“And let my prisoner loose on a space station full of alien super-weapons? Not so much. I can do it. What does the switch to open the door look like?”

“There will be a large panel at roughly my height above the floor, on an exterior wall. It will have many switches, but the one that opens the hangar door immediately is for emergency use, so it will be large, and a different shape and color. It should be very obvious. Just hit that.”

“Understood. If I end up stuck inside a wall, Shall, kill the Liar.”

“It is unfair to link my survival to your potential user error,” Lantern complained. “But you won’t get stuck in the wall. The generator compensates for such mistakes. Just make sure you set the distance far enough, or it will compensate in the wrong direction, and you’ll be floating outside the station instead of inside, waiting hours for the teleporter to recharge.”

“How thick are the walls?”

“About two meters.”

“All right. Call it a hundred and five meters, then, to put me inside the hangar bay? Make it a hundred and twenty to be safe.”

She fiddled with the device strapped to the arm of her suit, checked her life support systems and comms, and took a deep breath. “Off I go.”

“Wait!” Elena unstrapped, took a step forward, and wrapped her arms around Callie’s chest. “Be safe. Watch out for kaiju and brain-spiders.”

“You say the sweetest things. Get back in your seat. I don’t want to accidentally teleport your arms off.”

“It doesn’t work that–” Lantern began, but then Callie winked out of existence.

“Cap, you there?” Ashok said. “Hey, cap, report.”

There was no answer, and Elena closed her eyes as something deep inside her rolled over heavily, like a stone.

There was a disorienting sensation of motion; it reminded Callie of being tossed into a swimming pool at a party at Michael’s mother’s house, one long-ago summer. They were on the moon, so it was a low-gravity pool, big as a lake, and they’d done these amazing dolphin leaps, arcing high out of the water, laughing uproariously, young and immortal and alive and in love forever.