The mention of the Wretch on national television had felt like the moment the wave had connected. It hadn’t been. That was just for me, my own misshapen boat on uneven, dark waters.

There was always going to be the backlash. Hostility, blame. Breakthrough being the faces of the enemy, for those who wanted to blame parahumans and make them out to be the people standing between the refugees of Gimel and a better future.

That backlash was always going to be hardest at first. The people who watched that show were the people who were receptive to it. We’d left the set—it hadn’t been going anywhere good—and they’d had another fifteen minutes of discussion and pre-recorded footage before ending prematurely.

The messages were rolling in from online, people finding us and then passing it on to their friends or whatever communities they belonged to. There was a lot of vitriol.

“You can tell yourself that it’s going to be worse when it’s new, the people who are going to back us have to catch on that something’s going on, catch up, and then find their own voices,” I said.

“Yeah,” Sveta said.

In the time it had taken me to say that, seven messages had come up. In the subject lines alone, two had profanity. The other five weren’t exactly roses and sparkles, either.

“But… this is pretty disheartening.”

“It is,” Sveta said. “Speaking from experience… the best thing you can do is look away.”

I watched as more messages came in. Sixteen in ten seconds. That was cheating, though. Five were the same guy. Subject line: Fuck. Subject line: Yourselves. Subject line: With. Subject line: A. Subject line: Rake.

“I have to wonder at the mechanics of that,” Rain said. He wasn’t next to me, but stood by Tristan’s laptop. He wasn’t looking at that either, but if he was here in the headquarters at eight o’clock at night, that meant the real him was in his cell, a laptop in front of him. He could see the same email feed.

“You could weaponize it,” Chris said.

“I don’t mind rake man,” Ashley said. “That’s a fire that burns hot and for a short time.”

“It’s a fire that burns stupid,” I said.

I saw her smile.

There were other messages, though. One more email came in. It was longer, with five times the filesize of even the larger of the others.

In Rain’s court, a girl had read her letter to him, giving him her forgiveness. It had been thoughtful, meaningful, personal, giving and possibly life-altering. This email was almost the inverse of that.

A woman had lost her son and she poured grief onto the page like water flowed from a waterfall. It was feeling rather than thought, raw, and disconnected from us, our actions, and who we were. It was purely and wholly selfish.