I was freezing cold as I trudged down the street, and my dress was sticking to me like it’d been put on me with a paint roller and craft glue.

  Silver hair plastered to my face, and I was having to blink water out of my eyes.

  I wasn’t crying.

  Probably.

  As cold as I was, and as much as my limbs protested with quivering shakes, it also felt good to me.

  The numbness was precisely what I wanted right now. It brought icy clarity that sliced through the jumbled mess of noise in my head.

  That fucking headache was back, too. The same dull, pounding pressure in my skull that made the backs of my eyes hurt and reminded me of every footstep I took.

  I arrived at my destination and pulled on one of the doors. I had to add a second hand and put my back into it to overcome the pressure differential and get it cracked open.

  The lobby was empty. I looked up at the mirrored dome in the corner of the room.

  The elevator dinged, and Colin came out first, wearing black sweatpants and a blue compression shirt with partial sleeves. He looked sweaty, like he’d been in the middle of a workout, and was carrying a towel.

  He gave me a long once-over look as I stood there, dripping on the polished stone tile floor.

  Approaching up to a few feet away from me, he said, “Morgan,” then extended the towel to me.

  I stood there shivering and stared at him. “You knew I was coming?”

  He nodded a single time. “Amy called. She’s concerned about you.”

  “It’s water. I’ll survive. Where’s Tess?” My tone was maybe a bit more confrontational than I would have liked.

  “She should be here in a moment. I take it you wanted to speak with her?”

  Several things went through my mind, all at the same time. Anger at the conversational tone he was taking with me. Frustration with Amy calling ahead. Obstinance, as I continued to refuse the offered hospitality in my stubbornness. Sorrow, because I knew I was probably hurting people who cared about me more than I was hurting myself, and all I really wanted to do was to hurt myself.

  I flexed my jaw. I wasn’t quite cold enough for my teeth to chatter, but the central air inside the building wasn’t helping things.

  “Yes,” was what I finally settled on saying, and left it at that.

  Colin gave me a long look, then asked me, “Will you please take the towel to dry yourself off with?”

  I wanted to be wet, and cold, and miserable. I suppose that I could return to being those things when I left here, so it didn’t feel like admitting defeat by accepting it. I toweled my hair enough so that it wasn’t literally dripping wet, wiped my arms down, then wrapped it around my shoulders like an undersized cloak.

  The elevator dinged, and Tess hurried out, carrying a large insulated bottle, the kind you’d keep coffee or tea in for travelling with on the road.

  She gave me a smile, and I could see the concern in the way she was carrying herself. A touch stiff in the shoulders, perhaps.

  “I made some hot tea for you,” she said, and held out the container.

  Her thoughtfulness irritated me, but I took the container. A button held a flip-top lid down, and it clacked open when I pressed it. I took a sip. It was warm enough to steam, but not warm enough to be burning hot. Lightly sweetened, with the citrus flavor of bergamot.

  The same tea I’d told her was my favorite when I’d been stuck living here.

  If Tess was a touch stiff, Colin was much more than a little stiff by comparison. I had the impression that I’d put myself on the shit-list by showing up like this. His eyes staying in close proximity to Tess told me that it was probably because he didn’t like her being upset, even if she was only doing a moderately successful job of hiding it.

  “...Should we head downstairs to speak in private?” Tess suggested.

  I nodded. The doors behind her dinged and slid open, and the three of us piled into the spacious elevator and rode downwards in silence. The elevator slowed and then stopped, and the doors opened to what looked like a well-cared-for living area. A slice of domesticity, only what I had to presume was fairly deep underground.

  No.

  Not here.

  This isn’t what I want. I don’t want to be welcomed back in and comforted.

  “No.”

  Tess looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. Colin stood impassively on the opposite side of her.

  I stared straight ahead, out the open doors, and I didn’t answer for a beat.

  “No. I want to see where I was made.”

  “Morgan, I–”

  I turned and looked back at her.

  “I need to know. The truth. I need to see it. And I have questions.”

  A pained look came over her face. “It can be… a lot. Are you sure now is–”

  I interrupted her with a “Yes. Now.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat, then offered a half-assed “Please, I need to know.”

  The doors closed, and we started moving again.

  Colin spoke up, surprising me. He was often fairly quiet, in the limited interactions I’d had with him, in my short recollection.

  “Are you aware that you’re being manipulated?” He asked the elevator, but could have only been addressing me.

