The words fell out of me before I could stop them, and the room went so quiet I could hear the city breathing forty stories down.
"When I was three." I stared at some point past all of them, at the windows, at the reflection of a boy with white hair and mismatched eyes who'd apparently been grown like a crop. "She tried to take me out of his program before it finished. So he killed her. Said it the way you'd say you canceled a subscription. Like she was an obstacle to my potential."
Nobody spoke.
Then Mera's hand found my jaw, turned my face down toward hers, forced me to look at her instead of my own ghost in the glass.
"Rome."
"I don't even remember her." The laugh that came out of me was ugly. "That's the part that gets me. He took her from me twice. Killed her and erased her. I've got nothing. No face, no voice, no memory. Just his word that she loved me enough to die trying."
