The city needed help, but she couldn’t do anything to help it. She could do this, ensuring that no one person would amass the power or the army necessary to seize a portal, this portal, and come through to raid the one lucrative settlement on Gimel. They would have to bring boats through, but there were boats here.

There were too many human rights abuses, too many cities worth of people being prevented from leaving. There were pockets like this all over, and as winter approached, things looked grimmer and grimmer.

“Did it go okay?” one of the capes on duty asked. A PRTCJ uniform.

“It went fine,” Valkyrie answered. “No casualties. Some captives. We’ll get information on the powers they’ve been using. I have the spirit of one, and I think he’ll tell me what he knows soon.”

“Wow. That’s pretty crazy creepy,” the PRTCJ officer said.

“Perhaps,” Valkyrie replied. “Excuse me. I need to rinse off the poison before the adaptations fade.”

As she walked away, she could hear a whispered exchange between the PRTCJ officers.

“You can’t just call them creepy when they’re Valkyrie, Crystal.”

“Oh, just stole a soul, gonna interrogate it, nothing wrong about that.”

Valkyrie paused.

“Oh, shit,” the not-Crystal PRTCJ officer replied, before ducking away.

“Don’t just run and… hi again, Valkyrie,” PRTCJ officer Crystal said.

“You don’t like it? You’ve been on the front lines here, in the northwestern American states, and in Russia. You’ve seen what we’re up against. We need information.”

“I don’t like it,” Crystal said.

“It will be more lives saved in the long run.”

“It’s capturing someone’s very essence. It’s deeply, deeply uncomfortable. If you’re capturing guys on our side with permission and bringing them back like I’ve seen, I’m okay with that. Otherwise, I’m not cool with it. I’m not going to shoot you or fight you or anything, but… not cool.”

“I’ve had at least one of these conversations every day for the past few months,” Valkyrie said. “Different points, different particulars. I have people telling me to take time off, but this—this is what wearies me.”

“Am I wrong? What am I missing?”

“You might be right. I just find that having the question constantly put before me is… it’s hard. If I hadn’t taken his life and automatically drawn him into me, he would have notified key people, and we would have lost the element of surprise. Many more would have suffered and died.”

“I don’t believe in the ends justifying the means, sorry. I think once you start thinking that way, you stop looking for those hard-to-spot answers. But I’m a flying blaster girl. Pew pew. It’s shitty of me to judge you when I got the easy, awesome power, and you got the power with the built-in moral dilemmas.”