It is human nature to view things comparatively, especially new things. After all, something can only be unique, or even identified at all, if it is first compared to anything else vaguely similar. The day that I had stood on the mindscape field with Charlotte and watched my city shimmer into being, I hadn't thought it was anything special. Sure, it was big, and it looked cool, but it wasn't until Charlotte saw it, and then I saw her city, that I could really appreciate just how different my city and my mind really were from everyone else's. To say something is big, pretty, or impressive in any way at all only works when compared to something that isn't as big, pretty, or impressive.

I was far from an expert on the variety of cities that were probably out there, but I had seen a fair few of them in my time. Charlotte, Jerry, Fiona, Uri, Sterling, the Evos at the compound, and, of course, my own. But that was about it. However, even by my admittedly limited knowledge, I could tell that Emma's city-her mind-was something truly remarkable.

Atop the mountain, at the peak of that massive staircase, it stood magnificent against the uninhibited sunlight of the mindscape.

The city rose before us like a dream made real, a place so awe-inspiring that it seemed untouched by a concept so basic as time. It was a masterpiece of marble and gold, like the idealized artwork painted of ancient Greece, a monument of white marble built into the very bones of the mountain, its pale towers reaching endlessly skyward. Domes of shining gold crowned its highest spires, glinting beneath the sun's eternal gaze and held aloft by towering pillars of that same white stone. The light bathed every stone, every arch, every bridge in a warm glow, and the very air felt alive with something ancient, something more than mere wind and warmth.

As we climbed the grand stairways that wound up to and then throughout the city, I couldn't help but marvel at the craftsmanship beneath my feet. The stone steps were smooth as if worn down from the passage of countless travelers before me who had never been here. The streets were broad and bright, paved with polished stone that reflected the golden light pouring down from the heavens. The city seemed to hum with life, yet there were only the two of us. Even the ghosts that had inhabited every city I had ever seen were conspicuously missing here, yet they seemed to be just around the corner, just out of sight. There was a rhythm to it, a harmony. I could almost imagine the throngs of people moving throughout the city with purpose, musicians playing in shaded courtyards, their melodies drifting through the open archways and down the stairways that led to hidden terraces. Music, that music was everywhere. It wasn't a single song or the sound of a single instrument; it was just... music. It was as if the whole city, Emma's entire mind, was constantly laced with some internal melody that, before now, only she could hear. The scent of flowering vines and citrus trees perfumed the air, mingling with the faint mist rising from the waterfalls that flowed under those arched bridges and cascaded down the mountainside.

Everywhere, fountains spilled crystal-clear water into intricately carved basins. Some were modest, nestled in quiet alcoves, their gentle trickling a soft whisper against the stone. Others were grand, great arcs of water leaping into the air before crashing down in shimmering sheets. Statues of gods and heroes stood among them, or at least that's what they looked like until we got closer. Instead, they were sculptures not unlike the ones in my own city. The first we came to was one of Bob, not as he had been the last time she'd seen him, but as he had been in the prime of his life. A larger-than-life figure, towering over an open plaza, his warm smile and gentle eyes watching over her city, the exact visage I would have expected from a child looking up at their loving parent. But there were others; there was one of Isabelle, looking down with maternal love and pride, alongside others of her friends, their forms captured in perfect detail, their expressions serene as if listening to that endless music mixing with the unending sounds of flowing water.

The city didn't merely sit upon the mountain; it was like it had grown out of it, shaped by a mind that seemed to understand the balance between nature and craftsmanship, a fusion of creativity, strength, and, most importantly, love. My city was large, sprawling, and modern-looking, but aside from that, it was devoid of anything that could be called real character; this one was different in every way I could have imagined. Mine had been built; Emma's looked like it had been painted straight onto that single ethereal point where the mountain met the sky. Its bridges spanned dizzying drops, arcing high over open space as though they themselves had no fear of the depths below, where the foundations of the city and the mountain itself faded off into the clouds that surrounded it. Some bridges led to hidden gardens, where trees bore fruit in every color imaginable, their leaves rustling in the eternal daylight. Others connected the grand palaces and temples that overlooked the world below, their walls gleaming white beneath the sun's embrace.

Farther down, where the mist thickened and the cliffs grew steeper, terraces jutted out from the rock face, their railings adorned with banners that fluttered in the ceaseless breeze. From these vantage points, you could look out to the infinite expanse of the mindscape clouds, yet it wasn't the mindscape, or at least, it wasn't part of it that I had ever seen before. It seemed like it was both separate from it, and yet above it at the same time. I supposed that made a sort of sense, considering she wasn't connected to the mindscape but rather connected to it through me.

There was a romantic sort of poetic symbolism there. She didn't have walls; she didn't need defenses. If anyone wanted to hurt her, if anyone wanted to get to her, then they would need to go through me to do it.

Every other city I had been in, with the exception of my own, seemed to have something about it that spoke to the mind of the person it represented. Some looked like medieval towns, others like canal-laced cities; some looked like pinnacles of industrialization. Mine didn't; mine looked too "new," for lack of a better term, to have any sort of singular identifier like that. I thought that was more of a statement of who I was than anything else, but Emma had it, too. Her city looked ancient in a way that no other city I had ever seen, but at the same time, it seemed ageless. It was how I imagined an artist would paint their fantasy impressions of Ancient Athens, Troy, Rome, or Carthage, and yet it was so much more. Ageless wisdom mixed with timeless beauty as though this place had always been and always would be. That thought echoed my earlier one in the dream, the fact that Emma had always been there, just out of sight, just like this city had always been here, just out of reach.

But even as I looked around her city, even as we climbed, a huge part of me was just watching her. It had been a while since I had felt the sense of magical wonder that she was feeling now. I suppose it was the same as waking up one day after winning the lottery or something, looking at your bank account for the first time, and seeing that hundred million just sitting there. The sense of "holy shit!" that would instantly come with that. Then, seeing that same number there every day for a year. Don't get me wrong; you would absolutely appreciate how much it was and how different it was to what most other people had, but that novelty - that "holy shit" moment - would inevitably fade away. Somehow, that hundred million would become normal. The same could be said for my city. I could only ever appreciate how different it was by comparing it to another Evo's, but even then, that sense of prideful wonder had faded over the long months since I had first felt it.

Not only did Emma feel that "wow" right at that exact moment, but I did, too. not just because this was something new, different, and staggeringly beautiful, but because, through our bond, I felt what she did.

Her eyes, and her awe-filled gaze seemed utterly incapable of fixing on one point for more than a few seconds before flicking to the next, new, breathtaking sight. But it was her eyes themselves that really caught me, even more so than they always had. They were practically dancing with the wonder that filled them. This wasn't just something new to her; it wasn't even just something new to me either; this was something much more profound than the comparison between her city and mine, between her mind and anyone else's; this was her. Every building, every ray of sunlight, every warm kiss of the breeze, and every soft, comfortable shadow. Every pristine white stone, every glinting color, every whisper of promise from every alcoved doorway, every scent in the air, every note of that unending melody- this was her, this was Emma. She was seeing her mind for the first time, but we were both also seeing the utter, stunning beauty of it. Something absolutely and undeniably unique. Something momentous. Something profound and real and true.

Every little detail about every little thing my eyes—her eyes—could see represented who she was as a person. Her hopes, dreams, fears, memories, loves, hates-hell, even her favorite food—all of it was here, laid out in an ever-ascending city that spoke more about the nature of her being and the beauty of her character than it ever could about merely its capacities.

Still, we climbed. We wandered through broad streets and narrow terraces, through hidden gardens and wide open plazas, and up the winding, artery-like staircases. All of them seemed to guide us upward; all of them offered that same spectacular view, and all of it gave me a deeper and deeper appreciation of just how breathtaking this woman was.

But there were other, more practical differences between her city and mine, or any other Evo city, for that matter. An Evo city was a lesson in metaphors; each building, every street, all of it had a purpose, all of it had some deeper meaning. The libraries, the marketplaces, the theaters, forges, mustering grounds, wells, hospitals, and banks all of them meant something. From a building that determined an Evo's ability to heal or to understand value to a building that governed an Evo's skill at a particular task or the function of distributing resources around the body, everything in an Evo's city was a physical manifestation of a mental or biological feature of a living person.

Emma had none of those things, at least not in the same way.

There were no grand buildings denoting biological functions; there was nothing that represented her mental defenses or ability to store information; there was no system of ascending importance of certain buildings or functions based on how close they were to the city's center; in fact, there was no city center at all. But Emma's city had something that I realized I'd never seen in any Evo mind. It had dimension. It wasn't just a sprawling mass of buildings nestled inside a set of walls; Emma's city had height, and it had depth, just like the woman it represented. There was more to her than a simple set of metaphorical buildings or massive walls, there was character, there was beauty, and there was something singularly unique. I'd never thought of an Evo mind like that, except for maybe my own, and even that was just because it was bigger. Every Evo mind, when the exterior aesthetics were stripped away, was pretty much the same as any other; they weren't quite uniform, but they were close enough for direct parallels to be made. Emma had no such problem; her mind was one of a kind, as - I now realized - everyone's mind should be. Without even trying. Without even knowing how, Emma was showing me that there was more to a person's mind than how it was laid out or how big it was. There was nothing at all in Emma's city that was even remotely recognizable as a source of power.

Well, almost nothing.

