"Nope. Could she fight a god? My Odette and her twin came through alone."

"I don't think so. But she could get hurt. But I guess if she's already a mom and she already killed her Shaw without there having been a war it's probably not especially risky."

"You think all of the worlds have the same stories in them, not just the same people?"

"I don't know but if she had to kill a Shaw--or someone else I guess--for killing her parents..."

"Odette and I haven't talked about it much. I figured if she was like me she didn't love sharing reasons people had to hate her family."

"Killing Shaw wasn't bad. Almost throwing the missiles back was but I think all the people Daddy killed before he met Papa were Nazis so it was okay."

"What's a Nazi?"

"Nazis are a group of people primarily defined by the idea that Jewish people and Romani people and handicapped people and homosexuals and some other kinds of people needed to die so they built death camps, rounded up everyone they could find that matched one of those descriptions, and worked them and starved them and beat them and experimented on them and denied them every form of dignity they could think of and threw them in the ovens when they died. They pulled out our teeth if we had fillings they could use and cut off our hair to make mattresses out of and the sky was black and greasy from the smoke from the crematoriums. The one who survived to the end of the war were nearly living skeletons."

"...yeah, I'd say killing those is okay, and I don't even know what Jewish people or Romani people are."

"Jewish is a religion. I'm Jewish. Daddy was Jewish, and Grandma and Grandpa were Jewish, which was why they were there. Romani is a culture. I don't know as much about them as I would like."

"Odette told me about religions. We don't really have them in my world. Did your Daddy get all the Nazis?"

"Nuh-uh. Just the ones who could tell him where to find Shaw. Most of them died at the end of the war, anyway, but some of them got away, including Shaw. Daddy found ones who could lead him to him and dealt with them and then after Shaw was dead there was us to look after."

"But they can't do it again?"

"Everyone hates them now. They kept what they were doing a secret during the war but now everybody knows."

"I hope that's enough."

"No one's going to put them in charge again."

"Our Enemy did a lot of really evil things but after a few Ages he was pardoned and people'd forgotten or wanted to give him a second chance, and now he's right back at it."

"If they try we'll stop them."

"Well, now you know magic, the better to stop them with."

"We could've done it anyway."

"War is awful. It is worth it to be way more powerful than the other side."

"...Okay, true," she admits, somewhat reluctantly.

"I'm sure you could've done it anyway. Your family sounds very capable and courageous."

"Yes," she says firmly. "Shaw was going to kill everyone."

"Everyone, huh? Why?"