I went back downstairs with Legend, and I talked with Director Piggot briefly. She told me she’d get me some equipment befitting my temporary Protectorate status, namely a phone and earbuds. They’d be useful in human form, and I figured I’d find a way to use them as Apex. As far as I was able to tell, I didn’t have ears properly; I seemed to hear with my tentacles.

  Everyone was insanely busy. I had a lot to do myself, despite the exhaustion I was feeling. Daylight was burning, so I wanted to get out and try to check on things before things got any worse. The first stop was the station. I needed my work phone and contacts list. The part of the city where the station was built sat a bit higher above the surrounding blocks. I was hoping that, plus the stout walls of the place, would keep the worst of the flooding damage under control.

  It wasn’t too bad. About two feet of water had flooded into the walls and had since subsided. The station took on some water under the garage doors, but it was built with spills in mind, and the sump pumps had handled it. Puddles in the garage, some damp floors on the first floor, that was about it. There wasn’t any carpeting or absorbent floor materials on the first floor, so that wasn’t super concerning. The backup generator systems kicked on when the grid went offline, so the building was powered. There was fuel for two weeks on hand. I’d get more when I started running supplies.

  I ran into Taylor coming out of the showers. She looked… rough. Bruised from head to toe, and she’d been crying. She stood there in her underwear, holding one elbow. I padded straight up to her and hugged her tightly, and she rested her forehead against my chest.

  “You have no idea how relieved I am to see you right now, Taylor.” My voice was thick with my own emotions bubbling up to the surface from where they’d been corked pretty effectively when I’d been in business mode.

  She sniffed and nodded.

  “Is your dad okay?”

  She pulled one hand on my chest into a fist. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “He doesn’t have a mobile phone, and the power’s out. I was going to try to go check out the house.”

  I lowered myself to her eye level, and I shook my head. “No, Taylor.”

  She frowned at me.

  “We’re going to go check out your house, together.” I think the look on her face might have been relief, but it was hard to tell. There was more going on than her just being worried about her dad.

  “Morgan, you don’t have to come with me. I can handle myself if anything happens,” she told me.

  I chuckled. “I know you can. I want to make sure your dad is okay, too, but there’s more going on than just that. I need to talk to him desperately. And it’s very time sensitive.”

  She tilted her head. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Get your stuff, I have to grab some stuff myself, and we’ll meet outside, alright?”

  Having something to do seemed to help perk her up a little. We parted ways, and I grabbed what I was after. I got my gun, spare magazines, and ammo, tossed it into my duffel bag along with three brand new burner phones, a pair of portable battery banks–the kind you recharge laptops, tablets, or phones with–and opened up one of the safes and grabbed out fifteen thousand dollars in cash. I packed all of that up, slung it around my neck, and met Taylor downstairs. She was in plain clothes, good. She also had a backpack, hopefully with her kit in the event something happened.

  I put her up on my neck, took off for Taylor’s house, and called my parents. They picked up on the second ring.

  “Morgan?! Are you okay?” My mom had answered.

  “Yes, I’m good. I got pretty beat up, but I’m alive and well. Are you and Dad okay? Have you talked to Melody?”

  The relief was palpable in her voice when she answered: “Yes, she called us. The shelter we were in took forever to let us all out; they were getting everyone’s ID details and headcounts. We’re heading home now.”

  “Alright, Mom. I need you to do something for me. It’s urgent, I need you to get started on it right now.”

  Concern edged back into her voice. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  I took a breath. “I just got out of some important meetings with the PRT. The government is sending FEMA supplies and relief, but they’re not going to be here in large quantities until next week. I’m helping bring in supplies, too. There’s another state of emergency declared. Things are expected to get… really bad in the city, and quickly.”

  “Honey? What do you mean by bad?”

  “Less than ten percent of the city has reliable electrical service, and it’s not coming back any time soon. There’s no potable water, either. I need you and Dad to go home, pack up anything that you want kept safe, pack up a week or two of clothing, load up the vehicles, and head to this address.” I gave her the address of the fire station.

