I saw her love for Doctor Shah. Through Lena’s eyes, I saw not the calm, detached psychiatrist who had oh-so-coldly signed the papers that once ended my dreams of magic, but a passionate, devoted woman who walked the border between magic and mundane, giving everything she could to try to help those who fought the demons and the darkness.

I saw Shah’s grief when a Porter named Jared killed himself four years ago: the deep, shaking sobs she had refused to let anyone but Lena see. I shared Lena’s helplessness as she tried to comfort her lover. In the end, Shah’s grief transformed to determination. Shah worked even harder to help those she could, like a libriomancer whose husband was killed by a spell gone wrong.

I also saw Lena’s memories of the attack a week before. I heard the crash of furniture from inside the house, where Shah struggled against impossible foes to try to give Lena a few more seconds, and I felt Lena’s anguish as her own strength failed her. I shared her fear, her despair at the death of her tree, and the seductiveness of its death. A part of her had wanted to give up then, to enter her tree and never emerge.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. To Lena. To Nidhi Shah as well.

“I told you to shut up.”

As Lena focused her attention on me, I touched new memories. I saw myself as she saw me, practically glowing with excitement as I worked over the fallen automaton at Hubert’s cabin. I watched my passion and joy turn to outrage as I realized what Gutenberg had done.

I saw my grief over Ray’s death as we examined his apartment, and my pathetically transparent attempts to keep that grief and pain to myself, to project an aura of strength.

I saw everything. Lena’s earliest memory, stumbling forth from a tree with no awareness of who or where she was. Her first kiss with Nidhi Shah. A trip they had taken to Wyoming so Lena could try to climb Devil’s Tower, and the nights they had spent in their tent together.

I had always known Lena was strong enough to break me like a twig, but I had never comprehended her strength as a person. She understood exactly what she was. She knew that someday she would lose Nidhi Shah, and when that happened she would lose herself as well. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid.

Even the murder of her tree and the loss of her lover hadn’t broken her. She had grieved as deeply as anyone, but like Shah, she turned that grief into another source of strength. She had sought me out, determined to live, to choose what she would become.

As I explored Lena Greenwood, she did the same, seeing me from within.