  “It seems like that’s what everyone is doing, to some level or another,” I countered back with.

  “I’ll be more specific then. You’re being manipulated to come here and ask questions.” His sneakers squeaked on the floor of the elevator as he turned to look at me. I only partially turned to give him a side-eyed glance back. “Specifically to hurt my wife, and to disrupt your relationships with your friends and allies.”

  “Colin,” Tess said softly. He shook his head.

  “I just want to make sure you know that’s what is going on here, Morgan.”

  I squeezed the vacuum flask between my hands as I felt the elevator start to slow once more. “Maybe I am being manipulated. Maybe that’s why you think I’m here.” My jaw trembled, and I squeezed it shut as the doors dinged and opened once again. I took a breath and let it out slowly.

  “I’m here because I want to know what’s wrong with me, and why I’m like this,” I pulled one hand free from the metal bottle to gesture at myself.

  “Please don’t fight,” Dragon said, stressing the fight. She touched a hand to Colin’s shoulder. “She deserves to know about herself. I thought it might have been more time before she asked, but maybe it’s a good thing that it isn’t.”

  Tess turned to me. “This isn’t going to be easy, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

  I stared at her. I thought I was staring hard, but there’s nothing tough about someone who looks like a half-drowned cat standing and shivering with a damp towel wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl.

  Tess gave a sad little smile and gestured out the door at a nondescript, sterile-looking white tile hallway. I stepped out, then she took the lead, and Colin trailed along behind me. I felt like I was on a tour, albeit an uninteresting one, as we walked down the hall and turned left through a robust-looking doorway that opened for us as we approached.

  It was about what I expected. A biology lab, not of the mad scientist tinker variety, but just a normal-ass looking laboratory you’d probably be able to find in a BBU classroom.

  Tess took a breath, then started speaking while leading me around the lab and showing me bits and bobs. “I hypothesized that it might be possible to revive you because, due to the circumstances of your death, you were left with your Changer core intact, but dormant. I spoke with your parents and asked them if I could have it, and the reason why I wanted it.”

  Tess tapped on a keyboard, and a large wall screen came to life and displayed images.

  High-resolution scans of what looked like a glass ball with strange, swirling patterns inside it.

  Patterns that made me think of the gorgeous tattoos that Amy had all down her back. Random-seeming, but not, and infinitely complex, such that you could stare at them for hours and not see every detail present.

  “This is it, the core that is inside your chest. For some Changer-type parahumans, they have a core, which is where their consciousness resides. As far as we know, this is how it’s possible for there to be Changers like Weld, who have no biological material in their body at all, because he’s likely got a core himself, which is where his consciousness is produced. It also allows for anatomical configurations that don’t really make any sense from a traditional perspective.”

  “What is it made from? Glass? Crystal?” I looked as she flicked through different images of it.

  “It’s crystalline, but made from exotic materials.”

  I turned my eyes away from the screen, and she paused while going through the images. “That’s a fancy way of saying we don’t really know what it’s made out of. It’s very hard and seems to be quite durable, but it wasn’t like I was going to put it under any stress testing.”

  “That came out of me? Out of the old me? Apex, I mean?”

  She nodded to me slowly.

  I turned back to the images. “Isn’t it…” I tried to pinpoint what was bothering me about it. I racked my brain to try to figure out what I was trying to ask, but all it did was make my head pound a bit worse, so I gave up. “I don’t know, doesn’t it seem a bit small for how big Apex was?”

  Tess turned back to her computer and tapped out a rapid sequence on the keyboard, and the images shifted to a three-dimensional wireframe render of Apex, and a circle was drawn around a white dot located in the upper chest of Apex.

  “I don’t know if the size matters all that much? It’s a very information-dense object. This is an approximation of where we think it was, but we don’t really know for sure, because I was going off where it was when you expired, which might not have been the original location.”

  I swallowed and pulled the towel around my shoulders a bit tighter. The air in the lobby was chilly upstairs. It was downright cold here in the lab. I almost felt like I should have been able to see my breath fogging up.

  “When we figured out that it was likely that we would be able to clone you, we encountered the first of… several challenges,” Dragon said.

  I swallowed. I didn’t think I liked the implications or the way in which she’d phrased that.

  “Who is we?” I asked her.

  “At that time, it was largely just myself, Colin, and Amy,” Dragon replied seamlessly.

