I picked out my clothes with care. I couldn't compare to Emma's fashion model looks and dress sense, but I would do my best to look presentable. I rummaged through my closet and found a set of clothes that I'd never taken to school. Ones I'd kept at home so they wouldn't get ripped up or stained by the bullies' pranks. I hesitated before putting them on. If Emma pulled something on me here-

99.8% chance of being free from attack in an hour's time.

Good. If Emma bullied me in my own house I wouldn't have to put up with her shit forever. I'd be able to kick her out within the hour.

I spent the next fifteen minutes planning our conversation. What would I say to her? What would I demand from her? There was so much I wanted to to make her answer for, but I didn't know what would tug at her heartstrings and make her see the error of her ways, and what would set her off.

I had always played it safe with the bullies. Took the first opportunity to end the confrontation, to protect myself, to escape. But if I never confronted her she would never change her ways. I would have to take risks, spill out my heart and make demands, and trust my power to lead me to safety.

I don't know where I got the courage. Whether it was the certainty my power gave me, or the warm glow from my medication, or finally getting fed up with months of putting up with Emma's shit. But when the doorbell rang, my normal sense of dread and anxiety about facing the bullies was dampened, muted, barely there at all. I could do this.

I heard Dad and Emma's muffled voices in the living room. I peered at the mosaic of futures and found that I could get a rough sense of their conversation. Polite smiles and solemn tones. They made their way to my room and I opened the door the instant before they arrived.

"Emma. Long time no see." I said.

"Taylor! I was so worried about you. You're looking so much better, I'm so glad." Emma was wearing a broad smile. One I knew from experience was one of her wide selection of fake ones.

Emma took a step forward and put her arms around me in a light hug. If not for the warning from my power I would have flinched and drawn away. As it was I managed to give a show of confidence. I returned her hug and held her tight, held on to her for a second even after she tried to draw away, before I released her.

As I held her I tried to remember what it had been like to hug her when we were still friends. When it had still been an innocent gesture of friendship, before it had become another tool for power plays and intimidation. What had changed? Was there some clue in that simple moment of contact to tell me whether it was honest or a deception? When I got Emma to be my friend again, would I be able to hug her and know simply from that contact that she'd changed back?

Dad was watching our facade of friendship with a smile on his face. "I'll leave you two to have fun. Remember what we talked about, okay kiddo."

"Okay, Dad." I said.

I stepped forward to close the door. When I turned around Emma was sitting on the edge of my bed. She was fiddling with her fingers on her lap, her eyes downcast. Her clothes were below her usual standards. A baggy shirt and old, faded jeans. Like the clothes I wore to school. Was that a strategy of hers? Trying to get my sympathy?

Emma raised her eyes and met mine. "How did you find out?"

Her voice was soft, her expression carefully blank. I hadn't been able to plan our conversation very far, but I had guessed she would hide her emotions. She didn't know how much I knew about her crimes and she didn't want to give anything away.

The problem was that I truly didn't know anything about her crimes, not beyond the magic words my power had told me to speak. The faint glimpse I could see of my immediate futures told me that if I got her to reveal her crimes I was going to be surprised, shocked, there would be an argument with raised voices...no. I couldn't let that happen. I had to keep up a front, pretend I had all the answers.

"You're not as sneaky as you think you are." I said. I put a smirk on my face. It was almost easy. It helped that I was feeling a little schadenfreude seeing Emma be humbled for once.

"This is big, Taylor. Not just for me and her, for you too. I don't think you understand what you've gotten yourself into. You don't out a cape."

What.

My mind went blank, my prepared questions and demands slipped away. A cape? I had expected Emma to be covering up for something dirty. A crime of passion committed by one of her dad's business partners, or a mother who beat her child in a fit of rage and went too far. But she was friends with a murderer cape. A villain.

What the hell have you gotten me into, Emma?

Emma leaned forward. "You didn't think of that, did you Taylor? I'm teling you for your own good. I looked up the laws when I found out last year. If you tell anyone what you know the PRT will find out and throw the book at you. Leaking state secrets, reckless endangerment of a Ward and her family by putting them at risk of retaliation by villains. The DA will be drooling at the chance to win points by prosecuting the hell out of you. The conviction rate is over eighty percent."

