Gary was staring us down. He didn’t look happy. Minutes spent on us and on small talk here were minutes he couldn’t do his thing. Good.

I answered so Tristan didn’t have to. “Speaking for myself, I was born to a family of heroes. My mom, dad, sister, my two cousins, two uncles, aunt, all had powers. I grew up with it. My boyfriend was a hero. Being a hero was my life, past, present, and future.”

“Was?” Hamza asked.

“Ah. That point in time was a past life, and a different me,” I said. “A majority of the people I just listed are dead or gone. Some died fighting in Gold Morning. Some died prior. Some… left.”

“You’re referring to your sister, who went to the Birdcage,” John Combs said.

Asshole. I wanted to say something to that, and I couldn’t. But was this his plan? To just drop things like this on us until something cracked?

“I was thinking of my uncle,” I lied. “His partner was killed because of our lack of secret identities. I think he couldn’t stay after that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lynn said.

There was strategy in play. To anticipate that they would go on the offensive, and to disarm and lay groundwork first. Paint a picture of who we were, then use that pictured ground as terrain we could fortify.

Hammering in that the other hero teams were doing good work, solidarity, being sure to express that we wanted to be heroes. All were meant to cut off avenues of attack.

Still, I couldn’t ignore the sister remark.

“Thank you. I was young, but it was hard at the time. A tragedy. My sister too. We’d just lost almost half of our family, the Slaughterhouse Nine showed up. She broke down. She went to the Birdcage because she didn’t trust herself.”

It was as kind of a response as I could come up with. I felt a creeping sort of dread with the notion that she might be looking, watching, reading something into this, maybe even showing up unexpectedly.

“And you went to the hospital at the same time. That’s hard,” John Combs said. “She’s free of the Birdcage now, of course. All of them are.”

He went straight to the hospital. Asshole. He had to know about the Wretch—the one I’d been, not the one I carried with me every day, now.

“You seem very interested in that one family member of mine.”

Stupid. Defensive.

“She did go to the Birdcage. That’s for only a select few,” John Combs said.