Amy touched the side of Victoria’s face. Eye damage from too many bright lights or flares. Victoria didn’t have Carol’s resistance to flashes. The eye was a complex machine. Amy fixed it.

Then the other arm. A bullet wound in the bicep. Healed over, but the muscle would never be as strong as it had once been. And the most recent wound, the skinning of the back of Victoria’s hand. The degloving of two fingers. The skin wouldn’t heal. Too much abuse, too recently.

Amy unwrapped the bandage as she regrew skin. She pulled stitches free, and took the skin that was being pushed free by the new growth. She paused, noting the missing fingernail, and picked through sheets for a few seconds, trying to find where it had fallen.

Didn’t matter. If Amy couldn’t find it, Victoria wouldn’t either.

What mattered was that lying there, sedated, Victoria seemed to rest just a little bit easier.

Amy gave Victoria love again. She reached for the brain and she took down walls with more care than she had the last time.

She stared down at Victoria’s face, burning it into memory. She wanted to think it looked just a bit more at ease than it had been when the pain and the tension had been lifted, and the body wasn’t working so hard on the little things. That the micro-adjustments in Victoria’s face were because a girl with love in her heart slept better than one without.

Leaning over, hesitating for one second, she bent down, and kissed Victoria on the lips. Letting go of Victoria’s arm, she made the kiss the single point of contact, through which she kissed Victoria’s whole being.

She lay down on the cot, her face inches from Victoria’s, her hand at the side of Victoria’s face.

If she took too long, she knew, Victoria would wonder and suspect.

So she gave herself fifty-nine seconds like this. Shy of a minute, because a minute felt like a milestone, and a milestone felt like an excuse to take more seconds, a second minute.

Her hand found Victoria’s arm, and as she sat up, pulled away, her fingers traced a line from elbow to fingertip. And in the course of that journey, she restored Victoria’s internal barriers and grudges, she let the artificial healing dissolve, and the wounds return. The wound at Victoria’s hand slurped up the stitches, which swam through skin like they might through water, finding their place.

“See?” Amy asked, her voice a whisper. “I’m in control.”

A flicker of Hunter passed through her mind’s eye. The manic look in the child’s eye.