Each building was a part of who she was rather than a metaphor for something someone could do. It was a difficult distinction to make, but I found myself trying anyway. Neither I nor any other Evo had a building denoting our understanding of a concept as simple as, say, our perception of right and wrong. The metaphor would have been obvious, even to me: a courthouse, right? Something that determined our sense of fairness and justice. I didn't have one, and neither - I was just realizing - did any other mind I had ever seen. I mean, according to my own understanding of Evo cities, we were perfectly capable of understanding value or assimilating skills, but determining if something we did crossed any sort of moral line? Nothing. The more I thought about it, the more that fact gnawed at me. Let's face it, no matter how noble we claimed to be, no Evo, not even me, was a particularly moral person; the limits we placed on ourselves in terms of abuses of power were entirely governed by that whole "keep your head down or the Inquisitors will get you" mentality. I, for example, had butchered hundreds of people and didn't feel a shred of remorse for it because, as far as I was concerned, they had it coming. Those who chose to ignore the Inquisitor threat seemed to invariably end up as some power-hungry monster who didn't answer to anyone higher than their own sense of greed. The tales of endless expansion of Evo powers had, after all, been what initially prompted the war between Evos and the Inquisition in the first place. I momentarily wondered if it was the Dragon who provided our kind with their moral framework, if he was responsible for our understanding of right and wrong, but that was a thought for later.

The point was that this logic could be expanded to cover almost every sentiment that governed an Evo's character. There was no building denoting a sense of love or loyalty. There was nothing for generosity or wisdom - rather than just plain knowledge - their habits, their humor, even something as universal as their hopes for the future. Everything in an Evo's city was directly tied to something they could do rather than the person they were.

Emma was the exact opposite. There was no library showing her ability to remember things, but there was a building that reminded her not of what she knew but how she had learned it. There was a building for her self-discipline, another one for her sense of family and belonging. Her memories, the things that were logically and clinically stored in my library, were, in her, spread everywhere, each one framed by the context in which they had been acquired. It was messy, illogical, chaotic, and so beautifully real. Her sense of right and wrong wasn't tied up in a single building; it was meshed together with the memories that had taught her those lessons - each one repeated in a thousand different ways for a million different subjects - all of them woven together to give her an innate sense of morality. I had been right, for example, when I said that Emma's visceral reaction to me was because my killing of the enemy went against everything she had ever known, but I had no idea as to how literal the truth of that observation really was. It wasn't just something she had learned; it was part of who she was.

More than that, there was a marked and profound difference between our buildings' actual physical construction. My library, for example, was a big building close to my monolithic spire that held my accumulated knowledge. I had never actually been inside it, but I imagined it would look precisely how one would imagine a library to look. Multiple floors filled with endless rows of books, each book representing a memory, a lesson I had learned, or a piece of information I had picked up at some point in my life. My internal editing station had given me the ability to perfectly recall anything that I had ever seen, heard, or learned, and it had also jammed a massive amount of new information into it as well. Some of that information, like my ability to understand computers or to play an instrument, needed my forge - the building next door - to translate that knowledge into an actual, performable skill. Still, there was a logic to how it worked, and more importantly, in this instance, my library looked like a library, or at the very least, it looked like a building. A great many of the more important-looking buildings in Emma's city didn't. A lot of them weren't even buildings in the typical sense at all.

There was, for example, a temple devoted to knowledge, not the storage of it, not the accumulation of more, but an actual temple, a place dedicated to the quest for knowledge. This temple was simply a statement of the importance she placed on learning. Not on what she learned, not a self-congratulatory pat on the back for how much she had learned - like a library was - but just on the value she placed on always learning something new, of always expanding that knowledge, and of always defining herself as a person who wanted to grow, rather than someone who already knew. But physically, it looked completely different from anything I would have imagined. It was essentially a large domed roof held up by six intricately carved marble pillars, and that was it. No walls, no windows, no doors, no rows of bookshelves, just a space of open air surrounded by columns and covered by that beautiful gold dome. Beneath it, inside the temple, there was a fountain that looked like the quill of a feather pen, with water trickling down the feather's side and into a basin that was wrapped around a stone depiction of a book. There was nothing functional at all about it, but then, there didn't need to be. This building wasn't about its size, its majesty, or its ability to serve a purpose; the temple only seemed to care about what it represented. Learning. Not knowledge. Learning.

But that was exactly the sort of mind Emma had. It was one that dealt in concepts, in abstracts, in ideas, not in function. Of course, she was perfectly capable of functioning just as well as anyone else; her lack of buildings dedicated to that was in no way an indicator of a lack of ability, it was just that she - her mind - placed infinitely more value on the idea and intention behind an action than on the action itself.

Then there was the music. There wasn't some grand concert hall or any other musically themed building, and yet it was everywhere. Its melody whispered past the swaying branches of trees and floated through the broad open plazas. It had no recognizable tune; it wasn't a song playing on an endless loop, nor was it a progression of different songs on a playlist. It was just music. It was her love of music. Her mind didn't categorize that into something physical; it didn't need that. It loved music, so it had it. It was such a refreshingly different approach to the uniform and clinical minds I had encountered before now. Something as simple as her love of it was all it needed to manifest it into something permanent. An unending, gorgeous tune playing to every corner of her city and the mind it represented. It was achingly beautiful.

Just like she was.

There was only one exception to the differences between her city's buildings and mine. At the city's highest point stood a grand palace, its walls inlaid with gold and mother-of-pearl, its steps lined with flowering vines that never lost their bloom. Outside it, almost like it was standing guard before the curved steps leading to the top, there was another statue. I recognized it immediately. It was me. Well, more accurately, it was us as we had been during the fires in front of the castle's keep. My arm was wrapped around her, holding her close and safe against me, my other hand was stretched out toward the mindscape clouds, my palm facing outwards like I was barring entry to anyone who didn't belong here. But it was her face that made me pause to look properly. She was looking up at me, her eyes filled with what I could only call fathomless levels of trust. I don't know if that is how she had really looked at me when I summoned those final fires, but in this statue, I could almost see the awe-filled love in those eyes. But then, this wasn't just a memory of that devastating battle, either. Nor was its positioning outside her Palace. She saw me as her protector, and I was protecting this spot in her city above all others: the center of her, the core of her mind, I was the guardian of everything she was.

I glanced at her, but she wasn't looking at me—at least not the me who was currently holding her hand and wandering her city with her. Her eyes were locked onto the me in the statue. I saw a wistful, tender look in her eyes as she recalled the moment when she finally let go of her fear and fully invested her trust and confidence in me. Statues, I already knew from my own city, were representations of core, defining moments in a person's life. It was oddly flattering to discover that I was already one of hers, even though I absolutely knew that there would already be a statue of her in my city, too.

Eventually, we started moving again. We climbed those steps, one of my hands trailing along the smooth marble railings, feeling the warmth of the stone beneath my fingers, while the other held Emma's. No words had been spoken; there was no need. I was seeing, feeling, and understanding precisely what she was, and a few steps behind us, Jeeves followed with the simplest of smiles on his face. When we reached the top, we turned to take in the view, and my breath caught in my throat.

The city stretched below us, an endless cascade of white stone and gold, waterfalls and bridges, courtyards and temples, all bathed in the ceaseless light of the sun. Beyond it, the world unfurled in the serene, pristine white of the clouds. Towering banks of them dotted the distance, the sun's light seeming to reflect off them, so its brightness came from every angle, and they looked like they were stretching into infinity. And above it all, the sky arched vast and blue, an ocean without end.

Even though we had climbed from that platform at the base of her city to its highest point, none of us had spoken even once. Emma's eyes, like mine, were full of wonder and awe, glistening with happy tears at the sheer magnificence and beauty of it all, but more profoundly, she was seeing just how incredible her mind really was. I suppose it's easy to be told that you and your mind are something special, but to see it - as I knew from my first time in my own city and the wide eyes of anyone else who had ever seen it - was something else entirely. My hand squeezed hers as we looked out in amazement.

"Is yours like this?" Emma finally asked, after what must have been an hour of wandering around within her mind.

"God, no," I almost snorted. "Mine is much more..." I frowned, not really sure how to finish that sentence. "I guess mine is much more like every other Evos, just a hell of a lot bigger. Wait," I turned to Jeeves, "If I can visit her city, can she come to mine?"

That smile on his face grew a little wider. "You are bonded now, and I am here. What do you think that means?"

I squinted at him. "I think it means you enjoy giving me half answers." Emma was just letting her gaze flick back and forth between us.

Jeeves chuckled. "You don't really have a city of your own anymore, and neither does My Lady," he nodded to Emma. "Your cities have sort of... merged. You are part of each other now, which means that I am, too. I am now the representation of your merged subconsciousness. So yes, you can both visit each other's cities as you please, regardless of distance. To be honest I'm not even sure there is a boundary between the two anymore."

My mind was already spinning with the implications of having a shared subconscious, but Emma seemed to have focused on a more pressing matter. Her eyes seemed to sparkle with excitement immediately. "Can we see it now?"

"But we've only just found yours," I answered slowly. "Don't you want to explore a little more first?"

"Of course, but I can't really appreciate what I'm looking at without understanding what you're seeing, and I can't understand without something to compare it to."

"Well then," Jeeves said with a smile, "let me help you with that."

He stepped to the side and swept his arm out in a grand gesture, like he was wiping away the clouds that dominated our view, which, as it happened, was exactly what he was doing.

The infinite sea of clouds didn't part like some old biblical story; they just seemed to melt away, fading until there was nothing left except the awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping view of the land of the mindscape, with my enormous, sprawling city directly below us.

I suppose that I'd never been given a proper understanding of just how big my city was, not really. I knew that it was bigger than anyone else's; I knew that it was a lot bigger, but that doesn't really translate to an actual physical size. The closest I'd come was the view from the top of my walls or from the balcony that wrapped around my central spire, but, again, that didn't really help. The only way to really measure the scale of something when you're right in the middle of it is to see how long it would take you to walk from one side of it to the other. I was now realizing that I had never actually done that. Sure, I could look at it and say that it was about fifty miles or so from the walls to the tower - a guess, at best - but that wasn't the same as really appreciating how far fifty miles really is.

