"I carry pepper spray," Lea said in an even voice as she threw a bag of trash into the dumpster behind Noonan's. Her breath floated up in the cold air as she spoke, drifting up to the dim stars overhead. Selah took a deep breath and she stepped into the light that shone from above the doorway, out of the shadows in the alleyway. The woman's face shifted as she pulled the dumpster shut and she began heading back inside.

"Hi," the girl said.

"Look kid, I am tired and I do not have time for your nonsense right now."

"I know that you're Andromedan," Selah called after her desperately, as she opened the door to leave. The woman froze, her back instantly stiffening. "Please, can we talk?"

"I do not know who you are or what you want with me," she spat. "But I can promise you this, you do not want to cross me."

"Please," she repeated. Lea slowly turned around, letting the door behind her swing shut. She stood firmly, crossing her arms over her chest as she sized up the girl. "I need your help."

"Why am I not able to hear you?" she asked after a few beats.

"I'm an Empath," she replied. Lea's impossibly straight back somehow got even straighter as she tightened her crossed arms more.

"Who are you?" The girl hesitated, trying to decide how to reply.

"It's a long story."

"Well then you will have to give me the short version."

"I'm from another Earth?" She rolled her eyes and began turning to leave. "Wait, please." Selah stretched out her hand, her eyes wide. Lea stonily stared at the girl, chewing her lip before exhaling heavily and touching her fingertips to Selah's. The girl closed her eyes, focusing on her powers.

A memory began to project itself into the dim light of the alley. It was hazy at first, but it steadily grew in strength. A younger Selah was sitting on a park bench next to Lea. She was blowing bubbles and laughing as the girl danced around, frantically trying to pop them all. She pulled the little girl into a hug, her smile wide as the memory faded and shifted. Then the two of them were wearing matching scarves, walking along the waterside and talking animatedly. Then they were sitting together in Lea's old apartment, reading side by side on a threadbare couch.

"What are these?" Lea asked quietly, her face illuminated in the soft glow of the scene in front of her. She let her hand fall away from Selah's, and the memories flickered away.

"On my Earth, my mother- your sister- gave birth to me a year after you landed. You raised me with her."

"How did you get here?"

"That's... also a long story." Lea turned and opened the back door to Noonan's again, but this time instead of leaving, she held it open for Selah.

"We will talk inside," she said evenly. The girl followed her aunt into the coffeeshop, where she was led into a small break room. The woman closed the door behind them and looked at her, still wary. "If you want my help, you will tell me everything."

Selah took a deep breath, not really knowing where to start, but diving into it anyways. Lea listened attentively, her grey eyes fixed firmly on her niece as she spoke, detailing how exactly she had found herself on this Earth, and what she needed Lea's help with.

"It will not work," the woman said finally, as she ended her speech. "I am not able to help you power the machine."

"What? Why?"

"For the same reason I cannot hear your thoughts. Empaths process on a different frequency than regular Andromedans. If this machine is set to be on your frequency, I will not be able to connect to it." The girl deflated a little bit, flopping back in her chair. "However-" she began.

"No," she replied firmly, standing up. "Absolutely not."

"She might be your only option."

"Then I am going to find another way." Shoving her hands into her jacket pockets, Selah turned to the door. "Thank you for your help, Aunt Lea." The woman merely nodded, watching as she left.

.

"That cannot be the answer," Selah insisted as she paced around the perimeter of Linda's guest room.

"Maybe we can find something else that will work," Kara replied, but the girl wasn't really listening.

"My mother is the reason that we are here in the first place. And now I'm supposed to ask for her help to get us back home?" She shook her head angrily. "No."

"Hey," the hero said. Selah finally stopped pacing and dropped onto her bed, her hands burying themselves in the blankets. "We don't have to go through her. You and Winn can keep working on the prototype, and I'm sure that you'll figure something out eventually."

"But what if she's our only shot?" the girl asked, staring firmly at the mauve carpet.

