“She won’t talk to me. To anyone. She looks up to you. If you said something to her—”

He shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong person. Send her to Ossare.”

“Wyatt made a mistake. That’s all. You don’t get to act betrayed here—she unscrambled Yuri when you weren’t even talking to her because you blamed her for something she didn’t even do. But she got over that. Are you just gonna turn your back on her now? I thought you were looking out for her.”

It took Blackburn so long to speak, Tom almost thought he wasn’t going to bother. But then he said softly, “She’s very gifted, and she has no armor against this world. She doesn’t have anyone in her corner, not in her home, so I’ll admit, sometimes I feel . . . protective. And it fools me sometimes into remembering what it was like once.” He stopped.

“What what was like?” Tom blurted.

“Being a father. Having some investment in the future.” His voice took on a note like he was mocking himself. “Having a soul, deluding myself with hope. But at the end of the day, I know what I am, and that’s why I can’t help now. She needs something I’m not capable of giving to her, Tom. I can’t offer forgiveness. I simply don’t have any. Not even for myself.”

AFTER THAT FINAL door slammed shut, a sense of bleakness sank over Tom. He grew oddly detached from the whole situation. Sometimes, mostly when he was sitting there fending off prying questions from Olivia Ossare during the counseling sessions they’d all been forced to attend since Yuri’s accident, Tom wondered if there was something wrong in how easily things had sort of dissolved away for him without destroying him. He wasn’t withdrawing like Wyatt, and he wasn’t moving on and cutting off any associations with what happened like Vik. Tom just sort of kept going forward.

After the loss of all his friends, and his future, it seemed almost like things had finally become normal. Tom knew what it was to feel rootless. He knew what it was to have nothing ahead of him. He knew what it was to have no attachments. This thing he’d dreaded had finally come to pass, but it wasn’t some sharp shock to the system so much as a sort of familiar pall descending over everything. That other person—the Tom Raines who was the Doctor of Doom with Vik, who helped Wyatt understand other people, who marveled at any new superhuman feat of Yuri’s, seemed almost like some stranger he’d encountered in passing, already gone.