Our group didn’t get a chance to get to bed at a decent hour following the suicide bombing. We transferred over to the DC PRT headquarters building, and Taylor, Director Piggot, and her staff slept there. It was a nice setup, much nicer than ours was. I imagined that they had both a far larger budget and more of a focus on image. Weld and I stayed up chatting with the locals while they started their crime scene investigations. The poor guy on the third floor was the actual waitstaff working at the hotel, and the bomber had duplicated their appearance.

  We still didn’t know who they were precisely, but there were a few leading suspects. The Fallen were the primary group believed to be behind the attack, based on the fire-and-brimstone scripture and manner of attack. The Fallen were not something we really had to deal with in Brockton Bay up until now, and for that, I was deeply thankful. They were classified as a terrorist group, although this was a bigger and bolder move than what they’d been associated with or had claimed responsibility for in the past.

  Their whole thing was that they worshipped or idolized Endbringers. Which is generally what I’d consider to be outright insanity, but they all had their various reasons. Many, but not all of them, were different denominations of religious fundamentalists. They basically took existing, long-standing scriptures and religious texts, and swapped out the ‘wrathful god’ or gods for Endbringers. I could sort of see it. Many religions seemed to handle both creation stories and end-of-the-world sorts of stuff, and Endbringers certainly fit the bill. The secular members of the Fallen were a mixed lot, but they tended to have some kind of misanthropic nihilism angle. Their members included both powered and unpowered people, which added to the threat they posed.

  The Fallen often became more active following Endbringer attacks, so it naturally followed that they’d be more active following the Brockton Bay Leviathan attack, and they’d be extra incensed that one of their deity figures had been slain.

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to cry about it. If anything, the other two had a big bullseye painted on them. We’d proven they could be killed; now it was time to get in there and end their reign of terror.

  Director Piggot, her entourage, and Taylor packed up and shipped out back to the Bay a couple of hours after sunrise. Taylor was a little iffy about going back with the Director without Weld or me present, but she was also concerned about the attack and wanted to make sure she’d be able to respond to issues back home.

  Weld and I hopped a chopper flight from DC to Philly; we were going to go visit Sveta prior to the attack, and decided we’d stick to the plan. It was only going to be a couple of hours difference, and everyone’s schedules had been thrown for a loop regardless. I was rocking an extremely classy look for the flight over and visit, wearing a pair of branded basketball shorts, an ‘I heart DC PRT’ tee, and flipflops. I was also going commando, and this shirt was leaving pretty much nothing to the imagination. Whatever. The clothing I’d been wearing when I was blown up had been my overnight bag clothing. I didn’t have a spare set, and I couldn’t be bothered to go clothing shopping.

  Weld was sitting across from me in the chopper. The crew had put down a packing blanket over the seats, and he had a ratcheting cargo strap over his lap secured to the floor. It seemed like overkill, but I guess seven hundred pounds of metal randomly flying around inside, if there was turbulence or something, probably was a nightmare scenario for the pilots. Meanwhile, I’d slouched in my seat, thrown my feet across the little aisle, and crossed my ankles, lounging.

  Weld and I had been chattering back and forth on our headsets about music. It was only a 40-minute flight over to the asylum, so we had been shooting the breeze.

  “Why Metal, though?” Weld asked me.

  I shrugged lazily. “Always enjoyed more aggressive and loud music. I got exposed to it in the gym over the years, and it stuck right away. It’s more popular on the weightlifting side of the gym than the cardio side, though, for sure.”

  “You play sports?”

  I smiled a little. “Did. Was really big into them, until I triggered.”

  Weld’s expression shifted. “Past tense. Why?”

  I frowned for a moment, then sighed. “Sorry, Weld. Even if you are a Case 53, it’s sometimes easy to forget you don’t have a frame of reference. You can’t play traditional competitive sports as a Parahuman. So all of a sudden, all the things I enjoyed doing, I’m barred from doing. Left me bitter and jaded about it. I went and got a different set of hobbies. Started dabbling in video games, took up martial arts much more seriously than I had before.”

  “Hmm, yeah, I could see that. If you don’t mind me asking, what did you play?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me talking about it, not anymore. I did track and field, and then soccer. My sister did soccer with me, and she also did basketball.”