"Then we'll figure something out." Groaning, she threw herself backwards onto the bed, rubbing at her eyes angrily.

"I hate science. I hate stupid science problems that I don't know how to solve."

"Aren't you a physics major?" Kara asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I hate it," the girl insisted. "I'm going to switch into-" she paused, clearly thinking of a different degree. "Theater."

"Alright."

"I know how it's going to go if we talk to her." Selah sprung back up off of the bed and resumed her pacing. "She's going to say some crap about how I'm a disappointment and then she'll sabotage the entire project. Trusting her would be too much of a risk."

"Selah, is it possible that you're projecting a little bit?"

"No," the girl replied lowly.

"What your mother did to you was inexcusable, I'm not trying to say that any of it was okay. But this woman is not your mother, technically speaking. Just like how this Lea isn't your aunt, and I'm not Linda."

"Yeah, but she's a literal doppelganger of my mother. On some level they are the same person. I bet that deep down you secretly love mauve, just like Linda."

"How dare you," Kara said lightly.

"I can't trust her, Kara. I won't trust her."

"Okay." Crossing back to her bed, Selah pulled open a notebook and began scribbling furiously, trying desperately to find another solution. As she wrote, her mind whirred, working through her calculations, thinking about her mother, absently scanning for any sign of Beta, and telepathically stabilizing the pen in her thumbless hand. After about twenty minutes, she hadn't made any progress. Instead, she discovered that one of her previous equations was wrong, and therefore all of her numbers after the mistake needed to be adjusted. Ripping out a page and crumpling it in frustration, she tossed it across the room and groaned.

"What would she have to do?" Kara asked. "Would she just be in the same room as the machine, and then she can help power it?"

"I would have to psychically connect myself to her," Selah replied. "I'd need to let her into my mind, to see whatever she wants to see, and then we have to join our thoughts and emotions.

"You don't have to do it. We can find another way," she repeated, but the girl began staring at the wall again, chewing on her lip.

"I'm going to go talk to Lea," she said curtly, standing up. "I guess that I'll see if she knows where my not-mother is."

"I'll come with," the hero said quietly, grabbing their coats.

.

Kara crossed her arms as she sized up Lyla warily. She and Linda were stationed in the professor's office with her, as Selah and Winn put the finishing touches on the machine. Linda was grading papers, but Kara felt that she couldn't take her eyes off of Selah's not-mother, preparing herself for anything that the woman might do. She had never met Lyla on their Earth, and while she knew that the small red-haired woman sitting opposite her was not the same woman, she couldn't resist the urge to hate her for what her Earth-38 counterpart had done.

"I know that you don't trust me," she said suddenly. "And from what I understand of how you got here, I can't say that I blame you. But could you please think it a little more quietly? You're starting to give me a headache."

"Sorry," she said shortly. She shifted her position in the hard chair and began looking out the window- although she made sure that she could still see the woman out of the corner of her eye.

From what Selah had said, there still was a fair amount of work that needed to be done on the prototype, but she couldn't help feeling excited about the prospect of going back home, even if it was a bit premature. It was now well into December, and she had mentally made a promise to Alex- wherever she was- that she would be home in time for Christmas. The idea of being home in Midvale with Eliza and her sister as they opening presents and watched stupid holiday movies still seemed to be light years away, but each new development brought them a step closer. She missed being home so much that it was like an ache that sat inside of her, deep within her ribcage. And now, it was almost here. It was so close that she could practically feel it. She wanted so badly to run over to Winn's office to check on their progress, or to see if there was anything that she could do to help, but she didn't trust Lyla enough to let the woman out of her sight.

Almost as if she had heard Kara's plea for any kind of an update, Selah appeared in the doorway, oil smudged across her cheek.

"Is it done?" she demanded, jumping out of her chair.

"Not yet," she answered. "I started a small fire-" at this Linda's head popped up from her marking, and the girl clarified. "It was just a very small one, I swear. But Winn said that I had to take a break, and he told me to find you guys."

