“I’m not looking to interfere in anything yet. I’m not going to break up your team by fiat or by leveraging the Wardens. I won’t use those things to make you leave them. I just want to look into this.”

“Possibly indefinitely. And that ‘yet’ might become a ‘now’? When? When someone else gets hurt? I’m thinking back to what you said earlier in the conversation, me being reckless? Can you give me something?”

“I can’t—”

I used my aura. I kept it within the room. A pulse, a thrum.

She remained where she was, stock still, head bent.

Then she turned toward the door. She took two steps, gave me a sideways glance, and stopped.

I was ten feet from the door, and she didn’t want to get that close to me.

“Step away from the door, please,” she said.

I took a step back and away, my expression stern, angry.

“When you traded files with Dragon, she had a bot sweep your computer. An automatic thing she does. She found your diary—”

“Jessica.”

“—Let me finish,” she said, and her voice was tense. “She found the diary, with her bot flagging certain lines to bring to her attention. She thought portions were concerning. Nothing criminal, but suggestive of a certain attitude toward Breakthrough that’s exploitative and unhealthy. The entries go back to before our first meeting in the Patrol headquarters in Stratford. I was told the minute I asked after your collective welfare.”

“No,” I said.

“It sounds like you, Victoria. It reads like you. It has details that fit you, that I strongly doubt others would know. It refers to your forcefield as ‘the Wretch’. It refers to details about your parents and family, your sister included. So far, by our checks, the calendar of events line up. I haven’t brought it up with the team, out of concern of outright devastating them, and on the off chance you are innocent, then I would ask you to keep Kenzie out of it. Reading that would disturb her.”

“What the hell is it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer my question. Again, just moving on to what she felt like she could and couldn’t say, finding the determination to say the things that were hardest to say. She went on, “…I did prod and ask questions as much as I could. My doubts were not eased. I have not found any holes in the story.”

“I have one. I wouldn’t write about my sister, I don’t even think about my sister if I can help it,” I said. The thoughts of Amy and this feeling of betrayal weren’t making it easy to think straight.

“I told you what you wanted to know, would you please step to the other end of the room?”

That—she’d told me because she still felt threatened? She was bartering?