  He raised a metallic eyebrow. “Eclipse? Is she any good?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, she’s not too bad. Challenge her to some time on the court, I’m sure she’d be down. If anything, she would probably be happy to play some.”

  Weld rubbed his chin and nodded. He looked like he was stewing on something.

  “What is it?” I asked him, “I can tell something’s on your mind.”

  “Is she single?” I blinked, then burst out laughing.

  I had to wipe at my eyes to clear them when I was done. Weld was still sitting there across from me with a puzzled look on his face.

  I chuckled a few more times and cleared my throat. “Ahem. Yes, she is, at least as far as I know. We’ve not been hanging out as much the past couple of weeks because we’re on opposite schedules.”

  “And what about you?” Weld asked me with a coy grin on his face.

  Is he hitting on me right now?

  “Weld, you do know I’m not straight, right?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I heard you like girls, but that doesn’t mean you like them exclusively!”

  I held my palms up. “Okay, that’s a fair point, but I am a capital L lesbian.”

  “Still doesn’t answer the question, though!” His smile persisted through my answer.

  I rubbed my face with my palms. “I honestly don’t know the answer to that question myself. I think I’ll go with the canned response and say it’s complicated.”

  The question of my sexuality was easier to answer now than it had been months ago. Trying to answer what my relationship status was? Anxiety-inducing. I liked Amy a whole heck of a lot, but the way things had developed between us was both fast, unplanned, and a bit frightening.

  I think the scariest part of all is that I’m feeling pushed and pulled in all these different directions. I’m still crushing on Victoria, I slept with her sister, I’ve got sort of a strong bond going with another, and then there’s someone all but chasing me around.

  Why didn’t I have these problems before, when I wasn’t a literal giant monster girl?

  Time to deploy the oldest trick in the book. I looked back up at Weld. “What about you? Did you do much dating back in Boston, before you transferred?”

  He rubbed the back of his head and chuckled. “Nothing successful, but there were a few attempts made. It’s pretty difficult to find someone who will see me for me, and not a cape chaser.”

  “It can be tricky, and being,” I held my fingers up for airquotes, “‘abnormal’ in appearance certainly doesn’t help, either.” A thought occurred to me. “Have you had a chance to meet anyone with Faultline’s Crew yet?”

  Weld cocked his head. “The villain mercenary group?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “You should know by now that I don’t think in such black-and-white terms. But yes, the same.”

  “No, I haven’t. I haven’t been looking to make any waves either, just having transferred here.”

  I pursed my lips at the phrasing. “Is that why you haven’t come to the station as well?”

  The guilty look that came across his face said a lot. “Listen, Weld. I won’t lie to you and tell you that it won’t get a note put somewhere on your file, but I do think you’re being very silly and missing out by not coming over. I know you’re looking to meet people and make friends, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyplace better suited to doing that than my place.”

  Weld shifted in his seat, then nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll make visiting a priority, and not just saying that, but meaning it.”

  I smiled at him and teased, “If nothing else, we do have an awful lot of cute girls present around the clock.”

  His smile came right back out upon hearing it.

  We landed not long after. Flying over Asylum East, it was hard to take in the facility. It was large, with many buildings spread across a large campus with greenery and what looked like either a park or a botanical garden. It was a beautiful place, but I knew that looks could be very deceiving. Society had a habit of putting pretty wrappers on ugly packages. I hoped that this place wasn’t going to be like that.

  Getting checked in wasn’t difficult; we were expected, but security was as tight here as one might expect from a full PRT facility. It was… about as I expected it to be. Partially a medical facility, and partially a nice-looking prison. They were extremely strict about one thing, and that was digital devices. Even though Weld and I both had elevated security privileges as members of the Protectorate and Wards, the local security team insisted on confiscating our devices and locking them up.

  I thought it was overly paranoid, but it wasn’t like we had much of a choice. We’d flown out here to visit someone, and we weren’t about to waste the trip over a squabble over phones. We were given visitor badges and told to keep them visible at all times, and were handed over to medical staff to be guided through the facility to our destination.

  Our escort, a PRT psychologist, explained the situation and rules for our visitation here today. Sveta had been admitted as a patient here after killing more than a hundred people in the Russian Federation. She had been known as Garotte and was rescued by a member of The Guild. She didn’t have very good control over her abnormal body, described as being “vaguely octopus-looking.” Her tentacles were super durable and astonishingly strong and fast, such that she needed to be held in a special containment tank, and people visiting her inside needed to wear the equivalent of a bulky, hard armor deep-sea diving suit.

