There was a stretchy, silky shirt that made Sveta think of Semiramis, with its color scheme. Jade, gray, and cherry blossom pink. It was pretty cool. Not the kind of thing Sveta would have picked out on her own, but now it was apparently hers. Its addition in her tiny wardrobe begged her to find things that matched it.

Sveta pulled a music player out of the bag that Victoria had sent. She pressed the button to turn it on and clicked through the songs. By the look of it, Victoria had asked Weld about what music she liked, then put it into the player.

And art supplies. She had her own buried in among her stuff, but Victoria hadn’t known that. It was a nice touch, and a clean, untainted notebook and paint set was inviting.

“Blame keeps you going, doesn’t it? Ernesto needed to blame his wife for what happened to his child. Indignation and quiet fury got him through days he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to manage.”

“It doesn’t make those days better. It’s my feeling that every day he focused on being angry and hurt, he got further from being okay.”

“Should—” Sveta started. She stopped as it hit her that she’d walked into a verbal trap, or that she was setting one up. Neither was okay. “Should I be okay? So many people died.”

“You were just a child, and you weren’t given a choice.”

“But Rain was just a child too, not that much older, and he was threatened with horrible, horrible things, he was brainwashed from a young age, and he had Mama Mathers looking over his shoulder, ready to make him insane and then to make him a breeder for her cult. He had a gun to his head and people act like—”

Jessica didn’t cut in, didn’t interrupt while Sveta thought aloud.

“—Like if Rain finds a ceiling to his self-blame or a point where he stops blaming himself, then he’s not repentant.”

“I have my own feelings about that, I’ve talked with him about them. I would reiterate, you were just a child.”

“So I should be okay? It’s okay for me to be… okay?”

She’d aimed to put an inflection on that last word, and then her voice had cracked as she’d uttered it, which doubled on the effect. The effect was to make it sound far closer to how profound and impactful the notion was to her. How scary and fragile.

She was playing dirty, she knew. This was the verbal trap that would either get turned on her, or that she would turn on Jessica. The idea of her being okay was too layered, too heavy, for it not to be used by one of them.