  “If you take the cars, drive extremely slow at the intersections, and don’t go in any moving water more than a foot deep. Go as fast as you can, please. Bring medicine too, I have food, but more will not hurt. Only shelf stable or stuff that’s frozen, I have some room in my chest freezer still.”

  “Why? I don’t understand?” Mom asked, then I heard Dad speak up in the background, on speakerphone.

  “What is the PRT saying?” He asked me.

  “There’s going to be an insane amount of crime. Emergency services can’t get around the city well because the roads are damaged from Leviathan’s attack, uprooting a lot of the storm drains and plumbing. We… lost a lot of people today in the fight. A lot of dead heroes, and even more who are going to be stuck recovering and can’t work. The city is probably going to be nearly lawless in the next couple of days.”

  One of them covered the microphone, and I could hear their muffled voices going back and forth.

  “Please just trust me. Worst case, it’s being over-cautious and nothing happens, right? Let’s be safe now and not sorry later.”

  Dad came back. “Okay, I hear you. That’s probably a good idea. What’s at the fire department?”

  “Food, shelter, water, and safety. I don’t have time to explain now, but just pack up what you can and head over. Maybe leave the car and just take the SUV. It’s locked up right now, but I can buzz you into the gate and close it behind you remotely. I’ll let you into the building after, okay?”

  “Okay… Just be safe, please? We love you,” Mom said.

  “I love you both, too, and I’m happy you’re both safe. Just… please be quick, this is important. I gotta go, call if any kind of trouble comes up. Call this number back. Bye!”

  I hung up.

  “It’s going to get bad, isn’t it?” Taylor asked me.

  I turned and looked at her. “Yeah. It’s already really bad. It’s going to get worse. We’re going to pack your dad up, too, and get him to the station.”

  Her hands gripped my tentacles tightly. “I- thank you.”

  “Of course, Taylor. We have to take care of our families.” She was crying again, but she nodded.

  A couple of minutes later, I spiralled down and landed outside Taylor’s house. There was a truck in the driveway, not that it meant he was home. Endbringer evacuation procedures specifically told people to walk, not drive, to their nearest shelters. The flooding wasn’t too bad over here. The house sat up on a raised foundation over a full basement. There were a few inches of water on the ground, and it would take days for everything to drain out. The basement was probably flooded, but hopefully that was the extent of it. I walked around to the backyard, where we could see the front of the house, and rested on my elbows and haunches.

  The mud was going to be hell for me in the coming days, I could already tell. I felt myself sink a good six to eight inches into the wet ground before it seemed to stabilize. My new, bigger form wasn’t helping. I knew I weighed more. A lot more.

  “Why do you need to talk to my dad?” Taylor asked me quietly.

  “So I was in a big, important meeting about the emergency response for the city earlier. It was a video conference, and both the President and the cabinet were there, as well as Legend.”

  “What, really?” She looked surprised. I couldn’t say I blamed her. I was, too, and hell, I’d been there.

  I nodded. “Yeah. They were debating trying to evacuate the city and write it off as a loss.”

  “What! They can’t do that!” Her voice rose sharply.

  I chuckled. “I felt the same way, but I don’t think people fully realize just how bad the damage is yet. We had access to reports from city infrastructure nodes all over. It’s… It’s fucked, Taylor. It’s going to take months on end to get anything like normal life restored here.”

  “Is it that bad?” She asked, voice quiet once again.

  “You heard what I told my parents. Basically, the entire water, sewer, and electrical grid systems are offline. And not like, throw a circuit breaker offline, but gutted. You saw how Leviathan ripped up all the stormdrains and everything?”

  She bobbed her head.

  “It wasn’t just storm drainage. A lot of the city’s data and power network was in underground tunnels that were damaged by that attack.” I glanced up at the sky, a cheerful sunny blue sky with some storm clouds being carried off to the west.

  “What did they decide?” She asked.

