“I’m sorry,” Karen mumbled quietly into the pillow. It wasn’t really a proper apology, in that there was no way Carmen was going to hear it; it kind of felt like one, though, and for the time being that was going to have to be enough.

The room smelled of sweat and passion; her breathing was only just returning to normal. Carmen’s was still as perfectly regulated as when she was triggered, despite all the activity Karen had ordered her into.

Had she only imagined the other woman’s attraction to her?

Karen lay there quietly, wishing that guilt didn’t take away from the pleasure she’d just experienced.

Still - it might be unfounded guilt all the same. Carmen had given so many hints…

She reached out a hand and snaked it around the other woman, hugging her close across her abs, and burrowed even further into her pillow. Men always seemed to have less trouble dismissing any guilt they might feel about sex, she thought; they also were much more likely to doze off immediately afterward. Maybe if she caught a quick nap things would look better when she woke up…

It was an odd hypothesis but perhaps one worth testing. From that perspective it was a shame that her phone went off almost immediately she tried to sleep.

A moment of total dread claimed her, a chill down her spine and a fear of the future itself, before she recognised the ringtone and realised it wasn’t the burner phone her handler had provided her.

She scrambled out of bed nude and over to her phone.

“Wainwright,” she said in greeting, her heart pounding, and was relieved to hear Colby’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Are you safe?” he asked.

“So far as I know.” Karen straightened all the way up. Her free hand brushed a stray fall of blonde hair back behind her ear as she glanced uncertainly at the windows, then the doorway to her room. “What do you need?”

“We lost HQ,” Colby said, and Karen’s perspective on the call changed. Suddenly just having his voice on the other end of the line didn’t help; he wasn’t a connection to an organisation working to help anymore.

Until HQ could be re-established, there wasn’t an organisation. “Where do you need me?”

“Karen, we talked about this-”

“Who else do you have, sir?” She never liked overriding Colby. Hierarchy was something she had a surprising amount of time for.

(Maybe that was why she’d been willing to take advantage of Carmen, she thought, as she looked over her shoulder. The supervillain-turned-maidslut seemed to be stirring slowly now, returning to wakefulness.)

“Estevez,” Colby said. After a pause he added. “Maybe Burrows. Technically.”

“With respect, sir, there’s no point us trying to keep potential assets off the board when we’ve got that few to start with,” Karen retorted. “I’m here. I’m maybe half-compromised, but…”

She paused. Still looking at Carmen, she cleared her throat. “Hold on.”

She raised a finger and beckoned her houseguest over. “I want to put my agent on the line,” she told Colby. “I was prepared to accept you were right until it came down to this. We don’t have better options.”

“What are you saying, Karen?”

“I’m saying if you can’t use me, at least use my asset.” She raised her voice, eyes locked steadily on Carmen’s. “Enmascarada, superslut,” she directed. She had to make sure that Colby heard everything, not just Carmen. If he couldn’t trust the villainess, what was the point?

She watched Carmen’s posture shift. Her eyes remained unfocused, her gaze abstracted, but her back straightened. Her feet came close together, though one leg was bent and primed, ready to lunge forward into action. Carmen’s face somehow took on a new dangerous edge while remaining expressionless, a strange trick that Karen wasn’t entirely certain wasn’t just her own perception, knowing the trigger had changed.

Lastly, the supervillainess’ arms slipped behind her back. She could see her hands clasp around the opposite elbows behind her back. The overall change made her look like a completely different woman; the sheer power and strength at Karen’s control wasn’t just something she knew about. Suddenly it was obvious; couldn’t be overlooked.

“Carmen, you need to go to Agent Colby,” she directed. “When I hand you the phone he’ll tell you where to go. You’ll go there and obey him, not me. Understand? You won’t let yourself anywhere near me until Colby says it’s clear.”

Carmen’s eyes never left Karen’s. Despite the glassiness in them, Karen had a sudden sense of being studied, of conflicting emotions.

But of course, under the aftereffects of the programming helmet, the woman couldn’t say anything she wasn’t prompted to. The best she could do was nod, in (grudging, Karen was suddenly sure) answer to the demand that she understood.

“I haven’t had a chance to prime her with anything else, Colby,” she said, talking fast, “so you know she’s going to be useful. She’s bulletproof. She can fly. She’s a powerhouse. And we know it’s Pytki-related now, which means any mind control is-”

The word stuck in her throat. Karen was suddenly choking, gasping for air. She’d been about to give her handler’s true identity - the one that gave her headaches even to think about now she had the information to deduce it - and just trying to say it aloud was such a struggle that she felt like there was a physical blockage in her throat. Her hand went to her neck as her mouth gaped open uselessly.

