She’s dangerous, she prefers to stay at arm’s length.  Throwing weapons, pistol, poison.  It’s not just a fear of you, it’s how she is, I imagined Gordon telling me.

Helen might say something like: The puppeteer raised her with care and a great deal of control.  A special trigger phrase to keep her compliant if she started to slip the leash.  He waited to use it, so it wouldn’t have been a common thing.  Remember everything we said about why he raised them at Mothmont.  Control and a firm hand.  Somewhere he could be close to them and steer them.

Except not in so many words.

Jamie was a hard one for me to guess.  I couldn’t slip myself into Jamie’s shoes and imagine what he’d say because Jamie would be the type to call up some obscure set of details.  He had a good memory, while mine was below average.  But Jamie would also have a sense of the building layout.  He could sketch out a quick map in that book of his, I could stare down at it, put all the pieces together, and start to imagine where Mary might have entered the building, where she might have positioned herself.

I tried to imagine the building as well as I knew it, but it wasn’t a complete map, and parts of it were nebulous, the scale not quite right.  I couldn’t draw a sharp picture, not a crisp image that stayed still in my mind’s eye.

Then there was Lillian.  Not an Academy project, except she was, in a way.  She’d grown up with the Academy in mind, had spent some time at Mothmont, and went on to be one of the Academy’s younger students.  Her family wasn’t so wealthy that she would thrive regardless of what happened.  She’d had to throw herself into her studies, into our activities, just to secure her future.  The Academy had its claws in her.

Lillian would share something about the science of the clones.  Maybe explain how the trigger phrase worked.

…Or, now that I thought about it, she might surprise us and say something very human.  Something like, she was so cold around you, but she let her guard down around him.  She even cried.

Wildbow, Twig, 1.10