  “I uh. Sort of inserted myself into the conversation, arguing that this is now a landmark city for the United States and the world. That people would flock here from all over to help rebuild and support the city that killed an Endbringer. That, for the first time in two decades, maybe people could have some hope for a brighter future. They decided to rebuild it and send relief and supplies to get started on that, but I had to uh… sort of make some shit up to that end.”

  Her expression darkened. “Is that where my dad comes in?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes. I told them that the dock workers were hard-working people looking for jobs. I need your dad to reach out to his people, organize them, and get to work… basically immediately.”

  She glanced up at the sky as well. “That’s… not as bad as I thought it might be.”

  I took a deep breath and agreed with her, “Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s going to be hard labor, but it’s going to be for a good cause. Helping themselves and their friends and families.”

  Danny walked around the corner of the fence and stared long and hard at the two of us before he came running towards us. Taylor hopped down, and they met halfway, hugging each other fiercely. Danny was laughing and crying in equal parts. Taylor buried her head on her dad’s chest. I could see some of the weight she’d been carrying around come off her shoulders.

  I let them have their moment and waited patiently. I texted Faultline in the meantime, hoping she’d get the message and respond soon. At least cellular service was running. When Danny and Taylor wrapped their reunion up, the two waded through the water to the backyard and took a seat on the back porch, where it was dry.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I brought Danny up to speed on events, the status of the city, and what I’d just relayed to Taylor. He listened quietly, but had questions as soon as I stopped the story.

  “So wait, they’re sending relief supplies in by water? The bay is blocked from the boat graveyard; they’re not going to be able to get a larger cargo vessel or barge into the docks.”

  “I know. We discussed that. We have a soft plan on how to address that, but that’s not the big challenge here.”

  He took his glasses off and wiped his face. “Okay… fill me in?”

  “So, I don’t know what kind of state the cranes and dockyards themselves are in, but basically, I need you to organize as many bodies as you possibly can, and lie, cheat and steal your way into getting those cranes operational, space cleared on the docks to start offloading, and repair any vehicles and hardware you need to move those containers around.”

  He nodded slowly, thinking. “Well, the gantry cranes were being kept operational and maintained for offloading the smaller boats we could get in. They might be damaged, but I don’t imagine they’re in too bad of a shape unless the tidal waves caused a ship to collide with them. They’re robust machines. Possibly the tracks they move on are blocked or damaged, but that’s a railroad line, it’s made to be worked on without too much effort.”

  I explained the stakes to him. That this was a do-or-die sort of thing. The federal government had been debating writing off the city. That locked him in, built his resolve.

  “How long do we have before the supplies arrive?” He asked.

  “Five days, but it might be here as much as a day sooner, depending on the speed at which they collect and load the material and the sea conditions on the way up.”

  “Oh. I see why you came here first. We need to get moving as soon as possible.”

  I nodded.

  “Danny– I know how much the union means to you, and how much this work means to the union. We’re talking about years of work moving supplies to rebuild the city, in all likelihood. If I can get the bay cleared of wrecks, can you get the people organized, on task, and hit those deadlines?”

  He sighed deeply. “I won’t make any promises until we can get out there and actually see what we’re working with.”

  “That’s understandable,” I said. “But regardless of how good or bad things might be, this needs to get moving like, right now. Water, sewer, and power are all out. That’s going to slow everyone down, as is the lack of solid transport. We need to get word of mouth out, and get people rallied and moving.”

  He nodded firmly. I took my bag off my neck and set it on his lap with my tail. He grunted when the weight settled on him, then unzipped the bag, his eyes darting around at the contents.

  “I don’t understand, what is all of this?”

  “Three mobile phones and batteries to recharge them a couple of times. Take one, hand the others out to the other union bosses as you see fit. Fifteen thousand in cash, for any bribes, supplies, or anything else you might need it for. Spend it freely to make this happen, feed people, whatever. I’ll get you more if you need it.”

  He lifted out the plastic pistol case and looked at me. Taylor glanced over at it and blinked.

  “Is this what I think it is?” He asked me quietly.

