The sleeve of the black dress chafed at her wrist, lace scratchy against her skin. The attorney had insisted this was the best look for her, something that would make her look sympathetic and childish, as compared to the black suit she’d dressed in originally.

  “You should change,” Darcy commented. She leaned against the bathroom wall, watching Vivainne fiddle with the dress. Beneath the skirt, even in leggings, her legs were cold, gooseflesh bumpy across her arms. “You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m just saying,” she said, pushing herself off the wall. She walked up behind Vivainne, shadowing her in the mirror. With rare tenderness, she smoothed Vivainne’s hair back, then pushed it forward over her shoulders. “You look uncomfortable.”

  “That’s not entirely the dress’s fault,” Vivainne said, frowning. She forced herself to stop fiddling with the dress, lowering her arms to her sides. They hung there, useless, itching to do something. “And I want to do what the lawyer said.”

  “Sure, but you need to remember, you’re not the one on trial here,” Darcy said. “You’re just the witness.”

  Vivainne frowned. That was easy to say, but the lawyer had warned her what sorts of questions they would ask. They would do anything to poke holes in her story, make her seem unreliable. She couldn’t let them do that to this case. She had to do everything perfectly.

  “If you’re going to throw up, make sure you get it in the toilet.” Darcy took a step back as a precaution.

  Vivainne shook her head, breathing in deeply through her nose. “No,” she said, quelling her rising fear. “I’m fine.”

  Frantic knocking sounded at the bathroom door before it burst inward, Jordan spilling inside and running over to the sink like he was going to hurl.

  “I’m going to be sick.”

  Vivainne took a step back, sharing a look with Darcy. “Yeah, we should get out there.”

  “Agreed.”

  Darcy’s arm wrapped around hers, an anchoring point as they left the bathroom and made their way through the halls of the courthouse. The halls were near empty, only a few guards and heroes in the halls, ostensibly for the safety of everyone involved. There were no reporters in the hallways trying to get an interesting story, not like there was outside the building. Still, Vivainne had spent every moment since speaking with the lawyer hiding out in the bathroom.

  She hadn’t been ready to step foot in the courtroom and have to look at her mother. She wasn’t ready now, but there wasn’t much longer she could wait.

  Darcy reached out for the heavy wooden door, swinging it open as Vivainne took in the last deep breath she would manage until she left the room. Then, she forced her feet to move and stepped inside.

  Someone was speaking. Vivainne didn’t recognize them, but it hardly mattered, eyes scanning for Charles in the crowd. She spotted him near the front, wearing the signature Recompense suit. He was the only thing she saw as she made her way silently through the courtroom to sit beside him.

  She didn’t lift her gaze, but she could feel her mother’s eyes on her. From the other side of the room, it was as if a darkness arose. If anyone else could sense it, they didn’t give an indication, but Vivainne shivered from the force and familiarity of it.

  The hatred. The mistrust that had always lurked beneath the surface, no longer unfounded.

  Vora knew just what Vivainne had done, and that all of this—her demise—was Vivainne’s fault.

  Ears ringing, Vivainne slowly focused on the trial happening before her eyes. On a screen near the front, in clear view of all the jurors, a video played. Taken the night before, Vanya sat in front of the camera, talking about their mother.

  Without context, it wasn’t damning. Vora hadn’t done nearly so many terrible things to the girl, not in the way she had to Vivainne. But the longer you listened, the more twisted it became. Vanya had been raised in isolation, periodically tested on her power in extreme ways that no four year old could understand. She spoke of games.

  Not games. A new video played, one of Vora’s own recordings. The little girl stood over a body, manipulating shadows from its corpse. Vora had told her it was just a puppet, like a character on TV.

  Vivainne shuddered.

  A shoulder brushed against her own. It drew her attention to the man seated beside her, inquiring eyes staring through a dark mask.

  She nodded in quiet confirmation. She was okay.

  When the video of Vanya finished, the attorney Vivainne was familiar with stepped forward and presented another piece of evidence, a video from Vora’s own collection.

  I wonder if my mother ever imagined her recordings would be used against her, Vivainne thought briefly before realizing the truth. Vora never would have considered the possibility of being caught, much less having her own work turned against her. She’d thought she was too smart to get caught.

  The attorney sat back down, the desk separated from the rest of the courtroom with wooden railing. He cast a glance behind him, giving them a reassuring nod before returning his attention back to the case as Vora’s lawyer stood up to speak.

  The longer the lawyer spoke, the more tense Vivainne grew, the muscles in her back growing taut until she was no longer certain she could get them to release. With a deep tenor to his voice, it was almost impossible not to listen to him, grabbing onto every word he let slide from his lips. The jury, a collection of nondescript men and women, sat to the side of the courtroom, wrapped around his every word.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “How can he be okay defending her?” Vivainne whispered furiously.

  Recompense shushed her quickly. She snapped her mouth shut, jaw knotted so tight it felt as though it would burst.

  The man sat back down and the attorney arose, stepping into the middle of the floor. “Calling our witness, Vivainne Monet.”

  She rose unsteadily from her seat, legs trembling as eyes followed her to the end of the bench and into the aisle, approaching the gate that sectioned off the galley from the rest of the courtroom.

  A guard, dressed in all black and carrying a power suppressant at his side, opened the gate to allow her inside. She passed by, following the attorney’s prompting to sit at the witness stand and face the courtroom.

