“Where would you like me to begin?”

  I let her question hang in the air for a few seconds, partially to process it, partially to let Lady Liberty squirm a little bit and give me some reaction to work from. I did let my ears wiggle and twitch a tad, though, just to make it clear that I’d heard her and was mulling it over. Where did I want her to start? Well, the beginning was usually a good place to start, yes, but there were multiple beginnings here, depending on the topic and context.

  So rather than go back to the start, I instead started with the one that had most surprised me, the one my inner gossip girl was most curious about.

  “I’ll admit to not really keeping up with all the superhero gossip, but…” I nodded towards the photo album that still lay on the table. “I’m pretty sure even I would’ve heard pregnancy rumors, if only because they would’ve flowed out from you to every other NMR Moonshot, active or not.”

  An odd little smile pulls at the corners of Mariem’s mouth, but the darkness in her eyes turns it rather bittersweet. Rather than answer immediately, she pulls the photo album towards her, and flips it back several pages from where Hounaida was showing me the pictures of herself and Zara the rescue fox. She flips another few pages, then turns it back towards me, fingers pointing at the top right photo of the left page.

  In that photo, a younger woman who looked enough like Mariem to be family was hugging her, her and Mariem’s hands on either side of her pregnant belly.

  “I cannot get pregnant.” Her voice was soft, more of breath with words than actually speaking, but full of emotion. “It — no, that’s not strictly true. I could get pregnant, but I have seen and heard from others that their powers stop extending to the child they carry partway through the first trimester. And…”

  “And if that holds true for you too,” I continued where she left off, “then there’s no way the fetus would survive the G-forces.”

  I’d seen and heard the statistics, too — the NMR made all of its female Moonshot with more physical powers sit through a lecture on what our powers could mean for pregnancy. It was about an 80/20 split on having the powers stop protecting the fetus versus extending that protection, with most of that twenty percent being A2 Moonshot. We didn’t know why, but, well… that was just the way of things, unfortunately.

  I had no interest in pregnancy, and even less in having children — I didn’t trust myself not to somehow overcorrect from the parental trauma that had been inflicted upon me — but the NMR still warned me that my teleportation and fire-body would probably kill any fetus. And, well, that was music to my ears, certainly… but I strongly doubted that I was part of the rule so much as an exception.

  I looked back at the photograph, my tail swaying in thought. I didn’t know much about Middle Eastern familial culture, but given the connected homes, that Mariem’s biography was explicit about her family being refugees from Tunisia, and the picture she’d shown me…

  “A surrogate?”

  “My sister Yusra,” she confirmed. “She carried both Hounaida and her own son Kalid. I… I did not even ask that of her,” she said with a wet chuckle, swallowing heavily before continuing. “She offered. She and her husband could not conceive any other way, and since there was already a chance of multiple children… why not?”

  “And the fox obsession was just…” I flicked an ear and waved a hand airily, before fixing her with a look halfway between a side-eye and a glare. “Happy coincidence. Or unhappy for you, I suppose.”

  “… ah.” Mariem wilted, her expression reading to me as ‘awkwardly aggrieved’. “I wish I had a better answer for you. And I will admit to having taken my time, as it were. Better to give her that chance to make her own impression before polluting it with my own past mistakes.”

  “Seriously?” I scoffed. “Mariem, that girl wasn’t even born in the same decade as your most high-flying of fucked-up assumptions. Did you really, truly think that I would think less of a child for the sole fact that she’s yours?”

  “Yes.”

  I winced, ears pulling low as I resisted the urge to hiss at her.

  “Yes, I did,” she continued, completely ignoring my response to her opening, “because it would be no less than I deserved.”

  “Okay, no.” I jabbed at the table to punctuate my words. “First, it’s not about what you do or don’t deserve, because you are you, and your daughter is her own person! And second, would I even be here in the first place if I were the type of person to act the way you worried I would?”

  “That—” I interrupted her by jabbing the table again, thwacking the carpeted floor behind me with my tail, and bringing my ears forward then back again. “I — no, no. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Mhmm,” I hummed, then let my ears spring back up into a less tense, wary position. “Now, before we both say more things we’ll regret, maybe it’s best we take the obvious segue and go from saying why you seemed to expect I wouldn’t be here into explaining why you asked me here in the first place.”

