“Jessica didn’t want me to do it. But…” she trailed off. “So much of my life revolved around him. Sometimes literally, I’d be tied to him. Fuck Weld. Fuck him for hanging around Slician so soon after breaking up with me. Fuck Slician for being willing to do that. Fuck Armstrong for not telling Weld off for choosing this moment and me to be a jerkass for the first time in his life.”

She had tears in the corners of her eyes. She turned back to look over at Titan Oberon.

Fume Hood was distracted from the creation of her spikes. Javelins, maybe. I saw the line of a beam cut across the space in front of her, cutting the beams in half. They billowed out to blanket the area around her in gas.

I watched the gas crawl across a whole tract of the city, getting partway to us, wary that I might have to sound the alarm.

It dissipated before it reached us.

No message on my phone. The team out there was doing something in the way of a testing of the waters.

“Sorry,” I said, seeing Sveta watching me put the phone away.

“No. I’d be offended if you didn’t check.”

“I’m so sorry about Weld,” I told her. “I’m sorry if there’s a fuck you in there meant for me, because I’ve been too busy, or distracted, or…”

She shook her head, leaning it against my shoulder.

“I don’t have a full childhood’s worth of memories to draw from,” Sveta told me. “I don’t have much in the way of an adolescence, that doesn’t still give me nightmares if my brain wanders into the wrong places when I’m asleep. So I hold onto ideas. Dreams and what ifs, and obsessing over cool boys with metal skin, or about the injustices Case Fifty-Threes face. Dreams about who I was and the anger, and feeling like this tattoo—”

She touched her cheekbone. With her at my left, I couldn’t really see it.

“—gave me membership in a club. Even if that club decided to turn on me or use me as a scapegoat. I don’t know if I even qualify now. Egg is kind of freaked out. I spent so long wrestling with this demon that was my body… I kind of didn’t realize that all I was inside my body, inside my head, my identity, it was more demons.”

“Can you befriend your demons?” I asked. “Tame it—them?”

“I think I’ve vanquished too many of them. Or left them behind. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

“Mind letting go of me? I won’t let you fall. Just…” I pulled back a bit as she unwrapped herself from me, making sure she had her feet on the sturdiest branches, while I held her arms. “Balance.”

“What’s up?” she asked. “Going to leave me up a tree?”

“No. I wanted to face you properly,” I told her. “Sveta Karelia. That’s you. It’s a name you can go by because it’s a name you chose yourself.”