  “If you think it’s a gun, magazines, and bullets, then yes, Danny, it’s what you think it is.”

  His jaw flexed, and he undid the clasps on the box and flipped the lid open. My pistol from Faultline.

  “Please don’t lose that and try and take care of it. It’s a bit sentimental to me,” I asked him softly.

  “I don’t want to take it,” he replied.

  “I know. I didn’t want to take it when it was given to me, either. But Danny? The city’s going to be lawless, and I’d rather you have something if you’re going around door-knocking. Expect looting and the gangs to rear their heads in force. They thrive on this kind of shit.”

  Taylor reached over and placed her hand on her dad’s knee. “Dad? Please, listen to her. She’s right. You need something to keep yourself safe.” He shared a long look with Taylor, then nodded.

  “Will you show me how to operate it safely?” He asked, and I readily agreed.

  Ten minutes of practice later and he grudgingly stuck it in a holster in the waistband of his pants with another magazine in his pocket, then threw his shirt over it to hide it. Taylor walked him through the basics of using his phone. It was a cheap plastic brick-type phone, the kind that are years out of fashion but still stick around because of their durability and excellent battery life. We plugged my number into it, and I told him I’d forward him a number for Taylor when we got her another phone.

  Before we parted ways, I gave him the same instructions I’d given my parents. Pack some stuff in his truck, drive slow as a snail, and come to the station.

  Confusion washed across his face. “I don’t understand. Is that a shelter area you’re staying at?” I chuckled.

  “Well, it is now. Before now, it was my super-evil crime den, full of drugs, strippers, and deviants,” I told him straight-faced.

  “She’s joking. It’s just a fire station she bought and has been restoring. It’s… where I’ve been staying,” Taylor told him. “It’s very nice inside. And it has water and power.”

  Danny looked like he had some things to say about that, but he held his tongue and stood up. I shook his hand, he hugged Taylor, and he headed inside his house to pack. Time was of the essence for all of us.

  “Ready to go?” I asked her. She looked at the back door. “You can stay if you want, of course. Help him pack, and make sure he gets there safely. There’s some… things I need to talk to you about, too.”

  She looked conflicted for a moment, then turned to me. I picked her up and stuck her on my shoulders. I whispered quietly to her as I extracted myself from the mud. “I’d feel better with you at the station, to be honest. If our families are going to be there, we need people keeping an eye out for people trying to break in or steal shit.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I was just thinking about that.”

  “See you later, Danny, be careful, please!” I called out in case he was listening by a window, and I walked out to the street before taking off.

  She was quiet as we flew back, like she had a lot on her mind. I could only imagine what was running through her head. When we landed, I shot a quick message over to Chess team and asked them if they were still in town and alive, then the two of us headed inside.

  We got ourselves in and situated, and Taylor grabbed a quick lunch from the kitchen. She turned to me as she finished up her sandwich.

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said, drawing my attention from my mobile phone.

  “Oh, uh, sure! Shoot.”

  “Some… things happened while I was at the hospital getting treated. Bad things,” she gestured vaguely.

  “Taylor, I… once again, I just want to say what a relief it is that you’re actually alive and not paralyzed right now.”

  She smiled a little, but it was a faint, sorry thing.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt you, just blurting out words as they cross my mind. Please, go on.”

  She took a deep breath. “They handcuffed me while I was waiting for treatment. I freaked out a little and thought I was getting arrested, so I escaped. I accidentally ran into another cape who was unmasked. It was Sophia.”

  I nodded along, listening as she talked.

  “Armsmaster caught me. Legend and Miss Militia were there. They told me I could be birdcaged for violating the Endbringer truce, or that I could join the Wards, or unmask myself to her. Grue and Tattletale got involved in coming to my defense.”

  Interesting that it’s Grue and Tattletale and not Brian and Lisa.

  “That was bad enough, but something even worse came out…”

  I tilted my head. Worse than the potential of being sent to the Birdcage?