She was smiling at me, like a cat that caught the canary. A Ward. She was friends with a Ward. A hero who was a killer, who was being protected by the state, who, who-

I did the best I could to cover my shock and keep my reaction believable. As if I was only shocked by her argument and not by everything else in this fucked up scenario. I closed my eyes, gave a long, slow sigh. Then I came forward and sat beside her on the bed.

I had no idea if she was bluffing me or telling the truth. I steeled myself and asked my power. If I found out all the details about her crimes and the murderer cape and I then went public with them, would I get taken to court? The medication in my bloodstream let me keep a straight face while a trillion sparks of pain danced through my skull, as the mosaic in my mind tore itself apart and reassembled.

4.3345005968802021% chance I'll be put on trial, if I go public with the details.

The legal threats had been a bluff. I allowed the smirk to return to my face and looked Emma in the eyes, held my gaze steady. "It's not a crime to out a Ward if you're reporting her for murder. Or if you're reporting her friend and her dad as accessories to murder."

Emma's eyes narrowed. Sharp and bold and undeterred. But I had become an expert at reading her expressions, the fine gradations of her cruelty. There was worry underneath.

"You have no idea what you're getting into." she repeated. "I was trying to break it to you gently. I thought you were enough of a goody two shoes to follow the law and keep out of trouble. It's not the law you should be worried about, though. If you think you can attack a cape and count on the law to protect you you're in for a nasty run-in with reality. Heroes and villains are above the law. They made up their own rules to follow. The unwritten rules."

"The unwritten rules?"

"That's why capes don't go after each other in their civilian identities. Cape life and civilian life are off limits, total separation. If a PRT agent finds out Kaiser's name they don't attack him when he's at home with his family. If one of Kaiser's goons finds out a hero's name he leaves his wife and kids alone.

"Do you get it now Taylor? Do you get what's going to happen to you? If you break the rules, the rules don't protect you anymore. If you out her for what she did as a cape-" Emma gave a vicious smile. "Do you think she'll have any more mercy for you and your dad, than she had for the gangbangers she killed? I saw her do it. She killed a man like it was nothing. He was helpless, beaten, and she dropped him off a roof. Washed the blood off her hands and came to school the next day."

Oh God. I should have known. The murderer, the murderer, she was friends with a murderer who would kill to protect herself. That had been part of my magic words, hadn't it? I had told her that I set up an arrangement with a lawyer to go public if someone tried to hurt me and dad. But that had been a lie. I didn't have any arrangement, I didn't even know any of the details yet. If the murderer found out what I told Emma and came after me...

Was it really true? Would the cape really kill me? I grit my teeth and forced the mosaic of futures to rearrange itself.

6.3624293761581810% chance Dad or I will be killed or seriously injured, if I go public with the details.

Low probability. Another bluff. Or...no. Not a bluff, I realized in horror. Six percent was far too high. A six percent chance the cape would come after me for revenge and succeed. There would be a higher chance she would try, maybe much higher if I got police protection and she had to bypass it to get to me.

The killer cape would seriously try to murder me. Maybe as a last desperate act of freedom before she was arrested for murder, or as an act of spite before escaping the Wards to become a villain. A six percent chance of death or crippling injury. I...I could live with that if it was only me, but if she came after my dad...

No. It didn't matter. I wasn't going to go public anyway. I didn't have proof of her crimes that would convince a jury.

I had to stick to my plan. Convince Emma that I had the dirt on her and that I was completely willing and able to spill it. I tapped into the simmering anger I was holding back, the anger I had been holding back for months under pressure from Emma and the other bullies. I gave her a withering glare.

"Fuck you Emma. You betray me for no reason at all, send a constant stream of pointless shit at me for a year, stuff me in the nastiest locker ever, and now you're giving me death threats to avoid getting what you deserve. No. No way in hell am I going easy on you. I told you I took precautions in case your cape friend attacked my family."

"I'm not threatening anything. I'm doing you a favor. Telling you what she's going to do to you if you spill."

"Did you tell her what I know?" I said.

"No." she said. "Not yet. I didn't want to watch you get yourself killed."

"I didn't know you cared." I said bitterly.