  “Okay,” she conceded, rocking back and forth slightly on her cushion seat. “How much do you already know?”

  “Give me a moment. But assume I’m starting from zero and go from there.” I’d started reaching for my bag as I spoke, and with my request made, I pulled out a notepad, four different colors of pen, and my dictaphone, which I set on the table and instantly got going. “Fair warning, this will record what’s being said, but it’s my backup device. That means it doesn’t have any ability to wirelessly connect, runs on disposable batteries, only saves to the memory card, and I’ll only be reviewing the recording on an airgapped, unplugged device to ensure nothing leaks.”

  Translation — so long as I didn’t fuck up, this recording wasn’t something Wiretap could listen in on. As much as I had held a grudge against Lady Liberty for valid reasons, she had held a much more justified one against Wiretap for even longer. Hell, if I’d had any reason to suspect my criminal case was in any way related to this, I’d have used it as an excuse to recuse myself. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one, so I couldn’t recuse.

  But given the scare I’d been given by Wiretap and her power just yesterday, I would have been remiss not to ensure those protections were in place for Mariem’s issue.

  Even with that, she still gave my dictaphone the stink-eye. But once it became clear I wasn’t going to budge on this, she just sighed, took a deep breath, and started talking.

  “It started back in 2012. I was still based out of Los Angeles — it was about as far as I could get from New York, which was where everybody assumed I’d set up shop. Lady Liberty, Statue of Liberty.” She rolled her eyes, and I flicked an ear in commiseration. “It was around that time that the various NMR branches started receiving odd fan mail for me. Initially it was… well, actually. Did you, um, ever receive fan mail?”

  “I still do,” I grumbled, ears falling limp in dismay. “At least most of it tends to be in Japanese nowadays, and those fans tend to be a bit more respectful than some of the stuff I used to get…”

  I shuddered. Yeah, it was somewhat annoying having to swing by the Japanese Embassy every month for another batch of letters, prayers, ofuda, ema, and more. But at least it wasn’t the sort of lustfully drawn pornographic material that kept ‘gracing’ my NMR-maintained PO Box during those mercifully short two years in Chicago. And before anybody said anything, no, I wasn’t under any illusions that the Japanese audience was somehow not sending me any of that shit, too.

  The difference was that the Japanese civil servants screening that mail actually listened when I told them I didn’t want any of that shit. The American ones didn’t give a flying fuck, and just added to the raunchy jokes themselves.

  “I can only imagine,” Mariem offered, her smile sympathetic. “And I suppose that you can only imagine why these instances of fan mail would have been ‘odd’ enough to stand out, given what you’re used to. And… well, they used photographs as a base.”

  “Photos of what?” I prompted, lowering one ear. Using photos ‘as a base’ implied a few things, certainly, but nothing sinister as of yet.

  “Everyday things. Eating, talking, smiling… just, simple interactions with the general public. And they were collages. Artistic little things, with drawings and cute little designs. I didn’t think much of them at first, and even showed one during an interview, when they asked me to share what kinds of things I received as fan mail.”

  “So what changed?” I grabbed my red pen and drew in a delta between that line of notes and the next, then looked back up to meet Mariem’s gaze. “What took it from ‘innocent enough’ to being something troublesome, if not outright problematic?”

  “Where they came in, and the content. Those first ones, including the one I shared? They all arrived at the PO Box for Manhattan’s NMR branch. The next set instead appeared all over the western United States. Houston, Denver, Vegas, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Seattle…”

  “And Los Angeles,” I added, to which Mariem nodded. “And what about the contents? What changed?”

  “The first few were just these fluffy things, little headlines about this bit of heroism or that combined with photographs. But this second round?” She shuddered. “They were still photographs of Lady Liberty, but they’d been staged, almost. Put inside scenes from Hallmark movies or romantic comedies, with a nondescript man set as the target of the smile, or as a conversation partner, or the like.”

  … oh. Ooh, okay, that, um.