  “Tattletale figured out that Armsmaster engineered a situation to fight Leviathan one-on-one to kill him and take the credit. He… deliberately used members of Empire Eighty-Eight as bait, getting them killed. Some heroes were hit, too, by accident. He used EMP blasts to damage my armband and some others in the area to silence people to buy more time to fight Leviathan.”

  WHAT!? There’s no way-

  “I was there, saw the whole thing. Leviathan was toying with him, acting weaker than he was. Then he disarmed Armsmaster and ripped his arm off. I…”

  She sighed.

  “I gave him first aid to try and make sure he didn’t bleed out. But when Tattletale brought this to light in front of Legend and Miss Militia, Armsmaster tried to attack her, and they stopped him. When he’d been taken down, he admitted that it was true by saying how it was going to be their chance to finally kill an Endbringer.”

  My shoulders slumped, and I dropped my head low.

  So that’s why he had a parolee armband on. He’s under house arrest. This is… insane. I didn’t think him capable of such a thing.

  “There’s more,” she said, softly. “Armsmaster burned me out of spite. Told my team that I’d been a narc the entire time. Tattletale knew and confirmed it to the Undersiders.”

  I brought my head up. “What?” I asked her, still a bit stunned, processing the previous bit about Colin.

  “I… set out to be a hero from the start. My first night out, you know how I met Armsmaster and gave him Lung? I told him I was operating as an undercover hero to bust the Undersiders. Because they mistook me for a villain. And I stayed in the whole time as the stakes got larger and larger to build trust and find out who their boss was.”

  There were a few tears working their way down her cheeks, and I saw her jaw working overtime as she processed her emotions.

  She choked up a little as she finished her story. “The looks on their faces, the revulsion and betrayal. I just… ran away. I couldn’t handle it; I would have fallen apart in front of everyone. But now I’m just… here. Alone. Cutoff.”

  “Taylor, come here,” I told her in no uncertain terms. She stepped forward, and I wrapped my arms and tail around her and held her tightly to me.

  She sobbed against me. My business phone buzzed. It was my security system alerting me that someone was at the front gate. My parents. I opened the gate for them, but they could wait a moment.

  I spoke softly to the girl in my arms. “Taylor, I’ll tell you the same thing I told Amy. If there isn’t a single other person in the world out there for you that you can count on, you can count on me. I don’t know you anywhere near as well as I know the Dallons, but from everything I’ve seen and you’ve shown me of your life, it’s going off the rails in a huge way.”

  She nodded. I ran a hand through her hair.

  “Why don’t we keep doing what we have been doing, and taking steps, even small ones, to try and fix that, hmm? The things you started doing this past week are big. Getting your school situation fixed, getting your dad to help you out with lawsuits to try and right some of the wrongs in your life.”

  She choked out, “They’re my friends, Morgan. The only ones I have, and I’m afraid I lost them now. I-I don’t want to go back to the way it was, before.”

  I pulled her back and wiped a tear off her cheek with one thumb. Made eye contact with her. “That’s not entirely true, is it, Taylor?” I asked her gently.

  She blinked at me.

  “I consider you a friend, Taylor, and I’m invested in trying to help you out any way I can. Despite the sort of rocky path we took to get here. I’m not just helping you out totally at random, you know.” I teased her a little on the last bit.

  She coughed. “I don’t… I thought you were just helping out, maybe because you’re nice–”

  I planted a clawed index finger on her lips.

  “I am helping you out for that reason, sure, but that’s not the real reason, Taylor. I told you last week when we were outside the city. You’re incredible, talented, and smart as hell. I know you have a hard time seeing it in the mirror, but trust me, there are a lot of reasons people would want to be friends with you, or more.”

  I wasn’t going to dive into the or more part of that unless she got hung up on it. Her face flushed, and she pushed forward to give me a hug. I gladly returned it in kind.

  A minute or two later, when she had calmed down a bit more, we separated, and I asked her something I’d been stewing on during the progression of this conversation.

  “Taylor, are you going to join the Wards? Do you have any kind of a game plan right now?” She jerked a little when I asked her that and started to frown, her cheeks flushing once again.