A peculiar expression flashed over Emma's face, something I couldn't read. Pain? Regret? Then it was gone and she spoke with a venom that sounded almost desperate. "I don't care about you. I never cared about you. You're a loser, Taylor, a complete waste of space. If you disappeared from the world no one would care. But if you get yourself butchered by a cape you'll leave an ugly mess. Have some decency and make it clean."

My throat went dry. I swallowed, tried to keep my composure. Emma had said worse about me before. But this struck home. Here I was trying to redeem her, save her, and she was tearing into me worse than ever. Somehow she sensed what I was doing and knew just what to say to rip out my heart.

I...I couldn't let her get to me. That was her talent. She knew me better than anyone. She was sick, now, and using it to hurt me, but in the future when I fixed her and she was my friend again she would use it to help me. I closed my eyes and tried to block out the ugliness of the present. Forced myself to remember the golden futures I had seen with my power, the carefree days that lay ahead of us after she became my friend again. Eating greasy fast food together at Fugly Bob's while she demonstrated the trick to wrangling a healthy meal out of the menu by knowing how they fudged the calorie counts. Convincing her to read Jane Austen and getting her to admit that Persuasion had literary merit.

I had to push through this hell and make it out the other side. Focus on what I needed to do to convince her.

Who the hell was her killer cape friend? I wasn't a cape junkie but I could make a guess. The Brockton Bay Wards were mostly boys. I could only remember one girl, the space-warper Vista, but she was young, probably in middle school. It had to be the other girl on the Wards, but her code name and powers escaped me.

The Ward friend of Emma's was probably a girl in our classes. I thought the Wards all went to Arcadia High, but that was a rumor, maybe a purposeful rumor spread by the PRT. From the way Emma talked about her she was a close friend. It would be Madison, or Sophia, or maybe Julia or Addie. One of the bullies.

That must be why Emma was refusing to give in to my pressure. The killer cape liked to bully me and Emma was afraid to ask her to stop. Could I afford to keep pushing her on this?

38.5146884170708337% chance Emma will stop the bullies and be my friend again, if I refuse to back down.

Good. Better than before. I just had to stay the course.

"Emma." I said. "You can insult me all you want. You can threaten me all you want. I don't care. I'm not giving you an inch. You and your friends at school lay another finger on me and I'll go public with everything. I don't care what happens to me. I'll drag you down with me."

Emma stared at me. Shocked that I was resisting her. She licked her lips, then spoke in that artifically sweet tone of hers. "I'm looking out for you, Taylor. It's my prerogative as your best friend." She leaned forward. "Don't you care about your dad? Don't you care about your family? I thought you learned your lesson after what happened to your mom. You cried yourself to sleep for a week that time. How many weeks will you cry yourself to sleep this time, when your dad comes home in a body bag?"

My voice wavered and cracked, but somehow I managed to speak. She was trying to shake my resolve. I had to trust the numbers. I couldn't back down. "I t-told you. I don't care what it takes. It ends here and now. You're going to stop bullying me. You're going to make the other bullies stop too. You're going to-"

"I see. I should have known." said Emma. "A week of tears isn't much in the grand scheme of things. Your mom gave you love for all of her life and you only grieved her for a week. Now you're telling me that you want to treat your dad the same way. Disposable."

Her words hit me like a punch in the gut. I swallowed. I had to trust the numbers. I couldn't back down. "S-shut up, Emma. It's not like that."

"No, I understand. You learned your lesson the day you cried yourself out on my shoulder after your mom died. You learned that you're the type of person who doesn't grieve when your parents die. All you need is a little cry and you're right as rain. That's why you treat them as disposable, why you're willing to sacrifice them for your selfish needs. You held out for a few years but now you've finally found a perk that you're willing to spend your dad for. That's why you're so insistent on following your stupid blackmail plan and getting him murdered. You want to finish the job you started and turn yourself into a self-made orphan."

"No, I, I..." I couldn't give up. I had to trust the numbers. I couldn't back down. I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't, I-

Emma leaned further forward, her eyes wide, her face almost touching mine. "Tell me, Taylor. Do you think it'll feel as good to kill your dad as it did when you killed your mom?"

Tears brimmed in my eyes. I couldn't think. I couldn't speak. I couldn't look away from Emma's eyes. From her oh so innocent smile.

What had I been thinking? Why had I ever wanted to be friends with this girl? This demon?