“We endured. We kept a balance. It wasn’t easy. A lot of the foods we experimented with made us violently ill. Fresh water was in short supply, we were cold, we got sick. Riley seemed to have saved us, if anything, by analyzing the food and curing the sickest of us—people I deemed so at-risk that it was unlikely she could do too much. Riley and Jamie Rinke were, to all appearances, angelic, all considered. Some reining in needed, naturally, and it took everything I had to stay on top of it all, especially with my own bouts with illness, but it worked. We’d made it out the other side.”

How does that get us from there to you strangling Bonesaw?

I didn’t butt in.

“The ‘other side’ was Valkyrie’s arrival. We talked. Everyone began to pack up, and she plotted the way back with Van. As liaison, it was my job to collect Riley and Jamie. Jamie was happy to go. Riley wanted to pack up her lab… and was resistant to my offers to help.”

“Tinkers are touchy. Little things like fingerprints can cause problems with specific tech. I have to imagine it’s the same for her work. Or was she up to something?”

“She was protective of her work in a curtained-off section of her lab. She wouldn’t let me approach, and my first thought was that we had people in more distant camps who had struck out on their own. Some parahumans, one couple, a jolly fellow who fancied himself a survivalist and who was taking an optimistic view of the situation. He would stop in every day or two, and he hadn’t stopped in for two days. We sent out people to get in touch with him after Valkyrie’s arrival, and they couldn’t find his camp.”

“Worrying,” I echoed the sentiment in her words.

“Terrifying. Crushing. Riley adopted her ‘Bonesaw’ persona, acting younger than she appeared—and with the surgeries she subjected herself to, she’ll never appear older than twelve. Laughing off my questions, being furtive.”

Another superhero team was running down the hall, far below us.

Jessica didn’t elaborate, didn’t explain the whole business.

For a moment, I was terrified that was it. I was left to draw the worst conclusion.

“She was my responsibility. I can say what I might say about workload, stress, the inherent difficulties of that situation, but I could have and should have kept more of an eye on her. The burden of guilt was on me more than it was on one very ill and traumatized young woman in a new and difficult situation.”

“That’s not being fair to yourself.”

“Maybe not,” Jessica said. “But that was what I felt in that moment. In working with people with criminal inclinations, part of my job is to protect society, and working with five people with powers, only two a real and present concern, I’d failed to protect a tiny, primitive microcosm of society. I got angry. Desperate. I tried to make her show me. And somewhere in the midst of it, she lashed out, I grabbed her, or the other way around.”