Anytime I wanted to travel to one of the more remote corners of my metropolis - for example, if I wanted to visit Becky's memorial plaza - I had just kinda thought of it, and my mind was instantly transported there. On the other hand, I had walked through a number of different cities in my time. Charlotte's and Sterling's being the obvious examples. Emma's city, in terms of simple scale, was about the same size as theirs; there was just a lot of uphill walking. You could walk from one side of it to the other in about an hour. Mine, if I was judging it correctly, was massive enough to make the same journey take about two days.

What that meant, in practical terms, was that the ground beneath Emma's city was almost completely consumed by the sheer, mind-bogglingly enormous size of my eternal city, with a ring of the mindscape greenery wrapped around it and stretching out to the horizon.

For Emma, what she was seeing was simply a matter of size and splendor, but although I hadn't really been given this sort of vantage point before, it still wasn't anything new to me. My eyes weren't drawn to the enormous scale of my city, though; they were instead pulled to the blackened, still-smoldering parts that had been so badly damaged during the battle of the compound. The damage wasn't terrible; there wasn't even a lot of it, and the parts that were damaged seemed to be completely swallowed up by the rest of the city and its shining magnificence, but to me, they were the blemishes that jumped out at me as if they were under a neon light. I had easily, almost effortlessly, beaten back the thirteen armies that had attacked me, but I hadn't really ever paid attention to just how much damage they'd actually caused. It wasn't like whole city blocks had been decimated, and the damage wasn't irrevocable, but the charred buildings, the fire-damaged and cratered streets, and the blackened marks on the mighty marble walls all told that my mind and my city hadn't escaped rom that fight unharmed. That would be something I would have to look into later.

Mental health, it would seem, sometimes required a bit of repair work to the mind.

"Oh, wow," Emma gasped, her eyes wandering over the sight as if it were the most impressive thing she'd ever seen, which may very well have been true. "Is that... Is that all you?"

"Yup," I nodded. "That's home. That's me."

"It's..." she struggled for words, just as I had when looking at her new city.

"Big?"

"It's beautiful," she whispered as she pressed herself to my side, her arms wrapping around one of mine. She let herself take in the pure majesty of the sight before us as I just smiled, enjoying the closeness and happiness she exuded. My mind was working differently now, perhaps shaped by Jeeves's quiet understanding of how all of this functioned beneath the surface. Emma's city was above mine—not just physically but in meaning. I should have realized it sooner. The clouds, the distance, the way its golden light cascaded downwards—it was never just about height. In the mindscape, nothing was without meaning. And fresh from the dream the Dragon had woven for us, I found myself searching for what this revelation truly meant.

It was a reflection of us, of the roles we played and the forces we embodied. My city lay beneath hers, rooted in structure, in the cold clarity of justice, in the unwavering lines of law and order. Towers of steel and glass, streets built with precision, every system designed to maintain balance. Above it, Emma's city stood in radiance, a vision of wisdom, rule, and governance, built on the very foundations that mine provided. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became.

I was the fountain of justice, the bedrock upon which order was built. Emma was the wisdom of governance, the guiding hand that shaped what that order would become. My city upheld the law, the framework that made civilization possible, but hers gave it purpose. Her rule rose upon the foundation of my justice, and my justice was watched over by the wisdom of her rule. It was a partnership in the purest sense—two forces intertwined, each incomplete and meaningless without the other.

Without her, my city would be cold, rigid, an unyielding machine that knew only punishment and consequence, an endless thirst for retribution and revenge without a guiding hand to temper it. Justice alone was not enough. It could build walls, draw lines, and enforce order, but it couldn't lead, could not inspire, and could not breathe life into what it created. And without my justice, her rule would be fragile, vulnerable to corruption and chaos. It would fail before it had ever begun. Power without law, authority without principle—an empire built on shifting sands, doomed to fall.

This was why our cities existed as they did, one above, one below—two halves of a whole, each sustaining the other. The light of her wisdom cascaded down, illuminating my streets, while the strength of my foundation upheld the majesty of hers. Not one ruling over the other, not one diminishing the other, but two forces in perfect equilibrium, each making the other stronger.

I looked up at Emma's city, its golden domes shining against the endless sky, and then down at mine, with its streets stretching out in the silent certainty of something that would endure forever. Neither was complete on its own. But together? Together, they were something unbreakable.

She was feeling it, too. The understanding being fed from Jeeves to both of us at the same time, and this new, profound meaning to our existences, this pre-ordained but completely accepted partnership between us, all of it solidifying into a single, timeless moment. It didn't need to be spoken; no words were needed. We were already here, and we were both looking at the physical manifestation of our acceptance.

We were all in, both of us.

"I want to see it," Emma finally said with a happy, content sigh, her body pressing a little closer to mine. "Your city, I mean, can we visit?"

Considering all of the trauma that she had been through in the last twenty-four hours, that sigh was as much a relief to me as it was a worry. Sure, at that moment, she was happy, but there was no ignoring the toll that recent events had taken on her, even if she were able to push them to the side for the time being. The darkness that had shrouded my city and the torrents of rain that had pelted its streets after the fight with Charlotte and the loss of Becky and Faye were more than enough proof of the fact that deep, soul-churning emotions had a very real and tangible effect on a person's city. Emma didn't have any of that. But with that being said, it was still early days. The pain and suffering of her losses hadn't hit her yet, at least not properly, and she-like me-was currently riding that wave crest of euphoria at our bonding. It would be heartbreaking to see this city diminished as much as mine had in the pits of my despair, but I now knew that I would be here for her throughout it all. I had thought of her as my rock in the dream, as the support and the safety that would put me back together after the tortures of war had passed. But that sentiment went both ways. I would be hers, too. There was no need to push the pain forward, though; if she was happy to let it lay for a little while, then I wasn't going to bring her crashing down to earth before I absolutely had to.

I smiled. "You sure? We haven't really explored yours properly yet."

"I love this," she beamed, looking around her city. "And I can see from your eyes that you're as amazed by it all as I am, but I can't see what you're seeing. I need to be able to see what a normal city looks like to be able to appreciate how different mine is." She held up her hand for my obvious retort. "I know, I know, your city isn't exactly normal either, but as you said, you can't understand something without comparing it to something else."

I smirked at her. "I said that, did I?"

"Yeah, you..." she frowned for a second before her eyes widened. "You didn't say that! You... thought it!"

"You're bonded," Jeeves grinned knowingly. "While you are in each other's cities, you will both know everything that the other one does, including their understanding of things. It's not exactly reading their thoughts or seeing their memories, but it's pretty close."

Emma was practically bouncing on the tips of her toes with excitement. The prospect of having someone else rummaging around in your head would put most people on edge, but - again, in a testament to her character - she wasn't even considering that; she was giddy at the prospect of rummaging around in mine and learning everything she was able to. Not only about me, but about anything I would be able to teach her that she didn't already know.

That brought up an entirely new question.

"Can I show her memories and that sort of thing, like I did with Charlotte?" I asked Jeeves.

"One way to find out," Jeeves shrugged, still maintaining that annoyingly endearing grin. "But my guess would be yes. I'm not sure you'll be able to give her the same abilities as you have. She doesn't have a power source to let them function, but mentally speaking, you are basically the same person now. You are one. You can already feel each other's thoughts, so it stands to reason that you can share the things you know with each other."

"Eek!" The squeal of unbridled joy that fell from Emma's lips snapped my attention back to her. If the look on her face and that burst of sound from her lips were anything to go by, the idea that she could digest my knowledge almost on a whim was one that she was very much in favor of. The beaming smile of pure delight and excitement on her face only served to emphasize her thoughts on the matter. She was like a child on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, that feeling didn't last.

As soon as we materialized in my city, it hit her. I suppose the only way to understand how much weight you are carrying around is to see how someone else reacts when they try to lift it. My city, my enormous walls, my battle-scarred streets, my dashing motes of light, and my glow-bathed monolithic towers, all of it had been standing tall against an almost crushing burden since the party all those months ago. Grief. I hadn't noticed it, not because of some super-hero levels of inner strength, but because I didn't know any different. All of that weight had been added, bit by bit, over the year's worth of turmoil I had been going through.

Emma, on the other hand, had no such experience. It could be legitimately claimed that her level of pain was worse than anything I had suffered, and she had gone through it over a massively shorter period of time, but her eyes barely had time to widen at the size of my city from the tops of my walls, barely had time to take in the sheer scale and strength of my mind, when all of that weight smashed down onto her.

I was used to feeling that grief; I had grown accustomed to that level of almost permanent pain, so much so that I hardly registered the gnawing ache of it anymore. It wasn't that I didn't feel it; I absolutely did; I'd just found a way to function through it until it became normal. But Emma, as soon as she felt the first shred of it, simply crumpled. It was like feeling my pain gave her mind the permission it needed to feel her own, and whereas the strength of my city had grown throughout the long months of my grieving, she had no such mental fortitude, and her city was in no way prepared for the onslaught of such powerful, life-altering emotions.

She went from a giddy, excited, vibrant girl to the crestfallen, devastated shell of a woman in mere seconds.

We were back in her city in an instant. I don't know why I thought it would help ease her pain, and I didn't know if I thought my mind was the problem, which it obviously wasn't, but I did know that she had enough suffering of her own to deal with without having to deal with mine, too, but the moment we materialized back in her city, she fell into my arms.

The bond we shared, the excitement at her own city's unlocking, the thrill of our connection, the love, the joy of finding each other, the sex, all of it was instantly lost to the weight of her grief.

"He's gone," she sobbed into my chest as the skies around her city darkened and a gentle rain started to fall. I just held her; there was nothing I could say. Just as she had felt my pain on my battlements, I was feeling hers now, too. "They're all gone."