  I peered past her at Colin.

  I didn’t have any idea that he was involved in it at all.

  Dragon smiled at me and answered my unasked question. “Colin was key in being able to streamline some of the technology that was needed to be able to revive you as an adult, Morgan.”

  “Well, thanks for that,” I told him. “I don’t know if coming back as a baby, or an old person, or whatever the other options might have been would have been quite as good.”

  Fuck, I’m so stupid.

  He gave me what I’d describe as a flat look. “I owed you; it was the least I could do to try and repay the debt.”

  What?

  I wasn’t sure if the confusion was showing on my face or not, but Dragon explained anyway, saying, “You gave Colin some lifesaving emergency… surgery, not long before you expired.”

  Expired. Like a jug of old milk. I snorted.

  Dragon tilted her head slightly at my response. “I died. You can just say before I died. It isn’t going to hurt my feelings or anything.”

  She resumed the slideshow. “As I was saying, we encountered a number of challenges with reviving you. One of the very first ones was that we had to figure out a way to try and reconstitute your genetic sequence.”

  “Didn’t you have like… blood samples, or whatever, from the PRT?” I had to admit, I felt mildly confused by that. I would have thought that sort of thing would have been easy to figure out.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “We did, but blood isn’t very good for cloning purposes, believe it or not. And even with Melody contributing a fair few samples herself, we were only able to get within a certain percentage of what your sequence was.”

  “So wait, wait.” I stopped to think about things, despite the brain fog and thudding pressure in my head. I rubbed my temple with my fingertips. “So I’m not her? Not one hundred percent, even with all of that?” I gestured at the images on the screen documenting some of the genetics work that’d been done in cloning me.

  Colin spoke up to answer my question. “It’s complicated, but the simple answer is that no, you’re not, and you couldn’t ever be completely identical. There are a lot of switches that get thrown at, or immediately following the fertilization of an egg cell, and not all of those switches are recorded in your DNA, but they do have an impact on who you grow into. Some of it is that it isn’t possible to know which switches are in what positions, and part of it is the sequence and timing of the switches being thrown. Many other epigenetic factors that we can only make educated guesses at.”

  “Having a twin sister was very helpful, because we could go looking for some of that information, since it’s typically similar between twins,” Tess added.

  “But not the same? Because we’re fraternal?”

  Tess shook her head. “Even if you were identical. There’d still be minute differences.”

  I took a tentative sip of my tea to test the temperature, then chased it with several deep pulls as I thought that over.

  The tea did a good job of helping chase off the chill, and I was slowly drying out, probably because of how dry the air felt in the lab.

  “...Is that why I don’t look like her?” I glanced over and up at Colin. “Because of these epi–” I frowned.

  “Epigenetic differences,” he supplied.

  “...Right. Because of those?”

  Colin looked over at Tess, and they made eye contact briefly before she answered, saying, “No. Those would cause differences, but they’d be very minor differences. You might have a slightly different shade of hair or eye color, or be a few fractions of an inch taller or shorter.”

  I shivered as a chill ran down my spine. “So w-why then?”

  “Morgan, there are no really clean or easy answers to the questions, continuing in the direction we’re going,” Tess said, her voice tight.

  My heart thumped in my chest, and I felt each throb in my head like it was a bell being rung in my skull.

  “Please. I need to know why.” My voice strained with the effort it took me to keep it from cracking.

  I was so close to losing my shit and breaking down in tears.

  But I had to be strong. Strong for this, because I felt like losing my composure meant I might lose this one chance I had in the here and now.

  Tess planted her palms on the countertop where the keyboard she’d been using was located. I watched her close her eyes and hold the pose for several long moments, then she nodded silently.

  “Okay. If that’s what you want, Morgan.” She straightened up and gestured at me to follow her. We left the lab we were in and returned to the hallway to visit another room.

  This one was set up to be like one of those labs you saw where the people used fancy gloves to control remote robot arms. There was a large glass window along one wall, and the interior was either pitch black or the window was electronically-tinted.

  Tess led our small group in front of a table with a control panel mounted on it. She stuck her index finger inside what looked like an overly fancy fingerprint reader. The panel, studded with numerous controls, lit up a moment later.

  She took a breath, and when she started speaking, I could hear a tension resonating out of her.

  I tried to brace myself for whatever it might be, and to pay attention to everything she was saying.

