“It absolutely is. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate her. I still feel like… if she died in the next five seconds, I would feel relieved first and bad second. She said once that hate is the emotion closest to love… but I don’t feel any love at all.”

“These changes started when she used her power on you?” Darnall asked.

“Can you elaborate on the scenario and timeline?” Jessica added.

“I went to Shin. To negotiate, to help. We were imprisoned as a political play. I was hurt. The doctor then drugged me, knocking me out. I came to, and I was—”

There it was. That feeling like my heart could stop, the feelings crowding in my chest, until it felt like there wasn’t room to expand in my lungs. I’d spent the last week trying not to think about that scene, that room, and how very helpless I’d been in there.

My arms were already folded, so I squeezed them against my body, hard. “—captive.”

“That must have been terrifying,” Darnall said.

“We had a conversation,” I said, controlling the tone of my voice. I shrugged, and I couldn’t relax my shoulders enough to unshrug, so I leaned against the wall instead, like I was finding a different posture. “They say, um, the unknown is the root of all fear. Maybe the conversation helped, because it made a lot of things known. What she’s willing and able to do. She used her power on me.”

“To do what?” Jessica asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But you know she used her power.”

I thought of my conversation with Defiant. The lie detector. “I don’t know anything. But I’m ninety percent sure. I was missing a fingernail after the attack that put me in the doctor’s control, just before… captivity,” I said. I looked away, devoting a lot of my secondary attention and processing to the study of a manufacturer’s sticker on the side of one of the chairs. “I had a fingernail after. Shin’s medicine isn’t that good.”

“Is it possible that was the extent of it?” Darnall asked.

“No,” I said, studying that sticker. Where had it come from? What language was that?

“You sound sure.”

“Ninety percent sure. I know her. Or… I knew her. I have a sense of her. I have a sense of what she does, like, I wasn’t surprised at all that… this. The monsters. The violation of the people who those monsters came from. Even fucking Mama Mathers didn’t deserve to be made into something like that. Even a tyrant like Goddess.”

“You think she did something more?”