  “And had the aesthetic changed at all?” I pressed, trying to keep the disgust I felt out of my voice, though the way I’d wrapped my tail around to my front and started stroking my fur with my right hand certainly broadcast my feelings on the matter. “Or was it the same arts-and-crafts, almost fluffy sort of thing?”

  “Not that first new batch, no. But the next was using much higher-quality photographs and materials. It had a more professional look to it, like it had… I don’t know, gone from a hobby to a passion, maybe?” She pinched at the hem of her top, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wore completely through it by the time we were done talking, even if she followed my gaze and hurriedly let go before doing any damage.

  “What about frequency and location?” I sketched out a very shoddy outline of the United States, one that would probably have had my elementary school teachers yelling at me, but that didn’t matter. “You said the innocent one was from Manhattan, and the first odd ones were along the American Southwest into the West Coast. What about this next batch? And how much later did it come than the ones before?”

  “Three months later. And… mm.” She reached for my blue pen, and filled in a few dots along the western edge of my badly-drawn USA. “San Diego at the southern end. Seattle up north. And every NMR PO Box along the coast in between.”

  Which meant that Nevada, Utah, Texas, and Colorado had been eliminated.

  “And this kept happening?” I circled the various dots, which were meant to correlate to the rough location of major cities. “Another set of these things every three months, but getting sent to fewer and fewer locations?”

  “Until eventually it was just Los Angeles and San Francisco by the end of 2014,” she confirmed. “The last straw was 2015, when Hounaida had started pre-school. At the time, my husband, Waqas, helped run the nonprofit I worked with to resettle my fellow Tunisians here in the States. And that nonprofit’s mailroom received one of these pieces of mail meant for me.”

  Oh, shit.

  “And at that point it didn’t matter whether this person sent it there because the nonprofit worked with you, or because your husband helped run it,” I guessed. “They’d already gotten too close for comfort, and if they found your husband’s workplace, it wouldn’t have been much of a leap to get from there, to him, to you.”

  “We all packed our bags that night,” Mariem explained. “Us and Hounaida, my sister and her family, our parents too. My brother Yasseen chose to stay in the area. He had just bought a house, and didn’t work in a field that would let him move. But the rest of us said that enough was enough. I called in favors, pulled some strings. And now we live here.”

  “And now you live here.” I pursed my lips in thought, ears twitching forward and back as I tried to parse this. “Did the NMR help you with this problem at all?”

  “They finally admitted something might be amiss after Waqas’ work received mail for me, but aside from that?” She shook her head. “They denied that there was a problem until they could no longer, and asserted that it had been solved with no real proof.”

  “What about when things started up again? I don’t see how they could admit a problem was big enough to need you to relocate, only for them to deny its existence when it comes back up.”

  “They have done nothing,” she revealed, tone somewhere between somber and dour. “They solved the problem already, they’d said. There was no more issue, and Lady Liberty couldn’t afford to let ghosts of the past trouble her.”

  I resisted the urge to scoff. It was probably less that they’d actually believed the problem to be solved as opposed to some higher-up refusing to lose face by admitting to not having actually solved anything, and leaning on Lady Liberty’s public image to make Mariem shut up about it.

  But I didn’t give voice to any of this. As much as I’d long wanted Lady Liberty to have some sort of comeuppance, this wasn’t how I would have wanted such a thing to happen. Not in the form of something quite so serious and personal as this. Maybe a small bit of public embarrassment, a blemish on the face of her perfect PR.

  But not this. Never something like this.

  “I wish I could say I was surprised, but… I’m really not. I’m sorry.” It was less me actually apologizing than it was commiseration, but Mariem offered a brief if aggrieved smile regardless. “Okay. Obviously this whole mess started back up again. How long has it been, and has the pattern repeated at all?”

  “The first repeat instance was about a year ago now,” she said. “They were sent to every NMR branch from Virginia to Maine, initially. Then it was just Virginia up through New England. Then it was New York down to Virginia. And this March was just Virginia, DC, and Maryland.”

  “Which means this person is somehow narrowing it down, and we still don’t know how,” I murmured, marking the locations on my rudimentary map. That was going to be a major issue here, really — no random civilian should have been able to track Lady Liberty in the first place. That somebody was managing to do so at all was worrying.

