“We have a guess about what he’s doing,” I said. “If he keeps us from leaving, there’s no food that isn’t contaminated. Everyone here starves… or we eat, and we might ingest the drugs that the Pharmacist planted.”

I saw something in her eyes. Alarm. Bewilderment.

She took over an Earth. She… did whatever she’d done to take over her cluster, and that can’t have been easy. Then there was Gold Morning, but… the entire reason she was here and not in her world was because she had been pulled into the fight. I could one hundred percent understand how she might not have made many calls then. It could seem like a strange, bad dream, realer than existence in the years before and after, but so hard to parse that the mind turned away from it.

But this might well have been the first time she’d ever come head to head with the fact that she was well and truly outmatched, while she was well and truly in control of her actions, past present and upcoming.

“How does he do it?”

“We don’t know, but you said it yourself, it felt like—”

“No way out. We evacuate.”

“He has a small army ready on the other side of the door, we, the non-Goddess good guys, have multiple teams there trying to stall Teacher. The max-sec guys are probably under orders to attack us from the rear, if we try to run for it, and the access tunnel—”

“Stop,” she told me. “Fucking enough.”

“The access tunnel leads to a means to communicate with the outside, and links the prison resources to outside resources. It gives him a way to tap into the ankle bombs your army is wearing. My teammates, Goddess!”

“I don’t care!” she retorted. Her voice was less of a shout as she spoke again, more of a hiss, “We evacuate. Figure this out. Yes?”

I was still, my thoughts stuck as I tried to figure out a way to reconcile it. So many of the options available meant throwing away lives.

Her stare was cold.

She found world leaders and went after them one by one. She sank ships. She killed hundreds, even thousands.

The eyes of someone that had killed thousands.

All around me, killers, terrorists, kidnappers and worse were staring at Goddess and me.

“Figure it out,” she said, with more emphasis.

She stared into my eyes.

I was stuck, my thoughts tied in a knot, as I processed the options available to me. Follow the law. When the law isn’t available, do what’s right. When what’s right isn’t clear, ask for help.