That flood of grief then translated into a physical response, and in short order, she was crying. More than crying, she was bawling. At first, she tried to stop it, almost feeling it unfair that his grief could invade her like this, but as she sat there, crying her eyes out, she also felt that this grief wasn’t just his, that she, too, was a powder keg on constant verge of explosion and that maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to just let herself feel it.

Fuck it.

The moment she allowed herself to ride it out, to accept it and let herself feel everything, it became bearable. And so, she lay down on her side and just cried for several minutes, acting as a pressure valve for both of them.

Eventually, she sat up, all cried out, wiping the tears and redness from her face. She moved next to him, hesitating before touching him around the space where his crest met the rest of his head. “Even after all you’ve put me through, even after the lies and everything, I still want to protect you. That’s always been the case with us, dynamic fusion bonding or no.”

She leaned her face into the skin behind his eyes. “You could build a new life here. You could have a new home with me. I’d protect you. I’d keep you safe. I’d never hurt you, I promise.”

He noticed it first, what was on the television, milliseconds before she saw it. He must have gone through the same horrified thought process, too, because neither of them reacted immediately. It was too absurd, too horrible to be real. The feed was coming from a camera inside a helicopter focused on the rally downtown. It was on the verge of turning into a riot, and the cameraman was frantically trying to zoom in on people running around on the ground like ants, but one of the ants was bigger and darker than all the other ants.

Enola!

Cora slammed the volume button to get some context, that yes this was a live feed, yes this was happening right now, and being broadcast all over the world. The newscaster babbling incoherently about “what appears to be a nonhuman being, but nothing has been verified at this time.”

On the corner of the screen, a black cargo van appeared, topped with what looked like a Tesla coil. It barged through the crowd, slapping human bodies out of the way, stopping not twenty feet short of Enola. The camera in the helicopter was shaky, trying to keep its subject in the center of the frame. Enola turned to face the van, his posture descending into something antagonistic.

Then the feed cut to black.

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