Coleen was red.

Coleen realized she did not know whether she still thought of herself as Faith or not. It seemed to her that everything Faith had done that she liked was done by someone else. The Faith of now. When Faith did something she could not stand… (Lizzie Lizzie Elizabeth!)

Well, then it was Coleen. It was all Coleen.

She had been trying so hard not to think of Elizabeth.

“I feel a degree of separation to everything now,” she said to Emil. “And I haven’t even begun to dive into any of the powers.”

They drifted at the edges of his consciousness. Occasionally she remembered them. Most of the time it blurred away from the numbness.

“You work through it one step at a time,” Emil agreed, caressing the queen with a finger.

“You know what that’s like, right? Not doing everything at once or overlapping over everything else. One thing at a time.”

Coleen agreed quietly and moved a red knight. She was unable to remove her fingers from the figure for some time.