Objectively, I hadn’t been there for her, I hadn’t seen the signs. I had my own objective excuses, like the death of the boy I’d hoped to marry one day down the line. That I was raised by our parents.

Whatever.

Forgive? Never. What she’d done was unforgivable. What Chris had done was unforgivable, and he had his own set of excuses. I didn’t have the benefit of memories or things that would help me figure him out. I didn’t understand him, or why Jessica saw good in him when he seemed so very twisted.

It didn’t matter.

She hadn’t made a clone of me. Okay. She had made a living strip of me, and I was pretty sure I knew when and how.

Okay.

My next conversation with her would be the last, one way or the other.

It felt like I’d solved a puzzle with no answer. A bit of a weight off my shoulders. Like maybe she wasn’t a bogeyman lurking around the next corner. Still someone and something I’d have nightmares over, for fucking sure. But I could think the next conversation would be the last without sticking a question mark on the end.

My leg hurt where it had healed. I rubbed my thigh with the heel of my hand.

“Is it possible there’s a window where her precognition isn’t working?” Tristan asked. Breaking the spell of thought.

“I don’t know. It’s like she passed on some instructions,” Rain said.

“The way the Titans moved,” I said. “Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think it’s possible?” Tristan asked. “She got this message, and now there’s a war waging inside of her? Between Contessa and the Titan?”

“I kind of relate,” Sveta said.

“It’s a chance if we’re right about this,” Tristan said.

“I don’t know if it is,” I said. I thought about what Chris had said, twice. About the others and what they’d observed. That this wasn’t a fight we could win. She’d already plotted her moves. “We speculated earlier that she chose how our powers would be altered. And she made them more aggressive. A little sloppier. Trying to capitalize on this weakness, using tools she arranged for us to have… it feels like the wrong answer.”

The fighting was ongoing. Now that I knew to look for it, I could see that hesitancy, the lack of coordination.

“The last times it felt like we made any moves that mattered, it was with the opposite of this aggression she prompted in us, giving us aggressive powers,” I said. “When we went to the shard world.”

“Can’t get there without the dream room,” Kenzie said. “I don’t think we have a day. You saw my alerts?”

“Your alerts?” I asked.

I had to refocus my vision. I saw the log of alerts. Cracks extending. Cracks extending. Cracks extending.