“What is it?” I asked. “You don’t get to not tell me. Out with it.”

She hated hearing that, which was why I kept going back to it, to hammer in at that idea she was clinging to as a safety. If I didn’t penetrate that safe ground she could go back to it endlessly.

With each repetition, I could see the emotional pain reach her face, her hands. Tattooed hands, with two fingers left untatooed, replacements for what she’d apparently lost in her fight against the Slaughterhouse Nine.

I wondered if there was a meaning there. She’d tattooed blood onto her hands, either consciously or not, but that little addition was like a ‘but not here, not with this excuse’.

I looked again to Sveta, to Vista, to Ashley, to Tristan.

Nobody was telling me to back down.

Okay.

She explained, “After I was done with the capes I started on other people. Victims of capes. People like, um, like the people at the Parahuman Asylum. There’s a facility in your Earth’s Europe. Not really like the Asylum, more like a big farm, where they do their best to get everyone set up to contribute to society and give them therapy, medical care, and anything else they need. For some it’s just somewhere warm and clean with animals to cuddle.”

“Please tell me that you didn’t do what you did because of me, or for me.”

Amy didn’t answer. She couldn’t meet my hard stare.

My dad spoke up, “When someone regrets their actions to the extent that I think Amy regrets hers, I think everything they do ends up being affected or colored by it.”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” I said.

“I helped a lot of people,” Amy said, still not meeting my eyes.

It seemed to take difficulty to get through it and explain it. Fucking good.

“But you hurt someone. Who?” I asked.

“A young teenager with control issues,” Amy said. “I did too much in one week, I was adapting to new roles and trying to handle interpersonal stuff with people who had been loyal to Bianca, who knew I’d been an… acquaintance of hers. I didn’t listen to the little voice in the back of my head that said I shouldn’t do delicate work, and I made a mistake.”

“What mistake?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Amy.”

“I’m fixing it.”

“What mistake?”

It was Chris who spoke up, “You know when you’re drawing, and—”

“I want to hear it from her.”

“—it’s very detailed work, and you sneeze mid-drawing, and draw a big zig-zag across the picture?”

“I want to hear it from her,” I said, again.

“It’s that,” Chris said. “Except it was someone’s mind and power.”

I might never forgive him for denying me the ability to make her admit it.