I looked out the tinted windows of Taylor’s vehicle at the nice two-story house sitting behind a well-maintained, fenced-in yard. It could have been the picturesque model of a suburban dream home, complete with a two-bay detached garage at the end of a stone-paved driveway.

  Nice in a way that said it probably cost a lot of money, but not in a way that was ostentatious or looked like it was trying to impress anyone.

  I toyed with my thumb in my lap, sitting in silence and staring out the window.

  We’d been here for several minutes now, but Taylor, the only other occupant of the vehicle with me, was giving me plenty of space to breathe and work through the writhing knot of complicated and bothersome feelings wriggling around in my chest.

  I was overthinking things.

  I was procrastinating.

  I was aware that I was doing both of these things, and was still stuck in a loop like a hamster running on a wheel.

  It was my parents' home. Their new home.

  The previous one, the one that old Morgan had grown up in, had survived Leviathan, but hadn’t survived what was later confirmed to be arson.

  I don’t think it would have mattered if it were the same place or not.

  Not really.

  Since the night of the diner, I’d been feeling… Off.

  Not all the time, thankfully. It’d been a few days, now Sunday afternoon. I had been able to keep my mind off the things that had been troubling me, thanks in large part to the attention of Amy and Taylor, and the presence of each of them in my life.

  One or the other, but usually both, had been present with me around the clock for the past two days. The cynical part of my mind whispered that they were keeping an eye on me because I needed to have a minder. The less-dreary part of me told me that I was important to each of them, and they’d like nothing more than to spend time with me.

  It was what they’d told me, also.

  My cheeks warmed thinking back at the past two days, which had largely been lazy days of spending time in their shared penthouse.

  I glanced down at my lap. I had my fingernails painted a pale lilac color, and I felt like it went pretty well with the dove gray A-line dress. It was a light cotton fabric and suited the warm weather, and it was one of the things that I found that I didn’t look terrible in. It hugged my chest and abdomen, and was only lightly flared around the hips, with the lower hem just above my knees. I couldn’t bring myself to buy any dressy shoes, so I was making do with some sneakers. I didn’t think anyone would really care.

  I looked back at the house. The driveway didn’t have any extra vehicles present in it. We were here a bit early. I swallowed and made up my mind.

  “I’m going to go,” I told Taylor, without taking my eyes off the home.

  “Sure,” Taylor’s voice was warm and supportive, despite my lingering procrastination.

  I tore my eyes from looking out the window to look at her. She was smiling, and the piercings on her lower lip suited the shape of her teeth.

  A wolfish grin, if I’d ever seen one, and one that did things to me every time I saw it.

  “You um, don’t have to sit out here by yourself, you know,” I told her.

  “I don’t mind going with you, if that’s what you’d like. Your parents and I get along quite well, and I see your sister basically every day at work.”

  I toyed with my thumb some more. It was tempting. Very, very tempting to have her there as emotional support. I felt a certain feeling of safeness with her, and with Amy, as well.

  But this was my family, and if I couldn’t face them by myself, what did that say about me?

  Certainly nothing good.

  I held my breath in my chest until it started to burn, then exhaled slowly. Indecision was this ever-present menace in my life.

  “No, I can do this. I have to.”

  Taylor reached over and lightly squeezed my thigh. “I’ll be out here whenever you’re done. Gives me a chance to keep on top of my emails and get a little bit of vacation-time work done.”

  “You work too much, Taylor. You shouldn’t be worrying about those things when you’re on your time off,” I chided her.

  She gave my leg a firm shake before drawing her hand back. “You’re the last person who gets to grouch at me about that. You didn’t know the meaning of separating your work and your life when you were doing this.”

  “I don’t remember, but maybe you’re right. Still, try not to spend the entire time you’re away from work, working?”

  She chuckled at me. “What about if I promise to be social while I’m doing it? I can call Victoria and pester her while you’re catching up with your family.”

  I glanced over at her, then nodded. “I guess that’s something.”

  I pulled the door latch and slid out of the seat.

  “Thanks, Taylor. For… Everything,” I told her with the door held open in one hand.

  She rolled her eyes and made a shooing motion at me with her hands. I smiled a little and closed the door, smoothed the front of my dress, and walked up the sidewalk toward the house.

  The gate on the fence was propped open and waiting for me like a standing invitation.

  The breeze picked up some as I walked up to the house and blew some silvery hair free from where I’d had it neatly parted. The weather was somewhat overcast and breezy, and there was a solid chance of it raining later. For now, the temperature was warm, and the sun was peeking out between clouds every so often.

  I rang the doorbell and didn’t wait long before the door was all but yanked open.

