“How good a job can you do if you live with one for most of your life and you can’t even see that she’s deranged enough to dismantle human beings and put them back together wrong?”

I flinched.

“How good of a job can any of you capes do policing any of the others? You’ve missed some pretty big stuff. Even among your families.”

“I can’t speak for my teammates or the other heroes,” Tristan said. “But there are others watching what’s going on in Shin. The last I heard, they were keeping parahumans contained to one area and letting the rest of that world get back into its own rhythm.”

“That—”

“But what I can say,” Tristan added, with more vigor, bullying his way through, “sorry to interrupt, but I wasn’t done. What I can say is that people are watching out, and I think we’re doing okay.”

“To go back to the topic of her sister—”

“Why?” Swansong asked. She was incensed enough to make me worry. “To poke at old wounds?”

“Easy,” I said. “It’s my wound and I’m not getting heated here.”

“Your sister, Antares, who is supposedly being watched, apparently just did to someone else what she did to you four years ago, when she put you in the hospital. She was sick then, she’s sick now, and no, I don’t think anyone’s watching closely enough.”

Ashley took a step forward before I could even process that mental image. I did a full one-eighty degree turn, my hand going out to almost punch her collarbone more than I put my hand out to stop her. The heel of my hand rested against bone, while my eyes dropped down, my expression tense. I was sure I was giving the crowd a good show—I turned away a bit and let my hair fall down into the way to hide my expression.

“Stop,” I said, my voice a whisper.

“I’m sure people are looking after the situation,” Tristan said. “We might not catch everything, but we don’t want any of the bad stuff any more than you do. We watch because we have to. Like Precipice says, this stuff you’re bringing up can be scary, our own lives are on the line when we go out there to stop despots and monsters, and we can’t afford not to keep an eye on the dangerous ones.”

His voice was confident, steady. I focused on it.

Misinformation, I told myself, and I willed it to be true. Misinformation that Amy had done something anything like what she’d done to me. A Teacher plot, aimed at making this worse.

I had a feeling in my throat like I wanted to groan or to throw up. I swallowed it, doing my best to logic it away with the mantra of misinformation.