“—but much like many teachers say they grow to care most about the class clowns and problem students, I came to hold you close to my heart. I wanted so badly to give you answers and to hear you out without having to rely on text to speech and letters you wrote between appointments. I wanted to dialogue, and it was so very hard to do that.”

“It was,” I said.

Why was it so much easier to talk about the things that I couldn’t normally even think about, like this?

“How did you find your way back from that?”

How did I become Victoria again, instead of the wretched thing in the hospital room, or in the home for invalids?

“My sister,” I said, my voice soft.

“Oh. That’s not an easy thing,” she said.

“No,” I said, my voice even softer.

I’d already filled her in on the details of yesterday and the past few months. She’d offered a listening ear. I’d spent all night working out my next few steps, I knew what the situation was, I didn’t really need more angles to view it from.

This, though… if I was going to make the most of the time I had with her here, then I wanted to at least get a handle on this.

“We were all brought to the battlefield during Gold Morning. There’s… that’s a hard topic to field.”

“There’s an unspoken agreement that the civilians don’t get to know,” she said.

“But you’re not really a civilian,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I’ve heard reports. Some from very close to the center of the action. I know what happened.”

“Body, mind, and heart, you know how that’s a thing?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I lost my body, two years before Gold Morning. My heart was… twisted into something unrecognizable.”

“Yes.”

“And… Gold Morning hit. And the—” I paused. There were people on the street, walking toward the school gate and the various block buildings as we walked away from it all. A tide we walked against. I had to shut up until people were mostly out of earshot. “And I was controlled in mind. I didn’t have much, but I could make my decisions. I could decide to use my power or not. She took that away from me, for a brief time.”

“I’ve talked to a number of people who had a very hard time with that.”

“You know who she was?”

“I do.”

I nodded to myself.

“Yeah,” I said. “My sister told me.”

Even if I was free to talk, the words still carried their ugly weight. The words and associated mental pictures still dragged my mood down.