  Sveta didn’t want to harm people; she was effectively innocent, but her body was instinctively predatory and highly reactive to perceived threats, even if Sveta herself knew the person wasn’t a threat. She’d been in Asylum East for several years now and had been steadily, if slowly, improving her control over her body and improving her mental health.

  We were cleared to enter her containment area after some brief testing involving chains and hydraulic rams to ensure that we wouldn’t be at risk. I reverted over to Apex, but I did make some modifications to scale myself down enough that I’d be able to physically fit. The airlock system you had to pass through with the big, clunky diving suit was very large and accommodating, but it wasn’t that large. We were informed that we’d be under constant monitoring inside, but it’d be remote, and the things we discussed kept confidential.

  We were let in a big set of heavy double doors into a wide, spacious room that was part hospital room, part clinical setting, and part zoo exhibit. High ceilings, heavy-looking walls, cameras, and recording equipment hanging from the ceiling. Pictures and art decorated the walls; there was a big screen television on the largest of the three walls. One wall was a large picture window that took up the majority of the wall, nearly floor to ceiling and wall to wall, with the exception of a very large airlock apparatus on one side that protruded extensively into our side of the room. There was also a heavily constructed and over-engineered device a few feet to the left of the airlock that looked like one of those bank teller window shuttle things.

  The glass of the wall was blacked out, and there wasn’t any audio or sound from the other side. The psychologist explained that they would open things up for us after we were in and settled, and bring up the connection slowly so Sveta wasn’t startled by our sudden appearance.

  I set my duffel bag of treats and goodies for Sveta down on the floor and took a seat with my rear half. There weren’t any chairs that were both sturdy enough for Weld and wouldn’t pose a risk with his power, so he remained standing. The psychologist left, and we waited. A minute or two passed by, then the window started to dim back towards transparency, and the sound came up along with it, taking about thirty seconds to transition from black to clear.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  I could see where people had been going with the ‘octopus-like’ analogy, but it was vastly lacking in detail and not overly accurate, either. Sveta had a bed that was more of a nest than it was a bed, and her room was filled with what I’d describe as faux flora. The kind of stuff you’d see in an aquarium or a bird cage for pets to entertain themselves, climbing on, and to mimic their natural habitat. Everything in the room looked like it was designed for a gorilla to be able to maul, big chunks of metal bolted and welded together, where furniture was used or needed.

  No doubt in my mind this place was brute rated. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a zoo exhibit. I found the thought deeply uncomfortable. The glass seemed thinner than I might have expected, but I did note that there was a tinkertech forcefield over the inner side as well. It was only visible around the very outer edges of where the field was being emitted.

  Sveta sat in her nest-bed, a rugged laptop propped beside her and a small collection of handicap-accessible game controllers within easy reach.

  At first glance, I thought she was nothing more than a disembodied head. But looking closer, I realized she was a face suspended in a mass of restless black tendrils, writhing like a nest of electric guitar cables. They shifted and curled around her in a ceaseless, alien dance, tiny organic structures nestled between them like hidden organs.

  Her skin was pale—ghostly, almost translucent—and a stark black omega symbol marked her cheekbone, bold and deliberate where a beauty mark might have been an afterthought.

  And yet… her face was breathtaking. High cheekbones gave her profile elegance, framed by the dark suggestion of hair. Her eyebrows were sharp, her golden-brown eyes luminous, lashes long and heavy. A straight nose, just the slightest bit upturned, and lips full enough to seem decadent—all the trappings of classic beauty, worn without effort.

  It wasn’t an exaggeration to call her gorgeous. If anything, it felt like an understatement. I could only imagine what sunlight and a body of her own might have added to the picture.

  “Wow,” was all I managed to say. Extremely eloquent of me, as usual. “Sveta, it’s so nice to finally meet you. You are… truly breathtaking, girl.”

  She blinked rapidly, and I feared that I’d just given her whiplash, but a smile parted those kissable lips, revealing perfect, pearly teeth. Color flooded her cheeks as she blushed at the compliment. Her eyes wandered between the two of us.