  There were so many people watching.

  Her stomach dropped, squirming as she pointedly avoided looking in her mother’s direction. Instead, she locked her eyes on the attorney, waiting for his cue. They’d gone over everything. What she should say. How to phrase her responses. What sort of questions the defense would ask. She was ready.

  “Please state your name for the court.”

  She shifted forward, lining up the thin microphone in front of her. “Vivainne Monet.”

  “And what is your relationship to the defendant?”

  For the first time, Vivainne glanced across the room at her mother. She sat behind the desk, guarded on either side by those black clad officers, but her hands were uncuffed. She wasn’t dressed in the white jumpsuits super offenders were supposed to wear, rather she wore what Vivainne had watched her wear her entire childhood. A dark dress suit with a white button up blouse, her hair slicked back into a low bun, as if this was just another day at the lab, not a criminal trial.

  As their eyes met, a smile flickered across Vora’s face.

  Vivainne shivered, pulling her attention back to the state attorney.

  “She’s my mother.”

  “And you brought her to the attention of the hero Recompense, did you not?”

  “I did.” Vivainne swallowed, her throat dry. Why didn’t they give her a bottle of water?

  “Why did you approach the hero?”

  “Because I realized no one was going to notice what my mother was doing unless I said something about it,” Vivainne said. “As far as I knew, I was the only one who had an idea that she was committing any crimes.”

  “And how were you aware of this?”

  “She asked me to help her.” She swallowed again. “And some of them were committed on me.”

  “If you don’t mind, explain to the court what she did to you, Vivainne.”

  The attorney took a step back, ceding full attention over to Vivainne. She watched the courtroom, glancing at the jury briefly before beginning to speak.

  “When I was three years old, my mother brought me to a lab and experimented on me. I was born a super, but my power wasn’t one she liked, so she tried to make me like her. She fractured my core in the process.”

  The attorney stepped back up. “Vora Monet took the power core from another super,” he explained. “Implanting it into her own daughter and damaging her irreparably. As you can see here…”

  He pointed toward a screen, where another recording began to play. Vivainne had already watched it, lived it, and the screams echoed through her mind even as she blocked them from her ears, refusing to look anywhere but at the hands balled in her lap.

  When the video finished, the attorney began speaking again, his words lost as her ears rang. The man had warned her they would play the recording, and she’d tried to brace herself for it, but none of that seemed to matter.

  Her mother’s lawyer rose from his seat, smoothly buttoning his suit jacket. She forced herself to focus, to hear the words coming from his lips, as he began to speak.

  “Miss Monet,” he said, smiling at her. It sparked with familiarity. Had she seen this lawyer before? “You were so small when you say the transplant happened, how can you be certain as to your mother’s motivations? Is it not just as possible to believe that your core was fractured previously, and your mother was trying to repair it? That is her line of research, after all. Vora Monet is known for her research into prosthetics.”

  “My core wasn’t broken before then,” Vivainne said. “And I had a different power before.”

  “Do you remember?”

  “No, but there are videos—”

  “And have you seen those videos, Miss Monet?”

  “Yes, I found them.”

  “You found them,” he said. “And how is that?”

  “When the heroes got a search warrant for the lab, I found my mother’s record room.”

  “I see. I was not aware it was policy to take young, unauthorized supers along on those sorts of missions,” he said. “Or that it was policy to use said young, unauthorized supers to gather information. That sounds downright irresponsible, to me, not to mention illegal. But, that’s not why we’re here,” he added, before the judge could say a word. “Are heroes in the habit of launching investigations on upstanding members of society based entirely on her daughter’s ill recollection of events.”

  Vivainne’s stomach lurched. This wasn’t how this was meant to go.

  Her eyes darted across the room, meeting Recompense’s for a moment before flashing back to the lawyer. “I do remember.”

  He looked at her apologetically. “You’ve already said you don’t.” He turned back to the room, facing the jurors. “How are we supposed to trust the testimony and evidence from Miss Monet, when she’s already proven herself unreliable and willing to step outside the law?”

  What?

  She opened her mouth, the slightest shake of the attorney’s head coming shortly after. She wasn’t supposed to speak out of turn, that would only do worse for her.

  Vivainne sat back, watching the lawyer and seething inside, anger bubbling up like the rising tide. How could he say these things, and she just had to sit back and listen?

  “How is it you came to Recompense’s attention?”

  “I was sent to break into his house, by my mother,” Vivainne said, the words as pointed as she could make them.

  “So you broke into a hero’s house?”

  “Not because I wanted to!” Vivainne snapped. “I had no choice.”

  “And did you have a choice when you broke into Monet Industries Lab and destroyed vital evidence? Evidence that could be used now in Vora Monet’s defense?”

  “I was attacked!”

  “Did you have a choice?” he repeated, locking eyes with her.

  She stared at the man, resisting the urge to melt into the floor. The answer sat at the tip of her tongue, even as she searched differently for a better one, an answer that didn’t give him more ground to stand on.

  But there was none.

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “No further questions.”

  “But—”

  “No further questions.”

  He walked back to the desk, sitting down beside her mother, a smug look on his face.

  With eyes boring down on her and a sinking sensation in her gut, Vivainne pushed herself to shaking feet and left the witness stand. On numb legs, she made her way back to her seat, collapsing back beside Recompense.

  Why had she thought testifying was a good idea?