Carmen surged forward, getting an arm around her and keeping her from collapsing. She took the phone in her other hand. “Agent Wainwright is having difficulties,” she reported. The arm that was supporting Karen shifted position and the supervillain flexed, her fist driving in under Karen’s wrist.

With a startled cough, air reached Karen’s lungs, whatever injury she’d done herself under her handler’s post-hypnotic conditioning righted by decisive action by the other.

“Yes,” Carmen said softly into the phone. “No. I have attended to it.” There was a pause. “I understand I am to obey you,” she told Colby, and it was clearly a reminder.

Held loosely against the powerhouse’s oh-so-soft, oh-so-tempting nude body, Karen gazed up at her and saw her with new eyes. The helmet conditioning she’d received was clearly already starting to deteriorate against her willpower, or she wouldn’t be able to push this far even in an emergency.

The fact she was trying to take care of Karen and to continue her mission…

“Understood,” Carmen said, and Karen had no idea what it related to. “I don’t know it, but I’ll find it.”

Karen felt exhausted. Her head was killing her again - she’d pushed her brain too far against her handler’s constraints. But she had more that needed to be done. “Tell Colby Pytki’s going to have to use gas,” she said. “Fantasio can’t adjust someone’s head without gas. In the open air…”

She wasn’t sure when she’d been gassed herself, but she knew she must have been. She noted though that she’d successfully named Fantasio; speaking about him in generalities rather than trying to name him as her handler bypassed the limits Fantasio had given her.

Thank God.

“Agent Wainwright informs me Pytki would have to use gas,” Carmen relayed. “Yes. I’m leaving now.”

She hung up the phone but didn’t let go of Karen. Her features, already seeming expressionless, smoothed out further into an unreadable mask. Karen suddenly had the clear impression of Carmen letting herself go, dropping herself back fully into the superslut programming.

The villainess lifted Karen effortlessly with the one arm that had supported her and walked back into the bedroom. Karen nestled in against her, instinctively cuddling in close, seeking a sense of safety after the panic and fear her choking attack had given her.

Carmen set Karen back down on the bed, gently, and left the room.

Karen lay back restlessly, closed her eyes, and cursed how helpless she felt at a time when her agency - and her friends and colleagues - most needed her.

There had to be something she could do…

*

After meeting up with Carmen, Colby and Estevez were flown in toward the house; the best way to avoid being seen on approach is almost always travel by superhuman, but it’s a luxury C.A.L.I.B.R.E. could rarely count on.

They stood together at the treeline, watching quietly. Estevez was the first one to notice Cooper, perched on the roof, examining the big device anchored to the chimney.

“What is that?”

“No clue,” Colby answered. “It’s not going to be good, though.”

“Looks like kind of a weak spot,” Estevez grumbled. “Should we smash it?”

“Probably. But we need to be sure it’s not reparable.”

“We’ve got a meta,” Estevez pointed out, jerking a thumb at the glassy-eyed Carmen. “She can smash the thing to fuck-”

But he didn’t get any further, because Chen suddenly surged out of nowhere at him, foot already scything around in an absolutely brutal spinning kick.

Estevez barely got an arm up in time. He didn’t so much block the kick as take some of the impact out of it. Pain shot up and down his forearm.

Estevez was no slouch in his unarmed training himself. Rather than dwell on the pain, he threw a palm strike with his other arm, short-range, inside her defences. He caught her on the sternum, the impact driving her back a step.

Watching, Colby flinched - because Chen hadn’t. He’d known she was compromised - had felt her brainwashed wrath in a surprise attack - but it was seeing her programming assert itself over the impact that really brought it home. He knew Estevez’ hit would have hurt, had to have - but none of it was shown in her face.

He drew his handgun. Chen must have caught sight of him in her peripheral vision; she dropped into a legsweep, and while Estevez hopped nimbly over her, Chen rolled to the and struck out. The other agent was sent stumbling backward and caught Colby by surprise.

Chen was already moving, acting with a single-minded focus only capable when mental manipulation had cut out anything but your sense of purpose. His handgun was batted aside and Chen pressed her advantage; two quick roundhouse kicks, stepping forward and pirouetting with each, and an elbow to the back of Estevez’ head.

Colby watched him stumble forward, down to one knee. He wanted to rescue his colleague, but knew Chen would be ready with a counterstrike; had probably not delivered a knockout blow in order to bait him in. He didn’t have the combat experience to handle this.

“Go!” he shouted. “Take that thing out!”

There might be more to Pytki’s plan. There might very well be - but if there was, there was no way Colby could stop it.

So he had to hope.

Chen registered what he’d said at about the same speed Carmen did. She gave up whatever thought she’d had of a trap, pivoting on her foot smoothly and lightning-fast. She was in the air with a flying kick as Carmen rose off the ground. Her trajectory was pitched perfectly; there was a lot of power behind the kick, and it caught Carmen directly in the jaw.

