Chapter 8: What Power Feels Like When It's Gone

The interviews that followed Wanda Maximoff were quieter affairs. Not because the subjects were less interesting — they were, each of them, precisely as interesting as the thing they were trying not to say — but because they were people who had not yet learned the particular composure of someone who has been questioned professionally before. They were nervous in honest ways. They fidgeted. They offered more than I asked for, then caught themselves and pulled back, then offered again. It is one of my favorite things about interviewing people who have not constructed their accounts in advance: the thoughts arrive in the order they occur, not the order they've been arranged.

I started with the junior team members. Two of them — a woman called Reyes who could manipulate gravitational fields and a young man named Osei who projected force constructs with unusual geometric precision — I interviewed together, which was a choice I made deliberately and mentioned to neither of them. People tell different stories when they feel they have a witness to their honesty. People who have done nothing wrong are not afraid of that feeling. People who have done something small and wrong sometimes talk faster.

Reyes and Osei had both done nothing wrong. They talked at a reasonable pace.