Mark Grayson
Mark had severely underestimated how much shit he’d accumulated over eighteen years. He sat cross-legged in the middle of his bedroom, surrounded by half-filled boxes and several piles of clothes. Moving to Upstate University wasn’t exactly moving across the country. Hell, he could fly back home in less time than most people spent driving to the grocery store, but his mother had been pretty insistent that that wasn’t the point.
He picked up an old baseball glove from the bottom of his closet. When was the last time he’d used it? …Still he tossed it into the box anyway. Just as it hit the pile, his phone buzzed somewhere underneath the mess on his bed. Mark dug through a couple of shirts until he found it.
u better not be late tonight
when have i ever been late
do you actually want me to answer that
…no
7 sharp
I’ll be there
screenshotting this
Mark snorted and tossed his phone aside. He’d been looking forward to tonight all week. After several supervillain fights and a few emergencies that required Invincible to fly halfway across the world, he needed this. Just him and Amber going out to eat, catching a movie and maybe heading back to her place afterwards.
Normal boyfriend stuff… and he’d been getting a lot more protective of normal boyfriend stuff lately.
The front door opened downstairs. “Mark?”
“Up here!”
He went back to packing, stuffing a folded shirt into the box. A minute passed without his mother appearing. Mark glanced towards the open door. She’d gone to another one of those meetings for the Spouses of Superheroes support group. Mark wasn’t really sure hearing how his father had hurt all these people was good for her, per se… but he understood the feeling. He’d offered to go with her once, but she said no, and Mark hadn’t offered again.
If anything, he was a little relieved she’d refused.
Footsteps eventually came up the stairs. His mother appeared in the doorway with her coat still on, looking around at the boxes. “You’ve barely done anything.”
“I’ve done loads.” Mark frowned and gestured to the messy room.
“You’ve put six shirts in a box.”
“There’s other stuff underneath them.”
His mother stared at him for a second before laughing. Mark grinned, though it faded a little when she sat down on the edge of his bed. She looked exhausted. Not physically, exactly. He’d gotten pretty good at recognising the difference over the last few months.
“How was the meeting?” he asked.
“It was fine.”
Mark waited.
His mother looked down at her hands. She gave him a tired smile. Mark pushed himself off the floor and sat beside her, shoving some clothes out of the way first.
“...Not revealing which superhero you’re with is sort of part of SOS’ ground rules, but I sort of. Well, one of the guys there called his wife by her civilian name. Alana.”
Mark’s stomach tightened. “A-As in Green—”
“Ghost, yeah.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “The entire time he was qualifying all his grief with, ‘I know he didn’t do it out of choice’ and ‘She looked up to him like a distant uncle,' and I-I… I didn’t know what to do with myself!”
“Jesus…”
“And he was defending him, Mark!” Her voice cracked. “He was sitting three feet away from me making excuses for Nolan because Cecil’s story says he wasn’t responsible, and I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. I couldn’t say that Nolan knew exactly what he was doing.” His mother laughed once, wiping underneath her eye. “I barely said anything the entire meeting, and he thanked me for listening.”
Mark didn’t know what to say. He knew why Cecil lied. Hell, he’d agreed with the lie. The world finding out Omni-Man had murdered the Guardians because he was an alien sent here to conquer Earth wouldn’t have improved anybody’s lives. It kept his dad useful, kept Viltrum in the dark, and stopped the entire planet from losing its mind.
His mother rubbed her palms against her jeans. “And the worst part is that now that I’ve come home, I’m worried sick about Nolan!”
“Mom…”
“He’s been gone, what? Two, three months? I wondered if he’s okay. If he’s eaten. If he’s hurt. When he’s coming back. Alana, Josef, and so many other people are dead because of him, and I still miss my husband.”
“...You’re allowed to miss him.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” Mark shifted uncomfortably. “I mean... I miss him too. Other times I think about what happened, and I never want to see him again. Then I think about him being out there and...” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Mark…”
His throat tightened. Mark knew his dad loved them. He turned against an empire he’d been serving for who-knew-how-many centuries for them, but even months on… the events of that day didn’t fade so easily.
She rubbed both hands over her face. “God, I wish I didn’t love him sometimes.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? Theo isn’t ever getting Alana back. Olga misses Josef every day. Nolan killed them, and I get to sit here wondering when he’ll come home once he’s finished helping Cecil and Allen?”