I just stroked my fingers through her hair, holding her as close to me as I could, and watched the vibrancy of her city gleam against the soft, aching pattering of rain falling upon it. What could I say? What words could possibly alleviate her suffering? What could I do to make her feel even a shred better than she was feeling now? After the death of Becky, I'd lost myself in my bunker for the equivalent of eighteen time-dilated months before I was able to function properly again, and even then, the pain had never gone away; it had never even faded; I'd just learned to live with it. What would have helped me during that time? The answer was glaringly simple: Absolutely fucking nothing. But we were connected now, and I understood.

She didn't need me to ease her pain; it was her pain to feel, and it was something she would need to process in her own time and in her own way. All she needed from me was to stand by her and to hold her as she felt it.

********

I'm not entirely sure how long we sat there. It could have been hours of mindscape time; it could have been longer; I didn't care; I wasn't checking. It wasn't important. I had carried her, still weeping inconsolably, from one of the plazas we had materialized in, to a bench in one of those hidden little terraces overlooking my sprawling city below. She had sobbed so hard that it felt like her soul was trying to claw its way out of her body, and she had done so for hours before exhausting herself to sleep. I had laid her head in my lap, never stopping the stroking of my fingers through her hair as she slept.

From the winces and frowns on her sleeping face, I could tell she wasn't having good dreams.

Both of us were soaked to the skin, but it wasn't cold. The air was just as warm and pleasant as when the sun had been shining down on her magnificent mind as we first arrived, so it wasn't uncomfortable to just sit there and let her process.

In the real world, barely ten minutes had passed since we had finished our bonding, since the moment of shared rapture and that mutual oath that had connected us forever. We were still in no danger; part of my mind was still watching the immediate area around the caves for any sign that we had been tracked, but there was nothing. Meaning that there was no reason on Earth to try and rush this process. But I could see it happening. There was no real difference in her city, at least not visually, but I could feel it strengthening; I could feel those pillars and the domed roofs they held up getting stronger; I could feel the resilience in every step of those stairs growing, I could feel the power of the emotion now attached to Bob's statue in her largest plaza, even if I couldn't see it from here. I could feel the importance of every arc of water coming from every fountain becoming more profound, even if only for the fact that they were now shooting out their jets in his memory. Their continued existence was an honor to his sacrifice. I was watching, in real time, as her mind, her character, and her entire worldview changed around me in response to the utter, inarticulate agony that was crashing through her.

Everything about her world at that moment was pain. When I had been in the darkest pits of my own despair, my pain had almost immediately morphed into abject, unquenchable rage. Mine was the burning fury at the people responsible for what had happened to me. But as I had said earlier during our flight from the castle, Emma was a better person than I was. Her pain wasn't transforming; she wasn't using it, or even planning on using it, to justify acts of inconceivable violence as I had. Hers was just that aching, gnawing hole where her heart had once been, filled with nothing but the sorrow of losing people so close to her. It was the memory of the good times she had once shared with them, coupled with the times they would never share again and the new memories they would never get to make. It was every word not said, every sentiment not expressed, every opportunity missed, and every feeling left unexpressed. It was the struggle against the unbelievable new reality she now lived in, one where her father and her friends simply weren't there anymore. It was grief in its purest and most personal form.

But coupled with that grief was the shock. In the real world, it was barely midnight. She had woken up that morning, not even fifteen hours ago, without a real worry or serious care in the world. Her life had been as normal as any other day she had woken up. Her father, her friends, and her life were precisely how she had left them the night before. Alive, well, and happy. She had been vaguely aware of the new guests in the castle, and the general hubbub around the place told her that they - we - were somewhat important, but otherwise, her life was still intact. Now, just over half a day later, it had been completely shattered. There was no other way to describe it. Her existence, as soon as that weight hit her, now consisted entirely of sifting through the shards of the wreckage of her old life, trying to find anything recognizable as the woman she had been. Less than twelve hours was all it had taken to completely destroy the entire foundation of everything she had built her life on, and that fact alone had rocked her to her core.

At that moment, all she had was me. It would be unfair and untrue to say that I wasn't enough; to her mind, I was everything, just like she was for me. I could feel the strength she was taking from my presence, both in her life and in her mind. I could feel how deep our connection went within her, I could feel how much she needed and wanted me there with her, right at that moment, and I could feel the depth of her gratitude that I hadn't just fucked off and left her to it. But I wasn't her old life. I wasn't her father. I wasn't one of her friends. I wasn't now, nor could I ever be, any part of the life that had been so suddenly and violently obliterated. But I was there, and she was taking a measure of comfort, no matter how small, in that comparatively minuscule presence, that tiny amount of strength against the storm.

We were in these fires together, and she knew, completely knew, that no matter how high the flames got, no matter how fierce the heat became, no matter how far away safety seemed to be, I would never let her go. She would never have to do this alone.

I couldn't tell how much that helped. I couldn't even tell if that fact helped at all at that moment, but it was a fact nonetheless. But I wasn't there to earn the title of best partner; this wasn't about me in any way at all. I was simply here for her because there was nothing on earth more important to me and nowhere else I would rather be. The war could wait. Charlotte, Jerry, Fiona, and even Isabelle could wait. The hunt for Marco could wait. The Praetorians and the destruction of their entire order could wait.

Emma couldn't.

So, I would stay with her for as long as it took until she was ready to go on.

"How do you do it?" her soft, hoarse voice asked suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts. "How do you keep going with all of that pressing down on you? How do I?" I hadn't even realized she had woken up.

I shrugged. "What choice do we have?" It wasn't a flippant or dismissive answer; it was simply the best one I had come up with during the times of my own turmoil. "The only way past it is through it."

"What do you mean?" She sat up, rubbing her eyes before looking deep into mine. The look within them was one of hopeful yearning, hoping that I would have the answer to how to make all of this pain go away. I guess it was a sign of the strength of our bond that I immediately dreaded speaking, knowing that I was about to disappoint her.

"I kept going because I had to. I couldn't afford to give in, no matter how much I wanted to. I'm sorry you felt it in my city. I honestly didn't expect you to feel what I feel as viscerally as you did, but I think the fact that the pain is still there shows that this is not something you ever really get over; it's just something you learn to live with. People say that time heals all wounds; it doesn't; it just teaches you how to work through the pain and keep going."

My heart broke as I watched her visibly deflate and that hope fade from her eyes. "So I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself and get on with it," she nodded with a sigh. Again, there was no anger or retort in her voice; there was no offense at anything I had said; she knew me better than that now. There was only resigned understanding. The pain wasn't going away; it wasn't even going to lessen; it really was just a case of forcing her way forward until that forcefulness became second nature.

"Would you want it to go away?" I asked

"Sorry?"

"If I could snap my fingers right now and make all of this hurt and grief vanish in an instant, would you really want me to?"

She frowned, her mouth opening, but whatever knee-jerk response her mind came up with died on her tongue. With another sigh, she shook her head.

"It hurts so much because those people matter to you," I said, brushing an errant lock of hair away from her face and tucking it behind her ear. She seemed to subconsciously lean into my hand as it touched her. "You're hurting because it was real, because they meant something to you. The pain isn't something to be avoided or even something to be feared. It's something to embrace because that's their memory, that's your love for them, and that's something you'll never want to lose. Then, one day, you'll find that you can remember them without the pain being quite so... this," I gestured my hand around her rain-soaked city. "Then, later, you'll be able to remember them without feeling the pain at all. I wish there was a way to get you to that point faster or some pearl of wisdom that would make it hurt less while you get there, but there isn't, and I think that would be an insult to their memory if we did. It hurts because their loss means something to you, to us. It hurts because they matter."

She nodded with another sigh and leaned her body against mine. "I understand. Thank you. Thank you for staying. Thank you for being here."

"We're in this together," I answered simply.

"We are," she nodded again. "I... I think I'm ready to try again."

I frowned. "Try what again?"

"I want to go back to your city if that's okay. I want to understand everything else. I want to see what you went through to get you to where you are now. I want you to show me."

"Are you sure?"

She sniffed and nodded again, pulling herself up to an upright position, and looked me in the eyes. "I'm sure. How much worse can I feel, right? There's no time like the present, and I need something else to focus my mind on."

I held her eyes for a moment, the desire to protect her warring inside my head with the recognition of her own strength and with the fact that she would need to dictate her own pace of healing. If she thought this would help, who was I to disagree? It's not like I had any frame of reference, and to be fair, my earliest thoughts after the loss of Faye and Becky were ones of wanting to know what was going on. I'd had questions, things I needed answers to, and it was only natural for Emma to feel the same. It had taken me months to find some of those answers, and there were others I still didn't have. Maybe giving Emma the crash course in everything I had learned really would be helpful.

"Okay," I finally said with a nod, "But there are conditions." I waited for her eyes to meet mine. "First of all, there are no prizes for showing how much pain you can take before breaking. If it's too much, you need to say, and we will back off and try again later. Secondly, we do this together. If you need to lean on me, that's what you do. No permissions, no apologies, no trying to act strong for my benefit. I've already been there, I know how much it hurts. It's not the same as what you're going through, but it's close enough for me to have no illusions about how shit this is going to be. Insisting on doing this alone will make things worse, trust me. Lastly, I know how you feel about the violence, and there is a lot of it in there..." I tapped the side of my head. "...if you don't want to look yet, then don't. I get that you want to know; you may even need to know, but you don't need to know everything right now. Okay?"

"You're protecting me, even from myself. " She nodded with a soft, weak smile as if she was once again chastising herself for how she had first thought about me. "I understand, and l'll try my best."

"Alright, let's go."

