And then life went on.

That’s the thing about grief. It trivializes everything around it. It makes the world seem small, unimportant in comparison. It makes it very easy to forget about the mundane bits of everyday life that seem silly when matched up against the enormity of the loss.

And that mundane world doesn’t care. It doesn’t wait for you to stop crying. It doesn’t put everything on pause while you compose yourself. It doesn’t fundamentally change, regardless of how changed you are. It will crush you beneath the treads of progress if you lie down and weep for too long. So you have to keep going.

Alex sat next to me, composed once more, but red-eyed and splotchy. She held my hand in hers, fingers intertwined. Morning light filled the room—or rather, more light filled the room and it was now morning, but I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with sunrise. I thought that the window was growing less opaque, and now it was just letting in the ambient light of Sanctum City.

I was glad. I liked seeing Alex. A lot.

I told her about my time in prison, what little there was to say before bill showed up. I glossed over the parts with my dad—I was pretty sure she’d think I was making it up, or that I was too damaged to continue at this point. I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

When I got to the part about the camera, and told her what they wanted me to say about Paragon, her hair started glowing again, and her expression grew darker than I’d ever seen it. I knew she wasn’t angry at me—I repeatedly assured her that I’d never actually said it—but it still scared me. I wanted to press myself in for a hug, both because I knew how much pain she was in and to hide from that look, but I also didn’t want to get set on fire.

“Those dogfucking sons of whores,” she whispered, voice sharp enough to cut. “They knew he was dead by then. That was going to be their story on how he died. A harebrained uprising and lover’s quarrel centered around a teenage girl. Sleazy, sordid, degenerate. That’s how they wanted to paint his legacy.”

I nodded and said nothing. Even to me, it was weird how I could happily face down hostile supervillains who wanted to turn me in for a bounty, dead or alive, but I was almost frozen in fear by Alex’s rage, even though it wasn’t pointed at me.

It took most of my courage just to bring my free hand up and stroke the back of hers.

The glow in her hair died, the heat dissipated, and she looked at me. “Sorry, kid, continue.”

When I got to the part about the redheaded psi—about Olivia, I asked her if it was possible that they could have taken her powers away. I expected any number of reactions, from derision, to panic, to yet more rage.

To my surprise, she shrugged. “Sure, it’s possible. People have looking for ways to un-meta metahumans since we’ve existed. Sometimes, they’re successful. Hell, with psions, it’s almost easy. Like that helmet they put you in. Target the areas of the brain that are most linked to psionic activity, and bam, no more psionic activity.”

“Shouldn’t we be more worried about that?” I asked, taken aback.

She rolled her head from side to side, as though indecisive. “Well. No. And yes. Legally speaking, depowering can only be done in cases of extreme threat or inability to properly contain, and if this girl was just a middle-of-the-road psion like you said—well, if SCAR has moved on to lobotomies to get rid of metahumans, that’s definitely an issue. It’s not exactly a surprise, but it’s also not a sure solution. Even with psionic powers, sometimes they’re just…built differently. There’s no one method that is guaranteed to work on every one of them, and definitely not on every metahuman. The idea is laughable.”

I still felt deeply, horribly unsettled. The very idea of not having powers anymore, or worse, something going wrong, having damaged, nonfunctional powers again—

I didn’t like it. Not one bit.

“I want to contact her family,” I said. “Or…maybe someone else should do it, but they should know.”

“I’ll do it,” Alex said immediately. “And we’ll see if we can’t talk them into suing, too. If what you said is true, even the HERO Act only gives them authority over metahumans. If she’s not one anymore, they’re legally required to turn her over.”

“Will anyone do that based on my word?”

“I don’t know, but it won’t be your word. It’ll be mine.”

“You’ll…say you saw her?”

She nodded.

“Is that…legal?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Who cares? SCAR doesn’t play by the rules, and I’m not going to let a technicality stop me from saving someone.”

I grinned and squeezed her hand. That was exactly why I loved Alex.

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That thought stuck in my head for a couple moments longer than it should have.

With that story over, I realized I didn’t have anything else to say, as Alex’s arrival had been the next noteworthy event. Alex didn’t seem too eager to fill the silence either. Her eyes were distant, and I didn’t need to feel the pain flowing through her touch to know what she was thinking about.

Or rather, who.

The silence stretched.

“Alex? Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

My mouth didn’t want to cooperate for this part, but after a few false starts, I managed to say, “Paragon said that…you were sent to contact me. That you were ‘gathering intel.’ Is that…true?”

She raised an eyebrow at me, and suddenly I felt like a total idiot.

“Sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s probably not the right time to ask. It’s not really important.”

“No, it’s important.” She let my hand go and turned to face me in the chair. “You’re wondering if our friendship is just a job to me. You want to know if I even like you, or if this isn’t all just another move in a giant, inscrutable, political chess match and I’m nothing but the hand moving you.”

