She started to talk, then stopped as her power misfired again. She gripped her arm, pressing down on the hole where she’d dug her thumb in. I assumed it was the point where her arm stopped and the prosthetic started, interrupting the connection.

I was lost. She’d always been tricky to deal with, but I’d mostly had a good sense of what made her tick. I’d been able to talk her down a few times, I knew what she liked and what she wanted.

I didn’t know, here.

“Fuck me,” Capricorn said. “I don’t know what to say. This needs to be answered, but there are people with lives on the line right now.”

“Go,” she said. “You guys seem to be good enough at finding us and showing up at inconvenient times.”

Capricorn shook his head. “Fuck this,” he said. Angrier, he said, “This isn’t over.”

“No,” Damsel said, her chin rising a bit more. “I didn’t think it was.”

“This isn’t good,” Sveta said. “This is pretty far from okay.”

“I’ve always been a long way off from good and okay,” Damsel said.

“That’s not an excuse to turn your back on those things.”

“Oh fuck off, you sanctimonious cyborg,” Sidepiece said.

“Clearly not a cyborg,” Damsel said.

“I’m—yeah. Not a cyborg. And I’m fucking off, don’t worry. People to help. Damsel of Distress?”

“Fuck offff,” Sidepiece said, head lolling back. She stopped as Damsel raised a hand.

“What?” Damsel asked.

“Help yourself so others can help you,” Sveta said.

Sveta and Capricorn were ready to go. I hesitated.

Everything kept coming back to the same scenarios, moments, and scenes. There were parallels, comparisons, things about people I noticed.

A therapist I’d talked to while Mrs. Yamada was away had explained it to me as a consequence of trauma. Some things were just so big in our own heads that they had their own gravity. They demanded to be dwelt on and they leveraged that dwelling to tie everything back into themselves, every detail they invoked and every question they raised. They were impossible to figure out but we had to try, and that trying became more leverage.

She was fundamentally broken as a person. I didn’t know a lot but I knew that, standing here and seeing her standing over a dead body. I’d been there, I’d been a witness, and I’d been galled then too. I’d witnessed a breakdown of someone extremely dangerous.

I one hundred and fifty percent understood Capricorn and Sveta’s reactions.

Those who had their trauma get too big were the types to extend it to everything. A bad event became a fear of the world, or of men, of capes, or it became self-loathing that permeated every part of one’s own being.