“He made mutagenic serums. The transformations,” Sveta said. “He was dosing himself? Or did his power change?”

“Dosing himself. The medicine he kept with him.”

Kenzie banged the table. “I feel so dumb!”

“Easy,” Ashley told her.

“I didn’t even think! He asked me not to record him changing and I didn’t because I knew he’d be naked at one part of it, and I’m absolutely not allowed to take those kinds of pictures, accidentally or on purpose.”

“Easy,” Ashley said, again. “Count to ten.”

“That’s your thing, not mine.”

“Count.”

“He experimented on a lot of people,” Sveta said. “He turned them into monsters. Freaks. You’ve seen the kind of transformations he can manage, except—the ones we saw were uglier.”

She met my eyes as she said it.

I nodded.

“You’ve seen them?” Natalie asked.

“At the hospital,” Sveta said. “The asylum. Parahumans who can’t control their powers and victims of parahuman powers get sent there to be taken care of.”

“You’ve talked about it,” Tristan said, uncharacteristically gentle.

“I was there for a month and a half, so I could talk to a therapist every day without worrying about rotations or anything,” Kenzie added. “I didn’t really see many others.”

“We’ve all—most of us have seen or been the victims of powers,” Sveta said. “I’m one. There were a few Case Fifty-Threes there. Um. People who lost their minds, one way or another, or who were already struggling with something and who had powers that made it worse. People who were hurt by tinker experiments, in ways that conventional medicine couldn’t help.”

“Bad situations,” I supplied.

“In the few years that Lab Rat was active, for every one person who went to the Asylum for one reason or another, there was a Lab Rat victim. He tested his serums on people and not every single one changed all the way back.”

“Did anyone ever ask him why?” Kenzie asked.

“Kenzie,” Sveta said, her voice hard. “Don’t.”

“I’m just saying! Maybe there was a really important reason, or maybe he couldn’t help it.”

“Kenzie,” I said, before Sveta could get riled up and say something regrettable. “This is a no-fly zone.”

She giggled in a nervous, bewildered way, “What does that even mean?”

“I hear what you’re saying, but… we can’t extend the benefit of a doubt. Not about this. Not until we have a reason to.”

“If we have to have a reason it’s not the benefit of a doubt,” Kenzie replied.

“It’s too close to home,” I said. I tried to keep my voice level. “For me, for Sveta. You can’t make apologies for his actions until we have more information, not when some of us here are unable to forgive people who did the exact same thing to us.”