“I don’t think I’m human, doctor, because when Gold Morning happened, she put me back together. She fixed the feelings and she stripped away the excess flesh. She made me the way I had been on the day I’d been when I was turned into a monster. People came and wrapped blankets around me, and I was numb from shock and trying to remember how to move again when she talked to me.”

“She talked to you?”

“She rambled. She was never good in a crisis and me being fixed was a crisis, I guess. She told me, um—”

I scratched at my arm, then stopped myself.

“There’s no rush,” Doctor Wayne said.

I met his eyes. “She told me that when she made that body, larger than mine, the sprawling, broken, wretched thing, raw materials were harvested from stray cats, dogs, and rodents. Birds, bugs, other things. People’s household pets that were left behind after Leviathan attacked. She said, um, she said—”

I felt like I’d get caught up in a loop of ‘ums’ if I let myself continue talking. I stopped to drink some of the iced tea I’d barely touched.

“Um,” I said, defeating the point of the pause. “Just, you know, I should be careful about giving or getting transplants. There’s a chance it wouldn’t be compatible with humans. Understand?”

He didn’t respond. Good.

“Because she didn’t want to get carried away, she wanted to get me as close to normal as she could get me and stop herself there. Then she said—she’d ask if I wanted more fixes, and I couldn’t talk so I shook my head no. She asked if I wanted my memories of things erased and I couldn’t let myself have that because there’s nobody left in the world I trust enough to protect me from her, except me. So I told her no, and I told her never to show her face in front of me again. So I’m—I’m—”

I blinked away tears.

“I am very alone, doctor,” I said. “My maybe-not-one-hundred-percent-human self is going to fight like hell to save people from… from that—”

I indicated the horizon. The portals speared and lurched up into the sky, frozen where they were, the sky on the far side a different shade.

“—and from other horrors. I’m not going to win every fight. I would really appreciate some help to keep me in the fight. Because we have a brief moment of calm, and history suggests the periods of calm before the crises get shorter and shorter.”

Again, there wasn’t an immediate response. He fixed his gaze on the broken horizon because it meant he didn’t have to make eye contact with me.