POV: CHASE
She doesn't wait for my answer to the question she asked. She already knows the answer to it, which is why she asked it, not to receive the information but to make me acknowledge that I have it, and she moves past the question into the mechanics, which is the part she came to explain.
"The curse in its current form," she says, "is operating differently from anything I built into the original working. What I built was designed to operate through active presence, through the curse inhabiting the cursed person and driving behavior. What exists now is a hybrid of the original mechanism and the mutation that developed from your obsession, and what this hybrid does is not what either of those things did independently."