“He’s trying to fix things.”
“I know. But he can’t undo what happened.”
Mark fell quiet. His mother wasn’t angry at him. She wasn’t even really arguing with him. But it felt like every answer Mark could think of was something she’d already told herself a hundred times.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. His mother reached over and squeezed his hand. Mark squeezed back. They sat there for another minute before his phone buzzed loudly against the bed. He ignored it. Then it buzzed again.
His mother looked behind him. “Is that Amber?”
“Probably.”
“What time are you meeting her?”
“Seven.”
She glanced at the clock. “...It’s 6:43.”
“Shit.”
“Mark!”
“Sorry!”
He jumped off the bed and started looking around for his jacket. It took him several seconds to remember he was already wearing it while his mother watched the whole thing with a tired giggle.
“You know you can get there in about thirty seconds.”
“I can’t show up flying. Amber’s boyfriend flying down in front of a restaurant is a little conspicuous.”
Mark grabbed his phone. Amber had sent another message. He typed back while heading for the door.
17 minutes grayson
literally leaving now
omg a miracle
Mark stopped beside his mother. “...You’re gonna be okay, right?”
“I’ll be fine. Go have fun, Mark. Lord knows you haven’t had the time to enjoy yourself with your father and Ozzy gone.”
Mark sighed. “...At least he’s okay.”
Three months ago, Cecil had informed them about some alien messenger coming to tell them Ozzy and the kidnapped girl were fine. There hadn’t been much word since, though the GDA was apparently keeping an eye out there.
His mother sighed and stood up, pulling him into a hug. Mark wrapped his arms around her.
“Go have fun,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Yes. And Mark?”
“Yeah?”
“Use protection, you hear me? I don’t want to find out you dropped out because you became a teen dad.”
“Mom!” Mark pulled away and headed downstairs to escape her laughter.
He slipped through the glass door to the garden and floated into the air. The ground dropped away beneath him. He cleared the houses in seconds, climbing high enough that nobody looking out their window would get a good look at him before angling towards the city. The wind caught his jacket and whipped it behind him.
His phone rang.
Mark pulled it out without slowing.
CECIL STEDMAN
…He was really tempted not to answer.
“What?”
“Good evening to you too.”
“Cecil, I’m busy.”
“I know. I generally know where you are, Mark, so believe me, I wouldn’t call you if it wasn’t important.”
“That’s creepy.”
“It’s practical. Now, we have a situation.”
Mark stopped completely, hovering several hundred feet above the city. He looked towards the restaurant in the distance and rubbed a hand down his face. “How bad?”
“Bad enough that I’m calling you. The Mauler Twins are building something big near the harbour. It’s draining the power grid like nothing else. The Guardians are currently occupied.”
“On it.”
He hung up before Cecil could say anything else, floating while he tapped in a message to Amber.
hey
oh no
"hey" 10 minutes before a date is never good
Cecil called. I’m really sorry
Then go
I owe you
You already owe me for last time
I owe you twice
I’m keeping count yk?
love you
love you too, now go save people
Mark put his phone away. “...Right.”
He pulled his jacket off first, bunching it up before stuffing it underneath the back of his shirt. Not ideal, but he’d figure that out later. His jeans came next—Mark stopped. No, those could stay on. He pulled the hem of his shirt up instead, revealing the blue and yellow of his suit underneath. A few embarrassing outings had taught him to always have it on.
Better to have the suit and not need it than need it and not have it, after all. The shirt followed the jacket, bundled as tightly as he could manage before he tucked both away.
“...Fuck it.” He dropped all the clothes and reached behind his neck, pulling his mask up over his head.
The lenses settled over his eyes, and then he flew.
【—〄—】
Cecil Stedman
Donald tapped the glass.
Beyond it, GDA personnel in protective suits moved between rows of salvageable bodies recovered from the harbour. Most were male, though a few weren’t, and all of them were apparently the same person. Mark had been less than helpful explaining how that happened, but they got the gist in the end. Cecil cut the kid some slack where that was concerned, since he’d been having a few rough months, especially since Omni-Man had taken off with Allen the Coalition Officer some weeks after Ozzy disappeared.
