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  APPROXIMATELY -4.13.5 PRE-INCIDENT

  Emmett slipped into the new Training Room to find Lock finishing his workout. He was sparring with Emmett’s new nanite training dummies. The idea was little more than a prototype right now, but it was something that Lock could spar with on his own time and at his own strength. He didn’t need Emmett to control it and didn’t need to worry about hurting one of his teammates.

  Lock must’ve heard Emmett come in, even though he was trying to be quiet.

  “Thought I told you not to sneak up on me?”

  “Wasn’t trying to. Just didn’t want to throw you off.”

  Lock scoffed. “Don’t worry about it. I was just leaving.”

  Lock turned and walked past Emmett and out of the demiplane. Emmett just nodded and let his former roommate go. With the move to the backup lab fairly recent, everyone was still on edge. Some more than others. Emmett was too, and no amount of TINA’s reassurances had helped.

  Emmett reformed the nanite training dummy and regarded it with a critical eye. He was already thinking of ways to improve it—make their connections stronger and their communication faster. That way, the training dummies would withstand more damage and reform faster after they broke apart. Maybe he could even see through them one day…

  But Emmett wasn’t in the demiplane to spar or to work on upgrades. He was there to talk to Athena.

  He wouldn’t have to wait long. She liked to wait until the user had finished their sparring before coming in to patch up the demiplane. The structure was far from critical, but Emmett could see it flickering around the edges.

  A minute later, Athena walked in, magic staff in hand.

  She paused when she saw Emmett. “I can come back later—”

  Emmett let the nanite dummy disintegrate. “No. It’s okay. I just wanted to talk.”

  Athena raised an eyebrow. “About…?”

  “You. How are you holding up?”

  She shrugged. “Good enough. Learning magic is keeping me busy.”

  Emmett waited expectantly for her to continue. Athena stared back, unflinching.

  “That’s it?”

  Athena turned away and started fiddling with the staff. “What were you expecting?”

  Even though Athena was trying to keep her tone even, there was an edge to it. Emmett tried to choose his words carefully.

  “You’ve been off ever since Gnosis.”

  Athena glanced back over her shoulder. “You need a fake eye to tell you that?”

  “No. Clara and Lock noticed too.”

  “Then why aren’t they here bothering me about it?”

  Emmett smirked. “Do you actually want me to answer that, or is that rhetorical?”

  Athena turned back toward him, eyes narrowed. Emmett was glad he had nanites helping regulate his body or he would’ve turned into a stuttering mess.

  “…Fine. They’re scared of you. Not like you’re going to murder them. More like they respect you like a mentor and don’t want to question you.”

  “So, where does that leave us, then?”

  Emmett shuffled uneasily. “I’m just worried about you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  Emmett stood his ground. “Do you want me to send you the biometric data TINA has? Your temper is short. You’ve lost weight. You haven’t been sleeping… You’ve got all the signs of PTSD.”

  Athena reached into her front pocket and pulled out her comm earpiece. She held it up. “TINA, I thought all our data was private?”

  “It is private, but it is hard for me to keep secrets—”

  “It’s my fault,” Emmett said. “TINA didn’t share it with me. I accessed your data without her permission.”

  Athena stuffed the earpiece back into her pocket. Her voice was cold. “That’s bold considering you keep putting off your issues, too. Some of us can’t swap body parts and erase memories just because we feel like it. We’re stuck with ourselves.”

  Emmett took a breath to steel himself. “You’re right. I’ve been putting off what I did, too. I killed people, and I can’t ignore it just because they were villains. I’m still beating myself up over it, even though I would do it again in a heartbeat. That’s where I’m at. I’m done beating myself up over it. I want to get past it.”

  “Fine.” Athena held up the staff and whispered magic words—ones he hadn’t heard before.

  Two silver chairs coalesced out of the surrounding mist. She took a seat and gestured for Emmett to do the same. It felt a little awkward with just the two of them sitting in an otherwise empty demiplane.

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  Athena said, suddenly, “No, I haven’t been doing well. I keep having nightmares about… About what happened. What I did… And I keep thinking about the Menagerie.”

  Athena recounted what had happened outside of the Gnosis compound. Emmett remembered all too well how the Menagerie had used the psychic, Kairon, to take over the Summit capes, the biomechs, McGuire, Lock, and Athena. For a few perilous seconds, it had been Emmett and Clara alone against all of them.

  But Emmett had never heard Athena’s version, and he hadn’t known what it was like for the Menagerie to take control.

  When Athena trailed off in retrospective silence, Emmett spoke up. “Lock said it was like the Menagerie was whispering in his ear.”

  Athena shook her head. “It was even more insidious than that. It knew my insecurities… It knew about Lucy. It wasn’t a friend or someone you trust whispering in your ear. It was me—whispering in my own ear. I’ve fought psychics before, but I could usually guard against them or force them out of my head.”

  Emmett said, “When the wave hit Belport. I was underground, chasing down the last members of The Freakshow. The psychic, Marie, said something similar. She’d been controlling the other members of the gang, but at some point they started forming a hive-mind, or something like it. It was like they were radioactive. I could feel her—like she was bleeding into my head.”

  Athena nodded. “Radioactive… Yeah. I could kind of feel them, too. It felt like static on the TV, and if I stared at it, I could make out other channels—other people. I felt Kairon when I killed him.”

