I blinked at her, surprised. "Huh?"

"You looked furious."

"Oh. Sorry. I was watching Hector and Caffeine pop out for their after-lunch cigarette." I rolled my neck, trying to get the tension out of my shoulders. "It certainly wasn't anything you did."

Tara said, "Word is Caffeine broke Dakota's finger."

"Not Hector?" I said.

"No. He was getting in trouble for smoking in the bathroom when it happened."

Jade said, "Wonder if getting caught smoking was deliberate-an alibi."

"If there were no witnesses, how do people know Caffeine did it? Dakota certainly wasn't saying anything."

Tara smiled grimly. "Doesn't mean Caffeine didn't. I mean, if she's sending a message it is probably to more than just Dakota."

"Or Tony," added Jade, touching her nose.

"Or Grant," I said.

"What happened to Grant?" asked Jade.

I said, "His sister said he threw up this morning, in the front yard, on his way out to the car. She was glad it happened before he got in the car." It was Naomi's car. She normally drove her brother to school.

"Stomach bug?" said Tara.

"That's what Naomi thought. She was worried she might catch it."

Jade said, "Grant was awfully pale yesterday."

I said, "Was that before or after Dakota 'accidentally' broke his finger?"

"Uh. I didn't see him before," Jade said.

Tara said, "I did. He wasn't cheerful before, but after Dakota's broken finger, he was shaking."

Dryly I said, "Something he ate, no doubt."

For the hundredth time, I wished I knew what Caffeine had on the three boys.

I wonder where she keeps that video?

Mom was in the kitchen, brewing a cup of tea and staring out the window at the icicles flowing from the roof right down to the bank of snow that blocked the lower two thirds of the window. We got them every year and they were beautiful, but I never realized how much they looked like bars.

"I need to go shopping," I said to Mom.

She reached for her purse and opened it. "For what?" she asked as she fished for her billfold.

"Armor."

"Armor?"

"Yeah."

"For bullets?"

"Bullets? Jeeze, no. For impacts. I was thinking off-road motorcycle armor."

"Motorcycle? You're not-"

"Riding a motorcycle?" I shook my head. "No way. But I'm still experimenting with adding velocity when I jump and I thought it would be better to be safe than sorry." I rubbed my left shoulder. "Certainly don't want to hit anything, but motorcycle armor is also designed to stay on when the wind is tearing at you and that's gotta be a good thing." I was serious about that part. Losing my panties in the wash was not a treasured memory.

And while it was true I didn't want to hit any stationary objects, the same wasn't necessarily true in regards to certain people.

Mom thought it over.

"You're not immortal, you know."

I blinked. "What?"

"You can die. You can be severely injured. You can break bones."

I thought about Dakota's broken finger. "I know. Why do you think I want armor?"

"Armor won't keep your brain from bouncing off the inside of your skull if you impact something and decelerate to a complete stop. I'm going to tell you something and I promise it isn't personal. It's about all teenagers."

"Is this going to take long?"

She tapped her purse. "Who was it that wanted something?"

I dropped down onto a kitchen chair, crossed my legs and sat up straight, all attention.

She snorted, then said, "Teenagers tend to think they're immortal. It's probably evolutionary. When the hunter gatherers were attacked by predators, it probably helped that the young men and women distracted the attackers long enough for the older folks to get the children out of harm's way. If these young hotheads didn't survive it, at least the adults, with the tribes' store of experience, and the children, with their genes, survived further."

Mom leaned over and looked in my eyes. "Don't be the one who gets eaten by the saber-tooth, all right? It's no longer an evolutionary advantage."

"I will definitely avoid any saber-tooths I see."

Mom stared at me steadily.

"And I'll be careful."

She shook her head and sighed.

Mom jumped us to San Antonio International Airport, to a cul-de-sac near one of the bathrooms outside security. She made both of us wear hats.

"Video cameras."

Our destination was up U.S. 281, almost close enough to the airport to walk, but we took a cab.

"Moto Liberty?" I asked, once the cab had dropped us at the store.

"They got good online reviews."

I ended up with an Alpinestars Stella Bionic 2 Protection Jacket. It had a fully armored spine, shoulder, chest, and elbow protection, and it looked cool: black with thin purple trim around each of the plates. Matching pants, thin, went under a pair of articulated knee/shin armor that cost more than the jacket did. When I added boots, I felt like the Terminator. We finished the outfit with armored gloves designed to save your fingers when you drive a motorcycle too close to a tree; goggles; and an open-faced helmet.

"Wouldn't you be safer with a fully enclosed helmet?"