********

The change in my city was remarkable to see. I suppose it's a statement of how the moods of those closest to us can affect our own. My city, when we had arrived the first time, had been as bright and as vibrant as hers had been-full of wonder, possibility, and our burgeoning connection. The weight that I'd been carrying was nothing more than a mild background pressure, but that pressure was all it had taken to crumple Emma completely. This time, the difference was instantly apparent.

It wasn't raining, not like it had been in Emma's city, but that darkness, that dullness to the light of the place, was just as present. I was hurting; that much was obvious, but I was hurting for not only the same reasons that Emma was but also because she was hurting at all. The sky of my metropolis held an air of solemnity, like a tension in its very bones; it was hard to describe. This wasn't the depression of losing Faye and Becky, this wasn't the despair and the self-recrimination of my time after my argument with Charlotte, this was something different. I suppose the closest thing I could compare it to would be to attend the funeral of someone you didn't really know. You weren't personally invested in the pain or the grief, but you could certainly feel it around you, and you could respect the importance of it.

Don't get me wrong; I was mourning Bob as well. His loss was another hammer blow to my chest, and I doubted I would ever find another ally like him again. But my grief was in no way comparable to Emma's; mine was the sadness of a drizzly day; hers was the torrential downpour of a monsoon on steroids. There was just no accurate way to measure one by the other; they were just too different. But just like the visit to that stranger's funeral, I had no choice but to feel the power of her emotions, the unimaginable depths of her pain, the overwhelming scale of her grief, and the longing sadness that came with it, and that came with a dullness to the light of the place, a muteness to the usual vibrancy of my city.

I felt Emma's fingers lace into mine, I heard her take a deep, stabilizing breath, as we stood atop my colossal city walls. They really were enormous; the base of Emma's city to the highest point of her palace was barely as high as my walls were, and there were many, many buildings - my monumental central spire included - that were significantly taller again. Still, it was the sprawling size of my city as a whole that really captured our attention. It was like I was looking at it through new eyes, now, though-through her eyes, and I could feel that familiar bubbling of pride at it. Emma's city was a masterclass in beauty and understated depth. Mine was a lesson in sheer size and strength. I could see it now - although maybe it would be more accurate to say that she could see it and I understood what she was perceiving.

The strength was everywhere. It was built into everything: every stone in the walls, every brick in every building, the breadth of every street, the inner walls, even the broad open plazas; all of it spoke to a resilience and a strength, not just of mind, not just of power, but a strength of character. Every struggle I had faced, both since my awakening and before it, was etched in the very fabric and foundations of the city. I suppose it was, in a very real way, showing my deepest scars to Emma. She was able to see - in vague metaphorical terms - the full extent of the wars I had been fighting my entire life. From the battle at the compound to the fight against my parents' cruelty, from the fear and rage of the party to that dull, lifelong ache to find somewhere to belong. The fight to be accepted, the fight to keep my head above water, financially and socially, after leaving home. The fight for knowledge, the struggle to understand what was happening around me since the acquisition of my powers. Even the ongoing efforts within my own mind to repair, or at least mitigate the damage done by those few who had managed to break into my city during the last big battle. Every scar, every fight, every struggle, every fear, it was right there for her to see, and now that she was prepared for the weight I was carrying, and the effects that it had on her, Emma was seeing it all.

"I... I didn't know," she murmured as she looked around. I just smiled weakly. Boasting seemed futile. A 'look how strong your man is' didn't seem to fit with either the moment or with her wider character. That sort of shit didn't impress her. She wasn't in awe of me; she was showing her compassion by understanding how difficult those times had been for me and an acknowledgement that I had spent the overwhelming majority of my life before her completely alone.

"It's okay," I smiled. I mean, it wasn't; the more I thought about it, and the more I looked at the evidence around us, the more I realized how much of a shit show my life was up until this point. "It's all baggage, and as the old zen saying goes. 'You can either let go or be dragged.'"

"Rhodri told me you'd had a rough life," she said with another sigh.

"He did?" I frowned. I wasn't sure exactly how he could have known that, let alone when he'd had a chance to talk to Emma about it.

"Yeah, when we were in my office, just after you left and before the attack," she nodded. "I was... well, I was still pretty pissed off after our fight, so most of my questions to him kept circling back to you. He told me about the party, how you beat him and Neil, but how much venom you had in you." I cringed. That was not a pleasant side to my history. "He understood that it wasn't about him, though, not really. He said that it seemed like you had spent your whole life waiting for the next knife in your back, that you expected to be betrayed, or let down, or even just attacked. I'm paraphrasing here, obviously, but he said he could tell you'd had a rough time of things just by how you perceived what he and Neil did as an attack. Even though it technically was one, they just saw it as a sport, as a game, and you... I think his exact words were... 'Pete beat the living shit out of us for trying.' He said he'd never seen anything like that sort of power."

I cringed a little harder. "Yeah, that was not a good time for me. I was coming out of a very dark place and..."

"He also said you saved his life." She didn't let me finish, doubtlessly knowing where I was going with the rest of my sentence. "He said that your past, whatever it was that made you the way you were, was the exact thing that caused you to fight back when everyone else just assumed they couldn't. He said it was you, 'going bat-shit crazy on them' that gave everyone else the window they needed to get out. He said that aside from losing Neil, watching you cut through those Praetorians was the only thing he really remembered about the attack and that it was what inspired him to join you. He thought a lot of you."

I paused for a moment, not really knowing what to say. "He was a good man. He was right, about my past, I mean, but I guess you'll see all of that for yourself before long. But I was... I wasn't very understanding when I caught onto their tactics."

She chuckled. "Yeah, he said they were pretty underhanded."

"Maybe, well, actually, yes they were. He was basically cheating. But that doesn't excuse my reaction, though. I hope I made it up to him in the end."

Emma nodded slowly, leaning her head on my shoulder as we looked out over the city. It was an easy sort of silence that settled over us for a few minutes. There wasn't any idle conversation meant to stave off awkward pauses between us; there didn't need to be. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was comfortable just living in the discomfort of my past. Sharing it. Not worrying about judgment, or, worse, pity. Emma wanted to know me, she wanted to know about my life, she wanted to know about my history, the really shit parts included. And although it couldn't be accurately said that she was the first person to do so, she was certainly the first person I felt totally at ease sharing that part of me with. Faye was possibly the only exception to that, but she literally lived in my head for almost the entire time of our relationship; the city before us wasn't just a part of me to Faye, it was her home, and so she had gotten to know me on a fundamental level that nobody ever had before. But our bond had been cut short with the death of her body at the party, and although I could honestly say she was the closest I had ever been to a person, I also knew that our connection had - and could have - never grown past the stage it was at when she died. I had been with Emma, in real world time, for about the same amount of time as I had with Faye at this point, and yet I could already feel that connection growing beyond anything I had ever experienced with my heroic former bondmate.

We both just stood there for a while, looking out at the city before us. From our perch, she could see the statue in my plaza depicting the moment of my victory at the battle of the compound; she could see - in the distance - the shrine to Becky and a newer one dedicated to Faye. There was even a statue to my parents, a sombre reminder of a childhood filled with fear and pain juxtaposed against the apparent heroism of their final moments. But there was also something new. Something that not even I had expected to see. There was a plaza dedicated to Rhodri, for the moment I felt him die and for the unwavering trust and acceptance he had shown in me before that. I smiled at that; I'm not sure why, maybe part of me had decided that as long as I was around to remember him, he would never truly be gone and his heroism and sacrifice during that battle would be remembered through me.

Strangely, there wasn't one for Bob. That felt odd. Like, if there was one for Rhodri, then there should be one for him, too, right? But no, nothing. Bob was... I suppose there was no other way to say it. Bob was my hero. He was a man who had epitomized our alliance more than anyone else, even more so than his wife. He was a man who had seemed to genuinely care about me, and that was before hearing the things he had said to me before he died. In Ukraine, he had been ready to risk his life to rescue me when Marco and the Praetorians had first captured me, consequences be damned. He had been the happiest to see me when I had liberated myself. He had been with me when the attack first came at the castle, and he had thought enough of me to entrust the care of his daughter to me. That was huge! He had died holding back the hordes of Praetorians, fighting to give his family - and me - as much of a chance of escaping alive as it was possible for him to give. He knew, absolutely knew, that it would probably cost him his life to do that, and he hadn't hesitated for a second. There was no other way to say it; he was a hero. He was my hero. He was everything I could ever imagine a father figure to be and everything I would love to imagine myself becoming.

Rhodri, on the other hand, had sacrificed himself, too. He had gone down fighting; he died epitomizing the romance and the glory of a heroic last stand. But I still didn't know a huge amount about him, not about who he really was before the party, or even much about him since. Yet, he had his own memorial in my mind. As deserved as it absolutely was, I couldn't begin to imagine why he had one and Bob didn't. It made absolutely no sense, and although things making no sense was about par for the course when it came to my mind, this was still a glaring omission, even by my own standards.

It was something I would have to ask Jeeves about later. Bob deserved his own shrine, perhaps even more so than anyone else I had lost, and if there were a way to rectify this massive oversight, I would do it without question.

There were other new additions to my city now, as well, things that seemed to have no real purpose other than to highlight my connection to the people around me, and this new symbol sat on the road directly outside my monolithic central tower.

The avenue of heroes.

I knew the name even before I properly grasped what I was looking at, and my eyes focused on a point on the street about half a mile from my tower. The road there widened, and buildings that had once dominated that part of my city had... well, they'd simply been shoved out of the way, for lack of a better term, like my mind valued this new construct more than it valued the placement of my library or my theater.