“From what we know he called himself Angstrom Levy,” Donald said. “Invincible says he and his other selves were strapped into chairs on the machine the Maulers built. Levy never attacked him and actually tried to stop the Maulers when they nearly killed him. Then more Maulers appeared, followed by...” He gestured through the glass. “All of this.”
“Appeared how?”
“Portals.”
“Where from?”
“We don’t know, and the one Mauler left isn’t well enough to talk yet.”
Cecil looked back at the nearest Levy. He’d seen a lot of strange shit over the years. Clones weren’t even particularly high on the list anymore, nor had they been for a while now. He had a girl who could rearrange atoms working for him and an immortal caveman who’d gone on to become Abraham Lincoln. Twenty-eight dead people with the same DNA didn’t crack the top ten.
The fact that they weren’t clones might, though.
“Our people checked the Maulers’ equipment?”
“What’s left of it. Most of the machine was destroyed in the explosion, but some of the underlying architecture is familiar. Neural mapping, memory storage, and transfer systems, just upscaled to new heights. But the principle is the same as a part of their cloning process.”
Cecil frowned. “You sure they weren’t making a bazillion copies of this Levy guy?”
Donald swiped across the tablet and held it out. Cecil took it. A diagram of the ruined machine filled the screen. The GDA’s reconstruction wasn’t complete, but the basic layout was obvious enough. A central chair, some kind of helmet, and a whole lot of other chairs that had absolutely no business being plugged into a public power grid.
“Our current theory is that the machine was designed to receive information from multiple sources simultaneously and transfer it into a single brain,” Donald said.
“Those sources being them.” Cecil looked through the glass again as he handed the tablet back.
“We think so.”
“So the Maulers built a machine capable of copying memories of who-knows-how-many of the same person, some of whom apparently aren’t even the same sex, into one guy’s head. And apparently the main guy had the ability to pull people from other dimensions, and we’re only hearing of him now?”
“That is currently the situation, yes.”
“Fan-fucking-tastic.”
“Anything come through after? Or leave?”
“Not that we saw, sir.”
So, the main Levy was pulling alternate selves and alternate Maulers in from other dimensions? Cecil stared at the bodies for another few seconds.
“Focus on getting the remaining Mauler up and running. I want everything about this Levy guy and what he wanted to get out of this catastrophe. Offer him the usual reduced sentence if he cooperates. Toss him in the slammer if he refuses.”
Donald nodded. “I’ll see it done.”
Cecil stepped away from the glass. That was problem number one for the night. Problem number two was waiting several floors below. The elevator opened onto one of the GDA’s newer research wings. It had been cleared out some weeks ago, when Allen had returned with the very first Coalition care package. Since then, he’d had the security doubled and every scientist working inside was reassigned from anything Cecil considered less important than preventing the extinction of the human race.
A pair of armed guards let them through the first checkpoint, and he passed through the others easily. Inside, technicians moved between workstations surrounding a collection of objects that looked almost insultingly mundane considering where they’d come from. The Coalition had been surprisingly generous. Nobody had mailed Earth instructions for building planet-killing lasers or top-notch weaponry.
Not too generous, which Cecil appreciated.
A scientist noticed Cecil approaching and hurried over. “Director.”
“Doctor.”
“We’ve completed another round of testing on the storage unit.”
“And?”
“The energy density is...” The woman paused. “Well, we’re still verifying it. If our current numbers are correct, a unit approximately the size of a conventional car battery could store enough energy to power the average American home for several months.”
Cecil stared at the black block. “Can it explode?”
“Probably.”
“Find out how.”
She hesitated. “S-Sir?”
“Anything that stores that much energy is a bomb if you mistreat it hard enough. I want to know exactly how hard before we do anything.”
“Yes, sir.” She hurried away.
Cecil moved farther into the lab. Another team had one of the transparent sheets locked inside a testing chamber. A hydraulic press bore down on it hard enough to deform the metal frame around the material without so much as scratching the surface. Cecil looked across the room again.
This stuff was too useful to bury.
The GDA had spent decades sitting on technology the rest of the world wasn’t ready for. Teleportation, weapons built from things that fell out of the sky, or a bevy of enhancements that could turn the average Joe into a superhuman. Most of it was dangerous enough that Cecil had never lost sleep keeping it locked underground.
