“Can it be inhumane if you aren’t human?” Gary Nieves asked.

“I think it can,” I said.

“I’m noticing you didn’t protest and say you were human,” Gary pointed out.

The reality was that I wasn’t sure if I really could say parahumans were human, exactly. Too many structures went out the window. Humans were social animals and parahumans were so often solitary, banding together by necessity and circumstance, but not by gravity and natural bonding, like humans seemed so able to do.

“I think my energy is better spent on other arguments,” I told him. “Whatever you want to call us, we think, we feel, we have ties to loved ones. Introduce humanity to an alien race from another planet with all of those qualities and I’d protest any cruelty or injustice turned their way.”

“She would,” Rain said. “She’s a natural hero.”

Thank you, Rain, but it’s best to stay quiet, I thought, as I met his eyes and shot him a tight smile, I willed him to absorb the intensity of the thought. If they turn on you or point fingers at you, this all gets messy.

“And I don’t think we’re that alien,” I added.

“Putting questions of cruelty and the inhumane aside, can you really say it’s fair, if parahumans like Swansong get preferential treatment? If people are dying out in the cold while a girl who got lucky gets her choice of apartments?”

“It’s—”

“It’s a tired old falsehood,” Swansong said. “I’m no slave, I’m no servant. I’m not an animal with my apartment as my pen to keep me contained. They had questions, I was in a unique place to answer them. I died, I came back. I remembered things. When I dream, I dream of other mes. The labs were interested.”

“When the world ended, we wanted answers,” Tristan said. “She was getting paid to help provide them. Enough to pay for an apartment. She’s working for the heroes and she’s doing so with the okay of the mayor.”

“The mayor,” Gary Nieves said.

I had a bad feeling.

“Do me a favor, Vince? Open up my second set of slides. Then go to slide… sixty-eight, I think it was,” Gary told the guy who was managing the slideshow that went with the talking heads on the screens outside.

Slide sixty-eight wasn’t the mayor. It was Amy. It was Cryptid, as some polished, gaunt figure that was so tall that Amy’s head only came to his elbow. Marquis stood off to the side. Other parahumans in fine clothing and costumes were arrayed around them. A photo.

“No, wrong slide, that’s Earth Shin,” Gary said. “Go forward.”