We’d put ourselves out there, and now we were on her radar. Probably. The others were agitated, their screens open to the one word message, all of its foreboding. The person we were investigating and tracking was reaching out. It could have been a threat, an ambush, a ruse.

“Victoria,” Sveta said.

I met her eyes.

“That thing, earlier today? The suspicious thing?”

The others weren’t talking anymore.

“That was Goddess?” I asked. “I asked if it was relevant to what we were doing, and you said no.”

“It was no,” Sveta said. “We had other, immediate concerns, and she—she wasn’t one.”

I frowned.

“Can you bring it up, Kenz?” Sveta asked.

“Are you sure?” Kenzie asked.

“We have to, I think. We can’t put it off or hide it. It’s going to come up.”

I could put the pieces together before the image appeared on the screen, and it was still a slap in the face. Still an impact that caught me off guard.

A scene, caught through a window. Goddess, eating lunch in Earth Gimel. Somewhere not too far from where she and her portal were situated. If it were that alone, it would have been unremarkable, except maybe remarkable because of the clarity of the shot.

Amy Claire Dallon was in the scene, along with what might have been a pet squirrel, lurking within her sleeve, biting into her sandwich while Goddess sat across from her, holding a sandwich off to the side, her finger stabbing at the table.

I was about to open my mouth to say something, or to ask, but Kenzie seemed to read my mind.

More images. Amy, her face covered in freckles from scalp to chin, hair tied back, long sleeves mercifully covering her arms and hands to the knuckles, she was wearing a different outfit. Three outfits.

Another image. Four outfits. That squirrel wasn’t a squirrel, whatever the hell it was.

It was good that they’d kept it from me. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything else and deal with this. It was good they’d warned me now.

But ‘good’ on both ends still left a horrible pit in my stomach.

“It’s unavoidable,” I said, half of my meaning intended to follow Sveta’s last statement. Half for myself, to warn the me of the present day of what was coming.

Beacon Interlude 8.x

After the stifling atmosphere of the television studio, the night air felt cool, too clean and refreshing. In the background and across the water, the city was going dark. There was still only so much power to go around.