With the way the discussion was going in the other room, I wasn’t sure we’d be invited in to talk trade deals or testify on my family’s behalf. I was worried.

I was avoiding breathing more often than I breathed, holding my breath like I was trying to minimize exposure to poison gas.

Or pathogens. The thought lurched into my mind and made me ten different kinds of scared, my mouth drying up, my hand moving involuntarily, streaking against the glass, collecting moisture and cold in the webbing between index finger and thumb. My other hand rested on Kenzie’s head, still, moved suddenly, and made her look up.

“Sorry.”

She shook her head and smiled.

I leaned my head forward to rest forehead against glass. Sveta moved, putting herself between me and Kenzie and my family, her back to that same glass.

Tristan watched the other room, arms folded, and in doing so he faced down the guards. Rain was caught between watching them and watching Chris. Ashley was more focused on Carol, my dad, and Marquis, with Amy a distant fourth.

Amy.

I’d wanted to face my demon and I’d put myself in a glass cell with it.

“You don’t have to move, I’ll go back to where I was standing.”

“I’m stiff, that’s all.”

Marquis’ statement. My mother’s response.

With some unsure movements, a shuffling footstep or two, she crossed the distance. Sveta looked back at me to double check, and I pulled my head away from the coolness of the window, wiped the moisture from my forehead, and nodded.

Sveta let my mom past, taking Kenzie with her.

Tristan watched. Kenzie listened in.

My mom stood beside me.

The guards to my right.

My mom pulled me into a hug. I let her, answered it. I squeezed her tight. I hadn’t hugged her since—had it been the barbecue?

Disturbing, somehow. All of this was.

We broke the hug. My mom touched the window for balance.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I really am. It was bad strategy, it was unkind when you were going out of your way to help—my power is—”

“Amy told me. Her interpretation.”

The words I’d had died.

She turned away, looking out past the glass at the storm-swept landscape of foreign buildings. Towers extending up from one of a building’s four faces. Another squat building had no third and fourth floor, a stone figure curled up within, holding the fifth floor up.

My mom drew a circle in the window, then drew her own icon within it, using a long fingernail for the details.

“I’m sorry,” I said, again.

“Me too,” she said. She drew another symbol. Fingerprints formed the sizing templates for individual segments of my dad’s grenade shape, and she used her nail to create corners.

She was apologizing for—?