“They’re keeping you here while they decide what to do with you,” Rain said. “You could go to a jail, if they find room, or we could look into alternative options. If you want to get a good result, now would be a really good time to tell them something useful.”

“Anything about Love Lost or her henchpeople we didn’t catch. Anything about a greater plan,” I said.

Colt shrugged. She looked lost, miserable, and lost, in that order.

“Alternatives,” she said, nearly at the point of being inaudible, like she was just catching up.

“What?” Rain asked.

“Alternative options? If I’m not useful and there’s no room in prison, what happens? Is it like… a firing squad? You wouldn’t actually.”

“No,” Rain said. “Sending you away.”

“My parents wanted to send me away. Either I helped the family business or I went away to a strict school. They have some of those now. And I talked to my cousin who got sent there, that’s where my parents got the idea from, and she said there aren’t any regulations, so they beat you, withhold food, make you run laps. Cold water for showers only.”

“They were trying to scare you,” Swansong said. “I’ve told you this.”

“I thought about it. I’m not sure. My cousin talked about menstrual products, said the girls were never given enough. But they weren’t allowed to use too much toilet paper either. That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you think of right away, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“If anything, it might have been a real shortage,” I said. “If she attended over winter.”

“None of this really feels real?” Colt said, very quickly, her voice keyed up in an odd way, like she was trying to wake someone up. “What happened yesterday with court doesn’t even feel like it was yesterday. And the only answers I get from people are vague.”

She sounded half the age she was.

“Did the people here drug you?” Rain asked, going straight to the same possibility I’d guessed at.

Colt shook her head. “I’m being sent away, and I don’t even know what that means.”

I cleared my throat, to let others know I was about to launch into an explanation. “We send you through a portal. We give you everything you need to survive, and the ability to use your powers. At scheduled times, we check on you. But those times may get more spaced out, if you settle in, if you’re healthy and safe. That’s if they decide on that. If we decide on it. Then when your sentence is done, we pick you up again, assess you, figure out if you’re able or ready to rejoin society. Hopefully by then we have the tools to handle it.”

“I think you’d still be in the dream room,” Rain said. “I’d see you every night, and if you had an emergency, I could send help.”

“I’m getting kind of panicky,” Colt said. “What can I do?”