“I was a little too young. I followed along back at home, where we made the dining room into a kind of headquarters, putting up a few bulletin boards. I colored in the maps and moved pins as the territories changed hands while doing homework and stuff. Is it a problem?”

“No,” Ashley said.

“What are your thoughts on the subject, Victoria?” Mrs. Yamada asked, handing me the water.

I drank before answering.

“It’s fine. Boston was mostly fine,” I said. “My family didn’t get hurt. To me, she was just a pin on the map of Boston we had in the living room—”

I saw Damsel’s expression shift. A slight narrowing of the eyes.

“—and a few interesting and impressive stories my aunt, uncle, and dad brought home.”

That amended the narrowing. Lesson learned.

“Good,” Mrs. Yamada said. “I’m glad to hear that. Questions, thoughts, observations? Anyone?”

Ashley wasn’t done with the questions and comments. The words she spoke next were an accusation, and she was very good at sounding accusatory. “You brought her here to change our minds.”

⊙

Our conversation stalled as a waitress wiped down a table behind Jessica. I swished the ice around my now mostly empty glass.

“I never liked the codenames,” Jessica said.

“We might be very different people in that. There’s something fun about them. They’re revealing.”

“They are, but they often reveal just how badly the patient wants to escape, to leave their humanity behind and dive into something well beyond humanity. Some don’t surface completely. Some hurt others on the way down. Some drown in that vast, incomprehensible sea.”

I drew in a deep breath, then sighed. “Feeling poetic?”

“My own kind of escapism, maybe. I think sometimes about a world where all of my patients can go by their real names.”

“I’m not following the train of thought, I’m afraid.”

“I arranged the group therapy. I thought for a long time about whether any of my patients were a significant danger to the others, or if they’d set the therapy of their peers back. I took precautions, I pored over the notes, trying to visualize how things might go, or the topics that I could safely broach or go back to. Like I said, the first meetings are hard.”

“Yeah. I can imagine that.”

“And while I don’t like the way the idea is often interpreted or the conclusions it’s taken to, there’s the notion of volatility, and the exponentially increasing chance of trouble as the groups of capes grow larger. With parahumans, things are often exaggerated, both in weak points or the hot button issues they have, or their inclination to push certain buttons. The more you put in one place, the higher the chance of the wrong button being pushed. That was another concern of mine.”

I nodded. “How long has the group been running?”