"Your...mother's—?

"One of her assistants. Yes."

E.J's silent for several seconds that feel like eons, a series of expressions—none of them pleasant—playing across her face.

"I don't know why my mother would have anything to do with any of this. I swear, E.J! I didn't have any idea until seeing that face. I—"

"Give me your Companion."

"What?"

She thrusts out her hand—her fingernails still pointed claws. "You said your mother fixed it."

My mouth works silently for a moment. Then, hands shaking, I pull the little screen from my pocket and drop it into her elongated palm.

"Don't you need me to unlock it for you?"

"Not necessary."

"But my private—"

"I won't be looking at your pictures or messages," E.J. says. I recoil at the vitriol in her voice. Lifting the screen, Somi swoops in and projects a sigil onto it. It flashes a series of fuchsia bars, goes black, then projects a wheel of glowing sigils. E.J.'s eyes narrow as they dart from glyph to glyph.

"She hacked it."

My lips work, but no words come out. I'd known my mother made modifications—"to help you keep everything together," she'd said. But I never imagined she done anything other than tweak Hex's personality a bit to compensate for my lack of executive functioning skills.

Scowling at my silence, E.J. clutches her hand around my companion, disrupting the projections. Then she turns around, slamming the door in both of our faces.

~*~

My heart feels like its clenched in cold fire. E.J. won't answer the door again, won't even speak to us through Somi. When the tears finally force their way through, I turn away from Kundu— running down the stairs as far as I can get. I throw myself onto one of the couches in the basement, where the rushing of the waterfall drowns out my sobs. Outside just beyond the glass, rain washes over the mountains.

Some minutes later, there's a hand on my back.

"You should go to bed" Kundu says quietly. "Get some rest."

Eventually I hiccup my way into forming a response. "I'm a liability to her. A threat. If my mom's really the one behind all of this, then how much danger am I really in? I should just go home."

"I don't know if that's—"

"Please. I don't belong here."

There's a long pause. "No one will keep you here against your will, and I know the boss will see that you get a lift home if that's what you really awant. But I don't think that'd be safe you. If you just—"

"I need. To go. Home. No...not home," I correct myself. "To a strikehouse, like any other new Stormstruck person. I'm not safe to be around."

Kundu blinks, then pulls a pendant out of their shirt, pressing it with their thumb. "Somi, could you get me the housekeeper, please?"

"Yes doctor. She'll be with you shortly."

A few minutes later Kat the Keeper comes storming into the room.

"I heard what you called me, red-eyes. We've talked about this,"

Kundu raises an eyebrow. "Trading a slur for an insult hardly seems the answer."

Kat shoots them a toothy smile. "Oh shut it you slimy bastard, before I feed your tongue to Abraxas." She looks from them to me, raising a quizzical brow. "What's going on?"

"Your guest has decided it's time for her to go to a strikehouse. I imagine arrangements will need to be made?"

The Keeper glares at me. "A strikehouse? Sweetie, are you insane?"

"Uh, I—"

"Yes, I know about the thing with your mother. And if you go back out into the public, what's to stop her from snatching you up? What if she makes you talk? Then we lose any advantage we had in her not knowing we were onto her. She could force information out of you about E.J. Not to mention we'd lose any potentially helpful information we' d get out of you to use against her."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"But she's my mother!"

"I hate to be the one to have to point this out, but it's beginning to look as though your mother may not be the most morally upstanding of people. This is not the time to be taking anything for granted."

Tears are streaking down my cheeks again. "I just want to help E.J, and if the only way I can do that is by going away..."

"Look, sweetie. Ashwyn." Kat crouches down on her knees, places her hand over mine. "E.J. cares about you. She doesn't want you to be in danger. Knowing you are will only throw her off even more. But you might be right about one thing. You shouldn't be here."

My stomach sinks.

"Kat," Kundu begins, but the Keeper throws up a hand to cut him off.

"I have an idea."

~*~

"Now remember, this is just for a few days. While you're here, the Doctor will be working on ways to help you adjust to your condition, and you can work on those meditation techniques the two of you talked about.

"Right," I say, doing nothing to keep the bleakness I feel out of my voice. "Ok."

"Oh, and there's one more thing."

Kat holds out a little silver case to me, pressing the latch at the center front to open it. Nestled in its velvet interior is a brand new companion screen—the latest model—and a silvery object that looks almost exactly like one of Somi's flying forms.