"How close?"

"Twenty minutes to a half hour." The hero's stomach dropped in anticipation. The girl glanced at her not-mother quickly before turning her gaze back on Kara. "Can I talk to you for a second?" She asked. Kara followed her out of the room and into the hallway, where she rocked on her heels for a few moments, deciding what to say.

"You okay?" she asked finally, after a few moments of silence.

"Yeah," Selah said quickly. "Um. I need her help now. Lyla's. Will you come with me?" The hero nodded silently, and they walked side by side back to Linda's office.

"How is it going?" the professor asked as they entered, piling up her stack of ungraded essays.

"Fine," the girl answered. "Um, good." Her hands twisted around an oil rag as she approached her not-mother. "Um," she began.

"I'll come," she said quietly, looking up at Selah, but the girl wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Please don't listen so closely," she muttered. Lyla nodded and stood, following the others across campus to Winn's office. It was a quiet walk, and the tension was palpable in the air. Once they reached the office, Kara held the door open for Selah and her not-mother, and then she went with Linda to go stand somewhere out of the way.

"Progress?" Selah demanded.

"Um, well." Winn began. "I put your fire out, to start. All of the rewiring is done, and now I just need to finalize the coding."

"I'll help."

Lyla didn't seem to know what to do with herself as the two started typing frantically. She glanced at Kara and Linda to see the hero staring evenly back at her, and she looked away, focusing her gaze onto her hands. Kara was reminded of Selah as the woman began fidgeting with her shirt hem awkwardly.

"Okay," Winn said finally, straightening up from the keyboard. "It should be done." The girl nodded, chewing on her lip and not making eye contact with anyone.

"Can you show her where to stand?" she said to the professor, nodding to her not-mother. Winn and Lyla approached the machine together, and the girl turned to Kara. Her hands were shaking and her chest heaved in short bursts..

"Breathe," Kara reminded, putting her hands on her shaking shoulders.

"I don't know if I can do this."

"Selah, look at me." Her scared grey eyes met Kara's, and the hero was surprised to see tears gathering in them. "We are so close to everything that we have been working so hard for. We're almost home. You have been so strong for this whole time, now you just need to be strong for a little while longer, and then we'll be safe." She pulled the girl's stiff body into a hug. "I'll be here with you the whole time, I promise."

"Okay," she whispered. Letting her go, Kara followed her as she walked over to the machine, where Winn and Lyla were waiting.

"We're ready?" he asked, tapping a few buttons on his tablet. She nodded mutely. "Okay, great. Then I am going to hit this button and the machine will either start or explode, killing me instantly." He glanced over at Kara grinning, but no one else seemed to find his joke funny. "Jeez, tough room. Okay," he pressed the button and shut his eyes, but no explosion came.

"Is it working?" she asked.

"Yes, for now. The machine was able to power up before, but once we got to around twenty percent capacity we ran out of energy. So..." he trailed off, looking at Selah and her mother expectantly. The girl took a deep breath, cracking her knuckles as she steeled herself. She shut her eyes and reached a hand out to Lyla. The woman slowly took it, and Selah's vision went white as the psychic connection began.

The sounds and sensations of Winn's office melted away, and she became engulfed in a white blanket of nothingness, until-

"I am sorry for the things that she did," Lyla's voice echoed in her ears.

"You're not her," Selah replied evenly, her eyes still tightly shut.

"And yet I carry her face. This must be difficult for you."

"Yeah, that's the understatement of the century," she muttered. A wave of energy washed over her and she shivered. "How long is this going to take?"

"Not long." Lyla fell silent, and Selah only heard the hum of their psychic connection. It was a gentle pulsating sound that filled her ears. Slowly opening one eye, she looked around suspiciously. She was standing in a boundless void of only white, and her not-mother was only a few feet away from her, in the same position that she had been in when they were still in the office.

