MIRA

Heretic's office was tiny, a rather cramped little space with just two chairs in front of her desk. Most of the walls were taken by the shelves of bins of files—copies, I realized, of stuff from City Hall or the college. Didn't matter which, I supposed. There were very little personal touches to the dilapidated room. Only a coffee-maker that had clearly been customized and a picture on her desk showed that a person was here.

Most of the light did not come from the burned-out panels above, but rather through the sunlit blinds and tiny window behind Heretic's head. I pushed past to the window, Henry following on my heels as Heretic swung over her desk to close the door.

"Oh my God," I whispered.

There were Sentinels all over the lawn—more than when we had come in.

Henry cursed and helped me shut the blinds.

"You're attracting all kinds of attention, aren't you Mira?" Heretic looked rather impressed. She shut the door and used her powers to move a filing cabinet in front of it. I could now better admire her control, how with just a flick of her wrist it hovered right into place.

I'd have to learn a thing or two from her on how to control my own power.

"That's a little extreme, isn't it?" Henry asked.

"Not when it comes to Atomic Energy." Her face darkened. "They won't deny me this day. Not after all they've taken from me. Now we might as well sit down."

Henry gestured for me to go first. We took the seats across from Heretic's desk and she started putting away files.

"So you're finally ready to know the truth about Ophelia?" Despite the hard, angular expression on her face, there was something soft about her voice.

"I was always afraid to ask." Henry averted his eyes for a moment. Then he met Heretic's steely green gaze. "We saw the crime report—and the knife."

Triumph flashed across her face. "I take it that you, Mira, knew the symbol?"

"Of course I would." I found myself gripping the sides of the chair for stability. "Atomic Energy had something to do with her death, didn't they? And the fire?"

"Oh, no, the fire was mine, they can't claim responsibility for that." She tilted her head back cackling for a moment. Then she ran her hand over the photograph on her desk and sobered. "But you don't know the whole story there. The three of us, the City Archivists—we agreed on that."

Henry and I exchanged a look.

"What do you mean, you agreed?" Henry asked.

"We planned it, Ophelia and Erik were supposed to get the files that we wanted to survive out, while I played the villain." Something in her demeanor shifted. Her sorrow transformed to rage, as quick as the blink of an eye. "I didn't know that they were onto us, that they were going to try and stop us. I was supposed to be the one who got killed. She died to buy me time—and for that, I killed him."

She laughed humorlessly. "At least Ophelia died for a mission that succeeded. So many of the people I knew in the Titan War didn't."

"The Titan War?" I recalled the Sentinel case files. "But you didn't appear in public until after—"

"Heretic wasn't my first identity." She closed a file and got up to put it in one of the bins on the built-in shelves. "I was Argent first. A hero. God, that was so long ago."

"I don't understand—why would you burn down City Hall and the Archives, why did Atomic Energy come to kill you?" I asked.

How deep does the rabbit hole go?

She turned back to me. Rage and sorrow were melded together for her, I realized. They were so tightly intertwined that she couldn't tell difference anymore. Both emotions looked the same on her.

Her gaze softened as she found me, and I could see the glimmer of tears forming in her eyes.

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"It's a long story," she admitted. "Sometimes I ask the same thing, how I got here."

She slowly sat back down in her chair and ran a hand through her short, choppy brown hair. She stared at the photograph like it was a million miles away.

"We used to be the Crusaders," Heretic whispered. "I was Argent, then. I was happier. I went to this college, and I had friends that all wielded the powers of the Mutated. Of course we all decided to become vigilantes together. It was a different time then."

She swiped at her tears before they could properly fall. "There were six of us, seven that were in on the secret. There was Sam, he used to be Crucible, there was Brandon as Nimbus, Jenna was World-Jumper. Ophelia used to be Psyche, before Claire came along."

I frowned—I'd heard the name Psyche in the news again. But it wasn't the most pressing question right now.

"And then there was Merlin." She swallowed, making her thin throat bob. "Timeline. And then there was Anya, who didn't have any powers but kept our secret. And the only one who is still standing by me."

She straightened up, her lips curled into a sad smile. "We were the Crusaders, then. We treated it like a game, living the ordinary college life by day and fighting evil at night. We were everything to each other."

