“But you wrote the scripts. You listened to the others, and you visualized ways you wanted the conversations to go. I got the impression it was pretty intense, even when you were a step removed in your participation.”

“Sure,” I said. A large part of what I’d contributed to those sessions had played into my last interaction with my mom.

Not that that interaction had gone well, but I could imagine that if I’d found myself in that same situation without the grounding of knowledge from those sessions, I might not have had the words to articulate as much of what I’d wanted to. It was even possible that, without the conflict resolution skills, I might have hurt someone.

The recollections of the therapy and of my mom were heavy, pressing down on me and my chest. I took a long sip of my iced tea. It was cold and sensory, pulling me away from that rabbit hole of dark thoughts.

“This group was intended to be slower-paced, less intense,” she said.

“Even with the time constraint?”

“Yes, even with. Part of it is that, as I said, it was the most appropriate for what I wanted to address.”

“Part?”

“The other part ties back to what I said about introductions, how the first meetings are the trickiest. It was a delicate balancing act to begin with, compared to your group, where we added someone new once every few weeks or months, while the rest of the group remained fairly stable. With this group, having them all meet at once, I thought it would be best to keep things calmer.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“My colleagues like to say there is a truism with groups of parahumans. That the larger the group in question, the greater the chance of a schism or disaster. I’m not sure I like exactly how the idea is presented a lot of the time it comes up, but…”

I thought of my sister.

“Groups of capes get pretty volatile,” I finished the sentence for her. “Each person you add is another chance for things to go wrong.”

⊙

Three more members joined the group. An unknown boy and two people I knew, male and female.

When I realized who I was looking at, though, my jaw dropped. I stood from my chair.

She, for her part, was on a similar page. She stared at me, confused at first. Then reality dawned for her as well.

She was pale in a way that skin didn’t tend to be, and she had a mane of black hair. A small black tattoo marked her cheekbone, partially obscured by skin-tone makeup that had streaked in the rain. For all that she was almost monochrome from the neck up, she was a riot of color from the neck down. Sveta.

Her hands went to her mouth.