But these weren’t weapons, even if they could be weaponised. If the medical equipment did half of what the Coalition claimed and his scientists were verifying, people were dying today from incurable diseases they might be able to treat. Their agricultural data could increase crop yields without tearing through more land. The power technology could make coal and gas plants obsolete.
Some of the environmental systems could apparently pull pollutants out of water faster and cheaper than anything on Earth. Now, Cecil could keep a gun secret without losing a wink of sleep. But keeping a cure secret was much harder. If he handed all of this to the United States, every intelligence agency on the planet would spend the next twenty years trying to steal it.
…It’d mean international committees. Though for the time being, no one would hear the words ‘Coalition of Planets.’ The notion of aliens more advanced than Earth was real, but it was also distant. Paternal, like the bullshit story Nolan had peddled and the majority of Earth still believed. Nolan also didn’t look like an alien, which probably helped a bunch. And now he was off-world helping a one-eyed orange alien collect ways to kill his own species, Earth had quietly entered into contact with an interstellar alliance, and Cecil had alien technology sitting underneath the Pentagon.
Meanwhile, the Viltrum Empire continued believing Earth was just another primitive planet waiting for Nolan to finish his assignment. Cecil intended to keep it that way for as long as humanly possible.
They reached the end of the lab.
“Anything from the deep-space scans?”
The head scientist inside didn’t need to ask what he meant. “No, sir.”
Cecil’s mouth tightened.
The Gelderian messenger had arrived three months ago, looking like someone had taken a short human, turned them green, then given them a mohawk and enough technology to make half the GDA’s research division start salivating. The message itself had been simple enough. Oscar Ward was alive. The kidnapped human girl now identified as Zoe Thompson was alive, and both were on Gelderia.
“Run it again,” he said.
“Sir, we ran it forty-three minutes ago. You know the scans can’t detect him at faster-than-light speeds.”
Cecil turned towards the observation window overlooking the lab. He wasn’t worried about the kid… is what he told himself, anyway. Months on and he’d found himself missing Ozzy’s knuckleheaded exuberance. But Ward was alive. Whatever the hell had happened after he chased Thompson out of the solar system, he’d survived it, found himself on an alien planet, and apparently convinced the locals to send someone all the way to Earth just to say he wasn’t dead.
But that was also three months ago, and Cecil wanted him back because it would very much make life easier. Certainly not because he enjoyed having a smartass twenty-year-old bugging him. The Coalition shipments were arriving frequently, and his bullshit super-AI—excuse or otherwise—would very much be appreciated. And, perhaps most importantly, Cecil wanted another heavy hitter on Earth before the universe decided to throw something worse than Nolan at them.
“Director?” He turned. One of the technicians stood a few feet away. “The scan is complete.”
“And?”
“Nothing entering the system.”
Cecil stared at him. “...As you were, Johnson.”
“Yes, sir.”
Donald met him outside the first checkpoint, reading the look on his face with that usual inscrutable precision. “You know he’s going to come back, right?”
“That’s what the messenger said,” he said through a yawn.
“You don’t believe him?”
“Oh, I believe the messenger. I just wish the kid had given the bastard a date more specific than ‘eventually.’ Why so concerned, Donald? D’you miss the kid?”
“...Don’t you?”
Cecil shoved his hands into his pockets and kept on walking.
【—〄—】
Samantha Eve Wilkins
The Kate in the middle looked her up and down, and so did the other two.
“You look terrible,” one said.
Eve sighed as she entered the Guardians HQ.
“...Thanks, Kate.”
“I meant the tired kind.”
“Mhm. Much better.” One of the duplicates smiled apologetically while another folded her arms.
Behind them, the lobby where the main computer was at seemed about as busy as Eve last remembered it. Rex wasn’t around, but she could hear his voice drifting in from the lounge where he was probably gaming with random people again.
There was a new member of the Guardians hanging out with Rae near the railing—Bulletproof, also known as Zandale. He’d apparently joined up between now and her last visit here some months ago, when they were collectively briefed by Cecil on Omni-Man’s sudden and unexplained space departure.
Eve wasn’t exactly an official Guardians member, but she might as well have been one at this point.
Kate’s duplicates merged back into one. “Seriously, though. You okay?”
“I’m fine… I’ve just been busy.”
“I know. India, Haiti...”
“Brazil.”
