The love of a mother for the daughter she had lost, and the certainty that she was loved back. Christine had felt it when Elijah had been days old, before his eyes had flashed as they had.

The woman had stopped. She might have been crying now.

“Ala,” she murmured.

“Mama?”

Christine touched Ala’s face, put a hand on Ala’s shoulder, then got closer, until her front pressed against Ala’s back. She lifted Ala’s arm, her own in line with it, and she pointed Ala’s finger.

Clouds began to form, loose and dark, in a vague line that reached out across the room they were in.

The beam of darkness that speared through the middle of those clouds would punch through ten walls of this facility. It only needed to punch through one to snipe their target.

The floor trembled. Christine reached out for Ala’s shoulder for balance.

Things gave way. An attack from below, cutting the floor out from beneath them. A furrow, cutting into the center of the room, ten feet wide.

Ala fired, but the tremor in the ground distorted her aim. Christine could feel the target was alive and well, still reeling with emotion.

One of Chevalier’s capes, though handcuffed, used a power to produce a circular pulse around them, extending out a hundred feet. Her Fallen were alternately pushed and pulled closer to the furrow, the hostages further away. Chort caught Christine and Ala with one arm, his fingers digging into the ground.

Another pulse from the same cape. It threw injured and hostages across the gap, Fallen into it, or onto the other side. Only a few were secure enough or as heavy as Chevalier, and didn’t move as a consequence.

She could hear it, now. The sound like a blade being drawn from a sheath, but constant. She could heard the rumble as machinery shifted.

The attack continued, tearing out more floor.

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—!”