  “There’s no easy way to put this, and only a few people know this, beyond this room. I’d prefer to keep it that way.” She looked over at me and waited for a response.

  “Okay, I can’t make any promises without knowing what it is, but I doubt I’m going to want to talk about it, at least, if it concerns why…” My breath hitched. “...I’m like this. Different.”

  She nodded to me once, and I saw Colin slip his hand into hers. I turned my attention to the darkened viewport, or screen, whatever it might be.

  “There were numerous issues with cloning you. Some things we had to correct for, some things we didn’t have a way of predicting.”

  I swallowed and ran my thumb over the latch on the bottle she’d given me. My other hand was clasped around my neck, holding the towel.

  Bubbling up out of the depths of my hind brain, the words came tumbling straight out of my mouth unbidden.

  “I’m not the first.”

  I don’t know how or why, but I was certain of it as soon as I’d voiced it.

  “...No.” Colin’s voice this time.

  “There were thirteen before you. We–I–wasn’t sure if you were going to survive, but you did,” Tess said. A few key presses on the control board caused lights to snap on, displaying a growing number of cadavers held in what looked like cryogenic suspension tanks, if Amy’s crappy Aleph movies were anything to go by.

  The first few looked barely recognizable as human beings, with twisted, malformed limbs, blackened and splotchy skin, and anatomical features that clearly didn’t belong on a human being.

  They were horrific to look at. I stared anyway, taking in the details, etching them into my memory.

  “The first few attempts were short-lived, catastrophic failures. There were… strange interactions between the cloned body and the changer core. It seemed like your ability was activating, but in a way that rendered the clone non-viable,” Tess spoke slowly. I saw Colin squeeze her hand out of the corner of my vision.

  “Each one lasted hours, days at the most, none survived long enough for whatever process that takes place that allows your consciousness to be transferred.”

  I swallowed, and my eyes didn’t leave the twisted corpses. I was thankful for the comforting emotional numbness I wore wrapped tightly around me as much as the towel was wrapped around my shoulders.

  “How–” I turned my head and coughed into my towel-covered shoulder. “How are they me-sized? Shouldn’t they have to grow from a single cell, or something?”

  “That’s one way of doing it, but we chose to use a different and much faster method to produce your clone, since we wanted to produce a mature version. So a large percentage of the body is printed out in a close-to-final configuration, and programmed to mature from there,” Colin explained.

  “You… have a Morgan Rivera cookie cutter mold?”

  I sound so fucking stupid right now. Ignorant.

  “You could say that, sure. Almost like being stamped out, and then someone needs to put on all the finishing details before it’s baked,” he responded, running with my childish metaphor.

  Tess hit a few more keys, and several more tanks lit up. These ones contained recognizably Morgan Rivera bodies, or rather, they looked like me, more than they looked like her. They were stitched closed after what I had to assume was a full autopsy, but otherwise looked… fairly intact.

  “Once we figured out what was causing the interaction issue, we fixed it and were able to progress much further, closer to viability,” Tess said. She paused and looked over at me, like she was gauging my reaction, or lack thereof, as she spoke. “We weren’t able to confirm, but I suspect that those later versions had some level of consciousness or awareness before they died.”

  I could see as much as feel that this was a struggle for her to talk about. I was getting a better understanding of what Colin had told me when he warned me that I was being used. This was clearly a subject that Tess struggled with.

  My eyes drifted over to his face. Gruff and rugged. Firmly-set.

  Maybe it’s not just her. Maybe it’s both of them.

  I glanced back at the tanks. “How did they…?”

  “Organ failure, mostly. It was quick,” Colin explained.

  I feel like a lot is being said between those few words, Colin.

  I nodded slowly.

  The remaining tanks lit, and there was virtually no discernable difference between the Morgans in those tanks and the one I saw partially reflected in the glass pane between us.

  “Amy came up with a variation of the cloning process that was a bit counterintuitive, and we tested it with the last few up until you. There were issues, but we got closer to viability when fixing each issue, and then, success, with you,” Colin said.

  Part of me wanted to reach out and touch the preserved body of the previous me, but obviously, I couldn’t do that. My heart went out to her. She looked like she could have been asleep, inside the tank.

  “I don’t–” My hand holding the towel slipped lower, to rest flat against my breastbone. I could feel my heartbeat through my palm.

  My chest was so tight under my palm that it hurt.

