I had no idea what was going on anymore.

  The AAG goons conducted something shockingly close to an arrest, or worse, an immigration control raid. It was all very hectic, especially because it seemed like no one involved was entirely sure what was going on. It was all a total mess, because no one seemed to have the full picture.

  I didn't know what was going on, obviously—hell, I didn't even know what day it was or where I'd ended up. David and Katherine were equally alarmed and confused by the sudden AAG appearance, and the hospital staff clashed with them briefly. Even the AAG fuckers didn't seem to know why they were capturing a naked woman at a hospital, but by God were they going to do it. I had my own suspicion, of course—I'm a sneaky little Anathema, hehehe—but how did they find out? What were the circumstances here?

  I had no idea. The one thing that gave me hope was that I wasn't being violently hunted down—yet. They were very rush-rush, yes, but they at least let me get situated in something that could maybe pass for an outfit, had you stood twenty feet away and squinted your eyes. Ironically, I somehow ended up being the calmest and least frantic person during the whole process. I mostly just stood around awkwardly, and then I was being escorted out and away.

  Ten minutes after that, I was sitting outside the big, glass-walled office of some local AAG bigshot while he chewed out the very same group of goons that brought me there. I was still in the middle of LA—I knew that because I recognized where we were. It was the same office where I did my testing.

  The glass was supposed to muffle any conversation taking place inside, but that didn't stop me from listening in. The full-time officers who'd done the raid or whatever had been told to go grab me and see if I was infected with an Anathema seed. Pretty sure that ship has already sailed, guys. Regardless, I did not want to go through any kind of fancy Anathema detector. In the worst case, I would have tried booking it and potentially killing a bunch of people. What was the worst that could happen? They'd kill me?

  That was already what would happen if I got outed, so it was either lose or probably lose, but maybe survive for a bit longer. Obvious choice, there. Fortunately, I had the good sense to wait a bit longer and see how things were actually going to play out. As for how things played out? The local head honcho intercepted us, wanted to know just what the devil they were doing with me, and now I was sitting outside of his office, eavesdropping on him as he chewed the subordinates out.

  "So someone told you to check if she was seeded, huh? Did you check to see if she might already be a Guardian?" He waved a stereotypical paper folder around at the cowering goons. "Did you think to check who gave those orders? Or hell, I don't know, if that was even legal?"

  Someone coughed. "Uh, no sir, we uh, we didn't."

  "No fucking shit you didn't. Tell me, have any of you ever heard of an awakened Guardian being seeded? No? You haven't? Of course you haven't, because it doesn't fucking happen." I was a little surprised at this point by just how pissed off the branch director or whatever was. Like, they fucked up big time I guess, but why is he acting like they killed his grandmother? "Do you want a lawsuit? You don't want a lawsuit? Well boo-hoo, too bad, because this is how you get a God damned lawsuit."

  Oh, so that's what it is. I wanted to kick my feet and giggle. There's truly nothing that can match the power of legal liability when it comes to getting your boss all twisted up. I also decided then and there not to push the issue. Even if I had a case—I didn't actually know—why would I risk extra scrutiny and actively piss off the AAG? I wanted them to be nice and mostly just ignore me. Not pressing an issue like this felt like a great way to keep things low key and buy local goodwill.

  The big boss man was starting to cool down a little, but he still had some more bullshit to work out. I did my best to keep listening. I doubted it was a mere coincidence that someone sicced a squad of AAG full-timers on me. "You don't even know where the order came from?" There was a pause, or maybe someone was just speaking too quietly for me to hear through the glass. "Christ. Okay, let me see that." There was the sound of a chair scraping, and then more silence—I guess he's reading through something?

  "Well that's not sketchier than a Central Park artist." What? I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. "Any of you ever been to Central Park? New York? No? Forget it." He mumbled something indistinct, and it was a few seconds before I could understand again. "—and I've never seen anything look this legit and suspicious at the same time. You know what? Now isn't the worst time for an audit, but we need to—"

  The muffled speech lost intelligibility again, and I was left mostly to my own thoughts. So, if "someone" tried to get me forcibly tested with what looks like a legitimate—I don't know, some kind of AAG internal communication—but it's not something they were supposed to do... There was one obvious and highly probable explanation. One of those "bigger fish" Dad warned me about must have tried to get me eliminated through this AAG seed testing bullshit. That's definitely not super concerning.

  Finally, after a few more minutes of sitting around in a hospital gown and watching people go in and out of the office in a hurry, the big boss himself came out to talk to me.

  There was some kind of sadistic amusement in watching a Tier 5 Guardian with significant institutional power scrape, grovel, and make all kinds of carefully spoken, tactically crafted apologies and assurances. His tier had been easy to discern even with a wall in the way—such a concentration of esoteric power was hard to miss. The others were 'just' Tier 3, which was something I could potentially deal with. Upper Tier 5, though? That wasn't something I wanted to tangle with. The best I could hope for with my current strength was 'get away, somehow.'

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about that, mostly because this particular Tier 5 was now more afraid of me than I was of him. Wisely, I mostly just kept my mouth shut and didn't let on that I was already planning to let bygones be bygones. No reason to make him think he's in the clear.

  David and Katherine were also there—they'd arrived not long after me, it turned out, but they hadn't been allowed near me until Mr. Bossman came out and started walking me towards the main lobby. David was on the phone with someone—no idea who, but I would bet it was a lawyer or something. "Hey guys," I said, giving them the lamest possible greeting. Girl, you need to do better than that. "Seems like it was just a little bureaucratic slip-up or something, nothing to worry about."

