“Are you okay?”

“She dug her fingers into my arm,” Jessica touched her sleeve. “And used contacts on her nails to manipulate my nerves, trying to make my arm turn against me. Tensed muscles until they tore from bone. I still don’t have the strength I did, I still have constant pain, and that may be a reminder of my lowest moment, furthest from the person I wanted to be.”

I had a half-dozen questions I wanted to ask, but there was no perfect order.

“Was it? Had she done something?” I asked.

Jessica shook her head. “Everyone accounted for. Everyone checked over. Nothing questionable. If I had to guess, she was protective of her work because it was all she had to show for the prior timeframe and as you say, it was fragile. I’ve gone over that conversation a thousand times in my head, since, and I think she might have misread my tone, or misread my impatience as my wanting her to leave it behind.”

“And Bonesaw?” I asked, quiet. “Is she okay?”

“Riley is Riley, Victoria. Physically? Even with nearly every bit of her technology removed from her body, I don’t think there’s much someone could do to her with physical wounds that would last.”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“Mentally? Emotionally?” Jessica asked. “She asked to stay. Valkyrie tried to convince her. They struck a deal that Valkyrie would visit now and then. She was ashamed she hurt me like she did.”

“Oh.”

“I think she’s more experienced than most when it comes to enduring betrayals and being hurt by people close to her. But that makes it more of a betrayal that I perpetrated, Victoria. Not less. More of a wrong.”

And in the doing, I thought, because there was no way in hell I’d say it out loud, you proved my sister right? Tired, sick, desperate and scared, you perpetrated what you see as an unforgivable betrayal?

“I can’t support or help anyone until I relearn how to support and help myself,” she told me. “I know you want and need me to be my old self, but I need to rediscover her, first. For myself first, then for others. If that’s even possible.”

Something about her tone at the end there made me look at her, study her.

“Did you trigger?” I asked.

She didn’t move a hair.

“Because I know your policies, and I can imagine you’d be the type to suppress it, do what retired capes are doing, pretending you don’t have powers, that a purely civilian life is possible, but—”

“Victoria,” she interrupted me.

I stopped.

She shook her head at me, before dropping her gaze to the crowds below us.

And hopes were dashed. Jessica was out of reach.

“I’m sorry that happened, Jessica.”

“So am I.”

⊙

My screen glowed with the text message from the Wardens, in the second before I drew a circle, radiating out to another application, which showed a map of the Headquarters. Once Cauldron’s, then Teacher’s, now the Wardens’.