“My mom hired a professional to get me back to normal, and it was mostly fixed. We bought some products to keep my hair from ending up like that after. I can’t imagine the professional or the products were cheap, and we were pretty tight on cash back then. She knew it was important to me.”

My heart hurt a little, thinking of that.

“That’s the way it should be,” Kenzie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

She turned my way, putting on the projected helmet so it was superimposed over her head. When she took her hands away and moved her head, the helmet moved with her head.

Now, though, the eyes of the mask widened and closed, as camera-like shutters closed around the edges. The eyelashes moved up and down a little, and shutters moved in lopsided ways, with only some of the shutters closing. Coming down from the top, curved forward, angry. Coming in from the bottom.

“Are you changing your expression?”

“Yes! It worked. Awesome. Okay, and let’s try this.”

Her eyelashes moved, until one was pointing straight up, one was pointing straight down. The eyes all briefly turned white.

“I think that worked. White eyes and… targeting mode?”

“Not targeting mode. I could build something like the flash gun into it. I can strike a pose and do the eye thing, like they’re crosshairs, and flash. There’d probably only be room for one shot. Okay, colors—”

She tapped her pen on her desk. The mask changed from shades of gray to pink and sky blue. I winced, and she immediately changed to the next. Seafoam green and black. Through each change, the circles at her cheekbones remained a slightly different shade, more muted.

“Something less garish, maybe?” I asked. “That one looks a little villainous. Cute, but villainous.”

She tapped her pen a few times, then made a mark on the paper.

Lemon-lime and dark gray, with green-gray circles for the cheekbones.

“Better.”

“Ooh, I know a thing. I can do a thing.”

She turned, and she started scribbling. She seemed energized.

But as she turned, the image at one of her cheekbones broke up, becoming transparent, like a few squares had been cut out of the image. It flickered as I moved my head to view it at another angle.

“You’ve got a distortion,” I said. I pointed.

“Silly me,” she said.

The entire helmet disappeared.

“Something similar happened when your picture was taken at the Wardens’ HQ,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re wearing a projection?”

“Not really,” she said. She scribbled. “I’m wearing tech, and it conflicts with stuff so it can be hard to coordinate. I wouldn’t call it wearing.”

“No?”