  “I’d rather rot in jail than be on the same team as that bitch,” she spat, her voice downright venomous.

  I raised a hand, palm facing out towards her, and she hesitated.

  “Taylor, she’s a member of the Wards under an extremely strict parole agreement to keep her out of jail, and she’s repeatedly gotten into trouble since then. She’s on a razor’s edge as it is.”

  Taylor blinked a few times. “She… is?”

  I nodded. “Yes, if she has any kind of further incident pop up, she’s going to juvenile corrections, full stop. What do you think is going to happen when she gets served a lawsuit for repeatedly assaulting, stalking, abusing, and harassing people in her civilian life? It’s not like she can hide that from the PRT.”

  Taylor chewed on her lower lip, brows knit together in concentration. “So… she’d be gone? Like… gone-gone?”

  I nodded to her. “Yes, and while your lawsuit is going to wind up getting delayed along with everything else because of all the shit going on in the city, I can tell you something you might not know. Director Piggot, the woman who runs the PRT here in Brockton Bay? She’s strict as hell and very concerned about optics with the Protectorate and Wards program. Especially in the case of the Wards. They got into deep shit for causing damage when the Undersiders robbed the bank.”

  I tapped a dull claw on the floor tiles for emphasis. “If you came to her with information about what had been going on under her nose without her knowing about it, and gave her the ability to get out in front of what is surely going to be some pretty nasty PR? Trust me, that kind of thing would have her full, undivided attention.”

  “What are you saying, exactly?” Taylor asked me.

  “I’m saying, Taylor, that you could be the person to personally flush that turd and have the satisfaction of her knowing that you’re the one who did it. We get a real piece of shit off the Wards program, and you get a heck of a lot of doors opened and leverage to work with at the same time.”

  She leaned back against the countertop, one arm across her chest and the other covering her mouth as she was lost in thought.

  I wondered if she was aware of how much she looked like her father when she was thinking during moments like these.

  “Do you think… they’d take me, after everything I’ve done? I mean, Legend said he was going to come talk to me about joining at the hospital before I’d escaped my cuffs and ran away.”

  I chuckled. “How’d you like to go sit down and talk to him personally later?”

  She jerked her head up and looked at me.

  I explained, “I have meetings with him later. They are… pretty strongly trying to get me to take the offer they extended to me after the ABB thing. Especially now that the whole thing happened this morning with Leviathan. I have some serious reservations about joining myself, but he told me that he’s privy to some information that addresses some of those concerns, and we’d go over it later. I might be joining the Protectorate along with my sister.”

  “So… You and Melody would be there with me?”

  I nodded. “That’s what it’s looking like. I still need to hear some things from him, but yes.”

  She rubbed the back of her head. “I– I don’t know. Maybe. If I went to talk to him with you, do you think they’d try and arrest me again?”

  I chuckled. “I’d like to see them try with me there. I wouldn’t let that happen.”

  She looked up at me and nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll go.”

  I clapped my lower hands together. “Great. Let me go let my parents in. Go grab a phone from upstairs if you need one and call your dad, see if he needs help getting over here. Oh, and Taylor?”

  She turned as she was leaving.

  “There’s no easy way to say this, but you’re going to have to tell your Dad. If you do decide to join the Wards, he has to fill out the paperwork. I know that’s… going to be a difficult conversation. I’d be happy to be with you during it, if you’d like.” I thought for a moment. “Not saying this to pressure you or anything, but with everything that’s going on and has happened in the past 72 hours… it might be easier to talk about now than it would have been before.”

  She thought about it for a minute, then nodded a little. “I think I know what you’re getting at. Maybe you’re right. And.” She took a deep breath. “It might be easier if someone else were there, that way I wasn’t just left feeling like I had to face it alone.”

  I held a fist out to her, and she awkwardly bumped it with her own. “Bet on it. I told you I’d have your back.”

