Virtually everyone present had seen her. There were enough she had touched, that she could give them physical sensation as well. With that, she gave them waking nightmares, to assault their senses. Whether their eyes were open or closed, she made them see their friends die in the worst ways, with hallucinated shots from Ala’s cloud stripping away faces, sawing off legs, and inflicting horrific burns. She saw them scream, struggle, some lashing out or charging.

She made them see floor where there wasn’t any, and a lack of floor where there was.

“It’s not real!” Chevalier bellowed, as the first few fell. She filled his mouth with the taste of bile, and the feeling of a hand reaching up his throat to grab his tongue. Still, he managed, eyes shut, his words somehow both a mumble and a shout. “Don’t move! Don’t move! That’s an order!”

“Are you watching, Teacher?” she murmured. “Send us more soldiers. Ala, shoot them. Chort, guard us. Everyone else—!”

The order she had been planning to give fled her mind as she saw a figure scrambling up a section of floor.

He found his footing, backed up, until he was nearer the hostages. He turned his full focus to her, glowing eyes peering at her, and there was no connection, aside from a vague buzz of technology that her power reached into. She had no way into his eyes.

He was supposed to be one of hers. He had been one of the ones to get away, as Sunflower had, but his escape had been late.

The one who was slicing up the supporting walls—

The ground rumbled, the floor twisted, the house-sized turbine in the center of the room lost some of its foundation, and the fans it managed that drew in air from the outside and pumped it into ventilation shifted in kind.

The fans still turned, but the turns were torturous, metal against metal. A continuous screech.

“Rain,” she called out, her voice high and ethereal, disappearing into and emerging from the screech.

He clenched his hands.

But as much as she called his name and invited a response, Rain wasn’t her focus. When she looked at him, she imagined one of her Fallen. The Fallen he should have and could have been.

She projected that image into the eyes of Chevalier’s capes, injured, cuffed, and free. She brought Sunflower into the scene, put this image of Rain there, his hand at her throat, her legs kicking and failing to scrape the ground and find footing. She made his fingertips so tight at her throat that they dug in and drew blood, the small mechanical arm that extended from his elbow with clawed fingertips having raked the flesh of the phantom Sunflower’s arm.

She watched with satisfaction as the first cape turned against the Fallen Rain to save the teenage heroine. A punch into the air, that produced a phantom fist that traveled until it struck Rain from behind.