"I don't want people sneaking up on me," I said, touching my ear.

"What kind of motorcycle does she ride?" the salesman asked Mom.

"A Kawasaki KX-65," Mom said. "She's just sixteen, after all."

He looked me over and nodded judiciously.

Outside, lugging our bags of gear, I asked, "Is that an appropriate motorbike for me?"

"Of course not! But the same forum that recommended this store talked about that model for lightweight, experienced teens. And by experienced, I mean experienced at racing motocross-which means, I guess, teens whose parents want them to die."

"Don't sugarcoat it, Mom. Say what you really feel."

We walked around the corner and jumped home.

I wondered how fast I could go in my new outfit.

Turns out there was an app for that.

My smartphone's GPS default interface could display velocity but it wrongly assumed that I'd just want to measure speeds parallel to the surface of the planet. So, sitting in a car, you could tell how fast you were going along the road, but in an elevator, it would show you as stationary, even if you were rising upward at twenty feet a second.

But there are pilots and hang-gliders who do want that vertical velocity, so there was a variometer app that would measure your velocity in three dimensions: sideways, up, or on a thirty-degree glide path. It also displayed altitude.

I bought a phone case, designed for runners, that strapped firmly around my forearm. Last thing I wanted was to drop my phone while moving at a 180 miles an hour.

It took me fifty jumps in the desert, near the pit, to determine that 180 mph was the edge of my comfort zone, the equivalent of a skydiver assuming a head-down, streamlined posture while plummeting.

The air rushing by at this speed sounded like a hurricane and my clothing snapped and tugged, but it didn't rip and it didn't come loose.

The goggles were a must.

Standing in the same sandy wash where I'd first experimented with velocity, I added 180 miles an hour vertical speed and shot into the air, my eyes glued to the speedometer on the smartphone display. As my velocity diminished, the sound went from the roaring shriek to a howl, to a whistling rush, to a gentle breeze. When the gauge read zero, I glanced away from the screen and, shocked at how high I was, I flinched all the way back to the reading nook under my bed.

I hadn't done the math ahead of time.

I did it now, in my head, then checked it on my computer. Fudging for air drag, I'd risen for over eight seconds and reached a thousand feet above the ground.

I did this several times, flying straight up. Usually, as soon as I began dropping again, I'd jump back down to the sandy wash. The next time, when I coasted to a stop near the apex, I added another 180 miles per hour upward and shot another thousand feet into the air.

The ground looked scary-far and the horizon was opening up around me. I did it again and this time, I didn't look at the altimeter. I just waited until the air stopped whistling past my helmet, then did it again, and again, my ears popping almost continuously. When I finally looked at the altimeter it read eight thousand feet, a full mile above the ground below.

If I keep this up, I'm going to need an oxygen set.

I stopped adding velocity and let myself drop, tilting forward into the skydiver's spread-eagle. In fifteen seconds I'd stabilized at 119 miles per hour, about two miles a minute, but I'd dropped several hundred feet in the interval. The ground was still far away, but the altimeter scared me. Not because of the altitude it was reading but because how fast the numbers were changing.

I jumped back to the ground, shivering.

It wasn't that cold here-in fact the sand was pleasantly warm. But a mile higher, with the wind tearing by at over a hundred miles per hour, it was not warm.

I stretched out on the sand, face up, and thought about Mom's homily about throwing myself before a saber-tooth.

No, I thought. The objective is to let someone else do it.

Grant missed one day and returned to school the next morning.

"Let's talk."

Grant whipped his head around, flinching. But when he saw it was just me, the panicked look faded.

But not completely.

"I can help you, you know," I said.

We were in the hallway, near the library. Grant had just come in from the parking lot, where his sister had parked.

He kept moving, still looking around nervously. I matched his step, waiting for him to say something, but he didn't. His destination was the oak bench directly across from admin, in plain sight of the receptionist.

Ah. Sanctuary, or at least witnesses. A place where Caffeine's gang was unlikely to jump him.

I sat down beside him.

"So, bloody nose for Tony. Broken finger for Dakota. What do you think they've got in mind for you?"

He squirmed on the bench. "Leave me alone."

I shook my head. "The thing is, if you ask me, I will. But try asking Caffeine to let you alone-I don't think that will work. Didn't you already try that?"

"We can't-" He shut his mouth and looked down at his lap. It was Caffeine, walking in from outside. She'd already spotted Grant and turned in our direction. She had a pencil in her hand, rolling it between her fingertips and thumb. She didn't look at Grant but as she passed in front of him, she took the pencil between both hands and broke it in two.

Grant jerked back against the bench and it rocked underneath me.