  "Bureaucratic—nothing to—" David rubbed his face. He looked stressed. Gee, I wonder why? "Okay, great, that's uh, great." He was still on call, it seemed, and he quickly asked whoever it was on the other end some questions. Yeah, definitely a lawyer type. I had a feeling that I was about to be stuck sitting around while the bigshots dealt with more boring nonsense. At least I had Katherine there, and she started hugging me as soon as she got the chance.

  I kind of hated that—no, not kind of. I viscerally and comprehensively hated her doing that, but I tolerated it for a few seconds before trying to extract myself. God, so fucking clingy. That wasn't even the usual metaphor. She was emotionally clingy in general, but right now, she was literally clingy. Stop fucking touching me!

  She suddenly jerked and hastily let me go—fucking finally—but I was a bit weirded out by the sudden shift. It was almost like I'd gone and slapped her. It was hard to read her expression—actually, it seemed like she was doing her best to hide it and stay flatly neutral. I really hoped she wasn't using her stupid power to read my emotions or some kind of similarly creepy and invasive shit. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that she was reacting to my intense desire to be rid of her.

  That was super obnoxious—hard to understate how much, actually. It made me instinctively angry, even, in much the same way that getting 'called out' by someone who successfully guessed at my real opinion or motive would invariably trigger extremely violent and aggressive thoughts. Shit like that, while infrequent, was even worse than the icky physical contact. It was perhaps the worst, deepest, and most offensive kind of personal violation—at least in my own, admittedly abnormal experience.

  If she made a habit of doing that—well, I figured there was roughly an equal chance that I'd either ghost her or just outright fucking kill her.

  Katherine Legato

  Katherine did her best to appear normal and happy for the rest of the day. The day before had been stressful—recovering from the aftermath of the incursion in her own neighborhood was bad enough—but on top of that, Alex had remained unconscious all the way until the morning after that. Then, right when she finally woke up—at the same time she and Alex's dad arrived at the hospital, funnily enough—there was that whole insane incident with the AAG.

  Neither she, nor Alex's dad, nor anyone else really knew what was happening. When Alex finally joined them again—and it became clear that there was some kind of mistake—she just wanted to hug her friend. Somehow, that ended up being the worst part.

  At first, Katherine was too wrapped up in her own emotions to register the changes happening in the other girl's spirit. Soon enough, though, the growing wail of an eerie misharmony cut through her awareness.

  Katherine's power didn't seem to give her any real ability to read minds—something which she was grateful for, truth be told—and it wasn't quite accurate to even call the feedback it gave her about other people as 'reading emotions.' The closest word for it, Katherine had already decided, was something like 'intent,' in a vague, imprecise kind of way. Maybe even 'attitude.' What she picked up on was the moment to moment will of other beings. That was the real truth of it, she felt, but it wasn't the best way to try explaining it to someone else.

  Regardless, the sensory impressions from her power largely still took the form of sound—or at the very least, that was the closest ordinary sense to it. The sound of someone's spirit was usually the most vivid and interesting part, and as she continued to hug Alex, the other girl's spirit ratcheted into a steadily growing, unsettling—misharmony.

  'Misharmony,' not disharmony, was a word Katherine had privately coined to better conceptualize a recurring pattern in the sound of Alex's spirit. There were many kinds of 'sounds' echoing through the world—harmonies, dissonances, simple noise, and many others. The 'misharmony,' as she'd taken to calling it, was something in between harmony and dissonance, something that she couldn't properly classify as one or the other yet was simultaneously more inspiring and hideous than both.

  It was harmony twisted. Like two musicians playing in tune but in different, almost identical keys, or a drum beat that was in the same tempo, but shifted slightly out of sync with the rest of the band. Katherine remembered a moment way back in her middle school years, when she was part of her church's youth chapel band. Their bassist was still a beginner, much like she was a beginner on the piano, and in one earlier performance, he seemed to have gotten mixed up while reading the staff. For the first half of the song, all of the notes he played were the third of the chord instead of the root. It was in the same key—the right harmony, even—but the effect was that it still sounded wrong, somehow. Not in any obvious or sour way, just strange and oddly disconcerting.

  That 'misharmony' was something Katherine heard a lot from Alex's spirit. It wasn't unique to the other Star Guardian—there were other times where Katherine had picked up on something similar—but out of all the times she'd heard it so far, the overwhelming majority came from Alex. It wasn't even an unusual sound for her, yet Katherine still hadn't grown used to it. When they hugged in the AAG office, though, the usual misharmony hit a new crescendo. It was overwhelming—terrifying and beautiful, sending frighteningly delicious icy tingles along her scalp at the same time that it twisted a knot deep inside her stomach.

  But that wasn't what drove a knife through Katherine's heart and took the breath out of her throat. No—it was the imagery that haunting music conjured, the imagery of will and intent and yes, even emotion. Disgust. Anger. Resentment. Even the resigned tolerance had a patronizing strain to it, the same feeling that accompanied someone loudly clapping for a horrible open-mic performance.

  Katherine tried not to be hurt. She couldn't help it, though, and later that night, sitting on the edge of Alex's bead while her friend showered, she wondered what was wrong with her. What must be wrong with me to make her feel that way towards me? It was—distressing. Alex is so... strong, and clever, and thoughtful.

  Katherine knew there was nothing great about her—but could I really be that awful?

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