in, half out.

The book I wanted was at the cabin but I took it to the house, to be near the phone in case somebody called.

But nobody did.

NINE.

Davy: Phone "Amerikate" was an expatriate mobile-applications developer living in Bristol with her partner and two daughters. She'd already written an application that mapped cell towers to GPS coordinates and was quite willing to modify it quickly for the kind of money Davy was offering.

"Why restrict it, though?" she asked.

"There's a nondisclosure agreement involved. I'm not at liberty to give you more details," Davy said.

"Suit yourself. If I knew more, I might be able to give you a better solution."

"If you can restrict it as discussed, it will do just fine."

"Get the carrier's best Android phone and then root it."

"Root it?" Davy pictured burying the phone in the back yard until white rootlets sprouted from plastic.

He was in an Internet cafe in Tornoto and they were talking computer-to-computer, voice over Internet. Both their cameras were turned off but, like he did every time he used a public computer, he'd stuck a Post-it over the computer's camera anyway.

"Get root access. Most carriers lock it off but we'll need access to take control of the phone's radio."

She's not even trying to speak English.

"You can give me directions?"

"I'll point you to a website. It's easy. I'll e-mail you the app and you can install it on the phone."

"Three phones."

"All with the same need? Location confirmation before tower connection?"

"Right."

"Okay. Same procedure for all three. The GPS stuff is going to eat battery, but I'll make it turn on and off when it needs to verify a new tower. That should help. I always buy a bigger battery, myself."

"Right. Bigger batteries. Check."

"Half to start?" she suggested.

"The fee? I transferred the whole amount ten minutes ago, to your PayPal account."

He heard keys clicking. "Ah. So you did. Give me three days."

"Yes, ma'am. Uh, if I misplaced one of the phones and needed to locate it, do you make an application that could do that?"

"No need. Several people make those kind of apps."

He winced. "I don't want just anyone to be able to locate it!"

"Not a problem. You get to set the security. I use one called 'Where's My Droid.' If I text the correct keyword to my number, it returns the GPS coordinates. A different keyword causes it to scream with a siren sound. You get to choose the keyword and, of course, you have to know the phone number of the handset, right? So, fair security."

Davy showed up with dinner, South Carolina BBQ, in the Yukon kitchen at 6:30 PM Mountain Time and found a note which said, "We're eating at the house."

He jumped to New Prospect and found Millie staring out the window into a snowstorm. He put the food on the counter then did a double take at the snow piling up on the window ledge. "That's pretty heavy. I didn't even notice at first because-"

"Yeah," Millie said. "We're used to it up north. Did you know Cent's school got out at noon because of this?"

"Nope."

"Well, neither did I."