  My cheeks warming, I was greeted by the sight of my mom. She looked a few years older than I remembered her, with a few more stress lines on her face, but she was otherwise trim and fit-looking.

  “Hi, Mom,” I half-mumbled awkwardly.

  “Oh my god, look at you!” She gushed, and I was squished into a tight hug.

  Maybe I’ve just been psyching myself out again.

  “Nate! Morgan’s here early!” Mom called into the house, and after giving me another near-bear-hug, led me inside.

  What followed was a half-tour of their new house, as well as a trip down memory lane with scrapbooks filled with family photos and a few school yearbooks.

  I was sitting in the livingroom on a comfortable stuffed armchair, having eaten some sandwiches with my parents as a late lunch.

  Dad apologized; he wanted to grill something, but wasn’t sure if the weather was going to cooperate.

  I laughed at that. I had to explain the situation with having a bit of a sensitive stomach nowadays, and that cheeseburgers might not have been the best thing in the world for me.

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  With the obvious exception of having lost some time, I felt like I was a cog in the machine and was meshing just fine with my parents. They talked about running Brockton Strong, which had grown into a major nonprofit company over the years, following a similar path to what Brockton Bay did following the Leviathan attack.

  I learned that our old home had been set ablaze by remnants of the Empire 88 after an embarrassing defeat at the hands of Brockton Strong in the weeks following the Leviathan attack. Mom and Dad had lost a lot of memorabilia when it had burned, but most of the important stuff, such as the family photos, had been with them in digital form while they stayed at the fire station.

  I asked each of them if they were happy with the work that they were doing, running a nonprofit now.

  Dad laughed and admitted that it was harder work than what he’d been doing in the Bay’s financial sector prior to the Endbringer attack.

  Mom said she wouldn’t trade it for anything and that she felt much more satisfied with doing that work than she had been working in software.

  A bit more than an hour and a half into our meeting, the doorbell rang, and Dad got up to get it.

  Presumably, it was Melody, who had texted Mom and told her she was held up with work stuff.

  It stung a little bit, feeling like I was playing second-fiddle to my twin's career, but at the same time, she was a superhero, and it wouldn’t be unusual for it to be some literal life-and-death sort of stuff.

  My rational mind argued with my hurt feelings until the two had come to some kind of neutral middle ground.

  Footsteps came down the hall toward the livingroom where Mom and I were still seated.

  I swallowed reflexively as my nerves flared.

  Then she came around the corner behind Dad, and it felt like someone grabbed my heart, squeezed it, and twisted it around inside my chest.

  The near-spitting-image of the girl I’d been seeing everywhere. The vision from before, a healthy, robust, happy past self.

  Happy might have been pushing it a little.

  Seeing Melody in the flesh was a sudden reminder of everything I wasn’t.

  Taller than I was. Golden-blonde, black-eyed, voluptuous, with strong-looking arms.

  She smiled at me when we made eye contact, and I stood up from my seat.

  She walked over and gave me a hug.

  I couldn’t help but feel like her smile didn’t quite meet her eyes, and the guilt and shame that followed immediately after thinking it.

  She broke the embrace relatively quickly, and I saw a third person, one who I wasn’t expecting, nor did I recognize.

  She was Japanese, with raven black hair with a strip of bang on the left side of her face dyed a vibrant purple color.

  The other woman extended her hand to me, and I took it, shaking quickly.

  Who…?

  Melody introduced her as Lily, a close friend of hers, and another hero on the local team with her.

  Mom and Dad busied themselves with grabbing food, drinks, and snacks for the new arrivals. They left the three of us to ourselves when they were done.

  It was mostly Melody and me talking, although I was having a hard time following a lot of what she was talking about.

  I kept having to remind her that I had a fairly significant amount of memory loss, especially ‘later’ in my life.

  She apologized each time, but it didn’t make having to say that I didn’t remember something she was talking about any easier.

  Lily was largely quiet throughout most of it, although I did notice that Melody was stealing glances and sharing grins with her on some of the stories that she told me.

  I couldn’t help but read into things with the two of them sharing a loveseat and sitting side-by-side. But I didn’t dare bring it up, because I wasn’t sure if this was something I was supposed to remember or not. There was a casual familiarity between each of them. I was pretty sure that they were more than simply teammates, but again, I didn’t want to bring that up without knowing more about the situation.

  The conversation between Melody and me had stuttered out, and there was a bit of an extended silence between the three of us.

  Maybe I should share something, instead of just being the sponge here. It’s… old, I guess, but maybe I’ll feel like less of a passenger.

  “Hey, um.” I drummed my fingernails on my thigh. “Do you remember Ms. Robert’s class? In uhh… Ninth grade?”

  Melody tilted her head at me ever-so-slightly. I continued: “We had that biology lab? To dissect a frog? And it like… sprayed everywhere?”

