“Yeah,” Sveta said. “Well put. Tattletale dialed up the assholishness to one hundred after the dreams.”

“She calmed down. Helped me help you with Amy.”

“Mm.”

“Want to, uh, fly?” I asked. “Visit the hill the others wanted to set up at?”

Sveta pulled her arm apart, wrapping tendrils around my shoulder and stomach. I put my arm around her upper body.

Flew.

Away from the site of old battles, from snow and onlookers.

Over to the stables. I could recognize their general shape and the fenced in areas meant for the horses. The hill wasn’t far from there. Large enough to straddle the definition of hill and mountain.

I found a tree to settle on, setting down on the sturdiest branches at the top. It bent a little under our combined weight, so I floated a bit to reduce that burden.

Titan Eve was in the distance, gas billowing off and around her with an intensity that didn’t match the wind. Head bowed, streams of gas instead of hair. Gas speared up, solidifying, and became a spike. She broke it off, then stabbed it into the earth, where it joined another two.

What was the range on that? What happened if she threw it this far, to us? Did it become suffocating clouds?

Sveta said, “After we were all sent our separate ways, I went back home. Dug open my boxes of things I’d packed for evacuation. I made a mess of my packing system, but I found my dream journals. I spent a while going over it. Seeing what I could piece together. There were some pictures of my artwork. Stuff I’d draw after dreaming.”

“Any glimmers? Insights?” I asked, carefully.

“I thought… I was stolen away from a life where I was happy. I realize now I wasn’t happy. But…”

She floundered.

“It was still a loss,” I said.

“It was. But I can’t reconcile it in my head, like this. If I’d never fallen and been hurt, if I hadn’t been sliced to ribbons, if they hadn’t taken me away… taken Nadia… I don’t think I would have been able to bear living there. Not with, um… sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.”

“…A body I hated even before I was Case Fifty-Three. I haven’t even fully formed a lot of these sentences as thoughts in my head, it’s hard to get it out in a way that makes sense.”

I gave her a squeeze with one arm. “You don’t have to make sense. If you want to vent incoherently, I’ll still do my best to listen.”

“Goo gobol goo hur ga guk,” Sveta said, dead serious, maintaining eye contact with me.

I smiled.

“I thought for sure that would get a laugh out of you,” she said. “Now I feel dumb.”

“Don’t. It would take a lot to get me to really laugh right now, while…”