“But you don’t consider yourself very… you?”

He shook his head.

“I want to know who and what we’re up against. I want to know who and what I’m working with. If you’re… closer to the agents? Is that a sore point or touchy subject?”

“More for Clock than it is for me,” Kid Win said.

“Let me know if I get insensitive,” I told him. “What filters through? What doesn’t? What matters?”

“Give me a starting point.”

“Day to day.”

“Day-to-day activities? I remember daydreaming about tinker stuff in class, the stress of not doing well in my classes. Actual time at school is a haze, but here and there I had some good ideas or epiphanies and I can remember those. I can relate back to the school stuff that I used to inspire tinker work.”

“So you don’t remember, say, math class?”

“The old me didn’t think of math class as anything except a constant feeling like I was struggling to tread water with weights tied to my ankles.”

“But you remember that feeling.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Is it mostly negative?” I asked. “What about good memories?”

“Hazy recollections of returning to the base after a fight we did okay in. Camaraderie. Being promoted. Legend complimenting me. That one’s sharper.”

“Are those all when you were around more parahumans? Stronger parahumans?”

“If you’re trying to gauge by that… Vista kind of skews the results. She was one of the strongest Wards and she was around a lot of the time.”

I nodded. “Fair. Good point.”

“And no. Some of the hazy good memory is around family. We did this one, um, it was a crisis point. No powers involved, but they sent me, Gallant, and Battery to talk to this woman who had been attacked, we were supposed to make sure she was okay, show our faces, give support and make sure no powers were involved. Not pretty but a bit of a softball for two teenage guys and an experienced hero, right?”

“Sure.”

“It wasn’t a softball. She was psychotic, vulnerable, broken. People with mental illnesses get preyed on more than they prey on others, and she said a whole bunch of stuff. Got to Gallant, feeling what she felt. Got to me, hearing the things she said, wrestling with what I was wrestling with at the time. Really scary, really sad.”

“This is a happy memory?” I asked. I could remember Gallant bringing that scene up back then. I hadn’t known Kid Win had been there. “That sounds horrible, I’m sorry, Chris.”