  Is it worth it? Is bringing it up just going to hurt them further? I don’t… I really don’t want that. But I feel like I have to say it, too. Like not saying it will just leave this giant purple elephant in the room between us. And I don’t think I want that any more than I want to hurt either of them.

  Maybe… Maybe voicing the truth will help with the pain.

  I held my chest, coughed, and cleared my throat. “Tess, Colin…” I trailed off. I should have turned to face them, but I was too much of a coward in this moment to do it. So instead I stared through the window and at myself.

  I took in a slow breath. “I don’t think you succeeded. Not… because of the way I look. That’s certainly hard for me to deal with, and it’s annoying that it bothers me as much as it does. I really wish it didn’t. Maybe it won’t always bother me. But there’s something else. I don’t really have a good way of explaining it, but I feel like there is something wrong with me. It’s just this feeling that clings to me everywhere, it’s always in the back of my head.”

  I saw motion in the partial reflection of the two behind me. Hard to totally make out with the way the lighting was, but I got the impression that they were holding one another.

  “...I’m sorry,” I said, the ache in my chest hadn’t gone anywhere. It was just as firmly rooted in place as it’d been before. I’d failed in my attempt to see if talking about it would help.

  I took a big drink from my tea while I let my brain percolate on the feelings I was struggling with.

  “I feel like there’s maybe a few different things. It’s sometimes hard for me to get through things. Mentally. I don’t feel like… dumb? But like everything is just kind of bogged down.” I stared at my reflection in the glass.

  “I get headaches, have them most of the time, actually. I’ve got one right now.”

  The constant companion I really could live without.

  “Bruising and bleeding issues?” Tess asked from behind me. I paused in the middle of bringing my tea flask up to my mouth.

  “Uh, yeah, actually. I assume Amy told you about that?”

  “She did not, no,” Colin said.

  I turned around, a frown already on my face, to see Colin holding Tess against his chest. She had her eyes closed, but I could see moisture on her cheeks and on his shirt. He rubbed her back and held her in his arms, and I had a sudden and intense longing to be back in the bed, squished between Amy and Taylor.

  He looked over and made eye contact with me, his face set and determined-looking. Annoyed or angry, I could tell, but maybe not specifically at me. It was difficult to try to distinguish what it might have been.

  He took a deep breath, then launched into a short explanation while stroking Tess’s back. “Your core isn’t a static, inert thing. It activates and changes along with your anatomy when you use your power.”

  I bobbed my head fractions of an inch. “That… makes sense, I suppose.”

  “Your previous form, Apex, wasn’t human biology that had been reconfigured into the Apex shape. It was something else entirely, and if you want to get more specific, it was quite a number of somethings working in coordination.”

  My chest felt crampy, but I remained silent and listened.

  “I’m not sure how much Amy has told you, but Apex was complicated.”

  I gave him another tiny nod. She’d mentioned it, but only the broad strokes.

  “Your core wasn’t made for human anatomy. It was changed to suit Apex’s anatomy and biology.”

  My brows wrinkled up in concentration. I felt like I was sort of getting it, but I was having to fight for it. “So…” I thought a moment. It was like trying to wade in the sea and fight against the waves, with each step harder than the last as the water grew deeper.

  “So… you changed it to work somehow?”

  Colin’s jaw muscles flexed, and I was reminded of what a traditionally handsome man he was. He shook his head. “No, the opposite way around. We had to change you to get you to be compatible with it. A continuation of Amy’s central idea.”

  I looked down at my flat chest where my hand was rubbing at my breastbone.

  “So that’s…” I swallowed. “That’s why I’m different.”

  Stubborn, rusty, grime-encrusted cogs fought to turn and mesh in my head. Some stuck, others turning in fits and spurts. “Is that why I get the headaches and the other stuff?”

  Tess balled her hand up against Colin’s chest, her fingernails scraping against the synthetic fibers of his workout shirt and causing the material to bunch up under her fingers.

  Colin’s voice was flat, level, and almost robotic when he responded after an extended pause. “No. That’s caused by incompatibilities between your biology and the core.” He stared at me, hard. “If you’re not able to use your power to change it, or yourself, it’s going to become an increasingly bigger problem over time.”

  I felt like the giant wadded-up, knotted mess in my chest started to uncoil and break apart as he spoke.

  “So what, I need to go back to getting more treatments? Like before, in here?”