  Melody snorted and said, “Robbins.”

  I looked up from my lap at her, momentarily confused. “What?”

  “It was Mrs. Robbins, not Roberts, our biology teacher, in tenth grade.”

  I blushed furiously and dropped my eyes back to my lap.

  “You know, I’m curious about a few things, if you don’t mind?” Melody asked me, her voice oddly neutral-sounding to my ears from the chiding tone she’d had a moment ago.

  “Um, sure, shoot,” I muttered.

  “Do you remember your accident, like, at all?”

  I glanced up to see those strange black eyes of hers studying my face intently. “Which accident?” I asked, remembering a number of times related to sports injuries.

  “The accident. The one with you and Dad,” she clarified.

  I dug through the murky depths of my memory, trying to think of any accidents I’d been in with our dad. After what felt like entirely too long thinking about it, I shook my head slowly.

  Melody shifted in the seat to rest her back against the loveseat, and she loosely crossed her arms, tapping one index finger on her bicep. The shirt she was wearing looked like a band shirt, or maybe a shirt for a video game, and it read Corpse Dolls in front of a group of what looked like stuffed Frankenstein-style doll-girls.

  “What about video games?” She asked after a beat.

  I frowned. There was something there. “I um.” I shifted in my seat and clasped my hands together in my lap.

  Silence extended between the three of us. “There was a game?” I said, trying to feel out the memory. It was doing that elusive thing where I kept trying to pull at it unsuccessfully, and was only getting bits and pieces of sounds and fragmented images. I kept seeing one figure, though, in the mess, and it seemed to be related to thoughts of Melody.

  “Oh, um…” I closed my eyes to see if it would help with trying to give me any more detail. “There was a game, right? One you really liked, I think.”

  “Mhm,” Melody hummed an affirmation to what I was saying.

  “There was, oh, it had heroes and villains! Fighting!” Excitement crept into my voice.

  I am doing it! Remembering something! Careful, careful…

  I saw the face and costume! Melody’s favorite character!

  I opened my eyes and smiled at my sister. “I remember! Your favorite character from the game!”

  Melody paused in her finger-tapping and quirked one eyebrow.

  “It was Alexandria, right?!” I asked with a grin.

  “No, it wasn’t. I never liked her.” Melody’s voice was as flat as a piece of cardboard.

  My stomach twisted. It felt like there was disappointment radiating off my long-lost twin. My face fell with the lack of reaction.

  “S-sorry. I was pretty sure about it,” I apologized to her reflexively.

  She resumed tapping her finger on her arm. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just an old game, not remotely important.”

  The dismissive way in which she said it made me cringe a little on the inside.

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, excuse me. I need to use the restroom, I think I went a bit hard on the iced tea before you two got here,” I chuckled. Standing up, I made my way out of the livingroom and to the restroom down the hall.

  As soon as the door was closed and locked behind me, I rested back against it, sliding down until I was sitting on the cool tile floor. My heart was racing in my chest, and I felt a tightness in my throat. My hands were trembling as I brought my knees up and folded my arms across them to rest my head on my forearms.

  I felt sick, with my abdomen cramping and twisting.

  I didn’t want to be here anymore. The home that wasn’t my home. A family that seemed to only partially recognize me.

  I fought hard to stabilize my breathing, my diaphragm doing that quivering thing like I was about to cry.

  I sat like that for some time in the bathroom. Probably an abnormally long amount of time. I thought I might have needed to throw up at one point, but thankfully, that never came to pass, and I managed to fight through and avoid crying.

  I felt sick to my stomach, and I wasn’t sure if it was the stress or if the food wasn’t agreeing with me, so sitting there on the bathroom floor, I decided that was going to be my exit strategy. Getting back up, I washed my hands, dried them, and gave myself a once-over in the mirror.

  I looked like shit, but the kind of shit that I took as my new baseline for normality. It’d have to do.

  As I walked back towards the livingroom, I heard quiet talking between Melody and Lily.

  “...Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on her? You knew she had serious memory issues before we came over.”

  Melody’s voice was quiet, but I felt as much as heard the tension in it when she spoke. I felt like an asshole eavesdropping like this, but my morbid curiosity had me rooted well in place just around the corner to the entryway.

  “No? Morgan and I were used to being our own critics on most things. Half confidant, half critic, almost always. But I’m telling you–”

  “Melody, don’t,” Lily cautioned, but Melody ignored her.

  “--I’m telling you that isn’t my sister. That’s… I don’t know. Some kind of science experiment gone wrong. It’s sick, is what it is. I wouldn’t have allowed it to continue, not like my parents did.”

  “Melody!” Lily hissed.

