“I thought he had a great opportunity to be one. When the therapy group formed a hero team, I thought two or more of them would go down the wrong track. It’s a small miracle that it was only one.”

We were ignoring that another two had died.

“So it couldn’t be helped?” I asked.

“It could have. But you’re not a therapist, Victoria. And I… as unwilling as I was to admit it, I wasn’t prepared to be one either. Not in those circumstances, with those pressures. I should have pushed back harder against the team idea.”

“We did some good.”

“Absolutely. Some essential good, from what I hear. Battles won and mysteries solved that wouldn’t have been uncovered without your hard work. I’d never deny that.”

“Cool. Then what went wrong?”

“Battlefields make for terrible therapy couches,” Jessica said. “That’s all. That’s always been the case.”

“Oh.”

“I’m going to keep looking for people,” Sveta said.

“Okay. Rain went upstairs,” I said. “Looking for you. And for doctors.”

“I’ll go up then.”

There was a silence after she made her exit. I didn’t know what to say, and Jessica didn’t volunteer anything.

I wanted to apologize to her so badly, and I suspected she wanted to do the same to me. We both left it unsaid.

“Are you still conscious?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she told me. “I—Hello.”

A cape was making his way up the stairs. A cape I’d seen with Gundeck, I forgot the name. He stopped when he saw me.

“Is it true?” he asked.

“Is what true?”

“Your contingency plan that you gave to the Wardens. Murder?”

“Oh,” I said. “That was a last-ditch thing. It fell through.”

“Good,” he said.

“Who did you hear that from?”

“Another cape. Your teammate told them.”

“Cryptid,” I said.

“Yeah.”

And that was that.

That was the card he had up his sleeve, the threat he’d held in reserve if we tried to stop him. Now he was using it to force the Wardens’ hand. People would react, the Wardens would reassure, people would take measures to get out ahead of it.

“Contingency plan?” Jessica asked.

“Kill all the capes,” I said. “Contagious, bio-altering sound, I think. It didn’t matter how, just that it got enough of us.”

“How—I don’t think that would work.”

“There are two things that the entities have always been bad at handling, when it comes to us. Dreams… Rain’s thing drove that home, but capes like Miss Militia and Swansong, they had screwy retention and processing of data through their dreams.”

“Swansong remembering things that Damsel did after dreaming, and vice versa. I don’t know about Miss Militia’s.”