The road was nothing special. It was the color of asphalt, it was a thousand or so yards long, and it was wide. What was new, however, was the enormous pillars that lined either side of it, and standing on each of them was a perfect statue of someone my mind decided were the most important to me. There was one of Jimmy, one of Becky, one of Philippa, and one of Uri. There was one of Jerry, another of Fiona; Charlotte's visage smiled down at me from another, and my parents scowled from two more. Faye beamed at me with those twinkling, mischievous eyes, Rhodri smiled approvingly from his place opposite, but it was the two closest to the tower that surprised me. Bob and Isabelle, both standing strong against the dangers we had faced together. Then, at the end of the row, directly before the doors of my tower, was another new statue.

It was an exact replica of the one outside Emma's palace. Me holding her as I had during the final moments of the battle in the castle, my palm facing outwards and her eyes looking trustingly up at me; the moment I had embraced my nature and really let loose to protect her. It was the moment we not only became more than two vaguely connected strangers but also started the bonding process. More than that, it was the moment that I first embraced my part as the Mantle.

But there was something more profound than that. I must admit that it took me a few moments to get it, to understand what my mind was telling me through this representation. These weren't just heroes, in fact, some of them could be said to not be anything close. I mean, Jimmy? I loved the guy more than any brother I could ever imagine, but he was hardly the heroic type. No, these were the people who had gotten me to where I was today. My parents, as much as I hated the childhood they had subjected me to, had ensured that the moldable clay of my formative years had turned me into something made of solid steel. Jimmy, the first person to ever have treated me like an equal, like a friend, like a brother, like I mattered. Every other relationship I'd had since leaving home, even Emma, had - in one way or another - been as a result of my powers. His wasn't. His was purely about me. He had been the support and the encouragement I had needed to move from that shy, withdrawn, closed-off young man into someone who had the inner strength to stand on his own two feet and meet the world head-on. No, he hadn't ever given me any of the tools needed to make me stronger, but he had been the one person in my corner, showing me that I already had all the tools I needed to manage on my own.

Charlotte, my friend; Jerry, Fiona, my comrades in arms; Isabelle and Bob, my strongest allies. Uri, my teacher. Faye, my first real love. Becky and Philippa, the women who had accepted me at my weakest and shown me what real affection was for the first time. All of them were the cornerstones of who I was; they were the foundations of my character, and each of them had played a deeply profound part in making me the man I had become.

At the end of the avenue, at the point where my tower rose majestically and eternally out of the street and reached up toward Emma's city above, stood the statue of me, holding Emma, the culmination of all of their efforts. The paragon of strength and justice. The man who could take on the world with a reasonable expectation of winning. The man who could love Emma the way she deserved. The man who could stand beside her when the war was over and she took her rightful place as the leader of our people. The man who would one day be able to enjoy the peace that had cost so much to win. The Man. The Warrior. The lover. The Mantle.

I smiled at it, I smiled at all of it and at what all of it meant, pulling Emma a little closer as we shared that one momentous moment, even if I was the only one of us able to appreciate it for now. These were my people, even the ones who didn't know it.

"It really is beautiful," Emma breathed with an easy sigh, keeping her head on my shoulder. "Do all of these buildings have a purpose?"

I chuckled. "Not all of them; there are too many. But in a normal Evo's city, yeah, more or less all of them do." I stepped behind her, holding her close to me with one hand while pointing out at the city with the other, the angle letting her look down my arm at what I was pointing to. "That's my tower. Normal Evos have a palace, a bit like yours. It's the building that represents my subconscious mind. I suppose you'd say that's where my character lives. It's also where my bunker is."

"Your bunker?"

"Yeah, I don't use it much. For most Evos, it's like an office in our palace. That is how they interact with their subconscious, and it's where they sleep. But I have Jeeves for most of that, so I just use the bed in there these days, and that's about it."

"So why do you call it a bunker?"

"Honestly? I don't really know. It just seemed to... fit, I guess. I remember thinking it was the sort of place a Bond villain would hide."

She Chuckled. "And you sleep in there?"

"Yup. Time moves faster in here, much faster than in the real world. For every minute out there, we experience about forty-five minutes in here. So for one hour's real-world sleep, we'd get almost two days here. Saves a lot of time."

"That's pretty cool. I didn't know that." She smiled up at me, the parts of her mind dedicated to learning glinting a little in her city.

My arm moved. "Those are my powerplants; other Evos have a well. They are the things that determine how much power we have. They have a finite reservoir of it that only replenishes as they sleep, but mine produces energy when I'm awake too."

"How much do they make?"

"I don't know. A lot. I don't think there's any way to measure it, or at least no units of measurement that I'd understand. But when I filled Rhodri with my power in the castle, his entire well could only hold about twenty minutes' worth of their output. I don't know if that was a lot; Uri may know."

"Uri? Whose Uri?"

"Uri is... was... a long story. I think that may be one of those things you'd be better to see for yourself when I show you my memories. I thought he was the enemy, but Marco had corrupted me, manipulated me into blaming him for things that were Marco's doing. Uri was actually one of my strongest allies, but I didn't realize until it was too late. He died in my arms, and when I was performing the last rites on him, I kinda accidentally downloaded him. Actually," I frowned, "he should be around here somewhere."

Emma's eyebrows scrunched up. An expression I immediately found adorable. "I have a lot of questions about what you just said."

I laughed. "Welcome to my world. I had to figure most of this out myself, and I'm fairly sure I have gotten a few things wrong."

She giggled. "I have mental images of you kinda stumbling around in the dark, trying to work out what each thing does."

"To be honest, that isn't far from the truth. Charlotte taught me most of it, and, as much as I hate to admit it, Marco clarified a few things for me when he visited, but yeah, most of it I had to work out on my own. So please don't take anything I say as gospel. I'm probably wrong about most of it."

"It's okay," she grinned up at me. "I think it's cute."

"Cute?" I pretended to scowl at her. "Puppies are cute. There was nothing cute about me running around like a headless chicken trying to get a handle on all of this at the same time as I was fighting off assholes. I mean, look at that," I pointed to the theater. "I had no idea that thing could even exist. Sterling showed me that." I held a hand up before she could ask, "That's something you can see for yourself at another time. But he used it to disguise himself to other Evos, making sure they wouldn't recognize him, and then he murdered about fifty of them, draining their powers to make himself stronger." Emma blinked, her lips parting for a second as if, like everyone else, the idea of an Evo hunting other Evos had never occurred to her. "Now, I have one, and sure, I used it to put the fear of god into Marco, but I can't think of a single honest use for it. But I have one, and I don't know what that means. Is it just something I learned from Sterling? If not, why do I have a building whose only apparent function is to be able to lie to other Evos?"

She nodded slowly, her mind slowly coming to terms with the existence of an Evo serial killer and the fact that she had been woefully uninformed about a lot of things before now. But she quickly moved onto the more pressing matter. "What did you do to Marco?"

"I... I scared him. Like, really scared him. I used the theater to give him a preview of what's coming for him."

"Why didn't you kill him?" She frowned at herself for a moment. "Not that I condone death or anything, at least, I never would have condoned it before, but..." her frown deepened. "But why didn't you end it while you had the chance?"

I cringed; there wasn't a good way to answer that question. "Killing him would be too quick, too easy. He wouldn't suffer enough for the crimes he has committed."

Surprisingly, Emma just nodded. "Do you think that it was you who decided that? Or the Dragon?"

I blinked. Damn, that was a good question. "I honestly don't know. And I don't mean that I don't know the answer; I mean that I don't know where I end and he begins. When it was happening, I just kinda knew it. I made that decision in the moment, and the Dragon just sort of approved of it. I don't know if he sent it to me or if he just agreed with my idea. There's no clear answer, it's all really muddy."

"That seems to be a theme," she grinned up at me.

"Oh, you're enjoying this, aren't you?" I chuckled back at her, trying and failing to put another look of faux-annoyance onto my face.

"Yup, loving every minute of it. It's..."

"Don't say it's cute!"

"It's... endearing," she grinned wider. "Okay, to be serious, it's actually pretty incredible how you've dealt with all of this on your own, and how much you've learned while going through everything you have. I'm... Is it okay to say that I'm proud of you?"

I just looked at her for a second, then smiled. Leaning down from my place behind her and pressed my lips to her forehead as she looked up at me.

"Anyway," I said from behind my smile and a deft change of the subject. "On with the tour." I lifted my arm to point at something new and Emma didn't argue "That's my train station. That's the building that governs the movement of resources around my body. Most Evos have a marketplace."

"Where are the trains?"

It was my turn to frown. "Actually, I don't think there are any. I think it's more symbolic than functional."

"Ah. So there are some physical differences between you and other Evos then, aside from unique things like the Theater." she nodded. I somehow knew that, for the smallest moment, her mind flicked back to that brief lull in the argument we'd had in her office before the attack on the castle, where she had asked me what was different about me compared to other Evos.

"Yeah, I guess there are."

"Are there any others?"

"Well, yes. Sort of." I moved my hand again as I spoke. "In a normal Evo city, their palace, their well, and their marketplace form their city center, but there are lots of other buildings too. The size of those buildings, coupled with how close they are to the city center, determine their strength and how important they are to that person. Mine doesn't seem to work like that. Like my library there..." I pointed, "...is much bigger than any other I've seen with the exception of Marco's. That's my hospital, which governs my ability to heal myself. Then my forge, which turns knowledge into practical skills, my mustering ground - which for some reason is a sports field - determines my physical dexterity, my bank is for my understanding of value and so on. But there doesn't seem to be any sort of order to how close they are to my tower, and all of them are massive. I don't really know what that means, but yeah, that's another difference."

She nodded slowly as she took this information in, her eyes staying on each building for the few seconds it took me to explain each one. "What about these?" she gestured down to the walls. "Are they your mental defenses?"

"That's right."

"And yours are bigger?"

"Yeah, massively so."

