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sorry,” I whispered again, but a moment later Alia quietly turned her back to me. I stood there, feeling more confused than ever. Who, exactly, was Alia?
    During the night, I woke up three times with a series of nightmares. Alia didn’t murmur in her sleep as much as she usually did.
    The first Guardian arrivals started moving in the very next day. They came in groups of five to fifteen vehicles. Looking down from the living-room window, I watched their motorcades pulling into the entrance to the underground parking lot. From up here, I couldn’t see much else, but Cindy told me that the families were greeting Mr. Baker, finalizing their re-initiation to the “true Guardian faction,” and then being sorted into their new homes, which were in this building or in similar ones around us.
    “We’re pretty sure there are spies among them, so it takes time to get them settled,” explained Cindy.
    “You mean the Angels already know where we are?” I asked in surprise. “What’s the point of you hiding this place, then?”
    “Oh, well, putting a hiding bubble over New Haven was never about keeping its location a secret,” said Cindy. “You can’t gather this many psionics in one place without giving yourself away. My hiding bubble simply makes it impossible for anyone to sense where everyone else is. You haven’t been able to sense any psionics since yesterday, have you?”
    “No,” I answered. I hadn’t been able to sense a single destroyer anywhere since Cindy had set her hiding bubble over the city. Cindy had once told me that even a proper psionic finder like herself couldn’t sense powers inside a hiding bubble unless they were only several yards away.
    “Well, the destroyers are still around,” said Cindy, “just like every other psionic in New Haven. And we know where they are, but the Angels won’t. The idea is to make sure our enemies can’t find out how many and what kind of psionics are living here. Not without spies.”
    I asked, “But if the Angels outnumber us, why don’t they just gather all their forces and destroy us?”
    “Two reasons,” replied Cindy. “First off, an all-out war would make our existence known to everyone on the planet. Nobody wants that. And second, the Angels don’t want to kill us. They want to convert us. As long as the Guardians continue living in small groups, the Angels could gather a slightly larger force and defeat them without attracting too much attention and without too many casualties, which means they could take more prisoners for conversion. Back when the Guardians had a master controller, we did the same to the Angels. Did you know that Mr. Baker was originally an Angel?”
    “No,” I said, surprised.
    “Some of us have been swapped back and forth many times. The problem is, if you’re reconverted too soon after one conversion, it could severely damage your mind. Even drive you insane.”
    “But the Guardians don’t convert people anymore,” I said.
    “Because we can’t,” Cindy said simply. “I know Mr. Baker said that the Guardians are better off without a master, and I believe we are too, but not everyone agrees. If the Guardians were to acquire a master controller again, she could easily become the rallying point for a new Guardian order.”
    “She?” I asked.
    “For some reason, master controllers are always female.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. There were still so many things about psionics that I didn’t know.
    “So how do the Guardians catch spies?” I asked.
    “With a delver,” answered Cindy, and I remembered that a delver was someone who could read your thoughts.
    “You mean Mr. Baker is using a delver to look inside everyone’s brains?”
    “That’s right.”
    “But he didn’t bother doing it to me,” I said, wondering why Mr. Baker had drained me as a “test of character” when he could have simply used a delver to read my mind.
    “Because he couldn’t, Adrian,” said Cindy.
    “You mean because I can