“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to be happy about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Too many close calls, too many questions. My sister was out there, and I couldn’t avoid this… third confrontation. The third in one night.

One fucking long night.

“I think the situation is as resolved as it’s going to get,” I said. “Teacher loses, he can’t blow the bombs, Goddess has her army. The heroes are up there. I think—if there’s anything left to contribute to the situation, we help her keep the peace.”

“We help them,” Crystalclear said. “We help the heroes. This protocol, I’m invoking it.”

As if we hadn’t fought enough uphill battles tonight.

But I nodded.

The others had caught their breath. Ashley was rubbing her forearms, moving her hands with a little bit more in the way of dexterity.

We entered the server room, and Sveta was there, a face and tendrils that were barely visible in the dark. She was hunched, for lack of a better word, over her ball. A case of bulletproof glass with staggered ventilation, so that a tendril couldn’t worm through. A circular lock required some careful manipulation and a clamp of Sveta’s teeth to properly open, if help wasn’t provided from the outside.

But it collapsed into a flat position, and try as she might, she couldn’t coordinate to un-collapse it.

“Can I approach?”

“You got them?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You shouldn’t approach.”

I stopped where I was, floating.

“I can’t coordinate well enough,” she said. “I practiced before, but never in the dark.”

“Give it here.”

The hunk of interconnected slats of bulletproof glass struck my breastplate in what was essentially a ‘soft’ pass from Sveta. The noise made my much-abused ears hurt.

I squeezed the orb, using my forearm instead of my right hand, and hard edges scraped against hard edges. It slid into its spherical shape, two pieces of plastic nipping off a bit of my arm as they came together.

I opened the lid, and Sveta reached inside, before pulling herself in. Tendrils had to be coiled together, piled atop one another, filling much of the space. With my hands full, I had only a glimpse of her expression.

Sveta’s hell.

I locked her in.

“Thank you, Tress,” Ashley said. “Doing that. I know we haven’t always been on the same page.”

“I’m still glad you’re okay.”

“It was noble, Tress,” Ashley said.

“It was stupid. For an instant, I forgot what I was. And I can’t do that,” Sveta said. “Other people can’t afford for me to forget. I positioned myself as best as I could, before he… seeped in.”

I felt some violent motion within the sphere, as if a torrent of physical activity could illustrate the feeling.

With a very different tone of voice, Sveta said, “I’ll need my armor.”

“I’ll get it,” I said. I started to hand off the sphere, then stopped myself. “If you’re okay with—”

“Yes.”