"Hmmm," she nodded thoughtfully. "So there's quite a lot different about you then. Who knew about any of this before the party?"

"Only Marco and Charlotte, although a bunch of people saw it during the party itself."

"Did they? Why?"

"I was dueling with Rhodri."

"Yeah, he said something about that, but... what's dueling?"

"It's... you know what, I think this may be easier and make more sense if I just try to share what I know with you directly. This is gonna take ages otherwise."

Emma giggled. "Sorry, lots of questions, I know."

"It's okay, I like it. I'm just not used to trying to explain it. I'm usually the one trying to figure things out."

She giggled again. "This is like the blind leading the blind. So, I'm guessing we're headed to your library?" I nodded with a smile. "How do we get there?"

I grinned at her, straightening up and taking her hand. "You ready?"

"For what?"

With a single thought and that strange whooshing sensation, we raced across the dozens of miles of city and rematerialized in the street outside my enormous library. "Holy crap!" Emma yelped as her head snapped in every direction, trying to get her bearings. "What was that?"

"The best way to travel around my city, really. I just kinda think where I want to go, and poof, I'm there."

"That's... pretty awesome," she snorted, brushing down her windswept hair. "But it's going to take some getting used to." Her eyes moved to the broad glass doors of the library building. "So this is it?"

"Yup."

"What do I do?"

"I ... have absolutely no idea." I looked around. "And Jeeves has conveniently buggered off so no help is coming from him. He does that a lot."

Emma snorted out another laugh. "Wouldn't that be the literal definition of being absent-minded?"

I rolled my eyes but laughed as well. "Now you see what I've had to deal with. I'm guessing we go in."

"Is that okay? I mean, I don't just want to wander around your head without asking."

I chuckled again. "What's mine is yours. Go ahead."

She smiled widely. "Okay," she said, her voice soft and demure, like she was accepting the greatest gift anyone had ever thought to give her. "Thank you." She leaned up and kissed my cheek before turning toward the library doors, taking a deep breath, and stepping inside.

********

I was sitting on the bench outside the library, just feeling her. It was an odd sensation, one that I could only attribute to the fact that we were bonded now, but it was a feeling much stronger and much deeper than anything I had felt with Faye. I couldn't see her, I couldn't hear her, but I could feel everything that she was feeling. I felt the moment she re-lived the duel before the party, the desire to satisfy her curiosity of what had happened based on what Rhodri had told her. I could feel the concern for me building in her at my reaction to what they had tried to pull. Next, it was the horror of the attack on the party. Strangely, there was no jealousy or any bad feeling at all toward Faye as she watched her final moments. She felt my pain and rage through my memory, and she shared my grief for my loss, and my outrage that it had happened at all. The party was a subject that she had wondered about since I had first mentioned it in her office; how the Praetorians didn't even hesitate before barging in and starting to shoot. I think a small part of her had assumed I was exaggerating, or at least embellishing a little, so it was perhaps a little vindicating to feel her shock and horror at the real, unvarnished events that had actually happened. They genuinely were the monsters, and as extreme as my reaction had been, it had been justified. That was another feeling that she'd never expected. She had never, not for a moment, ever felt that there was a good reason for violence- and now she did.

I felt her sadness, the deep, heartbreaking sadness at my memories of my parents' treatment of me, my childhood as a whole, and then, like me, the surprise and curiosity at the resoluteness of their final moments. I could feel her confusion at the things that the judge had said during Becky's memorial service. I could feel the anger in her building at the things Tiberius had said to me during my time at the Russian compound. I could feel the disgust at Marco's corruption. I could feel it all.

It wasn't a linear thing. There was no particular order to the things she was learning. Some things were obvious, like moving from the duel with Rhodri to the attack on the rest of the Party and the loss of Faye. Other things, like moving from Tiberius, to Marco's corruption, to the events at the conclave and the end of the Archon, were a little more thematic. She wasn't following events as much as she was following concepts. Yes, she strayed into the more violent memories a lot more times than I was expecting, but every time I felt her recoil in horror at what she was seeing, I also felt her mind reaching out for mine, just for that little bit of reassurance that I was still there, and I was still me.

It was an odd, yet strangely comforting experience. I wasn't paying much attention to what she was looking at, I was more focused on what she was feeling, and although they ranged from endearment at memories of Jimmy, to the utter revulsion at the discovery of those atrocities in Ukraine and the piles of dead bodies in the snow, I never felt her disgust or horror ever directed at me. I could also feel her starting to understand what it really meant to be me. She had laid into me in her office, saying that I acted like violence could solve any problem; I had retorted that no, it couldn't, but there were some problems that only violence could solve. Given what she was seeing, she was surprised to find that she was starting to agree with me.

But then, something changed. She hit on something that completely caught her attention, so much so that she kept revisiting it over and over again, her shock and her excitement growing more and more with every passing moment. It was something old, something that had happened way back at the start of my journey with my abilities. Something that had happened at a time when, as far as I had ever been concerned, nothing important happened at all, from before all the shit really kicked off and I was dragged into this world. I could feel her mind reeling, spinning around in a loop as her excitement and amazement grew exponentially. In only a few minutes, it was hard to tell if she was even looking at anything new at all, it was more like she was just standing still, letting her mind travel down the logical paths of her thinking, and dissecting whatever it was that had gotten her so wound up.

Sixteen hours after she went in, she practically bounded excitedly back out. The smile on her face was beyond anything I could have imagined, given the reactions she'd had to first being in my city. She had been right; she needed something to occupy her mind, and by the looks of her, she'd found it. She flew out of the library and leapt into my arms, kissing me over and over through the sheer, undiluted joy of whatever it was that she had experienced.

"How'd it go?" I panted as I finally put her down, my own smile instantly matching hers. I had initially gone in with her, but after an hour of watching her wander around the rows of books, picking one up, absorbing the knowledge inside in only a few seconds, and then bouncing excitedly to the next one, I'd gotten bored. Yes, yes, I know how that sounds, but for Emma, she was indulging in her passion for learning with every new find, and although I would like to think that learning was something I also enjoyed, I already knew all of this stuff, they were things I could bring to the forefront of my mind with just a thought, so I had ended up just standing around and watching her stare at one book after another. After about an hour or so, we decided that I should wait outside, giving Emma free rein to look at anything she wanted.

We were bonded, after all; nothing was off limits. She would know everything I did eventually, so there was no point in putting limits on things now. The only stipulation I had given, though, was that the red books were to be read with caution. For some reason, my library had sorted every violent or traumatic memory in my mind into one of those crimson tomes. Pretty much my entire childhood was in them, something that Emma picked up on pretty quickly.

"That was incredible!" she squealed, her excitement more than evident in her voice. "Your mind is amazing!"

"Find anything interesting then?"

"What, you mean aside from literally everything?" She gushed. "Yes, actually! I watched your awakening!"

"O...kay..." there it was, that was what got her so excited. Although I couldn't think of any reason why. "I didn't think that was anything special."

"Well, it was to someone who's never seen it done before. But you missed something really important! Like, ridiculously important!"

"Oh?"

"Yup," she beamed, bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet, like a child needing to spill the juiciest of secrets. "Think back. Do you remember the night at the hospital, when you were still recovering from your accident, just before Marco visited you? You were starting to read thoughts from your friend and from the nurses around you, and that Doctor - Doctor Harris - came to your room in the middle of the night to give you those EEG results?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"She said you had very high Theta wave readings!"

I stared at her blankly. "I feel there is something important about this that I don't know yet."

"Evos don't have Theta waves!" The excitement in her voice made it come out more like a scream than a statement, and her hands were practically shaking me. "We performed EEGs on all of the rogues that we found. We had assumed that all of our kind had them, but none of them had anything like what your results showed!"

I frowned. "I... I don't understand."

"Pete, babe, I know what's so different about you! I know why the Praetorians wanted you, why Marco targeted you. I know why all of this is happening to you! Evos don't have Theta waves; it's a biological impossibility; their brains just don't work that way... but Inquisitors do!

********

There is a moment, which most of us have felt, where something just clicks into place. It could be trying to learn a new subject at school or work or trying to figure out the intricacies of a new relationship, but there is often a moment when everything just suddenly makes sense. A single thought that lands like the missing jigsaw piece that brings the whole concept together into a single, understandable whole. One that you can see, one that you can fully comprehend, and one that you can finally start to work with.

Yeah, this wasn't one of those moments.

Emma was looking at me with the same expression of unbridled excitement as she'd been wearing when she bounded out of the library, her eyes sparkling with the thrill of this new discovery. I, on the other hand, seemed to be able to do nothing more than just blink at her. What she had just said made less than no sense to me, and yet she had said it with the certainty of someone pointing out the existence of gravity.

"I... I think I'm gonna need you to explain that," I said slowly, the tone of my voice making it abundantly clear that I was in no way prepared for this level of revelation today.

Emma, still bouncing on the balls of her feet, beamed a little wider. She was in her element; this was her happy place. Her mind had found a puzzle and was so engrossed in getting to the bottom of it that nothing else was given the time of day. Not her grief, not the danger we were still in, not even the brilliance of her new city. For this moment, all that mattered was the puzzle. Well, that wasn't entirely true, but it was certainly all she was currently thinking about.

"One of your parents, they must have been an Inquisitor!" She gushed, still hopping from one foot to the other and her hands still shaking me.

"No, they weren't," I squinted at her. "Inquisitors, to me, have this aura around them, like they're standing in front of a white light. All Evos see them like that; it's how we identify you. They didn't have one."

"Are you sure?" She frowned. "I know about your relationship with them - although I didn't look at the details - but have you actually seen them since you were awakened?"

"Yeah," I nodded, "I saw them at the hospital, after my awakening. They came in a day or so after that night with Doctor Harris. No auras around either of them."

