My hand was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop. I was glad for the bandage on the other.

We passed into the showers, which smelled like showers in any gym, physio center, or PRT Wards building I’d been in, except for maybe the scent of a different flavor of soap.

They locked the door behind them, leaving me to find my way myself, my arm feeling bruised where I’d been manhandled.

I found my team in the same hallway they’d been in before.

“She’s back,” Rain said, for the benefit of others without the angle or line of sight to see.

“Sveta?” Kenzie asked.

“Victoria,” Rain said, while everyone got to their feet.

“Hey,” Vista said. She hurried to my side, hands steadying me. “You’re as white as a sheet. The surgery—”

I shook my head. I counted heads. Tristan, Rain, Kenzie, Ashley, Vista. “Where are Sveta and Theo?”

“She got dragged off when you passed out,” Tristan said. “Marquis said they gave you a drug that knocked you out—”

“Against my will and express permission,” I said, my voice tight.

“That would explain why Sveta flipped. We were wondering if it was her new body having a weird stress response or if something else happened. She fought guards to try to get to you,” Tristan said. “She almost used her power. We told her to calm down, that we couldn’t afford to risk everything. She listened.”

“Where is she?” I asked. “I need her.”

Tristan’s voice was calm, resassuring, “In a special cell. We’ve been visiting but they only let one person visit and only for a short while. Theo’s with her now. The idea is they’re supposed to sit in those cells, then they get dragged off during the next round of punishments, but that punishment doesn’t count against their sentence.”

“What?” I asked, alarmed.

“It’s okay,” Vista said. “Citrine’s getting us out. We leave before any punishments happen.”

“We don’t leave without her.”

“I know. We know,” Tristan said.

My emotions felt so messy. As bound-up and constrained as they’d been in the room they felt like a tangled mess of wires inside of me now, impossible to untangle, choking.

“Why do you need her?” Tristan asked. “What happened?”

In my mind, I’d thought of my friend because I could trust her, but I did trust the team, if only a slight fraction less.

“Master–stranger protocols,” I said.

Our time with Goddess had hammered in that particular lesson. Everyone got it.

“What happened?” Ashley asked.

“Amy,” Vista guessed. I flinched, looking away.

“Fuck,” Tristan said, with some emphasis and at least two syllables. “Marquis said she left, he’s never been anything but straight with us, we were focused on Sveta because she was in more immediate danger and you were just getting surgery, we looked in once or twice—”

I shook my head.