I walked over to my computer and turned the music down.

“You can leave it on if you want. What is that?”

“Oldies rock,” I said.

“Oldies, huh? Where’s the line drawn for that?”

“Before we were born, I think. A lot of what I listen to is from a decade before that.”

“Ahhhh,” he said, like it was a big revelation. He walked over to his table and whiteboard, paging through the papers he’d left behind. The conversation with Byron was among it. “From the days before powers.”

I frowned a little. “I hadn’t wanted to make it about powers.”

“I ruined it for you.”

“No, not ruined,” I said. “It’s more—”

“It’s hard to get away from, isn’t it?” he asked. He did what he could to fix his hair, where the helmet had pressed it down. As simple as the action was, there was something very serious in his eyes and his voice as his hands worked. “It saturates everything. Our team, we get it more than a lot of others, I think. Other teams, maybe they have one or two members who really feel the weight of powers the way we do.”

I thought about it. “Different ways, for different members of our group.”

Fingers worked to twist locks of hair into the rolling curls. He still hadn’t painted his hair again. “You’re an outside case, but I think you qualify, you’re even an expert on the matter. Sveta’s been like she’s been for… five years?”

“About.”

“Ashley dealt with her hands from the time she was thirteen to the time she was a little older than twenty. Two years spent being dead, clock turned back a bit, fuzziness from not being her original self… still. Eight or nine years at most?”

I shrugged.

“Byron and I trigger, endure a few years of this. Kenzie triggers really young, same principle, though, and she doesn’t have that many years under her belt. Rain triggered later than most of us, but he’s very, very similar to you, I think. He grew up within arm’s reach of powers. Not so direct as you, but… there.”

“Yeah.”

“You lived it. From birth, your mom was a hero and that was normal. Your dad.”

“My aunt, my uncle, my cousins. My boyfriend, friends, afterschool activities, hopes, dreams, field of study, the meals I ate. Over a thousand nights spent acutely aware that one of my parents was out there, and they might not come home.”

“How do you avoid drowning in it?” Tristan asked.

“If you’d asked me before? I’d have said they were natural waters for me. I didn’t drown because I breathed it.”

“And now?”

I shook my head. “I think I could still breathe it, live it, if it wasn’t for—”

For the wretch.

“For?” he prodded.