More than anything, I felt wrong down to my bones. I was supposedly better, Chris had supposedly healed me, but I felt like I was crammed into my body, nothing in the right order, but the signals to tell me things were off had all been tampered with.

Like looking at myself in a video, seeing my reflection flipped around compared to what I normally saw in the mirror, but being unable to point at anything specific.

From skin to meat to the bone. I hated it. Hated it. Hate.

I sighed. Then, experimental, I pushed out with my aura, while focusing on my mental image of Contessa. Seeing if there was a pulse, a clue. Anything even from my fragile, wretched companion.

I looked at Rain. He had his mask off and his hood down, and was pale enough in this gloom that old notches and scars on his face stood out. Other kids his age had circular scars from pimples, and Rain did have a couple of those, but mostly they were lines of pink, or marks in the skin.

More than anything, his eyes were wider.

I wanted to ask, and I didn’t want to ask. The Scholar strangled the Monster, one fighting the other.

You need to know, Victoria.

“Sorry,” I told Rain. Noncommittal. Hoping he’d clarify if my aura was different.

“I’ve dealt with worse,” he said.

I hesitated, and then I asked, “Is it awe, fear, or something else?”

“It’s always been fear. I’ve never felt your awe, exactly,” he said. “So maybe it’s the awe? I don’t know.”

I frowned. “If you had to give it any label at all, what would you call it?”

“Interest? Attraction. Like when I noticed Erin for the first time.”

Of fucking course. I couldn’t help but grimace.

I nodded. “Thanks for the clarification.”

“Photos taken,” Kenzie reported from above.

“Come on, then. Let’s go,” I told Rain.

Our journey took us out of the ‘emotion’ spectrum of these crystalline plains, into images and holograms, false faces and representations. My trading cards, the masks I’d tried on, posters of me, seeing myself on television.

I supposed that worked for ‘images’.

There was more ambiguous territory, where the scenes were more alien, but I couldn’t tell if they were actual aliens and alien memory, images stored for some particular kind of power’s execution, or if they were dreams and nightmares. Too inconsistent to pin down.

There was another puzzling stretch, and the three of us split up. The images were too dark, more incomplete than anything, and we were left to make our best guesses for two areas in a row.

Ten minutes had to have passed. Rain persevered, despite the fact he was the one hiking all of this. I could default to floating, and Kenzie was here by camera alone.