“Mmm,” she said. She’d had a shadowy picture, and that picture was growing clearer. There would be an organisation, somewhere. Not government, she thought. Something easier to disavow. A string of initials. The good guys, almost certainly, or at least the good guys as Mark would reckon it. Something he felt proud of, enough to boast to his nephew a little. Far away, on the other side of the Atlantic, a person she’d once been had received that promise: Everything you do for us, you’ll be doing for the right reasons. For the good guys.

It was the Phoenix. That was what he cared about; that was what he was here for. The Phoenix, abstract to everyone but Walden herself—really, abstract to Walden as well—until it had destroyed Old Faithful, and so revealed to anyone who knew anything about its kind that somehow a human magician had gained personal and immediate control over power equivalent to a small nuclear warhead. Power and weakness were too attractive a combination to ignore. I’m big and slow, you might say. Come eat me.

How big, and how slow? What could the Phoenix do, and how well could Walden control it? Mark had been testing. And writing reports, probably. Just not the one he claimed he was here for.

All of this was a vague and rather distant set of Oh yes I suppose, unsurprising as Mark fucking Lilly had been unsurprising. It’s how the world works. I didn’t make it that way. But there were reasons, oh there were reasons, why a person might take the job where she would be underestimated and undervalued forever. A fear of boredom, yes. A love of the work. And a certainty: this is what I have done. Here is power, and here are power’s consequences. I can point to them. I can name them. Here is the child who knows today what she did not know yesterday. She will take her knowledge away into adulthood and find her own terrible strength there. Those are her choices. These, circumscribed, limited by ancient stone and crumbling concrete, by time and tradition and school bells and school boundaries—these are mine.

Selves came and went. They grew and grew. You discovered something to be and then you learned how to inhabit it with every inch of your being. And so you became old, and strong, and terrible.