“No. I wish I could. You should go talk to them. Get the answers you wanted.”

“Come with. You don’t have to betray your bosses and mentors to come and listen. And you can tell them everything we’ve talked about.”

I only realized after saying it that Vista might have wanted to hang back for the same reason she’d stepped away after Gallant had introduced me to the Wards.

It was too late to take back my offer.

“I need a promise,” she said. “Don’t leave.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Don’t get so far away or disconnect so much in this… whole complicated mess that I don’t see you again.”

“I’ve got people to look after,” I told her. “Jessica Yamada asked me to look after them. I’m still working on that. I have no plans to go anywhere.”

“You stay Victoria Dallon. You don’t dive so deep into the waters that you emerge out the other side and the inside parts of you are out, and the outside parts of you are in.”

“Dennis is going to be okay, Missy. I really believe it.”

She gave me a glare of a look, a warning.

“I promise. At the end of this all, you can call me big V, and I’ll call you little V.”

She didn’t look convinced.

“It’s part of what I’m after. I mentioned the volcano. I want to work around it, use it, without losing myself to it. Everything I’m doing right now is to avoid losing to this… phenomenal force we’re up against. I want control of myself and of things in my reach. I don’t want to be Mark or even Crystal, though I think Crystal might be a little less disorganized and lost after today. We’ll see.”

“Will we, though?” Vista asked.

“I don’t want to be Amy,” I said. “I don’t want to be Amy’s monster, either.”

“In the report—I only glanced over it. They said you destroyed Teacher’s crystal, and it was dangerous?”

“I’m pretty sure it was safe. The entire thing was reckless.”

“Then aren’t you contradicting yourself?” Vista asked, hostile now.

“Not doing anything felt more reckless. If Teacher had won, and he was about to, we might have lost control of everything. Forever.”

Vista nodded. She cracked her knuckles.

I watched her.

Saw her nod.

“We good?” I asked, again.

“We’re good. Ninety-nine percent of everything else is kind of balls.”

Vista smiled at me, but behind that smile was that faint, vaguely resentful expression. A smile for me, resentment for ‘everything else’.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Hold onto that one percent that isn’t, then.”

“I was,” she muttered. “Until you barged into my room way fucking earlier than I expected.”

I smiled, she looked up at me and smiled a bit too. Not quite so resentful.