“No need to worry about that. You did good, Tattletale,” I said. “You deserve a break.”

“Sure. You too, I hope.”

“Want to, like, grab a coffee in the cafeteria?” I asked her. “Might have to duck out as people start waking up or showing off, but…”

“We’re not friends, Vicky.”

“Sure,” I told her, rolling my eyes. “So as not-friends, do you want to dream up punishments for kids over coffee? I’m ravenous.”

She looked down at the cup she was already holding, then pitched it into the garbage. “Rachel kludged this together, and it’s so strong it makes my eyes hurt. Fine.”

“Fine,” I said, with a note of easy humor and a lack of guard I hadn’t let myself feel in a long, long time, like I could have laughed as I said it.

Last 20.e1

“I hoped, going in, that I would be able to see your face.”

They hung upside-down, in a hell of metal and broken glass. The soft things around him were the most dangerous, because crumpled metal hung below his head, littered with tiny glass shards, and the soft portions of his immediate environment offered no traction, nothing to hold onto.

His brother was beside him, but the boy’s features were a cipher. Look at the eye, and the other eye, the nose, the mouth, the hair, and even the shape of the head changed. Look to the hair, and everything else shifted imperceptibly.

There was no memory or detail to be uncovered by coming here and seeing this. Reliving it. He knew agents stored details, but what they chose to store didn’t always make sense. He could reason some of it out, suggest that one person he passed on the street might have had a latent power waiting to be awoken by one bad day. His brother, for whatever reason, hadn’t been a consideration.

So terribly important to him, and a mere prop to his power.

He gripped his seatbelt, one hand at the edge of the window, struggling to hold onto the one rigid, grippable thing there. His arm was tired.

“I’ve been working hard. Trying to stop the kinds of people who got you.”

He reached for his brother and couldn’t manage it.

“Every day, I see people with powers. Every time I see them, I see the agents and their work. Maybe that gives me an edge here. It keeps me awake, because I’m supposed to be unconscious when they take you.”

His arm trembled with the exertion of supporting the weight of his body, his fingers pressing into the ragged edge of the window.

He told himself that yes, he had been unconscious when the event had actually happened, but he was different now. He’d spent decades fighting. Decades giving his all.