“I don’t know or trust you,” I said. I was mindful that guards might be listening. “You’ve been level and fair in most things to do with Earth N, I don’t have any grudges, but right now you’re not winning points with me, and if I get answers I want to hear them from the mouth of that person. I grew up with them, and if a lie comes from that mouth, at least, I’ll know it.”

Hate was a harbor, a refuge. I could take conflicting feelings and bury them in it. I wasn’t sure I cared if she died. I might have been relieved, even. Hate was dangerously close to love in how passionate it was, but never in my love for her or for Dean or for any teammate or other family member had I ever driven forward, gone on the attack, accused. Not on this level. Even in my arguments with my mom, it had been debates and arguments from reason prior to Gold Morning and me shutting down after.

New ground was safer.

Amy made Marquis stand down again.

“I do have it handled,” Amy said. “I want to stress that.”

“I want to judge that for myself,” I said. “Tell me.”

I saw her do something I’d seen too many times in our childhood, in our early teen years. I thought of it as clinging. Finding an argument or idea and constantly going back to it. She’d convinced herself she had it handled, and she’d go back to that over and over, even after it ceased making sense.

I had zero doubt she’d done it in rationalizing things as she did them to me. Zero doubt they played into her spiral down.

She would say it again. That she had it handled.

“You don’t get to keep silent if I ask,” I said, with emphasis on the ‘I’.

“I checked over all of the prisoners from the prison on your Earth and the leftover parahuman warlords from here. Put things in place, mental checks, emotional controls, whatever they needed. Chris handled information gathering, interviews, collected a handful he thought would be useful to keep around as…”

“Lieutenants?” I asked.

I saw Chris shrug.

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “I wanted to focus on good things, peace, giving you the distance you wanted. So long as he wasn’t hurting innocents and let me keep one eye on what he was doing, I didn’t mind. Same checks and balances for him.”

“And nobody checking and balancing you?” I asked.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“Isn’t it? This is important. This is billions of lives important. That’s what you took on here. And if they’re hearing from outside sources that you’re unchecked and imbalanced then that impacts everything. Like Vista said, we get dragged in to put out your fires.”

“I have it handled.”

There it was.