  The answer probably lay in the four-year gap, that dead zone between when Mariem’s family moved here in 2016 to the resumption in 2020. And if I wanted to even guess at how he was tracking her, I’d need to get some baseline understanding of what might have been available to a member of the general public, what somebody outside the NMR or FMB might have used as a starting point.

  The other option was to take the mailings themselves and work backwards from there — but if this guy had been subtle enough not to throw up any red flags in nine years, then that probably wouldn’t be enough on its own. I was still going to need something to get me started on grinding all of this BS to a halt, if not outright finding the guy and taking a more direct tack, but this wasn’t a simple matter of working forwards or backwards.

  This was bureaucratic triangulation, plain and simple. And the more data points I had for this, the better.

  “Who knows your location when you’re out and about as Lady Liberty?” I asked as I took some quick notes regarding possible next steps. “Where you start out, where you go, where you call it for the day, that sort of thing?”

  “The FAA, NORAD, the NOAA, and NASA.”

  I blinked, my ears flicking in confusion.

  “I’m sorry, what? Did I hear you correctly — NASA? Really?”

  “I can’t make calculations on the Coriolis effect by myself,” Mariem said, as though that explained anything.

  “... you know what? I’m going to just pretend I understand what that means and make a note that those sources probably aren’t available to civilians,” I muttered, shaking my head to clear away the mental clutter. “Okay. What about the actual mailings themselves? Do you have any of them handy?”

  “The NMR keeps them, just like all the other fan mail its supers receive. Didn’t you say you received fan mail?”

  “Yes, but I’m not exactly a normal case, and — you know what? Nevermind. Better follow-up: do you know where the NMR is keeping it all?”

  “SJA Barnes had it collected and sent to the Joint Force Headquarters in DC for review. Or, well, it was supposed to be for review.” Mariem scoffed, a bit of anger creeping into her expression. “Then she got orders to stand down and not reopen a closed matter.”

  Ah. Of course.

  “Even so, it should all still be there,” Mariem continued. “It will just be a matter of getting access to it.”

  “Which I don’t have, you’re not allowed to ask for, and Megan isn’t allowed to give… okay, that complicates things, but I’ll figure it out.”

  “You have an idea, then?” Mariem’s eyes shone with curiosity, even as her tone moved a bit towards the conspiratorial.

  “Maybe, but that idea might be dead in the water, so I’d rather not say anything until I have Plans B through D ready to go first.”

  That was a lie. It was also one I fully expected Mariem to call me out for saying to her face, but no. She just nodded and accepted it, which…

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  My ears flicked back in confusion. I could’ve sworn I remembered some faint accusations of knowing I was lying to her face all those years ago, how her powers told her that. It was one of the reasons I’d been so wary of sitting down with her, one of those things I’d been afraid to even think in case whatever principles or mechanisms her cognitive or intuitive power operated on could pick up on that.

  But I’d just lied to her face, and… no response? Nothing? Nothing at all?

  … huh.

  “In any case!” I cleared my throat and flicked my tail in an attempt to take back the initiative that definitely wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t let it happen. “We don’t know how this, ah, miscreant—”

  “Stalker,” Mariem interrupted. “Please. Just call this person what they are.”

  “… if you insist,” I sighed. “We still don’t know what this stalker is doing to track you down, so while I would normally advise changing up your routine in subtle ways to try and shake him loose, that only works when we know the possible vectors. Fact of the matter is? We don’t know. And trying to figure out the ‘how’ is step one. Once we know how he’s finding you, we can cut off those sources of information one at a time, then seal off any avenues of approach.”

  “And if he escalates?” Mariem asked, glancing at the photo album that still sat on the table. “What then?”

  “… you won’t like it, but that would actually make things easier,” I admitted. “There are a lot more options available to me when imminent danger comes into play, especially imminent danger to civilians. Doubly so for children. But!” I held up a hand to try and calm Mariem, who had let out a sharp hiss when I raised the possibility of her daughter and nephew being at risk. “But. This person? Whoever he is? The one trait he’s exemplified so far is patience. Most stalkers simply don’t have the self-control to keep to this kind of slow progression or narrowing-down of possibility. And given Megan came to me so things would stay quiet rather than going for a nuclear option, then unless she and I have both gravely misjudged things, things won’t escalate to the point Hounaida and… Kalil, you said?”

