“No!” Kenzie said, to the wall. The wall and the two Ashleys weren’t in positions to hear.

“No. Bring your blade this way, pry.”

“Don’t scratch the edges of the lenses,” Kenzie said, again talking to the wall.

There was no echo of her statement this time. The Ashleys worked in silence.

“There.”

“Got it. Here we are. I’ve seen this before.”

“It looks like someone wrapped barbed wire around an ice pick and put a lens on the butt end.”

“A small ice pick, maybe. I need you to stick that into my eye.”

“Me?”

“You.”

Kenzie’s eyes widened.

“Didn’t leave instructions?” Chris asked.

“I… kind of forgot that her hands are wonky right now and her sister’s hands are even more dangerous.”

“We might need to turn it on,” Ashley said.

“It’s on!” Kenzie hurried to say, shouting at the wall. “Don’t flip the switches or you’ll change polarity or bias, or you’ll turn it off and it’ll become a weird stabby knife instead of one that goes through eyes!”

They couldn’t hear us, and a phone call or message was a procedural nightmare that would take a while to arrange and use. Even if we did tip them off about what was going on, we’d risk the ‘good guys’ finding out about the cameras.

I folded my arms.

The camera’s focus changed. The strange Ashley had the lens gripped by the flats of four blade fingers. The points of the fingers extended a bit beyond the pad or ‘head’ of the eye camera. If everything went in smoothly, the points would bury inside the eye before the object fully did.

Ashley took it, not flinching as the point touched home. Other parts of the camera flowed in. The points of her sister’s claw came perilously close to her eye and eye socket, but they didn’t penetrate. Our Ashley pushed it the rest of the way in with a stiff finger.

“One eyeball on the inside,” Tristan said.

“Until battery runs out,” Chris said.

“Nuh uh,” Kenzie said.

“Batteries run out. There’s no way you hooked that up to some greater power source and still sent it that far away from the source.”

“I included a battery recharger,” Kenzie said.

“What you said about sleeping with your head on a book,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you worry, when I had my claws so close? Did you fear me?” It was the other Ashley, talking to our Ashley.

“I trust you as far as I trust myself.”

“So corny,” Chris said. “I can imagine them just doing that nonstop for the next two years, and acting like it’s still cute or funny.”

“For the record,” Tristan said. “You’re not in the good books either. This whole thing with being underhanded and potentially screwing up everything is so not good.”