“Ah, shut up about it,” Nine says, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re back now.” He nods his head at the kids below, many of whom are still furtively glancing at us, screwing up their telekinetic tosses, and thus running a lot of laps. “You want to say a few words to the next generation? They’d eat that shit up. These are my favorites. The messed-up ones. They remind me of us.”

I take a step back from the catwalk’s railing and shake my head. “I’m not ready for anything like that,” I tell him. From behind my back, I pull out the small box I’ve been carrying with me since the Himalayas. “I actually came here to give you something. Lexa, too, if she’s around. . . .”

Nine raises an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, let’s go say hi. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Nine dismisses his class and leads me to an office on the building’s third floor. It looks out over the sprawling campus, or it will once the windows are put in—right now, there are a bunch of blue tarps covering the opens spaces in the wall. Lexa sits behind a desk, staring at a multiscreen computer rig. Like Nine, she’s dressed casually and seems at ease here. Her smile is wide when she recognizes me, and she immediately leaves her screens behind to give me a hug.

“So, are you a professor too?” I ask her.

Lexa scoffs. “No, Nine outpaced me there. I’m back to my favorite role: benevolent hacker.” She waves me around the desk for a look. “Check it out.”

At a glance, it’s hard to take in all the information that flows across Lexa’s screens. There are world maps with little blue dots, multiple search-bots trawling the internet, dark net forums and boxes of encrypted data speeding through processes I don’t understand.

“So, what am I looking at?”

“I’m keeping tabs on the Garde,” she explains. “Scrubbing their information if it gets made public. Keeping their families confidential. Even once they’re under the protection of the Academy, you can’t be too careful. Not to mention, some governments still aren’t super-enthusiastic about this whole initiative.”

“Is this necessary?”

“Better safe than sorry,” she responds. “Lawson and the other Earth Garde people have been good to us, but . . .”

“But then there’s shit like this that makes you wonder,” Nine interjects, handing me a piece of official-looking government stationery. I give it a quick read.

I, the undersigned, affirm that I am a naturally born human of Earth and a law-abiding citizen of an Earth Garde nation. With my signature I pledge an oath to Earth Garde, a fully sanctioned peacekeeping division created by the United Nations and administered by the United States. I do solemnly swear that I will defend the planet and the best interests of my nation and its allies against all enemies, earthly and extraterrestrial; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Earth Garde; that I will only use my Legacies in service to my planet; and that I will obey the orders of the jointly appointed Earth Garde High Command according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I look up at Nine, feeling a little bewildered. “Is this legal?”

“I don’t know, John. I’m a professor, not a lawyer.”

“Lawson assures us that it’s just a formality,” Lexa interjects. “But we’re keeping our eyes open, just in case.”

“Well, if it ever looks like they’re not on the level . . . ,” I start to say, then show the two of them what I’ve brought with me.

In New York City, the rebuilding is still in progress. A year later and they’re still hauling away the debris from the Mogadorian bombardment. In places they’ve finished clearing out, construction crews are getting ready to put the city’s skyline back together. A similar process is happening in major cities all around the world. VH Day wasn’t without damage or casualties.

I float above a construction site, smiling at a familiar flash of silver energy. In a pit that will one day become a skyscraper, Daniela uses her stone-vision to shore up a cracked section of foundation.

“Shit,” grouses a guy in a hardhat. “You keep that up, I’m gonna be out of a job, honey.”

“I ain’t your honey, old man,” Daniela replies, and elbows her way through a crowd of construction workers. By the way they watch her strut away, grinning and exchanging glances, I think this might be a pretty common scene.

Daniela climbs out of the construction site and heads to the sidewalk, where she’s approached by a middle-aged woman who walks with a cane. The lady stops to hug Daniela, and Daniela stoops to pet the golden retriever the woman has on a leash. The woman looks familiar, and it takes me a minute to figure out why.