“Brazil too.” Kate nudged her arm. “That’s kind of my point. You disappear for weeks. I see more of you on TV helping some kind of disaster than in-person.”
Eve started walking. “God, when did you become my mother?”
“Probably around the time you started looking like crap.”
“Again, thanks.”
Kate laughed and bumped her shoulder. Eve couldn’t help smiling a little.
“...So, any news?” Kate asked.
“No.” The humour faded from Kate’s face for a moment. “You miss him too, huh?”
“Of course I do.” Kate shrugged. “He was fun.”
Eve snorted. “I’m sure he was.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it like that… but you’re not wrong. You know,” Kate said thoughtfully, “if you’re curious—”
“I’m not.”
“I didn’t even finish.”
“I know where that sentence was going.”
“Do you?” Kate leaned closer. “I was just going to offer some useful information.”
“I don’t want useful information.”
“Could save you some surprises.”
Eve stopped walking, and Kate stopped too, looking completely innocent. “Are you seriously offering to tell me what Ozzy’s like in bed?”
“I was going to ask if you’d rather find out yourself, actually.” Her smile widened. “Wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
“Why are you like this?” Eve felt heat rush into her face.
“All right! All right.” She held up both hands, still grinning. “I’m done. Seriously, though. You look more tired than I’ve ever seen you. Can I help?”
“Yeah, actually. That’s kind of why I’m here.”
Kate perked up. “Oh?”
“Have you seen Rudy?”
【—〄—】
“Fascinating…”
Eve sat on the edge of an examination table while Rudy stared at a holographic model of her brain. His lab occupied the quietest section of Guardians HQ, filled with enough medical equipment and half-finished projects that Eve felt a little taken aback. Rudy himself sat at the main console in a plain grey shirt and slacks, looking so much like Rex when they first met that she felt herself thrown back in time for a moment.
She was surrounded by several screens displaying scans of her eyes, brain, and nervous system. “That’s the fourth time you’ve said that.”
“Because it remains fascinating.”
“...Well, it’s getting less fascinating the longer I sit here. I am okay, right?”
Rudy glanced at her. “There is nothing physically wrong with you, if that’s what you’re concerned about. Your eyes are functioning normally. So are your optic nerves and every region of your brain I’ve examined. I can’t detect any significant physiological changes whatsoever.”
“So I’m healthy.” Eve rubbed underneath one eye.
“As far as I can determine.”
“But I can suddenly see emotional colours and you don’t know why?”
“Yes.”
She waited for more, but Rudy looked back at his screens.
“...That’s it?”
“What else would you like me to say?”
“I don’t know. You’re the smartest guy I know. I was hoping for something a little better than ‘I don’t know.’”
“I could speculate.”
“Please,” she said exasperatedly.
Rudy gave her a cautious look. “It would be almost entirely baseless.”
She hopped off the examination table and walked over to the console. Pink light flickered around her fingers as she summoned a tiny cube, turned it over once, and let it disappear again. Her powers felt exactly the same as they always had. Matter still made sense to her in that strange, instinctive way it had since she was a kid. There was just something else now that she understood and felt bewildered by.
It started last week. Eve was flying over a relief centre, watching flashes of black that… well, it was death. It was worse at a hospital where all sorts of colours, black included, lit the building up like a Christmas tree.
“I still don’t get why now,” Eve muttered.
“Your abilities already provide you with sensory information no ordinary human possesses. You perceive matter at a molecular level without requiring conventional sensory organs to do so. It’s possible this is an extension of the same mechanism.”
“But you don’t know.”
“No.”
Eve smiled despite herself. “I’m gonna enjoy hearing you say that while it lasts.”
“I don’t expect it to last long.” Rudy closed several of the scans. “But Oscar would be considerably more useful here as the preeminent expert on these new energies.”
Eve’s smile faded a little. “Yeah. I know.”
“The GDA continues to scan for his return, but there has been no contact since the Gelderian messenger.”
“His ring can heal people with this stuff,” Rudy said. “We don’t know whether emotional energy itself is responsible for the healing or merely powers whatever process his ring uses to accomplish it.”
“Still.” Eve looked around the lab. “If I can see him do it as I am now, maybe eventually I can do something with it.”
“That is possible. Your abilities allow you to perceive and manipulate matter at an extraordinarily fundamental level. The possibility that you may eventually learn to interact with it is worth investigating.”