  “So, I brought along a friend and coworker. I figured it might be nice to be able to socialize outside, just a one-on-one? This is Weld, the new leader of the Brockton Bay Wards.”

  “Hi, Morgan, Hi Weld!” Sveta’s voice was soft and quiet, almost demure, and she spoke with a pleasant-sounding Slavic accent.

  Weld smiled and waved at her. I eyeballed her enclosure. It was quite large, basically a small studio apartment entirely contained inside. I didn’t think that Weld and I would have issues fitting inside, provided we could get through the airlock without issues. I was going to have to absolutely pack my big ass inside, even scaled down as I was, but I figured I’d probably fit. Being extremely flexible as I was, certainly would help.

  “So, Sveta. I have great news for you! Both Weld and I passed the testing setup they had to be able to come see you directly! No pressure or anything, but I figure having some uhh…” I looked over at Weld. “Human…ish? Contact might be nice?”

  Weld laughed. “Sure, I think we fit the bill of ‘humanish.’”

  Sveta’s tendrils became a bit more lively after mentioning being able to actually hang out with people.

  “Wow, really? I mean, that would be very nice, but are you sure? It’s… dangerous to be around me.”

  Weld spoke up: “I’m literally entirely metal from head to toe. This isn’t just a skin covering or suit, or something.”

  Sveta gasped: “Whoa, that’s super cool!”

  He grinned and nodded. “Thanks! I think so too!”

  She looked back over at me. “Well, if you’re sure. It’s not really something I ever get to do, so I’d be willing to try. I’ve been making progress with having people in here with me, but, you know, in the suit.”

  I waggled my head up and down at her, then looked over at Weld. “Would you like to go first, or should I?”

  Weld made like he was dusting off his hands and stepped toward the airlock to examine it. There was a lot of exposed metal around the heavy-duty bulkhead doors. He stepped through the door with care. When he was inside, the control panel, which only consisted of a few status lights and a cycling button, came to life. I imagined that it was likely locked out of operation most of the time remotely. He pressed a button on the wall panel, and the door closed behind him. There were several low-pitched mechanical thumps and a subaudible sound I’d since associated with maglocks powering on or off, and then the inner door opened.

  Sveta closed her eyes and seemed to be doing a breathing exercise while this was going on, and a few times her tendrils moved to latch onto things elsewhere in the room, preparing to move, but she remained put where she was. Weld once again very carefully stepped through the door and into the room, keeping his distance for the time being at Sveta’s request.

  “Should I come in now, or do you want me to wait?” I asked her.

  Eyes still closed, she knit her brows, then told me to come through. The door cycled remotely, and I had to pack myself into nearly every square inch of the airlock. My anxiety and claustrophobia reared their ugly heads while I was stuffing myself into the airlock chamber like a mutant contortionist. The door closed behind me, and my chest and gut twisted, cramping.

  Not now. Fuck you. Fuck you for making me feel this way when someone else needs me. Look at this place she’s trapped in, with no hope. Your stupid fear of tight places isn’t going to stop you from being here and following through on your promises.

  Deep breath in. Hold it. Slow exhale. Rinse and repeat.

  The twenty or thirty seconds it took the door to cycle felt like an eternity to me, but I knew it wasn’t. I focused like hell on the important thing here, and that important thing wasn’t me, it was Sveta.

  Eyes on the prize, Rivera.

  The inner door clunked, and relief at having an escape available hit me. I moved slowly, not to startle her, unpacking myself by crawling into her space headfirst.

  When I entered, her tendrils reacted. They splayed out, making her look a bit like a sea urchin. A part of my mind recognized what was going on and responded in kind. My tentacles lifted and rose, spreading out similarly to Sveta’s, but rather than being rigid and spiky, mine were sort of waving around like seaweed.

  Sveta’s tendrils shot out and wrapped around parts of the room above, around, and behind me, and with a “Eek!” she launched herself directly at my face like she was shooting herself out of a slingshot.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Sveta couldn’t stop apologizing as she was dragged directly into my face. Several of her tendrils wrapped around my hard head, and I could feel some pressure there, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. All the rest of her tendrils wrapped around and intertwined with my tentacles, gripping and squeezing them tightly.

