It took surprisingly little effort to convince Michelle she didn't need to know about what had happened at Tech United or the answer to the mystery of Sam's powers, and surprisingly monstrous efforts to convince the courts they hadn't been responsible for kidnapping. Elena was in and out of trials and courts for the remainder of the summer, though the last bit of funding remaining for Camp Universe covered the expenses from the trials, as well as bail.

Sometime during that first conversation with the police, Patrick slipped his hand into Elena's. She felt her breathing slow, and her stomach settled, and her pulse didn't pound quite as hard in her ears. It wasn't exciting, exactly—it felt natural. After that, they held hands every chance they could get. The first time Michelle caught them, she just smirked and said, "I was wondering how long it would take you to figure it out."

Sam stayed with the Camp Universe team in their hotel room for another week or two, but after that, the police took him into custody. Early on, they were allowed to visit him, but his case worker grew more and more icy with them as the summer went on, especially since Michelle seemed to have less and less patience with him with each visit.

After one visit where Michelle had actually snapped at Sam, Elena spoke with her in a low voice. "I've never seen you like this."

"We can't stay attached to him," Michelle said. "They're going to need to find him a home. We're not going to be able to visit him anymore."

Elena had been thinking about this one. "Do you want kids, Michelle?"

"I never married. I don't even have a partner."

"You know what I'm thinking."

"Would you want to be a single mom?"

"My mom is." Her first thought was that that didn't make a very good argument, but she pushed the thought aside. She needed to stop thinking such negative things about her family members if she was going to make amends.

"But—" Michelle shook her head— "would you volunteer to be that?"

That ended the conversation, though Elena knew Michelle well enough to hear in her voice that the issue wasn't really over. She didn't find out until a couple of weeks later that Michelle had already pulled her final strings and cashed in her final favors. Sam went to live with her in the third week of August.

Elena stayed with the rest of the Camp Universe team in San Francisco while the trials were still happening, but she called her mom a couple of times a week throughout July and August, and she visited for a week at the end of August before, finally, returning to school. She bid Sam and Michelle good bye and returned to the oasis of her science and engineering classes.

And for the first time, she found her classes to be insurmountably difficult.

Not the content—she still earned A's. She was still the envy of her classmates. But everything that had driven her to her scientific endeavors had faded. The subconscious desire to lack no knowledge; the conscious hunger for as much understanding as a human mind could contain; the craving to have control over the elements that surrounded her; the longing to impress, for her words and name to bear weight. The deep need to carry out her father's legacy.

She still loved science and enjoyed being in a lab as much as a machine shop, but freed from the forces that had compelled her to stay, she found little lasting satisfaction in the work she produced. It was pleasant but empty.

On their sixth or seventh official date, Elena brought up her struggles to Patrick. He just laughed.

"What?" She felt a little offended, like he was trivializing her.

"Sorry. It's just, I should have realized what your reasons had been for being an engineer."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, you've come a long way. You were kind of a control freak."

"Well . . ."

He took her hand. "You're nineteen, Elena."

"So are you."

"And I'm undeclared and loving it. Why don't you study some different things?"

"But . . ." She winced. "I love engineering. I really do. I love building things, and making things work, and seeing science come alive—"

"So maybe you'll come back to engineering." He shook his head and smiled. "But you've got time. Try some different things. Learn about yourself."

So she did. She took a class in literature, which made her brain hurt in ways it never had before; a class in art, which she hated for its lack of structure until she could get used to it; a class in law, which put her to sleep; a class in business, at which she was surprisingly good; and a class in teaching, which required her to help out in a fourth grade classroom once a week.

She still wasn't great with kids. But the teacher of the classroom wasn't great with science, and she put Elena in charge. Elena spent her free time building demonstrations like the ones she had for Camp Universe. For a little while, she found her joy again in the astonishment of the kids as they saw science in action through Elena's creations.

Maybe she'd keep it up for another semester, or maybe she'd go back to engineering. Like Patrick said, she had plenty of time to decide.

The professor of Elena's teaching class came to evaluate her during the last week of the semester. Elena was teaching the students to make helicopters out of paper to demonstrate aerodynamics. Her professor sat in the corner with a clipboard.

Elena took a deep breath as the kids finished their cutting and folding, keeping her eyes away from the evaluator. "Alright, we're all going to send them up to the sky, on the count of three! One, two—"

Twenty little helicopters flew to the ceiling and fluttered back down, but one shot straight down to the floor. All eyes turned to the little girl—Moxie—whose helicopter had failed.

"I think mine is broken," Moxie said.

Elena glanced down at the folded paper on the floor. It looked fine to her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled; she could feel her professor's eyes on her.

She had no idea what had just happened. She waited for the panic to begin to arise, for her stomach to turn, for her skin to crawl . . .

But it didn't.

Elena knelt down and picked up the folded paper. "It's not broken. It's different. Let's try to find out why."

"I messed up," Moxie said.

"Maybe," Elena said. "And if you messed up, we can fix it. But maybe you just made something new. Something I've never seen before."

Moxie's eyes met Elena's, and she grinned.