  “Kalid.”

  “Right, sorry; not always the best with names. Regardless — if things somehow escalate to the point someone else in your family is in danger, especially if that someone is Hounaida or Kalid, that frees both Megan and me to put stronger cards into play. We’d rather not have to, rest assured, but contingency plans exist for a reason.”

  “You make a plan you hope to never use, such that if the time comes when you must, you are not paralyzed by indecision,” Mariem said, showing agreement by way of finishing the explanation.

  “Which is why I need you to make sure the rest of your family knows that this is happening. Yes, that includes Hounaida and Kalid,” I added, much to Mariem’s visible displeasure. “We adults have a habit of self-censoring our observations based on bias and preconceptions. Children don’t, and that means they can and do catch things we don’t consider important. Wisdom from the mouths of babes, Mariem.”

  The other woman looked like she very badly wanted to refute my assertion, and had even floated an inch or two off the ground in agitation.

  “I know you want to protect them,” I continued. “But until we know how this stalker is tracking you, we need to consider every possibility. And that means looking out for every possibility — even something as simple as seeing an unfamiliar delivery truck driver in the neighborhood can be the crucial bit of information we’re missing.”

  Mariem very much did not like my suggestion — her neck and jaw tensed, her eyes narrowed, and her fingers picked at the hem of her top again. But as much as I could tell she wanted to argue, she wasn’t stupid. She knew that I wouldn’t be suggesting this if it weren’t important, that I wouldn’t be telling her to burden the rest of her family with this knowledge without purpose.

  But after a tense few seconds, she seemed to come to that exact realization, and relaxed. Not entirely, to be sure, but enough that I wasn’t worried that she’d pick her top apart thread by thread.

  “Okay,” she said, licking at dry lips. “Tell the others. Don’t change anything. Keep an eye out. Is there… I don’t know. Something, anything else I can do?”

  “Not until I know more, I’m afraid.” I sighed, my ears drooping as my head dipped. “I’m sorry. I know that it’s anxiety-provoking. That there’s a feeling of powerlessness to it, and that’s probably particularly galling for somebody as otherwise powerful and influential as you are. But this isn’t your fight to win. You’re not one of the players on the field, Mariem, you’re the ball.”

  Once again, Mariem lapsed into silence. And once again, she looked to the photo album for strength.

  “I’ll let you work,” she said. “I… I haven’t done this before. Been — been the victim, before. But I’ll trust you.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  With that, there was nothing more to be said on the matter. I picked up my dictaphone from the table, shut it off, and put it back in my bag.

  Removing the recording device from play changed the atmosphere in the room, if only a little. Mariem’s shoulders fell slightly, some of the tension leaving them as her entire posture loosened up.

  I suppose that being on a hot mic was enough to make her slip into the role of Lady Liberty as a coping mechanism, even if only slightly.

  “Thank you.” The softness of her voice had my ears both pointing directly at her, and it took me a moment longer to register the exact words. “I don’t think I said that yet.”

  “... you hadn’t.” I hoped she didn’t take my pause at the beginning as being something negative. It was just slight disbelief, given… well…

  It had been almost sixteen years since the last dregs of my ability to feel hero worship died a miserable death, strangled in the same iron grip that had grasped my tail and plucked me skyward in the span of a few measly seconds. Sixteen years since I’d decided that Lady Liberty was just as awful as every other volunteer sign-on or re-up I’d encountered in the NMR, who’d all tried to drown me in their own deluges of propaganda and sound bites. And suffice to say that after sixteen years of anxiety, avoidance, and anger, I hadn’t expected Lady Liberty to ever be thanking me for anything. It was weird. And I wasn’t sure how to feel about it, wasn’t sure what to properly do with the anger, the resentment, the complete subversion of any expectation I’d held in the worst possible way.

  I’d come in here thinking that I was going to have my pound of flesh for that day, regardless of whatever all I’d agreed to do for Lady Liberty.

