“I grew up into powers,” I told the people at the table. I could see expressions of concern. “I’ve been studying them for a while. I studied enough to know that there were huge gaps in our knowledge and those gaps were barely closing with every passing year. Where did powers come from? How do we get them? Now we know. Gold Morning wasn’t just destruction. It was answers.”

“And you didn’t share,” John Combs said.

“For decades, people who told about other major secrets were visited by a bogeyman who targeted capes. It was someone who could kill or disappear the invincible, outsmart the masterminds, and survive things that would kill or stop just about anything. Whatever they planned to talk about would be mended shortly.”

“Yeah,” Tristan said. “Then Gold Morning happened. There were people here and there who talked about it, but most stayed quiet. Pressure from other groups, and most of the ones with a podium to talk about it had the sense to stay quiet, because the bogeyman would act on this kind of thing.

Thank you for the reminder, Tristan, I thought.

Lookout’s hand went over mine on my armrest, squeezing.

“We had glimpses through Scion’s eyes, when our powers manifested or when certain effects came into play. During these times, we saw things as he saw them. It includes millions of fragments raining down on us, invisible to the naked eye. Each of those fragments… a power. We were made to forget, but when Gold Morning happened, we were able to remember. He stopped caring so much about perfection, and he became something else entirely. Not that he was ever human.”

“What was he? An alien? A demon?” Gary Nieves asked.

“He was an alien from another reality, more distant from us than Gimel is from Bet, as best as we can tell,” I said. “He moved between realities like we walk through doorways. Something went wrong with what he was trying to set up, and he lost his partner.”

“He had a partner? There’s another one of these out there?”

“Dead in the crash landing, we think,” I said.

“What’s the point, then? Or was that broken up in this crash too?” John asked.

“To experiment with what we’re given. To be open and vulnerable for effective study.”

“A real justification about why you’re all so screwed up?” Gary asked.

“That’s—” I started. I was aware of all of the eyes on me. I smiled. “No. Because we have definite proof to the contrary.”

“That you’re not all screwed up, with some alien god as an excuse??”