And then the practice with pens and paintbrushes. The focus on manual control. Crude, scribbled images, where pen was so often dragged wildly across the page mid-stroke. Slow, gradual improvement. A rough outline of her old room. A staff member, viewed from the back through the glass wall of her room, as he cleaned up blood from the floor. That had been after Ernesto had hurt himself. Ernesto hadn’t had powers, just the bad luck to have a kid who developed them and accidentally used them on his dad before he learned control. Or her dad, Sveta didn’t remember. Ernesto had always sung to her from across the hall.

On the next page, one of her first attempts at a portrait, to try and draw Ernesto as she’d remembered him.

On the page after, emboldened by her efforts with Ernesto, she’d drawn Weld, even attempting to paint within the inked out lines.

She stared down at it for a long time.

A soft knock at the door disturbed her thoughts.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and it was Mrs. Yamada who came in. Sveta felt her heart leap and already jilted emotions whirl around inside her organs and head.

“I saw the light on under the door. I was going to go upstairs and work on things until you woke up, if you were asleep. But this doesn’t look like a very comfortable room.”

“It’s what I wanted,” Sveta answered, raising herself up. Threads of herself worked with the prosthetic arms to hug the open portfolio against her chest. She had the portfolio with her, some grooming things like a brush for her hair and a scrubber to get the waxy shedding off her tendrils, and a bunch of clothes she’d removed from her bag and piled around it to try to make a pillow.

Jessica had a pillow, she noticed.

“Sorry, to make you worry. I’m alright. I’ve dealt with worse.”

“I’d like to see you moving toward better. Steadily, carefully.”

Oh.

“Sorry,” Sveta said, instinctively. She hated when she did that. “I didn’t think you were checking in on us anymore. Weren’t you delegating? We were going to see someone else.”

“Victoria contacted me,” Jessica said. “It seemed important for me to come. She was going to bring you things, but she gave them to me instead.”

“A pillow.”

“Yours, apparently.”

From Weld’s. How many times had Sveta brought up the subject of pillows, in her nattering to Victoria? How she was always worried she’d destroy someone’s pillow or make it lumpy, how it was all she really needed?

Victoria had been thinking about her.

She reached out with tendrils, and she saw the alarm cross Jessica’s face.

“Sorry! Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m impressed you’ve come so far,” Jessica said. She relinquished the pillow.