  But now, maybe an hour or so later, and… I wasn’t sure I wanted it anymore. Retribution was cathartic, yes, and catharsis felt good — but it wouldn’t solve anything. It wouldn’t begin to make up for what had happened that day.

  And seeing what lay beneath the cape, seeing the woman, the wife, the mother behind it all? Seeing what she fought for, what she protected above all else, what she stood to lose? I didn’t want catharsis anymore.

  I wanted closure.

  “That day in Chicago.” This time, it was my voice that drew a surprised look from Mariem, and she looked at me with a question in her eyes. “I was basically a kid, Mariem, meeting the one superhero she’d ever been allowed to look up to. Yes, I laid it on thick, said things I didn’t mean, outright lied about what I thought and felt and believed about our shared superiors, the goal, the mission… all of it. I’m not going to deny that. But you… you—”

  I cut myself off, and took a deep breath to try and steady myself. My ears were pulled so far back and tight against my skull that I was giving myself a headache, and my tail had almost completely wrapped around my midsection, since my sitting position kept it from going between my legs.

  It was so hard, so hard to not be toxic and angry and awful, to keep my voice down, to not scream in Lady Liberty’s face and demand — demand something. I wasn’t even sure what. But I didn’t want to scream. I didn’t want to shout. I wanted to accept those emotions, accept the ugliness and nastiness that threatened to spill out, acknowledge them as being valid… and let them go.

  “You assaulted me,” I whispered, not trusting myself to let my voice be any louder than that. “And I want to know why. After all these years you owe me that much, at least.”

  Mariem swallowed hard, and refused to meet my eyes. She instead looked down at her lap, carefully pulled her hands away from the hem of her top, and folded one over the other.

  “Do you know what synesthesia is?” She paused for a breath. “It’s—”

  “A neurological condition,” I interrupted. “Hear colors, taste sounds, any number of similar things.”

  “Mhmm,” she hummed, still staring at her hands. “One of my powers, it… causes something similar. Changes how I see a person, how I hear the words they say. Depending on what people say and do, how they act, it changes how they look to me, how their voices sound. Dishonesty was my first good guess as to what I was seeing, and for a long time, that was what made sense.”

  … oh. Oh, no.

  “What did you see?” I asked, a little scared of the answer. “What did it make you hear?”

  “Oxidation and decay,” she answered. “Rust, tarnish, corrosion, spreading across their skin, eating away at it, creaking and crumpling and crunching as they moved. And their voices — have you ever heard old radio broadcasts? Where everything was nasal, high-pitched?” She glanced up at me briefly, and I nodded, drawing a grimace from her. “That is what my power shows me, and for the longest time, I thought it was a measure of how dishonest somebody was being. But you lied to me today, didn’t you?”

  “... I did, yes,” I admitted. “Because sometimes, for me to do my job properly, I need to be careful what I do and don’t share.”

  “I guessed as much. But despite that, I saw none of that… corrosion on you. I guessed that you were not being entirely truthful, but that was from your body language.” She briefly unfolded her hands to wave one at my tail. “Your body language is very honest, even when you are not.”

  I wanted to correct her on that, but thought better of it. Mariem was very clearly teeing up a question for me. It would have been remiss of me not to ask it.

  “If it wasn’t dishonesty, then what?”

  “I still don’t know.”

  “Then what’s your current guess?” I pressed.

  “Insincerity,” she answered. “How genuine somebody is or isn’t being. How true to themself and their ideals their actions and words are or aren’t. And while that is neither honesty nor dishonesty...”

  “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it would’ve been close enough,” I murmured, feeling my eyes go wide and ears fall flat in moderate horror. “Oh, God. This country must be a special sort of hell for you, isn’t it? All the customer service smiles, the little white lies we tell ourselves and each other, the faces we wear for the public… and you can’t help but see it, can you?”

  “Not exactly?” Mariem shook her head. “It is not all or nothing. There are gradations to it. The little lies we tell ourselves, the comfortable falsehoods that get us through the day, the false smiles we wear to comfort those around us, even when it hurts? Those are… a patina, of sorts. A layer of armor. And it can even be beautiful.”

  She reached out and let her fingers dance across the photo album on the table, her touch lingering on an image of her daughter. Then she closed the folio, and rested her hand atop it.

