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.“Thanks for understanding, Trina.”She wraps both hands around my upper arm and dimples up at me.“I totally, totally do, Rigel.Don’t you worry.”Stifling a sigh, I just smile stiffly back and turn to talk football with the guys.In Weight Training, I pair up with Sean again, this time for squats, since I’ve thought of a bunch more questions to ask him.“So,” I mutter, once we’re separate from the other guys, “did you check with whoever you needed to check with? Can you tell me more…stuff now?”“I, uh…” He turns away from me to pull a weight off the rack.“There’s stuff I probably shouldn’t, but if you’ve got questions, I’ll try to answer them.”Fair enough, though there are probably a million questions I don’t even know to ask.“Okay.You said yesterday I only went to Mars for a few weeks.Is that where I got hurt?”Sean takes a while to clip the weights onto the bar before answering.“You, uh, actually went as M’s Bodyguard—got special training and everything.And yeah, that’s where you lost your memory.”“So I got injured protecting her?” That sounds way cooler than a car accident.“Did I, like, throw myself in front of a projectile or something?”He positions the bar across his shoulders and squats.“Not…exactly.But a lot of people do consider you a hero.”I think about that as he does a few reps.“Can’t you just tell me everything that happened? In order?”Standing up again, he gives his head a little shake.“Even if I could, it’d take way too long.”“But—”David Jaworski, one of the receivers on the football team, pauses on his way to the medicine balls.“It’s so weird to see you guys acting like buddies without M or Molly running interference.Guess you worked everything out in Ireland, huh?”Like I’d remember? I shrug and wait for him to move off before saying, “So Matt was right? We really didn’t get along? Why?”Again with the grimace I can tell isn’t from the weights.“What you said yesterday.M.But it was more my fault than yours.” He finishes his set and we switch places before he continues.“When I first got here, I was kind of…possessive.She didn’t like it.And you didn’t like it.Especially since neither of you knew about the whole Consort thing yet.”“But once that was all explained? I still wasn’t cool with it?” For years, my dad drummed into me how important it was to get Faxon out and the Sovereign back in.To get everything on Mars back to normal.It was the whole reason we were looking for the lost Princess.I should have been totally onboard with anything that would help.“Well, it was kind of a shock, I guess, especially for M, since she was raised here, never knowing about, well, anything.Took a while for her to come around to the idea.She met you first, so you were…better friends with her than I was.And I kind of, well, took it out on you.More than I should have.Sorry, man.”I shrug, then start my squats.“Not like I remember, anyway.But she finally came around, right? The guys said you two were definitely a thing last spring.So why’d you break up?” I add in a rush.“Yeah, she finally realized how important it was politically, and all.But she’s…not really ready for that kind of commitment yet, I guess.”“She is just sixteen.Considering how long our, uh, people live, maybe she figures there’ll be plenty of time later?”Though I mean that to be comforting, Sean winces a little.“Yeah.Hope so.So, any other school-type stuff you had questions about?”He obviously wants to drop the subject of him and the Sovereign so I start asking about last year’s basketball season.When I get to last period, Ms.Raymond assigns one of the new girls to work with Abigail on story planning and layout, another with Becky for reporting and editing, and the other with Jeremy on photography.Then she hands me the log-in info for the newspaper website and sends me to the computer in the corner along with the Sovereign.Who I’ve got to start thinking of as M, disrespectful as it seems.Otherwise I’ll screw up and call her “Excellency” or something, like I almost did when I first met her, which would be totally uncool.She sits down next to me at the monitor [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]