  I gripped and squeezed her right back. My tentacles were more pliable than hers were when they weren’t actively engaging or exerting much force, but they were nearly rock hard when they were. Her tight coils squeezed and bore down hard on mine, and mine squeezed right back, like we were having a macho handshake grip strength competition. The girl never stopped apologizing the entire time, and a few inky black drops squeezed from her tear ducts.

  I had the impression that this was essentially what was going on, a sort of sizing-up and shaking-down of two things that recognized each other as predatory organisms. I was invading her space, even though she’d consciously invited me in, and her body, as it were, was doing this dominance thing. It didn’t escape me that the way we were squeezing each other would quite literally have pulped a person. I could only imagine the things the poor girl must have seen and experienced.

  I brought my lower hands up and wiped her tears away with my thumbs, being careful with my claws around her eyes. She was silently mouthing apologies still.

  I whispered to her, as close and personal as we were, and tried to project my voice so that it would sound as if we were intimately face-to-face. “Hey, silly girl. You seem to be awfully upset over nothing.” Our tentacles were still writhing and squeezing one another, but it was more of a back-and-forth thing now, rather than a straight contest of strength. More of a wrestling match on a mat.

  “I can’t–I can’t have this happen again, I thought I was ready, but I’m not,” she whispered.

  Weld was watching the exchange while being very still and very quiet. I reached my tail claws around and patted him on the shoulder to let him know how I was feeling, then gave him a tail-claw thumbs-up. He nodded slowly.

  I ran my thumbs, which I knew would feel both slick and cool to the touch, over Sveta’s cheeks and eyebrows, giving her a sort of gentle face massage, and I cupped her face in my hands with the lightest of touches. I hoped the touch would be soothing and comforting to her. A tendril slithered down and wrapped around my forearm, and started squeezing with intense force. My blue, speckled skin deformed under the pressure, but it didn’t hurt. If anything, it felt like a nice massage on muscles that normally felt as solid as boulders.

  I knew a panic attack when I saw one. I intimately knew how ugly they could be. I hoped that my touch wasn’t unwelcome. I really couldn’t do anything about the fact that she was perched right on my head, so I made the most of what I could with what I had available.

  I did what I could to try and reassure her. “You’re not hurting me, Sveta, not even a little bit. You’re safe, and I’m right here with you. Nothing bad is happening.”

  She worried her brow at my words.

  “Did Jessica teach you breathing exercises, too?” I asked her quietly.

  She wiggled her face up and down.

  “Want to do a few with me?”

  “Okay,” she whispered back.

  “Let’s do three seconds in, hold for two, three seconds out,” I took a slow, deep breath in, voicing the sound of the inhale, waiting, then repeating for the exhale. With my weird anatomy, my chest didn’t flex much, and I certainly didn’t have a recognizable face to follow along with. So I made do with what I could do, and I mimicked the sounds and patterns of breathing.

  Some time passed, and I felt her tentacles start to relax, one by one. No longer wrestling, instead slowly shifting to exploring. Sveta opened her eyes. She was right over two of my large eyes and one of the ridges where my gemstones were heavily clustered.

  She let out a nervous little laugh and smiled.

  “Is it okay if I keep touching your face?” I asked her.

  “Mhm, yes, please. That felt very nice.”

  “I’m glad. As you can see, I don’t have a face, so I have learned to express myself more through body language and touch than I ever would have done before.”

  “I mean, you totally do, it’s just not a human face,” she said.

  “Well, sure, but I tell people that I don’t have a face, because I feel like I don’t have one, since my head is entirely rigid and static outside of my tentacles. And a lot of people get weirded out by tentacles, so I try not to use those to emote with, you know?”

  She did her wiggle-nod.

  “Do you think it might upset your body if I moved us back over to where you were originally?”

  “Um, probably not, it feels much calmer now. I’m sorry about all of that.”

  I slowly moved us over towards where her bed was, and Weld tailed along, taking a seat on the floor cross-legged, while I sat on my haunches with a girl on my head and in my hair. Once we were settled in, Sveta looked like she was concentrating for a moment, and she released my head and arm, but kept a hold of my hair, backing away so that we weren’t quite so close, and so that we could have a three-person conversation more naturally.