  Tess sniffed and wiped at her eyes with the back of one hand, then spoke up.

  “No, Morgan. The core’s incompatible with your biology in multiple different ways, none of which we can fix.” She stepped back from Colin, took two steps closer to me, and held her hand out. I looked down at it, then back up to her eyes, and shook my head slowly.

  She smiled a little at me, then drew it back and folded her hands together over her abdomen. She was wearing another of her typical long-sleeved turtleneck knit shirts. Charcoal, with white diamond and chevron patterns. It looked good on her. She usually had a knack for wearing things that really suited her features.

  “If you’re not able to figure out why your ability isn’t working, you’re living on borrowed time.” Her voice was calmer than I would have expected it to be, but I saw her fingers twitching on her midriff as she spoke.

  My mouth went dry. I swallowed. “How um. How long?”

  Her lip trembled when she answered. I didn’t know why I was focusing on such small details like that right now. Maybe it was a way of distracting myself from the reality of things.

  My situation, as it were.

  “Weeks. Maybe months. Longer, if Amy provides you with regular top-offs with her ability, but even that’s going to reach a limit where she can no longer compensate for it.” She cleared her throat. “There will be diminishing returns.”

  I felt like I’d shrugged, and a great weight had come off my shoulders. Except, rather than being squarely borne by my back and shoulders, it was weighing on my heart, underneath my slowly circling fingers on my chest as much as anywhere else on my body.

  I feel…

  I half-turned to look back at the rows of those who came before me.

  I’m just a number in a sequence, but I feel better, oddly enough.

  A lot better, actually. My head still hurts like hell, but that’s about it.

  The tight, congested pressure in my chest had dissipated, as if it had simply evaporated away after the full truth had been revealed to me.

  I was struck with a very sudden realization. Action was needed.

  I took a few steps to the side and placed the metal bottle down, pulled the towel off from around my shoulders–I was mostly dry now anyway–and I stepped back over to Tess. She looked down at me, the moisture on her cheeks catching the lighting from the other side of the barrier between us and my former iterations.

  I didn’t ask for permission. I just stepped in and hugged her tightly. About as tightly as I could with my meager strength and fortitude.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish there were more that I could do,” she whispered to me. I squeezed her. She was lighter than I would have expected. And more human-feeling than I could have imagined, in my arms. Were it not for the fact that I knew better, I don’t think I would have been able to tell the difference.

  I took one hand off Tess’s back and extended it in Colin’s direction. He glanced down at it, then took it, perhaps a touch reluctantly. I squeezed his hand. He returned it.

  “I’m sorry for barging in here and demanding answers. I feel…” I paused a moment. “I realize what you were trying to tell me, Colin, and I feel like an asshole for insisting and doing it anyway. But there was something in me that needed to know, and now that I do?”

  I glanced up at the ceiling.

  “Now that I do? Honestly, I feel significantly better. I wouldn’t say I’m feeling great. I do have a wicked headache, but that’s kinda normal for me. But I’m feeling a lot better, overall.”

  Colin gave me a short nod and squeezed my hand again before releasing it.

  He leaned over and toggled a few switches on the control panel, and the lights in the room we were standing in came back up, and the lighting on the other side of the divider went dark, returning the sealed part of the room to the state it’d been in when we’d entered.

  “There are people who have made it their life’s mission to fight against, sabotage, harm, and attempt to destroy Tess.” His voice had a sharp edge to it. There was no love lost there. “I do my best to try and protect her however I can, but it’s no coincidence that you’re here today, talking about this.”

  I was pretty sure I knew what he was getting at. “Who are they?”

  “They call themselves The Dragonslayers, and they’re led by a man who calls himself Saint. He’s anything but, I can assure you.” Colin drew one hand into a fist at his side. “That’s likely who you ran into. They’re probably aware of elements of your history and Tess’s efforts to help you and your family.”

  I frowned, having thought of something that bothered me quite a bit. “Do you think they’ve been in contact with members of my family, too? Or just me?”

  Tess disentangled from our shared hug and took a step backwards to lean against Colin’s side. She straightened out her bangs with her fingertips for a moment before responding. “They’ve tried, and I’ve talked to your family about it in the past. They occasionally interfere in some things we have shared stakes in, namely, Ambrosia and Brockton Strong, but the extent of their interference has been largely hacking and financial crimes. They haven’t made any direct action against anyone in either of our worlds in a few years.”

