Violet wasn't sure what to make of Em as Perry led her to his room. He was hunched over in the bed, staring into space with hardly any movement to their footsteps. Violet stared as if her own presence would somehow wake him from his stillness, but it did little. Em was as fragile as when they first met, terrified and hardly holding together as his life was flipped upside down. Even his eyes hardly followed as she made her way to Perry's side, sending shivers through Violet with each passing second.

"So, what's the diagnosis?" Violet inquired forcefully, making sure every part of her demeanor was coated by professionalism. Looking at the situation any other way only pulled at her heartstrings. "Panic attack?"

"Far from it, actually." Perry had her nose buried in a clipboard as she made her way to Em's side, his sharp eyes following her movements lazily. "At first, I thought it might have been stress...maybe even a flaw in his original design..."

Perry skipped over the word 'design' effortlessly, but Violet didn't need special ears to hear what was wrong with it. The surgery to transform an ordinary moonshadower into a member of The Guard was often called their design, a complex measure of tearing them apart and putting them back together until they were made of nothing but what The Guard wanted. It was a terrifying thing for Violet to wake up all alone, 14 and feeling broken in a pure white room with tubes sticking out of her arms...

She knew Perry was skilled. After all, Violet had agreed to every little change they made to her--to make her better--yet she couldn't quite fall in love with the word 'design'. As soon as she woke up that morning, she saw how much they had destroyed her, and just how much she had let them do it.

"But what was it?" Violet crossed her arms in an attempt to distract herself, drawing Em's muted attention back to her. Perry had flipped a piece of paper over on the clipboard, briefly glancing up before getting lost in her notes again.

"Fae Misha had to run a couple of her own tests. Seems there was a flaw in his coding and someone tried to find their way in." Perry placed the clipboard on a table as Violet raised her eyebrows.

"His...coding?" She specified, knowing just how dangerous that was.

"You know, how you protect your thoughts from mind readers?" Perry began, but Violet only shook her head with frustration.

"Well, I know that." She cut across sarcastically, stopping Perry's chatter at the root. Mind readers were dangerous, always seeping into The Guard's minds and stealing precious information. After a few dangerous incidents, Misha had issued an order to code their thoughts, a painstaking process of taking each memory and replacing it with a maze of numbers, symbols, or old memories that would only mislead any mind reader.

Violet had taught herself to translate the memories so that each one was a new language and maze. It would confuse any mind reader, yet Em kept quiet about his own tricks. He never liked to discuss his coding process, but what little she was able to find was the memories. Em had buried all his precious information among a childhood backyard and a gentle family.

"So, Misha requests that everyone recodes their memories every 6 months cause of new information, right?" Perry began, and Violet nodded in response. "Well, turns out it's been about 6 months since Em recoded, so there were a lot of holes in his thoughts. A mind reader found him, dug through his thoughts, and started to tear apart his coding. That's why it hurt him so much."

"And he's so...dull because..." Violet trailed off, unsure how to describe Em's blank stare and vegetative state. He was still hunched over and silent as death, only moving to tap his fingers or shift his gaze. It sent shivers down her spine just staring at him, so empty and blank...

"Misha was up all night recoding his thoughts for him." Perry specified with a brief gesture at the silent boy. "It'll take a day or two for him to fall back into the rhythm of his own thoughts, but he'll get there. It's not easy having someone else define your way of thinking."

"But here's the really interesting thing." Suddenly, Perry's voice lit up with a sense of mystery, drawing Violet into her gossip like a wave to the shore. Dropping into the simple excitement, her ears twitched as Perry lowered her voice to a whisper. "The mind reader found his way in quick. Like, real fast."

"So?" Violet found her own voice falling into a whisper, lost in the wonderful world of rumors.

"The mind reader knew Em's mind. The mind reader knew him."