“Come with?” I offered. “I meant what I said. If this stuff ends up mattering, that work you’ve done will put you head, shoulders, and tail above the rest.”

“Can’t. Made myself too essential to too many people.”

“It’s not necessarily one or the other.”

“It might be. Vic, they were talking about reporting to their bosses. I’ve got to report to mine. What do I even say? That you seem eager to dive into this? That I don’t know if you’ll ignore orders?”

“The truth. That I think this is pretty darn important. I have questions I want to ask those guys and I want to piece together some of the puzzle.”

“Important? Do you mean essential? Important feels like too weak a word, and if it’s essential, it implies you’re willing to break the rules to go do what you did last night, again. And if you keep that up, one of the handful of people who I knew before Gold Morning and like might disappear. I might feel like I’m obligated as a Warden to report it, and I really don’t want to do that as a friend.”

She stared down at the ground, lips pressed together, and I was reminded of the girl who’d disappeared around the time Dean had introduced me to his team as his girlfriend. To get a handle on her emotions where nobody would see.

And then she’d marched back, expression controlled, and looked me in the eye. Right now she couldn’t bring herself to look at me, but she had that exact same fierceness combined with the apparent resentment at having to be fierce.

Even then, she’d been working so damn hard to work at becoming a stronger, better person. Now… if it weren’t for a neutered media apparatus, or if we were back in twenty-thirteen without the end of the world on the horizon, I could believe she’d be one of those capes who could alter the state of conversation in a room, just by being there.

And I was disappointing her.

“Not essential. Inevitable,” I told her, quiet.

She looked up at me, gaze level.

“I don’t need to break rules because I think this is coming no matter what we do. It’s happening no matter what we do. So I don’t need to rush to it. It’s coming.”

“A breaking down of the walls? They’re coming through to us, is what the leadership says.”

“A breaking down of everything,” I told her. “They are us, at least in part. They’re rooted throughout the city. There isn’t anything that isn’t touched by them. They’re here. We need to figure out how to deal with them.”

Vista heaved out a sigh.

“Do you think I’m wrong?” I asked her.