Her hands curled into fists, with the thumb tucked the right way to punch. It was so easy, so instinctive for her. Just like it was for me.

"We didn't know that they were already making plans, we just slowly got in over our heads trying to fight a big bad superhero war." She shook her head slowly. "Dark Titan wasn't like the others that have come before or since. There was no good motivation, no good intentions gone astray. Just a man who wanted to rule the world or see it burn."

She grimaced, shutting her eyes. "I lost so many friends. So many of the Mutated died in the war, on the field of the final battle, along with Dark Titan himself. There weren't many of us left after. Most of us wanted to hang up our masks and become ordinary people after that."

She opened her eyes again, and she picked up her photograph. "Ophelia was still active every once in a while, but most of us put away the capes and moved on with our lives, although we didn't stop being friends. In fact, I don't think we could've, really. There was too much history, so many secrets we shared. It was only natural, in some ways, that we paired off the way we did."

She traced the glass with her finger. "Merlin and I were supposed to have a child, a daughter. I'd gotten my job as an archivist, he was going to do some nine to five office gig, and we were going to be happy. All of our other friends had their own kids. But I had the worst year of my life."

She set the photograph down on its face, so neither Henry nor I could see it.

"Atomic Energy took me, and several other women prisoner, because we had super-powered children on the way." Her eyes were someplace faraway now. "Our children were taken from us. Everyone else was killed. But Merlin—because he was the mayor's brother, he made a bargain for my safety. He would disappear, a prisoner in their manor while I could go free and keep the secrets of what I'd seen."

My stomach lurched. I was taken from my parents. Dr. Banning was lying to me.

I met her eyes, and I felt sorry for her. She wasn't Heretic anymore, not to me. Instead, I could see her as just a woman who had been hurt.

"I did some digging, I couldn't just let it go." Her eyes remained locked onto mine. "I broke into their facility, I stole files from their databases. Sam and Ophelia helped me, they were the only ones who understood that had their children been born one year later, they could've had the same fate as mine."

She twisted a silver and hematite ring on her finger. "We found out that they'd been setting us up, letting us fight each other in hopes that we'd kill off all the Mutated. The last of their biggest mistake. When that didn't happen after the Dark Titan War, they decided to create an army to do it for them, and recruit those who were scared of their place in a world with the Mutated to carry out their will in the meantime. The Sentinels and the Shadows."

I'd grown up knowing that I was a weapon—but this was even worse.

"Ophelia, Erik, and I—-we decided to do something to make it easier, to allow Ophelia and Sam's children to live without fear of being hunted by Atomic Energy," Lora continued, more resolute. "I would play the villain, the Heretic. I would make Atomic Energy pay for their mistakes, and the mayor for allowing it to happen."

"So you burned records about the Mutated," I realized. "Making it harder for Atomic Energy to hunt the Mutated children they didn't take. And they couldn't so easily kidnap others to make into Sentinels."

Lora nodded. "No one was supposed to die. It was supposed to send a message. But I suppose I did that much."

And there it was. The answers to the questions I'd wanted to know.

"And the Shadows. . ." Henry looked like he was going to be sick. "That's what happened, to all the kids who developed powers, who couldn't get out of the city fast enough—"

Lora nodded slowly.

This was how deep the rabbit hole went. Murder, kidnapping, and so much more just to clean up the accident from 1979.

"You told Verity all of this, when she went looking for you." I hesitated. "She was going to be your apprentice, your sidekick."

"I couldn't turn her away. I wanted to save her, Mira."

"So did I." That had been the whole reason I looked for the truth. And now I was here. What now? What could I even do with all of this?

"I suppose I should also be more honest with you now, Mira." Lora closed her eyes and inhaled sharply through her nose. "I imagined this day for years and years. Now that it's here—I don't know how to say it."

I blinked at her, unable to parse her words.

She opened her eyes and tilted her head. "I suspected it when I first saw you, you have his power, and you look like me."

My heart beat faster, in anticipation of her next words, as it dawned on me.

"I wasn't sure until Verity told me about you," she admitted. "When I saw you again, at the Winter Festival, I knew then that you were my daughter."