Hard to convince myself of that, but I tried. If three portals failed, what happened? Did they open so wide that each intersected with the others? What happened to something caught in the middle?

No response from Fume Hood or Tempera.

Crystalclear was well. He’d been manning one station, and his group had succeeded in finding and catching the person who had brought the tinker device there. The portal widening device.

I stood, unable to keep sitting, my phone still in my in hand. Sveta sat with Kenzie, the two of them looking at the same phone. Capricorn was off to the side, sitting against a wall. Chris typed.

A response from Weld, brief, and Sveta burst into tears. I sat down next to her to hug her. When she stood up a minute later, pacing, I remained where I was, keeping an eye on Kenzie and an eye on my phone.

There was an agitation that was taking over. I could see it in everyone’s body language.

Phones here and there beeped, people scrolled.

Only the anxiety.

It wasn’t quite true, I knew, but I imagined it all the same. That we couldn’t bring ourselves to raise the subject, but we were all doing the same things at the same time anyway. We sat and we poked at our phones, and we convinced ourselves it wasn’t true, we stabbed fingers at the phone with more vigor, as if that could somehow get through and evoke a response. We searched, told ourselves it was a congested network, and held off on sending messages while hoping for one more. The realization settled in, and it wasn’t the good kind of settling.

Each and every one of us had one name in common, someone they cared about, and for some, one of the only responsible adult figures who cared about them in turn. She had every reason to be right at the epicenter, which didn’t make it better.

Today had proven more than anything that these guys still needed her. What the hell was this team going to do without its therapist?

Torch 7.1

I gripped until my fingernails threatened to penetrate the skin, squeezing, strangling, until my hand hurt and my bullet wound hurt more. The pain in the bullet wound intensified, until the muscle started to cramp.

“Relax.”

Relaxing my grip was a thing I had to tell myself how to do, more than pushing on through the pain had been. I released the stress ball with the doofy character face on the front. Bloodshot eyes receded into sockets and the mouth closed to settle into the infuriating little grin. My handprint remained as an indent on the ball’s thin skin, slowly disappearing.

“Agh,” I made a sound. The cramping feeling in my arm wasn’t going away. It was like a charlie horse, but more intense than any I’d had.