"There was no way to safely recover your old Companion. E.J. copied your media and contacts out and packed them into your new one, though. Everything she safely could. She says not to worry, she didn't see anything personal in the process." Kat pauses, smiling a bit. "As for the actual companion side of things, she's given you one based off of Somi's programming, but totally separate and private. Says she'll pay for you to get different replacements of your own choosing, if you want."

I bite my lip, reaching out to take the screen. The moment my fingers make contact, it glows purple—as do the eyes on the little silver servitor-body. It hovers into the air, taking a position over my right shoulder.

"Unfortunately, since we need to keep the existence of this room known to as few people as possible, you'll really have to stay in here. We'll be telling people we sent you somewhere else. Everyone will be safer that way, too. Including you." Kat continues, scratching at Abraxas's neck-feathers with her right hand. I just nod mutely.

"I'll be back to check on you later today," Kundu assures me.

Abraxas caws twice, and they turn to go.

"Wait," I call after them. They turn back to me, Kat raising her eyebrows.

"Yes?"

"Why did E.J. try to hide her type from me? Why didn't she just tell me from the beginning what she is?"

They turn to each other, exchanging a look I can't quite decipher.

"I think it's best you ask her that directly," Kat says after a moment, giving me a sympathetic look. Then she turns from me once more and follows the doctor out. Hidden metal workings clank and groan as the massive stone doors grate closed behind them.

The cavern is lit only by tiny, flickering lanterns carved directly from the mountain itself, and it takes a long time for my eyes to adjust. The stone here is raw and dark, but sort of glimmers where the light hits it. Here and there, huge veins of some kind of purplish mineral run through it like rivers of translucent shadow. Though the space itself is only a little larger than an average bedroom, the "ceiling" is high and peaked, disappearing into shadow.

I can only just hear the distant rushing of the waterfall, several paces below my secret chamber carved into the mountain behind E.J.'s tower.

The chamber had been here for a very long time, Kat had explained, though E.J. added the bathroom more recently. The stone here is unique, and has a way of containing Umbra. Nothing in, nothing out. It's where E.J. goes during storms if she wants to avoid the change or shut it down quickly, but she can't do it often, as it's not healthy for her to suppress the change.

The nature of the stone also means that I can't access the Aether in here. I don't really care, though. I have E.J.'s collection of aethercasts stored directly on the wall screen for entertainment and background noise.

"Would you like to give me a name?" The Not-Somi inquires after a few moments of me just staring around.

"Sure," I sigh. My eyes continue their wandering while I think. "Um, how about Boon?"

"I accept. Thank you very much." It pauses for a moment. "You must be feeling terrible right now. Is there anything I can do for you?"

I blink several times. Hex was never empathetic. A special feature E.J.'s been working on, perhaps?

"Um, yes I am" I manage after a moment. "But I can't think of anything you could do. I can't really think of much except everything that's going on, to be honest. How bad I feel about my hacked companion..."

The little silver bat-thing bobs in the air. "Perhaps it would help if you focused on something else? You could unpack."

I take a deep breath in, let it out slowly. "You're right," I say. "I'll do that."

~*~

A short while later I sit on the large bed that is one of the chamber's few furnishings with my Pygmalion in my lap and an aethercast playing on the screen mounted to the wall across from me. I'm not paying much attention to it, really—but it makes me feel less alone. My focus is absorbed mainly in my work, plans for my series of paintings for Ms. Thornstrap. Whenever my mind begins to drift to something painful, I banish the thought and look up at the screen, losing myself for a moment in the moody love story playing out in muted hues across its glowing surface.

Kat comes back a few hours later with my dinner and far too little news. She doesn't have much to tell me of E.J.'s well being, and if we've gotten any closer to getting Beatrice back, she doesn't know of it. But she keeps me company for a time, answering my questions as best she can and letting me pet Abraxis. When it's time for her to go, I ask her if he can stay, but she just chuckles and wishes me goodnight as she leaves, taking my crow friend with her.

~*~

Kat and Kundu come and go over the next two days, disappointingly lacking when it comes to news of E.J. I tell the Head of Security everything I know about my mother, her temple-compound home, and her associates and acolytes. She records it all without comment, but her expression grows more incredulous the more I share. Sometimes I forget not everyone's the child of the high priestess of a minor religion.

Finally, Kat comes in to tell me that E.J.'s sent people to investigate my mother's temple, only to find it abandoned. I gape at her, with no idea what to say. Of everything that's happened to me recently, the revelation about my mother is the hardest to process. A small, desperate part of me still hopes this is somehow all a misunderstanding, that there's some convoluted but inarguable justification.

I know in my heart that part of me is wrong.