  “...What did it feel like?”

  “Like turning off the TV.”

  Emmett said, “Yeah. I felt something like that too. Like my head was suddenly quiet, and I was alone again.”

  Athena leaned forward, elbows on her thighs and head in her hands. “I wish I could just forget the whole thing. But it’s like the bastard’s burned into my brain.”

  After a moment, Emmett said, “Do you think it’s this bad just because it was the Menagerie? I know you said you weren’t always the shield, but…”

  Athena sat up suddenly. She stared just over Emmett’s shoulder, like she was looking into the past. Her voice was icy, like her face had been moments ago—almost like someone else was speaking through her. Someone she used to be.

  “I culled an army once. Before the battle even started. The ground was flat. I aimed low—along the shoulders, just to be safe. Afterward, I waded through the sea of headless statues just to make sure no one suffered.” Athena sucked in a breath. “Gods, back then, it was… easy. I’ve lived a long time, Emmett. I don’t know how many people I’ve killed. But it gets a little harder each time—Menagerie or not.

  “...Was there any other way to stop them?”

  Her question caught Emmett off guard. “No. That was our only option. And we couldn’t have saved you, Lock, McGuire, or anyone else. If you hadn’t killed him, I would have.”

  Athena leaned back in her chair. “Just like that?”

  Emmett nodded, slowly. “Yeah.”

  “Are you alright with that?”

  “I need to be. We’re not beating up henchmen anymore. We gave that up when we took down that mutagen manufacturing warehouse—before summer. We’re going up against governments, ancient vampire corporations, and a radioactive psychic hive-mind. Between the Brotherhood and the Menagerie, the fate of the free world is at stake!”

  “Does that make it easier?”

  Emmett stared, dumbfounded, at Athena. Finally, he echoed what she said earlier. “It never gets easier.”

  Athena scoffed a laugh. “If it does, then you’re a monster.”

  The mood in the demiplane lightened a little. And gradually, the pair talked about other things. There was enough weight on all of their shoulders, and it wasn’t going away anytime soon.

  ~

  APPROXIMATELY +0.10.4 POST-INCIDENT

  Mod’s group had made monthly—sometimes weekly—visits to the demiplane. Sometimes it was just the two of them. Other times, it was all four of them. McGuire even showed up a couple times through video chat.

  Athena left a code phrase in case she wasn’t there—that way anyone could conjure chairs for people in attendance.

  Therapy Session.

  Today, it was Mod and Athena. They sat across from each other in the demiplane. Mist swirled around them, and nanites pulsed across the floor. The movement was only microscopic—far too small for anyone but him or TINA to notice. And it was the kind of thing that Emmett only half-controlled, like breathing. He kept the rise and fall of nanites slow as he tried to relax.

  “So, how did the visit with your family go? You’ve been more quiet than usual.”

  Mod shifted in his chair. He wasn’t physically uncomfortable—he wasn’t sure if his new body could even get uncomfortable, in that sense. But then, he had other physical tics left over. Who knew how long it would take for those to go away.

  “It went well… I had a lot to catch them up on. I didn’t tell them everything—nothing about you guys—but now they know the gist about me. Now they know that I’m not a villain… which I guess was the main objective. …I didn’t want their last memories of me to be lies on the news.”

  Athena’s expression softened. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  “No. This is the last visit until…” Emmett trailed off. The last visit until this was all over? Until they saved the world? “...For the foreseeable future.”

  Athena nodded. “Lock?”

  “He still hasn’t seen his sister. He thought about it, but didn’t think it was right. He said she buried him. And it didn’t seem right digging it up again.”

  Athena crossed her arms. “What about you? You’ve got all those protocols and walked right into your house without trouble. Why not visit occasionally?”

  “I’m not exactly Emmett anymore. There’s not an ounce of me left that’s biological.” Mod almost rattled off the percentages of himself that were metal alloy, plastic, composite, and nanite, but stopped himself short. There was only one number that mattered.

  “I’m one hundred percent different now. Technically, that makes me an android and not a cyborg—”

  “But you’re still you,” Athena interjected. “You’re still Emmett. Or Mod. I guess I’m the archetype for having multiple aliases, but I tried to keep it to one name at a time.”

  Mod shook his head. “People keep telling me that I’m the same person, and I guess I am. But how are you supposed to feel like the same person when there’s nothing left of you?”

  Athena leaned forward. “It’s got to be a strange feeling, but we’re always changing. Everyone is. When you graduated college, did you feel like the same person you were when you were a child?”

  “Well, sure… but also not.”

  “That’s life. People are constantly changing. Just because they don’t live in the same country or because they become a mother or a father, doesn’t mean that they’re different people. I’ve changed a lot since my warlord days on the other side of the world, and… as much as I’ve tried to leave it behind, it is still a part of me.”

  Mod said quietly, “I… I’ve always thought about the Ship of Theseus in a literal sense. It seems silly when you’re only talking about one thing, like replacing a few planks or a prosthetic leg, but what about when the entire ship is different?”

  Athena smiled. “Quite a few philosophers have racked their brains over that. How does it feel to take a millennia-old question to a new frontier?”

  Mod scoffed. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  ~ ~ ~