"How long is not long?" she asked, warily opening the other eye.

"I see that you were not gifted with my patience," Lyla quipped, raising an eyebrow. The girl offered no reaction. "That was a joke."

"I'm not really in the mood, thanks."

"I apologize."

An image rose up in front of them, projected into the air like the memories that Selah had shown to her aunt in the alleyway a few nights prior. It was of Kara and Selah walking side by side through the city, drinking lattes.

"What is this?" she demanded, taking a step back. "Are you doing this?"

"As our bond grows in strength, your memories will begin to rise to the surface. This is normal."

"Okay well, I hate it."

"I see that you and Kara are close?" Lyla asked, looking at their faces as they flickered in front of her.

"She's my father's cousin. Some of the only family I have left." The memory faded, but another one took its place, this time of Selah studying a textbook at the kitchen table of her apartment while Nia sat across from her, writing an article.

"Who is this?"

"She's my roommate. Are all of the questions really necessary?"

"If we are to connect, you must fully let me in. You are still holding back."

"Gee, I wonder why."

"The more that you block me out, the longer this is going to take, Selah."

"Please don't say my name." Lyla was quiet, and the apartment slowly disappeared. The next memory took longer to appear, and it flickered more erratically.

"What is this?" she asked, her face confused as she looked at the scene. There wasn't much to see, just two dark walls and a door with a sliver of light that shone in from under it. "Are we inside of a closet?"

"Yeah." Selah replied. "We are. This is where Aunt Lea used to make me hide whenever you came home drunk." The door was ripped open, and a blinding light poured in. A tall figure was silhouetted against it, its hands reaching and grabbing sharply. "It didn't ever help very much. It's hard to hide from a telepath, I guess." The woman winced as this memory vanished.

"I'm sorry," she said again, looking at her not-daughter.

"It wasn't you." Selah said, shrugging flatly.

"I'm still sorry." The girl waited for the next memory to rise up, mentally steeling herself for it, but none came.

"What's happening," she asked, looking over at her not-mother through the corner of her eyes. "Why did it stop?"

'You are blocking me again. We cannot progress until you let me in."

"What, do you want me to tell you about all of the times that you hit me? How I couldn't tell anyone, and even if I tried to, there were no bruises left, so I had no proof? How you reminded me time and time again that I ruined your life, and that I was the reason-" Selah cut herself off, taking back the steps that she hadn't even realized she took towards the woman.

"I know that this is hard." Lyla said quietly.

"Do you know the worst part? It wasn't always bad," Selah admitted quietly. She looked up as a projection of her childhood apartment materialized in front of her. "I think that it would have been easier for me if I could just hate you all of the time, but you were really nice to me sometimes. You came to visit me after I moved in with Aunt Lea." She and her mother were sitting side by side on a sofa, watching a movie together. "You would take me out for ice cream every now and then, or we'd go to the beach. But the tiniest thing that I said could set you off, and then you'd blow up at me and disappear for months." The scene shifted, and Selah was alone on the couch, the television turned off. "I never knew which version of you I was going to get. I never knew what wrong thing I was doing to deserve the bad versions."

"My sister, she was good to you?" Selah nodded slowly, still looking up at the image of her younger self.

"She worked a lot, to pay the bills and keep the lights on. She bounced around through a lot of different jobs, but none of them paid very well, and she had both of us to worry about. I was alone a lot, but I never doubted that she loved me."

"And yet, she let me do all of those awful things to you. She never stepped in to protect you."

"It's not like she didn't try," the girl said weakly, trying to defend her aunt.

"She let me take you away from her, knowing the things I was going to put you through."

"She did what she could," Selah insisted, angrily rubbing at the tears that pricked at her eyes.

"But was it enough?" Lyla pressed gently.

"No," she admitted.

The apartment scene dimmed, and then suddenly they were underwater. The room became ice cold. Bubbles floated up around them, rising desperately to the surface above, and hazy figures flashed above the water, but none could be seen clearly.

