“I hope you’ll forgive my saying so, Victoria, but there seems to be a common thread running through your statements and behavior here. You seem to be fighting with all your might to get control over the situations you find yourself in. You talked about wanting to get a handle on the situation with the people who attacked your teammate in her home. You’re sacrificing sleep to hunt people down, and you stood up on stage and took an aggressive stance to regain the control you’d lost. Then you left to keep it.”

“Well, I mean, obviously.”

“Explain this to me.”

“The Fallen? Chaos and ignorance. The community center attack? Shortsightedness, more chaos with civilians caught in the fray. Hollow Point? Chaos and greed. The invading soldiers from Cheit? Secrecy and ignorance. We combat the chaos with order and the ignorance with the sharing of information. We combat greed by being selfless.”

“No mention of your sister and this Goddess?”

“I don’t… really think of my sister, if I can help it.”

“Sorry. But you did ask me here to discuss her, didn’t you?”

I hesitated, then nodded, finding it momentarily too difficult to talk. I drank some of my peach iced tea.

I tried to think of my sister as an agent of chaos. Maybe way back then. Goddess? She would cause chaos, as soon as she decided to make a move. But was she an embodiment of it?

If I’d thought she was one, I wouldn’t have been willing to consider the meeting.

Doctor Wayne Darnall wasn’t talking. Waiting for me to finish sipping at my iced tea and round out my thought.

“I don’t know how to deal with her, and I worry I’m not strong enough to deal with Goddess. I want help. I need… whatever armor you can give me, psychologically. I need tools or weapons, coping strategies, any mental tricks you have for not snapping.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Victoria. My goal and my role is to equip you with tools that you learn to use over the long term. The operative word is learn. Nothing is instantaneous.”

I’d known that. I just… a part of me had hoped he could give me some tricks. Even for the placebo effect, just to give me a sense that I wasn’t completely defenseless while facing down giants like my sister and her new queen.

“Sorry,” I said. “For wasting your time.”

“It’s not a waste. I don’t think there are any one hundred percent answers, but I do think we can take some baby steps in the right direction. We can talk coping strategies, coping mechanisms, but only if you understand these aren’t fixes, and I’m not giving you the all-clear.”

“Please,” I said.