He squeezed his fists so tight the skin over his knuckles became nearly translucent. Images pulled from linkage records projected like three-dimensional animations. “Don’t.”

“That was probably his first commandment: don’t embarrass me.” Stacia enlarged an image of him as a preteen. Then as a teenager. Then as a young adult. The intervening years finding him bulking up. His face thickened and hardened. His eyes, haunted. “When did he first hit you?”

Hondo turned away from her.

“Which line was his mantra? ‘God had a plan for your life’?” Stacia affected a Southern preacher. “‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’? No, you were too much of a straight edge. Overcompensating by being an overachiever, excelling at the things you could control. You couldn’t do anything about who you were. He probably had to go with how ‘you were not going to embarrass him or your mother with your deviant ways.’ Your lifestyle, your choices would get you, them, most importantly, him kicked out of the church. He’d sooner kick you out of your family. That sound about right?” Stacia lowered her face into his field of vision. No matter how intently he was determined to stare at the table, he couldn’t not see her. “That kind of experience, that kind of trauma might make someone wary of even the idea of community. To you, ‘community’ was code for just another cult waiting to spring its trap shut on you.”

Hondo’s mouth ground, but it took awhile before he uttered anything other than an unintelligible gurgle. Finally, his voice hovered little above a cracked whisper. “It’s not like that.”

“Then tell me what it’s like.” Stacia shut off his holovid file.

“I never did fit in around here.” A tear welled in his right eye. An angry thing. He wiped it away out of disdain, not pain. Not sadness. Not regret. Not shame.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you let me in, allowed me to participate in the game of Muungano—and that’s all it is, a great big dress-up game where you got to bully others and be in charge—but I was never one of you. Not really.” With a brief shudder, Hondo shifted to the side, still not meeting her eyes.

“How much of that was just in your head?” Stacia leaned in close so the heat of her breath tickled his ear.

“You’d like me to believe that. That I never saw the sideways glances. Never heard the whispers behind my back. That the jokes—because everyone here is just so damn funny—were at my expense.”

“So you decided to repay us by, what, betraying us?” Fashioning a chair across from him, Stacia sat down and waited for his denial. Perhaps another explosion of protest about his innocence. But his shoulders slumped. Not a lot, a barely noticeable drop, but it was like he’d released something. His fists tightened and relaxed again.