Emma's frown grew a little deeper; the puzzle was getting more complicated.

"More than that," I went on, gesturing an arm around at the rest of my city, "I'm very clearly not an Inquisitor."

"Oh no, you are definitely an Evo, but there is no other way you can have those Theta waves! I think you're a hybrid!"

"I feel like I'm about to get a headache," I groaned, scratching the back of my head.

Emma giggled but grabbed my arm, led me the few steps back to the bench, and sat me down. "Okay, let me see if I can explain," she started, pausing for a few moments as if trying to think of a way to get over her information in a way that I could understand. Then, taking a deep breath and turning to me, she started. "Okay, a lot of this happened before my time, but I have studied the research notes extensively. The Inquisition has been finding rogues for years, hundreds of years, but since the peace with the Conclave, we have usually just asked them to help with our research and then let them go on their way. At first, it was just normal tests, asking them to try to influence Inquisitors of varying strengths or try to read our thoughts, asking them questions about their minds, and so on. Most of them knew even less than you did; they'd never had anyone to teach them anything, so even the most basic of understandings was beyond them. We didn't learn much more than we already knew."

"But then, as technology progressed, we got access to new tools to test them with. X-rays, MRIs, EEGs, that sort of thing. It was a way to look for any actual physical differences between Evos and Inquisitors. This was how I came up with my theory that we were actually offshoots of the same species because from all of those tests, we could only find a single physical difference between them."

"Our skulls," I nodded.

She blinked at me. "Yeah, exactly. How did you know that?"

I cringed. "I've, um, kinda broken a few Inquisitor skulls over my time. I worked out that I had to if I wanted to get into their minds. That stuff is definitely in the red books. I'd advise staying away from that subject in them."

She nodded thoughtfully, seeming to sidestep the implied violence neatly. "Hmm, I never thought about what would happen if an Inquisitor's skull was damaged. We'll have to circle back to that. Anyway, yes, you're right; the only physical difference between our two branches is our skulls. Now, evolutionarily speaking, most species develop in one of two different ways, either offensively - mainly carnivores - or defensively, like herbivores. Sharp claws, hunting instincts, pack mentality or meat-eating teeth for predators, thick hides, armor, speed and stamina or camouflage for prey, right? I mean, it's a basic description, but it's enough to prove the point. Either something evolves to hunt, or it evolves to survive or escape."

"I'm following so far."

"Humans are different. We never really evolved to have either. We don't have sharp claws or thick hides, we aren't particularly fast or strong, and almost any other creature on earth can outlast us when it comes to bursts of speed. All we had was our intelligence, our minds, and increased stamina. But realistically, that shouldn't have been enough. Sure, we worked in groups, and there is safety in numbers, but you can't really think your way out of a wolf's jaws. Humans developed, evolutionarily speaking, at a truly colossal rate, much faster than anything nature should have allowed. I mean, even something as simple as the use of tools is remarkable, but the intelligence to look at a rock and a stick and say, "That could be a spear, and I could use it to stab that wolf," is a level of thinking that literally came out of nowhere. There are other factors to my thinking, obviously, but broadly speaking, that is where my theory came from."

"Which one?"

"That Evos and Inquisitors, our people, developed first—specifically Evos. Maybe not as we know them now, but a more primitive version of them used their powers to grant themselves knowledge, and that knowledge allowed humanity to survive and thrive. Then, over time, the Inquisitors developed an ability to resist Evo influence. Maybe those who didn't have the power to stand against stronger Evos instead developed - or even gifted themselves - physical defenses against them. Over time, then, as human civilization developed, and the threats of the rest of the natural world became less pronounced, the acquisition of powers became less and less important for survival, Evos got weaker and weaker until they had no powers at all, that is where the rest of humanity came from."

I frowned. "So if Evos kept getting weaker until they turned into humans, why are there still Evos now? I mean, I get the Inquisitors. It's a physical trait, like our appendix, so that would be passed down, and without any powers, they probably would never have known any different, but what about Evos? Why do they keep popping up?"

"The gene." Emma smiled. "The gene that activates your powers is triggered by en-utero illnesses, and the development of Evo powers is our most primal defense against those illnesses. There are probably hundreds of different genes in the average person that have been passed down for hundreds of thousands of years but are dormant, no longer needed. I bet in a few more hundred thousand years, we won't even have an appendix, for example. This one is just activated by outside forces, which can still happen."

"O...kay..." I squinted. I was still following her logic, but it wasn't explaining what was going on with me. "So, skulls?"

"Right," she smiled, nodding enthusiastically. "Our skulls are the only physically identifiable distinction between Evos and Inquisitors. Inquisitor skulls are..."

"Thicker?" I offered when she paused to think.

"No, not thicker, they're denser, but more than that, they emit a bio-electrical current. There is a lattice of minerals in the bone of our skulls. It's a bit like how electrical wires project an electromagnetic field, but the ones in our skulls only seem to serve to project certain types of brainwaves. Not very far, and not very strong, not even enough to be measurable beyond our own skin, but we've always thought it's as powerful as it needs to be to block Evo minds."

"Theta waves," I nodded, finally getting where she was going with this.

"Exactly. Well, there are other things the lattice projects, but Theta waves are the most relevant here. That is why it's a biological impossibility for you to have them," she beamed excitedly. "The only way you can have them is to have that mesh of minerals in your skull, and only Inquisitors have that. Or at least that was the theory"

I frowned again, letting the thoughts percolate for a moment. "But if those Theta waves block evo thoughts, how do mine let my other thoughts through, and how are other people able to get to me? I mean, this can't be a matter of choice, there have been a few times when other Evos have attacked me - Sterling, the Evos at the compound, a few even tried in the castle - so mine obviously don't block them, so... I don't know, how can your theory be right if the thing that stops Evo thoughts in Inquisitors, doesn't stop them in me."

Emma's grin, as wide and beaming as it had been before, seemed to grow to the point that it looked like it would split her face open. "As you said in the office, we need to keep an open mind. The simple answer is, we were wrong."

I blinked at her again.

"You're right. If you have Theta waves and are still able to project your powers, and those waves haven't ever stopped anyone from visiting or attacking your city, then they obviously can't be what stops Evos from being able to use their powers against Inquisitors, it must be one of the other forms of energy our skulls produce that stops them."

"Well, the Praetorians must have figured it out, because whatever form of energy that does block Evo powers, they've worked out a way to turn it into a weapon, and it damned near worked on us in the bailey."

Emma nodded. "Yeah, but they've had access to Evos in a way we never have. I would love to see their research."

"Jeeves may be able to help you with that. He downloaded everything."

Her eyes widened to the point that they almost dropped out of her head. "Wait, What? Really?"

"Really."

"Oh my god, this is amazing!!"

"I'm sure he will be able to show you everything he's found once we get to somewhere a bit safer. But anyway, what do you think the Theta waves mean, then?"

"I'm not sure, but I'm starting to think that it's a way to unlock our cities. You didn't need them. Obviously, you were already able to do that. But for the rest of us, I'm wondering if Theta waves are a way for us to let certain Evos connect to us."

I blinked again; I was doing that a lot.

She chuckled at the look of confusion on my face. "Yes, I know, it's a bit of a leap. And I may be wrong, but until today, it had never occurred to me that an Inquisitor could have a city." She waved her hand toward her city in the sky. "But now that I know we can, the question has to change to - as Jeeves said - why have they never been unlocked before? If he's right, and they do need a bit of help from someone else, how could that happen if we are completely, biologically closed off to other people? There has to be a way in, and the only explanation that could be is that it's a conscious choice. I chose to let you in. I think that could be where the Theta waves come in. You having Inquisitor genes also explains why you weren't awakened until you were an adult."

"It does?" Another blink.

"There must be something different about your skull too, something that has never been detected because nobody was ever looking for it, but I think that the accident..." she paused. "Well, I guess there's no way to say this delicately; it did quite a lot of damage to your skull, and that let your powers out. They were locked in like any other Inquisitor before that."

I stayed quiet for a moment. I suppose it was a good point. I had spent the vast majority of my time in the hospital thinking and talking about the most obvious and apparent damage to my body: my legs. There had only been a few mentions of my skull, specifically the fragments of it that had been jammed into my brain, and once those had healed... or vanished, or whatever... I'd never really given much more thought to it. I had been infinitely more interested in my ability to walk again. Could that damage have been the thing that finally let my powers out? It sort of added up. Marco didn't detect me until after the accident; nobody had, and I'd never had access to my powers until he had first awakened me. But there were still questions.

"Where did my powers come from then? Have I always had them, or was it from the whole MRI surge thing?"

"I don't know," she shrugged. "I mean, before the attack, I was going to ask if we could run the same tests on you as we did on all the rogues, but obviously our conversation never got that far, and then we were attacked, but if I can get you into an MRI and X-Ray one day, I may be able to give you an answer. Until then, we'd just be guessing. It could have been the MRI, they could have been there all along, or it could be a combination of all of it. We just don't have the information to work it out yet."

I nodded; at least I wasn't the only one not working with all the facts in place. "So how does this all tie back to my parents? I was under the impression that the genes that give Evos their powers could be present in a huge number of people but are only activated by certain illnesses. And that gene could have come from either of them, or even from grandparents, or great grandparents, or whatever. But how could I have Inquisitor traits too? I don't think I even know how those are passed down."

It was Emma's turn to wince. "It's passed down through direct breeding." I held her eyes; that sounded like a very diplomatic way of telling me something important. I just had no idea what it was. "Inquisitor genes can only... only... be passed down from a parent."

"But neither of my parents were Inquisitors."

"Pete, babe, one of them had to be. It's literally the only way. Which means..."

I nodded with a sigh. "That at least one of them wasn't my real parent."