  “The most tragically beautiful thing my power has ever shown me… it was a mother, holding her dying child. Telling him that it would be okay, that he just needed to rest, and she’d see him in the morning. It was a promise that was broken before she ever gave words to it… but to me? Her skin was burnished, molten gold, and her voice, a song of hope on a damaged radio, the one that helped us know when to flee Tunisia all those years ago.”

  “… it’s intent,” I murmured, the realization heavy on my tongue. “It’s not just whether they’re being disingenuous. You’re also getting an idea as to why, aren’t you?”

  “I think so,” she agreed.

  “Then…” I swallowed. “When I… when I tried to schmooze, to sweet-talk. What did you see?”

  Mariem looked me in the eye, then. Maybe she was seeing some of that corrosion, that disingenuous rusting. Or maybe she didn’t, and was looking for it anyway. I wasn’t sure.

  “A ruin,” she said, pity in her tone. “A rusted, pitted mess, thick with sludge and waste. And the sound…” she shuddered. “I don’t know how to describe it. It almost hurt to listen. But I knew what it meant. I’d seen it before. It was hate.”

  And as someone in Mariem’s position — a Muslim immigrant woman in a position of power that couldn’t just be taken from her and given to someone more ‘fitting’, more ‘suitable’, more white — she made a valid assumption as to the nature of that hate. She used her lived experience, her time in the United States and the NMR, and made the all too reasonable assumption that the hate was directed at her, just like it had been so many times before.

  “… it wasn’t for you,” I said after a moment’s silence, after giving her words the space they needed to breathe. “Hell, I don’t think what I felt for you after was even hatred. Disappointment, sure, plus some dismay and betrayal. But not hate. Not for you.”

  “Then who?” Mariem begged, pleaded. “Please, Naomi. This power did not come with a manual, or a guide, and if I’m to understand more of what I’ve been experiencing…” She trailed off, and took a ragged breath before meeting my eyes once more. “I want — I need to know. Please.”

  … she genuinely couldn’t see it, couldn’t so much as fathom the possibility.

  I almost envied her.

  “It was hate for two things,” I relented. “Hate for the NMR, and…” I sighed, my ears falling limp as I looked away, not wanting to look her in the eyes for this. “And myself. Mostly myself.”

  “… I’m sorry,” Mariem began, and my ear flicked towards her when I caught the slight tremble of hesitation in her words. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, I don’t want to doubt you, but — I don’t understand. I’ve seen self-loathing before, and it was… it was nothing compared to the hate I saw that day.”

  “Hah…” I huffed out a little mirthless chuckle, and worked my fingers through my tail’s fur to try and settle myself, similar to how Mariam had been playing with the hem of her top. “Be glad, then. It’s a measure of mercy that you’ve never had to see somebody hate themselves that deeply. And for the record, I don’t anymore. But back then? I…”

  My voice died as I realized I didn’t know how best to put this. It wasn’t a matter of whether it was something I wanted to share or not, either. After Mariem had taken the risk of reaching out, opened her home to me, showed me her family, and proved that she wasn’t the same impulsive twat who would attack me like she did…

  She’d bared her soul to me today, with no assurance that I would accept her openness for what it was, and seemed to almost want me to spurn her, inflict some kind of penalty, do something more concrete to even out the scales. And maybe I would have, at some point. Maybe a younger me would have just… lashed out. Thrown foxfire at her face. Scorched the photo album that sat on the table right in front of me.

  But I didn’t want to. That kind of eye-for-an-eye gamesmanship didn’t help anyone, didn’t fix anything.

  Lady Liberty had bared her soul.

  And in this sentence, it was only proper that I do the same in return.

  “That girl you saw in 2005? She didn’t exist, I didn’t truly exist until just two years earlier. I wasn’t allowed to. I was… I was stuck trying to be someone else, needing to be someone I hated. Forced to be the perfect son, the perfect brother, an upstanding young man.”

  I briefly looked up from my hands and tail to see if Mariem understood what I was getting at. But when I saw the look of dawning horror, of pity in her eyes… I had to look away.

