Armstrong was the kind of guy who had that effect on people. He’d leaped from a position at the university to a position of being consultant to the early Boston PRT, then full-time staff, and ultimately director. He was responsible for rescuing Weld after Weld had been dropped off, an amnesiac with a head and part of a chest, left in a scrapyard. He’d treated Weld as the closest thing to family. He’d looked after the original Ashley, reaching out and trying to coax the supervillain into a position with the PRT. When Sveta had started dating Weld, he’d accepted her as readily as he’d accepted Weld, even going so far as to fund her prosthetic body.

He was someone who cared. Who looked for answers.

It hardly needed to be said, but Kenzie’s ‘guesses’ about timeline and Armstrong coming weren’t guesses. We’d been thinking about plans, about who we wanted to come and pick us up, and Ashley had suggested we ask Darlene and Candy to ask Armstrong to come for Sveta.

I had little doubt Ashley had wanted to see him too, but we had collectively glossed over that detail.

Once he’d caught up on the situation, Armstrong had reached out to the mayor Jeanne Wynn.

“Knowing it could be soon makes the waiting harder,” Sveta said. “Especially with everything else going on.”

“Yeah.”

“But I have you for company for the next five minutes,” she said.

“Makes me think of the hospital. A lot of moments where I wanted to make the most of our limited time together, but not knowing what to say.”

“We hung out so much we ran out of things to say. But having you around is nice, even if we aren’t talking every second.”

“Do you remember the drama when they rolled out that whole patient chat thing?” I asked.

“They regretted that about five minutes after turning it on,” Sveta said, smiling. “I think about half of the technical downtimes were to give hospital staff a chance to recover.”

“They eventually outsourced the management,” I said. “You were gone by then.”

The patient chat had been voice chat and instant messages for patients who couldn’t leave their rooms but who had access to computers or phones. There was more limited access for people like Sveta and I, who had needed more specialized interfaces for using keyboards. Pullable ball-tipped knobs for Sveta with a spaced out key arrangement, while I’d had the knobs unscrewed and removed, just using the spaced out keys.

Thinking about the events, schedule, and timeline reminded me that I hadn’t actually been in the hospital with Sveta for all that long. She’d left not all that long after I’d arrived.

“Did we ever look up what happened to Earl? Buzzer?” Sveta asked. “I know he was one of the real personalities in the patient chat. He graduated out, didn’t he?”