I could have taken over, doing the task, but I kind of didn’t want to leave him with nothing to do. I felt like he might walk away. I shifted position to give him better access to my side. The skin at my ribs hurt the most.

“Are you happy?” I asked him.

“The world is ending.”

“But… before that. Or past that.”

“Reasonably happy,” he told me. “I tried retiring. Turns out that if you neglect your powers—”

“You lose control,” I finished.

“Yeah. My power became hair-trigger. Almost like it was ready to go off if I sneezed. I made a deal with the local PRT. Helping the police, someone to watch the back door when the police kick in the front. I see in the dark, so I sometimes catch things. Couple of times a month.”

“And after Gold Morning?”

“Tent cities, protecting the area. We only got a place to stay last month. Now everything’s in five boxes in another tent.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, and he did it with a languid ease, the movement of his shoulders not affecting the dexterity of his fingers. “You’ve had a rough time, I hear.”

“What have you heard?” I asked him. It was me who tensed a bit.

“Brockton Bay had its trials. New Wave stuck it out in one of the most talked about areas, then disbanded. I was—I was horribly sorry to hear about Eric and Neil.”

“Ah.”

“I—even before that. The attack on the mall. I heard you were hurt. I sent a card.”

“I got it. Kept it right up until Gold Morning. You didn’t leave a return address.”

He smiled. “Carol would have hounded me. I needed away.”

“Because of Aunt Jess?” I asked. “Fleur?”

“It was a good excuse.” He tied off the sutures and put everything down, before reaching for sticky bandages. “How much do you know about the old days?”

“War stories, victories, lessons from defeat.”

“That sounds like your mother.”

“Yep. War stories are more my dad’s thing, I think.”

“I remember… being a kid,” he said. “My sisters—your mother, your aunt, they disappeared. I don’t remember specifics. They were young but I was still very small. Kidnapped. Did she tell you?”

“A little bit.”

“The kidnappers wanted ransom and our parents weren’t equipped to pay. We looked better off than we were. They kept Carol and Sarah for weeks. The cops called one sunny afternoon to say that the pair of them had escaped. They came back to us with powers.”

“Yeah. More or less what I heard.”

“They came back haunted, and our parents weren’t equipped to deal with it. So they sent us all off to a kind of boarding school with an attached summer camp. Nature, airy classrooms, small class sizes, horses—your Aunt Sarah loved—”

He paused.

“Probably still loves horses,” I said, thinking of the Valkyrie-created Aunt Sarah.