  We started off chatting about small talk sorts of things, such as what it was like to have a daily life with all of our various challenges. Sveta gulped down all the information we were providing her about life outside her little space, and we didn’t pad around the rough edges of what had been happening. This included the activity we had in DC, as well as the bombing late last night. She was impressed that the two of us were okay and still decided to come see her.

  I couldn’t help but tease her about that. “Well, Sveta, the life of a hero has a lot of ups and downs, and one of the downs is things like being blown up at a work function.”

  “Are you really hitting her with the ‘just another day in the life’ right now, Morgan?” Weld joked.

  I stuck my tongue out at him, then licked one of my eyes.

  “Ew, gross,” Sveta laughed, and I snickered along with her.

  I turned my head back to face her. “But yeah, it really is just a day in the life.”

  “I can only imagine…” she said.

  “Why?” I asked her, and Weld tilted his head.

  “Why what?” Sveta asked.

  “Why only imagine it when you can do it?”

  Wistfulness crossed her expression, and she glanced down at the floor. “I can’t,” she said in her soft voice. “I’m a monster, responsible for more than a hundred deaths. Jessica says I need to look toward the future, but if I’m being honest, I don’t know that I can really see it myself.”

  “People said the same thing about me, you know,” Weld said. Sveta looked over at him.

  “That I was a monster, not even a human being, not even organic. If I lost my balance and fell on someone, they’d probably die. I could easily kill someone purely by accident if I wasn’t careful.” Weld looked up from his own lap to make eye contact with Sveta. “I was able to make it, I don’t see why you couldn’t, once you get better control of your ability!”

  I turned to her. “You can damn well be a hero if you set your mind to it, Sveta. You’re super strong and very fast, and with your body, you could probably do all sorts of stuff; the sky’s the limit.” I paused a moment to think.

  “I couldn’t make any concrete promises or anything, but I could ask some people I’m friends with about what sorts of options would be available for you, if you wanted a different-looking body, too.”

  She nibbled on her lower lip. “What do you mean by different looking?”

  “I mean… just exactly that. I’m not going to tell you that one body is right or wrong; that would be absurdly hypocritical of me. I look like this because my body changed, and it isn’t human anymore, either. But I can choose to shape-shift and look human if I like. Most of the time? I don’t want to, Sveta.”

  I shifted my bulk around. “I don’t want to tell you something that isn’t true, or give you a hope for something I don’t personally know, but what I will tell you is that I have very talented tinkers in my circle who could make you some kind of mechanical body, and I also have people, myself included, who are very talented at manipulating biology and organic bodies and technologies. And if we can’t figure it out? We have resources, we have allies near and far. We’ll make whatever it is that you want a reality to the best of our ability.”

  I’d gone and made her tear up again, and she had several inky teardrops running down her cheeks once again. Her lip was quivering, and her voice trembled when she responded. “I’m just some random girl in a special hospital, I don’t–”

  “Up, up, up.” I reached out with an index finger and pressed the pad of my finger against her lips, silencing her. “No ma’am. I don’t want to hear any of that coming out of your lips. Not one bit. You take those doubts and those insecurities, and that weasly little nagging voice in the back of your head, and you tell it to go straight to hell.”

  I removed my fingertip. “But–” she started, and I shook my head and threatened her with a waggling fingertip once again.

  “No buts.”

  I looked over at Weld. He nodded in agreement, a big boyish grin plastered on his face. “You heard her, she’s also my boss, so I have to agree with her, even if I wasn’t already firmly in her camp on this one.”

  “We’re Brockton Strong. We can do whatever we want when it comes to helping people who need it, Sveta. And I’m making an executive call here and saying that I think you could use a hand. You can refuse us, of course, but I will judge you for it if you do. Because there’s no guilt and no shame in getting help from friends.”

  Tears were streaming down her face now. “We’re friends, aren’t we?” I asked her, trying to impart playfulness into my voice.

  She cried-laughed out loud, which wasn’t very, and sniffled. “Yes, I’d love to be friends with both of you, all of you.”

  I slithered my tail behind me and into the corner of the airlock, and hooked a pair of claws through the straps, bringing it in and setting it down in front of her. It was both heavy and stuffed full of stuff. I’d gone around the station, told people about the girl I’d met online with special needs, and asked everyone what, if anything, they’d like to give her. Turns out, it was enough to pack a duffel bag full.

