“What kind of something?” Weld asked.

“Very subtle, but enough to break Jessica’s trust in me, and to break the team’s trust in me. Tattletale and I found other possible leads. The fact we were looking might be why this happened, because they wanted to throw us off the scent. But I’d have to know more to know.”

“I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you’re talking about. I got a friend invite from Slician,” Sveta said. “I already turned off my phone’s access to the network. It was there, waiting, I just don’t see my phone enough to catch it. I only just got hands that can press buttons on screen without a stylus.”

“The way these guys operate, it’s possible the invite was fake, but in a way that has plausible deniability, where even Slician thinks she could have done it by mistake, or when drunk. It’s possible the images were altered.”

“Altered?” Weld asked.

“I can talk to you about this after,” I told him. Sveta felt barely under control under my hands.

“No,” Sveta said. “Altered?”

“Shrinking the distance, props. Taking people out of the picture, or altering the people in the background. Stuff that stands up to scrutiny.”

“I don’t remember her putting her head on my shoulder, but—”

Sveta flinched.

On a level, I could see why that simple little thing in particular hurt. Because Sveta, prosthetic body or no, control or no, had always had a claim to that. Even after leaving the hospital, she’d had her head and his shoulder to lean on.

“—but I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t feel much, so I don’t want to rule anything out. Half of me wants to say you’re paranoid. Half of me hopes…”

He didn’t finish the sentence, faltering.

Sveta turned. “Hopes what? Does this change anything? The—that you want to leave me because I’m a monster?”

“That’s not it,” Weld said.

“Then what is?” Sveta asked. “Tell me you’ve changed and tell me how and okay, that’s going to break my heart, but okay. I can get over that. Tell me I did something wrong, something unfixable. I can get over that. Tell me I depended too much on you and you see me as a little sister more than a girlfriend. That you don’t see yourself ever getting over that and seeing me as a girlfriend again? I can… I can accept that.”

I looked away, blinking tears of my own out of my eyes.

The implication in Sveta’s statements was that these options were good because she could come to terms with them, the flip side being… she couldn’t accept or come to terms with the reality.

“If we know something else is at play, we can avoid playing into their hands, we step back, act like things are normal,” Weld said.