  She headed out, and I debated changing to let my parents in. I wasn’t sure I really had the ability to even do so at the moment. I felt that heavy fatigue in my head as much as I was feeling it in my body.

  Well. Melody had told them, and maybe they didn’t believe her. They were about to get a wake-up call if they hadn’t taken her seriously. I had about eight hundred other things I had to take care of that were of a higher priority than stressing myself out over what my parents thought about Apex at the moment.

  I walked down to the garage and grabbed a big floor squeegee and activated the door lift in front of where my parents had parked. Dad hopped out of the passenger side, and Mom started the SUV up to pull it in.

  He paused a moment when he stepped into the garage and looked at me.

  “Hi Dad, I’m blue. This squeegee is for you.”

  I handed it over to him. He looked like he was malfunctioning just a little at the moment.

  “We have a little bit of flooding on the ground floor. Think you can help get the water pushed out before it winds up getting moldy in here?”

  He nodded rapidly, took it from me, and got to work.

  I was grinning internally.

  I waved at Mom to pull all the way up into the bay. She did, parked, and climbed out. She came around the back of the SUV to look at me tentatively.

  “Morgan, is that… really you?”

  I sat on my haunches and ran some claws through my tentacles. “What, is it my new hairdo?”

  She laughed a little and stepped closer, reaching a hand out to touch my upper arm. I shifted to rest on my elbows so I wasn’t looming over her quite as hard.

  She touched my upper arm, running her fingertips over my strange hide.

  She spoke hesitantly, asking: “Are you… inside of there?”

  I shook my head a little. “I am inside, sure, but I’m not like riding around inside like this is a robot or something. This is… just how I am now, Mom.”

  I could see the conflicting emotions on her face as plain as day.

  “I know it’s a lot. That’s why… I’ve been sort of hiding this part of my life and haven’t been around much. I can only look like my old self for a small portion of the time.”

  She brought her hand up to my hard ‘face.’ “Can you feel that?”

  I nodded gently. “I can feel the carapace parts of my body. The sensations aren’t quite the same, but they’re close enough.”

  She was quiet for a moment, then she asked me, “Are you okay like this? Are you… happy?”

  That was a heck of a loaded question.

  “Mom…” I took a breath. “It’s hard to say ‘yes, this is good,’ or ‘no, this is bad’ because this is just how I am, and I don’t really have control over that. Like, imagine if, after the car accident, I hadn’t recovered fully and was stuck in a wheelchair. You wouldn’t really ask the question like that, you know?”

  My mom stilled for a moment, and then I saw the change in her expression. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be an offensive question.”

  “Oh no, Mom. You’re fine, really. I’m just trying to explain that this isn’t a conscious decision on my part to be this. It’s the true manifestation of my power, I guess you would say. It’s just… who I am. But to answer your other question. I think… after a lot of time thinking about it and living like this, that I’ve come to really appreciate it. So I think I’d say I’m happy, yeah, in a sense.”

  I shifted on my elbows. “When I first got my powers, I was scared of them, and I was always extremely self-conscious about how weak I was relative to everyone else. I tried really hard to overcome that fear and anxiety. And then one day, I just wasn’t allowed to ignore it any further, and I had to face the reality of my situation.”

  My mom listened to me quietly, studying my expressionless face. “I lost some things in the process. That hurt, and took getting used to. But I gained other things, too. I got some, maybe even most of the things I’d wanted when I was so worried about being the weakest member of the team on the Wards. I’m strong, fast, and tough now. I can fly. Even if I look strange or scary, my ability to do the things I wanted to do from the start has never been better. So in that regard, I’m very happy. I’ve been able to help and save people in far bigger and more impactful ways than I could have possibly done before.”

  Her eyes glistened, and she smiled at me. “You sound like you’ve grown up so much lately. If you’re happy, that’s the most important thing I care about. And it sounds like you are.”

  I snickered. “Yeah. You could say I had a heck of a growth spurt.”

  We embraced, and when we did, I didn’t feel that hesitation and apprehension. Just my mom pressing against my chest.