  “I endured nineteen years of trying so desperately to be somebody I wasn’t, of trying and failing to be someone so antithetical, so much the opposite of who I was inside, and who I wanted to be. And when I got to leave all that behind, when I was finally free to be me, I promised myself that I would never again compromise who I was for the sake of giving someone else what they wanted to see.

  “But then we got word that you were coming to town — Lady Liberty! The superheroine, the only heroine I’d been allowed to admire and not be scolded or derided or—” I cut myself off, took a deep breath, and tried to get my ears to stop pulling down and low so painfully much. “I brown-nosed. Fed you a line of bullshit. Tried to schmooze and pander, and… God. I didn’t even remember my own promise to myself until I’d already started talking, but by then, it was too late. I’d already compromised who I was for the sake of trying to make a specific impression. And once I realized that, I began to hate myself all over again.”

  Old habits die hard. They had a way of creeping up on you when you least expected it.

  The worst part was? All of this was just so damn fitting. I’d held this grudge for fifteen years. For fifteen years I’d wanted to know why, expected there to be a clear reason for it all… and in the end, it was nothing more than a great big mess born from old habits, mixed signals, poor communication, and bad decisions.

  “… I’m sorry,” Mariem said softly. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Any of that.”

  “I won’t ask you to try. I just… hope this lets you understand a little more of what you saw from me, that day.”

  “It does,” she affirmed. “And… I’m sorry. As little as that apology may be worth anymore…”

  I… I wish I could say that I’d had any sort of response ready for her. Something I could say to fill the dead air, to acknowledge what she’d said while also not committing anything.

  And beyond that, I wasn’t sure either of us had much left in the tank, emotionally.

  “If you’re okay with me getting back to one last bit of business before we part ways?” I offered, taking the opportunity to adjust how I was sitting so I could gently massage some feeling back into my legs.

  “I — of, of course,” Mariem stammered slightly, clearly caught off guard by my sudden change of topic. “Yes, by all means.”

  “Thank you. Now, I can’t give you an estimate on how long it’ll take me to get the stalker’s past mailings, unfortunately. That’s going to depend on what lengths are needed to even lay eyes on them, let alone get them in, and it’s going to depend on Megan’s availability to help. That being said — the last time the stalker sent his ‘gifts’ was back in March, and since he seems to operate on a quarterly cycle and it’s the end of May, the next ones should show up in a matter of weeks, yes?”

  “Always the fifteenth of the month,” Mariem confirmed for me. “Or the sixteenth if it’s a Sunday.”

  “Okay. When the next round comes in, let them check for trackers, obviously, but then take them, and make sure you’re running a bodycam with a timestamp when you do. We’re going to need physical evidence anyway, and video showing multiple instances of this in various locations will help. Beyond that, just… keep an eye out, okay?”

  “I will. And Naomi?”

  “Hm?” I’d uncrossed my legs and made to stand before she finished speaking, and apparently she’d had the same idea, as I had to look slightly up to meet her gaze instead of down where she’d been seated.

  “Thank you.”

  “Ah.” I swallowed, one ear flicking dismissively as I tried to play off some discomfort. Despite the serious heart-to-heart we’d just had, hearing that from her of all people still felt… weird. “Don’t thank me yet, not until I’ve got some results. Oh, and we’ll need to sit down together again once I’ve gotten the past mailings, otherwise I might miss something you know to look for.”

  “Oh!” Mariem snapped her fingers in clear realization. “Ah — when you do, please give a bit of warning? I would like to get something for you to autograph for Hounaida.” I blinked. “I-if that is okay with you, of course!”

  “… actually…”

  I reached into my bag, pulled out my most underrated of tools in a lawyer’s arsenal from its carrying case, and handed the now-ready Polaroid camera to a somewhat stunned Mariem.

  “How about instead, you tell me where to stand?”

  I almost giggled at the sheer surprise on Mariem’s face, but she took the Polaroid camera from me anyway.

  After how heavy today was, how emotionally raw we’d both become by the end of our discussion… a little levity was the perfect balm for our weary hearts.

  Plus, hey. I got to be the reason a little girl smiled today. And that?

  That was all it took to make today a good day, regardless of anything else.