After a second, unable to look at her, I nodded. I felt ashamed now. She’d pretty much cut to the center of it immediately. She knew me so well. Of course she was my friend. Only a friend could do that, and I’d been a bad friend just for doubting that.

“It’s a complicated answer, kiddo, but the short answer is, yes. Yes, I was directed to contact you. Yes, I was reporting on you. Yes, our friendship was a part of my job. Yes, it’s all a part of a calculated move on behalf of interests that are far above and beyond us. And to be completely frank, no, I don’t like you.”

As someone who had recently been partially eviscerated, I got to feel that again, in full, at the end of every sentence, with the last one finally spilling my metaphorical guts on the floor and stomping on them in front of me. I looked up at her, unable to breathe.

She was smiling, hints of mischief in her eyes. “The longer answer is, I was directed to contact you based on my own repeated recommendations to my superiors. I reported whatever I thought would be most likely to get you selected for the Aurora program. I entered the Skip repeatedly when I was supposed to be on sabbatical just to hang out with you. I could not give a damn about any of the politics or larger interests.” She reached out and put a hand on my cheek. “And I don’t like you, because I love you, kid. You’re one of my favorite people on this planet.”

The breath I’d been holding rushed out of me all at once, and I felt a tear leak from the corner of my eye. “Y-you could have just skipped to that part.”

“What can I say?” she said said pulling me in for another hug. “I love the dramatic reveal.”

I pushed myself into her arms as my insides settled back down, having been tossed around by that little rollercoaster ride she’d just taken me on. I whispered, “You came for me.”

“Always, Anna.”

The heat that flooded me then was like nothing I had ever felt before, save for the barest fluttering of it when she had first appeared in the telegate portal. It was better than the dangerous, narcotic bliss of appeasing Hyperion’s ego, better than the caesura of pain my “relationship” with Dane had been, better even than the simple warmth and contentment of my real home. This was something wild, burning, passionate, something that affected me in places that had heretofore been…unstimulated.

At that moment, I finally let myself realize that I might have, maybe, been in love with Alex.

Which terrified me out of my mind.

For starters, she was almost twice my age. Sure, Hyperion was something like four or five times my age, but I knew for certain that what I felt for him was mostly fear mixed with a very twisted kind of survival-based codependence and obligation, not love. Alex, I cared about—I wanted to curl up next to her on a couch, which was a very weird but very specific desire I realized that I had. But if she wanted to do that too, it was most likely platonic, sisterly cuddling. The chances that she thought of me as I found myself thinking of her were, bluntly, slim based on that alone, and that was probably objectively morally correct. I knew that these feelings were likely doomed from their very inception.

Second, I had never thought of myself as gay. Granted, in retrospect, I’d never found myself particularly attracted to men, either, save for my brief proximity to Paragon’s butt—and to be fair, the aesthetic appeal of a nice butt was universal. But like many other young people, lacking any strong impetus to ask myself these questions, I’d defaulted to thinking of myself as heterosexual. And to add to my confusion, even thinking back to Riley twenty minutes ago, I’d admitted she was attractive, but it wasn’t like I’d wanted her to drag me into bed or anything. I felt no connection to or desire for her at all.

Alex, I did.

I accepted that none of these feelings or revelations were something I was prepared to deal with right then. I was still less than two conscious hours away from, you know, horrible torture, and some part of it might be the emotional vulnerability that stemmed from having my mind buckling from the strain of that. Not to mention, the news we’d just spent half an hour crying over. I didn’t think this was sudden development—thinking back, the hurt and betrayal I’d felt from Paragon telling me something I probably should have suspected anyway had been a bit too intense—but it was an inconvenient moment to realize it.

And doing anything to act on it right now would make me the scum of the Earth. Alex was in mourning, and clearly stressed besides. This wasn’t a good time for either of us.

I shelved all of that for a later date, and as hard as it was, broke off the hug.

“So,” I said with forceful, if audibly artificial, perkiness. “What’s next? Where do we go from here?”

Her eyes scanned my face, then she stood. “Well, I’m going to go make my report, and then take a shower. After that, we’ve got some stuff we need to talk about, some decisions to make, and then we’re going to relax.”

I frowned. “Relax?”

“Yeah, it’s that thing you do when you have a couple minutes and a break from mortal danger,” Alex said. “Don’t worry, you’ll like it.”

I tilted my head. “I don’t understand. Are we safe here?”

“Well, the door’s locked, so.”

“But, how’s relaxing going to help?”

She gave me a look. “Well, for starters, it might lower your chance of a coronary before you’re thirty.”

My stomach roiled. “I…don’t know if relaxing is really something I’m capable of.”

“We’ll see. Hang tight, I’ll be right back.”

She left, and I noticed that her butt was also very, very nice in tights.

No, from the sudden pounding of my heart, I definitely didn’t think relaxing was on the table.

So I did what everybody else did to kill time and eat stress in the morning.

I got another cup of coffee.

My old one had gone cold.