Ashley turned back to look out at the distance, and Kenzie climbed up on the rock Ashley was leaning against.

A moment later, Kenzie had her headphones out of a pocket. She plugged it into her phone, reached down, and put an earbud in Ashley’s ear, then put another in her ear, before lying down on the rock.

Slowly, Sveta lowered her hand.

“Why?” I asked.

“I gave my reasons before, so did Rain, so did Kenzie,” Sveta said. “We’ve had this discussion. This isn’t news.”

“It’s one thing to know it and see it in therapy, it’s another to experience it in the wild,” Rain said.

“Why?” I asked, again. “You can’t—I understand reaching out to people, but can you really reach out to people who aren’t reaching back? Can you give forgiveness and understanding to someone who isn’t looking for it?”

“I think she is,” Sveta said.

Tristan said, “I don’t know what you guys talked about, but I discussed this with the others, and I have an idea what they probably said. Do you know how many appointments and meetings she goes to?”

“It came up,” Rain said.

“Okay, good. But did you talk about why?”

“Because she needs careful handling?” I asked.

“Because,” Tristan said. “She’s a special case. She’s not the original Ashley, I’m not sure if you picked up on that.”

“I got the gist of it.”

“Like she said, her memories aren’t hers. She was cloned, they took her and they made up composite memories, but they had no reason to give her those fuzzy memories of other, nonconfrontational stuff. That wasn’t Bonesaw’s work. It’s the agent.”

I drew in a breath and I sighed.

“The world ended, and it ended because of them. We can’t have a sit-down talk with Scion because we killed him. We have a shitton of questions and the only kinds of people who can answer them are the people who got really close to the agents, like Bonesaw, who made Ashley—”

I felt a chill.

“—and the people like this. Who are very little of the human, shadows of the human, and a lot of the agent. All of us have problems, and a big part of those problems are the agents, handling their side of things. I know I’ve talked to Rain about this, I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but when I’m talking to her I’m also talking to the agent that’s very close to the surface. I feel like if I can get along with that agent, I can get along with mine.”

“Yeah,” Rain said.

“I want to get along with the human,” Sveta said. “I don’t want to define her as the monstrous half.”

“That’s fair too,” Tristan said.