The young boy looked from Kahlee to Nick and then back to Kahlee, his eyes wide and white against his dark face.

“We were playing Conquest,” Nick admitted with an exasperated sigh, letting his young companion off the hook. “But only for, like, ten minutes. Before that we studied for two hours at least!”

“You know the rules, Nick,” she replied. “No extranet after curfew.”

“It was just ten minutes!”

“I can check the logs,” she reminded him. “See if you’re telling the truth.”

“I am!” he snapped back defiantly, before adding in a lower voice, “Well, maybe more like twenty minutes.”

“Am I in trouble?” Yando asked, his lower lip trembling slightly.

Kahlee shook her head. “No. You’re not in trouble. But it’s time to get into bed, okay?”

The younger boy nodded, and she took him by the hand and led him to the door. Then she turned to Nick.

“We’ll talk about this when I come back to take your readings.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, his voice dripping with teenage sarcasm. “Hate to go one whole week without someone jabbing a needle in my neck.”

Kahlee led Yando to his room and tucked him in, but her mind was on Nick the entire time.

She wasn’t sure if she should punish him or not. In his first two years at the Grissom Academy, Nick had been a holy terror. Always ahead of most of his classmates in the biotic Ascension Project, he had been arrogant, selfish, and prone to bullying the other children. In the last year, however, something had changed. Nick had gone from a problem child to a model student, the perfect example of everything the Ascension Project was trying to achieve.

Among humans, biotics — the ability of some individuals to use their mind to affect the physical world through small bursts of dark energy — was a commonly known, but still misunderstood, phenomenon.

Many erroneously believed that biotics were mutants blessed with superhuman telekinetic powers.