  “This is for you. Crystal said she was going to make you up a thing or two, and well, we might have gotten a bit carried away at some point,” I laughed.

  Sveta disengaged from me. Over the past hour or two that the three of us had been chatting, her tendrils seemed to get quite intimately acquainted with my tentacles. We’d apparently built some kind of tentacle rapport; her body and my hair fairly chill with one another now. I had no idea how that worked, but fuck it, we’re monster girls, and if we spent too long thinking about the weird things in our lives, we’d never get anything at all done.

  She slid into her bed and reached out with her body, carefully unzipping the bag and opening it up. We had posters covered, damn near top to bottom, with signatures. We had some balls made from this type of extremely durable plastic used in sporting equipment, with BS logos etched into them. Stretchy wristbands in a spectrum of colors, this absurdly soft fuzzy blanket that was embroidered, and a bunch of entertainment media, ranging from books to films and video games.

  We were going through the stuff when a weird chime sound came over the speaker system.

  I looked over at Sveta, who’d frozen.

  “What’s that?” I asked her.

  “There’s a call, sorry, one moment,” She reached out to another nearby control panel mounted on the wall, one with big, durable-looking buttons and switches, and she pressed a button.

  There were a few clicks, then Director Piggot’s voice came over the sound system. “Apex, Weld, are you there?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Weld said, and I answered with a “Yes, Director.”

  “I apologize for bothering you both during your visit, but you’re needed back here immediately.”

  Weld, Sveta, and I all shared looks.

  “What’s going on, Director?” I asked her.

  “It isn’t a single issue; it’s multiple, and they’ve all happened in the past couple of hours.”

  “Oh, damn. Okay. Is there anything you can tell us at the moment? Our phones are back at the entrance checkpoint, so it’s going to be a little while before we exit the building and can call.”

  “Hrm. Yes, but you’re not to speak of this to anyone, Sveta.” Sveta, for her part, seemed surprised to be addressed in the call.

  “Oh, um, I won’t, I promise,” She said.

  “Headquarters was assaulted directly a little over one hour ago. Wards HQ was raided, and equipment and far more important things were stolen. Minor injuries, but nothing serious, other than some somewhat major structural damage.”

  Sveta’s eyes grew wide, and I turned to face Weld. He had his game face on, and I gestured for him to get ready to leave. He nodded and stood up, slowly making his way over toward the airlock.

  Piggot’s voice came back over the overhead. “Additionally, there’s been a string of corpses found in the city. Three groups of three individuals, and all were… mutilated. Serial killings, from what we can tell, and we have a strong suspicion as to who might be responsible.”

  Nine murders and nine mutilated corpses, all at the same time? Please, no. You can’t be serious right now. We haven’t even recovered from the devastation Leviathan caused.

  “Can I ask who, ma’am?” Weld asked, pausing inside the airlock chamber.

  “Patterns are consistent with the Slaughterhouse Nine. Your chopper is refueled, you’ll be flying directly back to save time. We’ll do a briefing in-flight when you’re underway.”

  Great. That’s just great. Another Class-S threat in Brockton Bay, less than a month from the previous one.

  “We’re moving, thank you, Director, and please be safe,” I said, getting up. The airlock cycled behind me, and the phone call cut off with a click.

  I stepped forward and wiped the remaining traces of the earlier tears from Sveta’s face with the backs of my hands, then pressed my index and middle fingers against the bottom of my head near my jaw before lightly touching them to Sveta’s cheek.

  “You think about what we talked about, Sveta. About practicing, about improving your control, and about how you’re going to leave here to go live whatever kind of life it is you want to live. About how you can become a hero, if that’s what you’d like to do. And I’ll talk to the people I know, and we’ll see what we can do on our side to enable that, okay?”

  She looked up at me and nodded slowly. “Please be careful when you get home? The Slaughterhouse Nine… that’s terrifying.”

  I crossed my lower arms over my chest and huffed at her. “Are you doubting my abilities to handle a gaggle of wandering loons?”

  She shook her head. “No, sorry, sorry!”

  I chuckled at her, even if I didn’t entirely feel the confidence I was projecting. “Stop apologizing, Sveta, start dreaming, and make plans for who you want to be.”

  A smile crossed her stunning face, and she nodded a single time.

  That was good enough for me.