She smiled and she didn’t give me an answer.

I knew that when Kenzie was happy, she bounced. When Ashley was especially pleased she had small smiles and she looked like she was queen of the world—brimming security and self worth. Tristan had a light in his eyes, and Byron came out of his shell. I’d never seen Rain happy, though—

That was a mental joke to myself. I’d seen insecurities and hangups that had tortured him for a long time just fall away.

Sveta in this moment was all of those things.

Seeing her happy made me just a tiny bit of all of those things.

I had moisture brimming in the corners of my eyes, seeing that. A pan— A cure-all for the creeping sentiment that had come with the mention of the Asylum.

“Since when are you a crier?” she whispered.

I hugged her with one arm, tight, then shook her. “I thought you weren’t going to tease me.”

“Not about that. About this? Definitely.”

“Lookout,” I called out. “Rescue me from Sveta. Tell me how we’re doing.”

She called back with her answer, “I’m being asked to make this work without looking, which is dumb, and it’s slow as anything. That’s how I’m doing. How are you doing, Antares?”

I let go of Sveta, and she smiled as I pulled away. “Tired but hopeful. Last time you added extra batteries to speed it up, didn’t you, Lookout?”

“They’re attached. But there’s a ton of on and off snow that’s not going straight down or down at an angle, thank you giant portal over there, and that’s taking time to calculate and render. And every time the wind blows it moves snowflakes across the ground, which is all stuff I have to filter without looking at it. It’s dumb.”

“If I could unsee what I saw last night, I would,” I told Lookout.

“But when I get this done, you’re going to look, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Have to.”

“I have to look too! See? Same!”

Fume Hood and Crystalclear were talking off to one side. Catching up, it seemed. Past them, I saw the trio of Malfunctions with the duo of eco heroes and Sweet Justice. It looked like Caryatid was still shielding Finale from the worst of it.

“Victoriaaaaa,” Lookout complained.

“You’re in a mood, huh?” I asked.

“Because this! Because I miss my old workshop, and the living situation when I’m out of costume is so crowded and so annoying, and nobody pays much attention to me. And because this!”

She punched a button. A screen on the face of the box lit up, displaying a line drawn out by pixels, hot pink on an electric blue background. The line started normal, then doubled back, then traced a bizarre path, corkscrewing.

“That color scheme hurts my eyes to look at,” Swansong commented.