"What is this?" The girl didn't reply, shutting her eyes. The image disappeared. "Selah?"

"We were at the beach," she said in a halting voice as the memory re-formed in front of them. "It was wintertime, so we mostly just walked along the shore, but then I asked you where you had gone to when you left me with Lea. You didn't like that very much."

"I did this to you?" She nodded.

"You threw me backwards into the ocean, and then you drained my powers so that I couldn't breathe underwater." Lyla's distant voice echoed around them,

'I'm your mother,' Dream-Lyla screamed. 'Don't you forget that.' The air in the room seemed to grow sharper as the anxiety from Selah's memory swelled. She could feel the weight of her winter coat and scarf around her again. Both were swollen and waterlogged and they began dragging her down to the depths beneath her. The girl blinked, pushing back the memory.

"Two weeks later, you sold me to The Agenda," she said.

Not-Lyla's face was pale.

"I," she began. "I don't know what to say."

"Let me guess, you're sorry?" Selah spat. She slid to the floor and sat with her arms on her knees.

"I am. I know that it doesn't help much."

"You don't get it," she said lowly as the beach scene faded, along with Dream-Lyla's voice. The room was still for a long time, with no new memories rising.

"You're blocking me," Lyla reminded, slowly walking over to where the girl sat.

"That's what makes this so hard. That you're sorry. That you're normal."

"I don't understand," the woman said.

"My mother told me countless times that I ruined her life. She always said that I was the reason she was the way that she was, that I made her that way. And look at you. You're proof of that." Selah wiped at her eyes again, her hands shaking. "On this earth, I was never born. And you're sorry. You're not a monster, you're perfectly fine." Lyla sat down next to the girl, who finally looked her directly in the eyes. "Am I the reason that she's not?"

She opened her arms, and Selah fell into them, gripping the back of her not-mother's shirt as the void melted away around them.

When she opened her eyes again, she was no longer hugging Lyla, instead she was standing back in Winn's office, her not-mother a few feet away.

"Did it work?" Kara asked, looking over Winn's shoulder at the tablet.

"We're at a hundred!" he exclaimed, throwing his arms up in celebration. Kara threw herself at Selah, hugging the girl tightly. It took a few moments for the girl to hug back, as the connection between her and her not-mother solidified.

"We can go home?" she asked Winn, and he nodded.

"I am almost positive it works. Either that or it will explode, killing me instantly." He repeated his joke, but nobody seemed to find it funny this time, either.

"Thank you."

"Come here, I'm a hugger," he replied, pulling the somewhat reluctant girl into a hug. "If you ever want to maybe blow up a university campus in the name of science, you know where to find me."

"Okay," she replied, smiling despite herself.

"Thank you," Kara said, turning to Linda. "For everything. You're a lot cooler than the Nazi Kara."

"What?" the professor asked.

"Don't worry about it," she replied. "Hey, hit me up if you're ever on Earth-38."

"Will do."

As they said their goodbyes, Selah noticed her not-mother standing back, beside the machine. After a moment, she walked over to the woman.

"I guess that I owe you a thank you," she said.

"I only did the right thing."

"But you didn't have to. I'm glad you're not... like her."

"Me too," she replied, before adding, "Selah, you are not the reason. She chose her actions, and that has nothing to do with you. It is no fault of yours." She nodded slowly, offering a small smile to her not-mother as she walked back to Kara, who was standing in front of the machine.

"Ready?" she asked. Selah nodded, grinning slowly.

"Let's go."

"Um Winn?" she asked, turning to the professor. "How exactly do we go?"

"Oh, that red button," Winn replied. "Both of you have to press it together, and then just click your heels three times."

"This earth has The Wizard of Oz," Selah noted.

"Maybe we should stay," Kara stated.

"Here's to hopefully not exploding." They both reached out and pushed down the red button together, and then they were swallowed up in a beam of white light.

.

.

.