She felt herself straighten. “And if I could use it...”
“We don’t know that you can, but yes, you could change the world long after your demise.”
“It’s everywhere,” she said. “Like, literally everywhere. Every person I’ve looked at. Animals too. It’s like some… fundamental force of the universe, like gravity. Except it hasn’t always been here. Or has it, and we just didn’t know?”
Rudy hummed. “...It stands to reason Green Lantern’s arrival could have brought these energies with him from his own universe. Your ability to perceive them now perhaps can be explained by some awakening process that requires time? Regardless, I believe this is an extraordinarily abundant source of energy, assuming it can be safely harnessed.”
Abundant was underselling it. She’d spent months bouncing between places where people needed help. Food, clean water, and shelter were all easy. Almost anything was easy if she understood what she was making. Doing enough of it was the hard part. She could turn a patch of dead soil into crops. Or throw up houses in minutes, repair roads, purify contaminated water, and make medicine down to the molecule if she knew its composition.
Then eventually her body told her to stop, and she’d be forced to eat damn near everything in sight to recuperate.
“But if I didn’t have to use my own energy...” Eve murmured.
“You are getting ahead of yourself. We don’t yet know whether your powers can manipulate it. Perhaps the key is devices like Green Lantern’s ring—an item attuned specifically to the Green Light of Will.”
“That’s what you’re calling it?”
“It was… accurate.” He scratched at his ear, looking away sheepishly. “My point is that as things stand, you’re thinking too far ahead. We don’t know whether doing so would deplete it from the individual producing it or what effect that might have on the individuals these energies are used on. Some of them could have potentially nefarious consequences…”
“I know, Rudy,” she said.
“Then you understand why I would strongly recommend against experimenting without Oscar present.”
Eve exhaled through her nose. “Yeah.”
But if this worked as she hoped… holy shit. She’d spent so much time thinking about what she could do for a village, or a city, or however many people she could reach before she had to stop. If the energy surrounding every living person could somehow fuel her powers instead, the scale of what she could do changed completely. Maybe she could build technology that allowed the harnessing of these energies.
Eve grinned at the thought… until she felt Rudy’s gaze. “What?”
“Nothing… it’s just that your mood has improved considerably since you entered my lab.”
“Well, yeah.” She gestured around them. “We just spent the last five minutes talking about how I might’ve stumbled into a practically limitless energy source. I’m allowed to be excited, Rudy.”
“That isn’t what I meant.” He regarded her with that same completely clinical expression he’d had on until she poked fun at his naming sense. “The prospect of Oscar returning appears to have had a disproportionate effect on your emotional state.”
“...Excuse me?”
“You were visibly disappointed when I told you there had been no further contact.”
“He’s my friend.”
“And mine, too. I didn’t suggest otherwise.”
Eve folded her arms. “What exactly are you getting at?”
Rudy paused for a moment, apparently considering the question with far more seriousness than it deserved. “I believe you feel a significant romantic and sexual interest in Oscar.”
“Rudy!”
“What?”
“You can’t just fucking say that!”
“I wasn’t aware it was a secret.”
“It isn’t—” Eve stopped. “That’s not the point!”
Rudy fell silent, finally seeing that he’d put his foot in it. But it was too late. Eve could feel her face burning. The worst part was that he wasn’t even teasing her. There wasn’t a smirk or so much as a twitch at the corner of his mouth. He’d apparently examined the evidence and decided to inform her of a fact she’d known for months now. She glared at Rudy while waiting for her face to cool down… and then something occurred to her.
Eve smiled. “How’s Amanda?”
He went quiet as a violet energy trickled out of him. Love. After all, despite knowing them for years, Rudy had made himself a body because he was in love.
“Amanda is fine,” Rudy said quickly. “She is currently training with Samson.”
“Your attempt to redirect the conversation is extremely transparent.” Rudy stared at her, seemingly dead set on ignoring the flush on his face.
“So’s the… how’d you put it again… the Violet Light of Love, just so you know.”
Rudy sighed. “This teasing is unbecoming of you, Samantha.”
“Well, I guess I have been spending a little too much time with a certain goofball.”
Eve felt her face warm at tangentially admitting it out loud… and had a sneaking suspicion that she was glowing violet, too.