“Bonesaw implanted us with memories, using a framework she got from the books. The ‘inciting incident’ for our powers. The paperwork surrounding our trips to other cities.”

“The gaps filled in. Some things, it reached for other available, familiar sources.”

“It’s vague,” her other self said. “But I didn’t dig too hard.”

There. Answers.

Hardly worth being imprisoned, but interesting.

“Do you have a recollection of… the fields?” her other self asked, as she prepared the tea. She had no need to ask Ashley’s preferences. Her back was to Ashley. “A memory that doesn’t belong to anyone—not any person. A thing.”

Ashley met her other self’s eyes. The questions that she was being asked were the same questions she had planned to ask. She nodded, and she studied her other self’s face. She couldn’t tell if she was relieved or not to have the answer.

She took the tea that was given to her, being careful with her uncooperative hands and the hot drink. “A great plain of red-black crystal, one facet cracking and then mending in the span of a few seconds? The creaking sound and the dull static? It’s a recollection that isn’t exclusive to us.”

Torch 7.5

I don’t know how I’m going to help these guys, Jessica.

I found myself actually hesitating before approaching Sveta, Tristan and Chris. The group had lost two of its members and its mentor in a matter of nine days.

Kenzie was missing, I noted. She was always early, barring extraordinary event. Worrying, when she was first or tied for first place among those I was most concerned about—she had just lost her friend, or whatever it was that Ashley was to her. Hard to pin down. That was the first half of it. The second half was the underlying threat within this group that Jessica had been so concerned about.

What do I even do?

The big question mark shaped space where Kenzie was supposed to be was enough for me to get over my hesitation.

They were standing at the top of a set of concrete stairs. The stairs were supposed to lead up to a shopping center, the sort of building that had a mall on the ground floor and in the basement and offices for the second floor and above. It had been looted on a prior occasion, and now the doors and display windows were boarded up, shutters closed where the shutters were intact.