  I heard her sigh quietly. “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s not fair of me to judge them. But it doesn’t change my feelings.”

  A cool, comfortable numbness had slipped over me immediately following the shock of hearing Melody refer to me as a science experiment. I had gooseflesh on my arms and thighs, but besides that, the chill was comforting in a way. Keeping my feet on the carpeted section of the floor, I walked past the entryway as silently as I could. Lily and Melody were facing the other way, and I don’t think they noticed me passing.

  Mom and Dad were chatting and cleaning dishes in the kitchen when I walked past. I briefly considered saying something, but decided against it. Instead, I carried on down the hallway until I reached the front door, where I let myself out and quietly closed the door behind me.

  In the couple of hours I’d spent inside the house, the weather had turned for the worse, and there was a light sprinkling of warm summer rain falling on the Bay. I let myself out of the gate and into the passenger seat of Taylor’s ride. She looked up at me from a tablet computer and gave me a quick smile.

  “All set?”

  I bobbed my head and pulled on my seatbelt.

  “Have a good visit? I notice you don’t have any runs in your makeup,” she asked with a chuckle.

  “Yes. It was nice,” I lied. “I’ll have to stop back over soon.”

  It was like I was hearing myself speak the words rather than speaking them myself. A peculiar feeling.

  “So, where to now?” Taylor asked.

  “Is Amy still home?”

  Taylor hummed a note and said, “Pretty sure, yeah. She mentioned that she might get some food delivered, but I don’t think she had any other plans.”

  “Okay, then let’s just head back, then.”

  Taylor pulled off the side of the street and drove us back towards downtown. Traffic was light with the weather despite it being a weekend afternoon.

  “Are you feeling alright? You seem a bit quiet,” Taylor commented after a bit of silence on the ride back.

  “Mm. My stomach decided to act up after lunch. It’s still sort of twitchy and crampy,” I told her, and it was the truth.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I reclined my seat just a touch and rested my head against the headrest, and Taylor remained quiet for the rest of the car ride back.

  I was really hoping that Amy was going to be home. There had been questions creeping and slinking around in my head, ones that I hadn’t wanted to voice out loud, at least, not up until now.

  Questions for her that weren’t entirely original.

  Start by asking your friends why you are the way you are.

  When we got back into the penthouse, Amy had come out and tossed her arms around Taylor’s neck to kiss her on the cheek. When she finished, she turned and held her arms out for me.

  I just stood there rigidly upright like a toy soldier. A look of concern immediately crossed her face.

  “Morgan?” She asked.

  “Amy,” I responded, just staring at her. Her expression shifted between concern and confusion.

  I just came out with it. “Why do I look the way I do?”

  She tilted her head slightly, and her brows drew together. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean exactly what I said. Why do I look the way I do? Why don’t I look like Morgan Rivera?”

  Amy froze for a moment, then she glanced over at Taylor. Then back to me, her facial expression slowly darkening. “Morgan, did someone say something to you while you were meeting with your family?”

  My voice was level, and maybe more than a little monotone when I said, “Please answer the question, unless you don’t know the reason why.”

  She studied my face in silence for several long moments. Almost reluctantly, she finally replied, “I only know some bits and pieces that I consulted with Dragon about. If you wanted the full answer and all the details, you’d probably be better off asking her.”

  “Okay.” I paused. “Thank you. For helping with everything, and for being here for me,” I added.

  Amy and Taylor shared a look.

  “Is it something you want to talk about?” Amy asked after silently communicating with Taylor.

  I shook my head slowly. “No, not right now. Maybe after I talk to Dragon about it, I’ll have more questions.”

  I turned and picked up the small clutch bag that I’d been using, which carried my phone and some other odds and ends.

  “Are you leaving?” Taylor asked, her voice subdued.

  “I’m going to go talk to Dragon.”

  “Can I at least give you a ride over there? I know it’s not too far, but with the weather…” Taylor’s voice trailed off as I walked toward the door.

  I stopped in my tracks before I opened the door, but didn’t turn to answer her. “No thanks. I think a little fresh air will do me some good on the walk over.”

  “Morgan, I–” Amy started, and I heard her take a few steps forward.

  I turned and looked at Amy, and she stopped in place. “I’ll be back when I’m done talking to her, I promise,” I told her.

  Amy looked distraught, but nodded. “Okay. We’ll be here waiting for you. Call if you need a ride or anything, please.”

  “I will,” I dipped my head to her, and to Taylor, then pulled open the door and left the familiar and comforting space of the penthouse.

  I had questions that I needed answers to, and I wasn’t going to accept any excuses for not getting them.

  I trusted Dragon absolutely. She was the one person in the world who wouldn’t lie or play games with me.