  “We weren’t sure if they were even still operating in North America until we received your report from the PRT the other night,” Colin said. “I’m keeping a close eye on things locally.”

  “So they just…” I fidgeted with my fingers, then reached over for the tea. “They just saw an opportunity to use me to spike barbs at Tess because of their own grievances with her?”

  Colin nodded to me, sharply. “That’s my assumption. They don’t really have a reason to contact you, otherwise. They’ve been fairly quiet for months now, sticking almost entirely to the digital arena.”

  I squeezed the bottle in my hands. The cool metal felt good against my somewhat clammy palms. “If I run into them again, I’m going to give them a piece of my mind. I don’t like being treated as some pawn to hurt my friends and family.”

  I took a deep drink from the bottle, draining the last of the tea. The citrus flavor was concentrated in the final few ounces.

  “I had a few more questions, if that was okay?” I glanced between them.

  Tess gave me a smile and gestured for me to continue. I could see she was still hurting, but I got the impression that my telling her that I was feeling a lot better after talking about things seemed to have helped lessen the impact.

  “If… Or, I guess, when I die, will you make another me? See if there’s something you can figure out? Maybe something will have changed, or you’ll have new information to work off?”

  Tess looked up and shared a look with Colin, then dropped her gaze back to meet my eyes. She shook her head slowly. “No. I’m sorry, Morgan, but this project has run for a long time now, and I think we’ve gone as far as we can, really. It’s taken…” She paused. “Quite a toll on me. And Colin, too.” She rested her head against his arm when she was done speaking.

  I nodded slowly. I could only imagine being in her shoes. I don’t know if I’d have the strength to continue doing it, knowing what I did now.

  “You said if I can utilize my power, or wake it up, or whatever, that should fix the issue?”

  “Might, not should,” Colin corrected. “We have no way of knowing without more data.”

  I tongued my cheek and thought back about previous discussions about my power, or lack thereof. There’d been several.

  “Well. I guess I can start by trying some really spicy food. Have any suggestions?”

  Tess smiled at my stupid joke, and Colin remained impassive.

  “Sorry, something Insight said. She didn’t think that it was likely to help.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I took my time to make eye contact with both of them and thanked each of them properly for entertaining my hysterics when I’d entered.

  “Would you like us to give Taylor or Amy a call?” Tess asked when I was done.

  I shook my head, and we left the cold labs behind and headed back upstairs.

  “No, I think I’d like to go and walk around some more. See if I can think about things some while I’m out.”

  “Would you please take an umbrella, or maybe a jacket, or something with you?” Tess asked.

  I shook my head. “No, for some reason, being cold and wet is sort of oddly comforting? I don’t really get it myself, it just… sort of is. It helps, somehow. Maybe I’m just crazy, or something.” I shrugged.

  “There are plenty of crazy people out there in the city, Morgan. I don’t think you’re one of them,” Colin told me.

  I blinked slowly.

  “I–Thank you, Colin.” I sighed, then made eye contact with Tess. “And thank you too, Tess. For… everything. Putting up with my mood swings, especially.”

  She looped her arm around Colin’s waist and gave me a genuine, bright smile.

  It was like a ray of sunshine, lighting and warming the room.

  “Of course, Morgan. We’re heroes, it’s what we do.”

  I wrapped my fingers around my thumb and squeezed. The comment probably wasn’t supposed to hurt, but it did. It was a bittersweet agony.

  I guess my ability to be a hero remains to be seen. If nothing else, it’s a direction to walk towards.

  I nodded to each of them, said my goodbyes, and excused myself.

  I was feeling a bit better about a lot of things, but I had a whole bunch more things that I needed to sit and think about. Process through.

  I walked around the downtown area. The rain was coming and going, sometimes drizzling, other times letting up long enough for some rays of sunshine to poke through.

  It suited my feelings quite well at the moment. I smoothed the skirt of my dress under me and took a seat on a particularly tall section of street curb. It was a side street, a glorified alleyway, but the important part was that I didn’t expect there to be any traffic on it. I wanted solitude. Or at least, as much as I could get, given the location.

  There wasn’t hardly any foot traffic in the downtown area, and the number of cars on the street was low as well. I rested my forearms on my knees and let the cool rain wash over me.

  It was the perfect cover for all the crying I desperately needed to get out of my system.