The supervillainess just blew through the kick as if it hadn’t happened; her own momentum as she started to fly sent Chen spiralling off and only her own astonishing dexterity allowed her to land without crashing or sprawling. Instead she hit the ground at a kneeling crouch, one hand down to stabilise herself.

The growl she let out was full of echoing frustration - no, not frustration. Anguish. Hearing it, Colby stopped dead and stared.

This was what mind control could do to its victims. Turn them against their friends, make them shrug off their own pain in favour of their purpose, and break into agony when confronted with failure.

He shuddered.

In the time it took Colby to get himself back under control and remind himself where his handgun had fallen, two things happened.

There was an ear-splitting crack of thunder as Carmen, still accelerating, smashed through the device and the chimney simultaneously. And Estevez jumped onto Chen’s back.

She promptly grabbed him by the arm, flipping him forward. Worked up in fury and despair, she hit him five times before he even hit the ground.

Colby had started moving for his gun, but not in time; Chen threw herself to the side, into a roll, and came up in a crouch between him and his weapon.

Over her shoulder, Colby saw Bennet hustling out from the house, topless, carrying what he vaguely recognised as the helmet from Karen’s report on the Rossum incident.

Wainwright had been wrong. There wasn’t just one mind control method here. There was a hoard of them. Which also meant there was a lot more work to do clearing C.A.L.I.B.R.E. out - if they even survived the war…

Chen’s face was an impassive mask, but her eyes burned with a genuine hatred Colby couldn’t match. She was the better combatant in any case; there wasn’t much he could do to turn this around, not with Estevez out of it - and the way she’d dealt with him, he didn’t expect Estevez to come round any time soon.

This was probably it.

There was the sudden *crack-swish* of a dart gun and Chen staggered, hand going to her neck where a dart had appeared. She tugged it out and tossed it away but her movement was already losing some of its grace.

Colby took a step back, anticipating one last frenzied attack - and he was right; he blocked the first punch, took a knee to the ribs that nearly downed him on its own - maybe something was broken - deflected a second punch that didn’t have half the impact of the first, and watched Chen’s eyes roll back in her head as the drug took full effect. She collapsed forward into his arms.

He looked up to Bennet, expecting her to falter and hesitate now it was her against a trained field agent. Bennet’s pace didn’t alter at all; she had her orders and she was following them.

Colby realised he should have spotted this wasn’t all Fantasio’s work earlier. He didn’t produce this kind of zealotry. His craft was making people believe subtly wrong things and locking behavioural rules in place.

How long must Pytki have been collecting other control methods?

Carmen came back flying low and fast. Colby barely had time to notice her coming in before she’d clipped Bennet’s leg out from under her, sending the enslaved woman tumbling ass over teakettle. The helmet scattered away and Colby abandoned his gun, sprinting to grab it.

By this time Cooper was on her way over as well, leaping after having fallen awkwardly from the chimney. She didn’t get much further, though - another dart caught her, too.

With a moment of actual peace on the battlefield and the control helmet in his hands, Colby actually felt safe enough to look around the battlefield.

Emerging from the treeline, clutching a dart gun and walking shakily, was Deputy Director Burrows. Her eyes were scrunched up and Colby could already tell it wasn’t squinting against the light, it was a reaction to the pain of the headache.

“Good work, ma’am,” he said deferentially.

“Don’t give me that,” she retorted. “Get anyone left in that house under that helmet or gagged. Now!” She sagged against a tree. “I’m… yeah. I’m just going to wait here.” She left the reasoning unspoken, but shot a nervous glance at the house. Colby knew well enough how to interpret that: out here where I’m safe from being compromised.

He snapped a salute and looked to Carmen. “You heard her,” he said. “Let’s go.”

*

Karen was pretty sure the amount of painkillers she’d taken to keep herself going, by this point, was well above what it should be; her headache seemed to be as bad as ever all the same.

It would have been so much easier to just lie in bed where Carmen had left her and try to tell herself that sending Carmen off to help was enough of a contribution. It would have been much less painful. And there would have been a lot less time spent fearing that what she was trying wouldn’t work. There was just one problem with the idea.

She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead she’d crawled out of bed and stumbled along the corridor until she stood below the attic hatch. Her vision bleary, it had taken her some time to find the hatch chain and pull it down, and climbing the rickety ladder thus unveiled hadn’t been easy either.

It was easier now she was in there; there was less light, so it hurt her eyes less. The headache was less of a problem. But that wasn’t why she was up there; she’d come up to look for a compact grey briefcase that she kept tucked away at the bottom of her box of Halloween decorations.

Sitting cross-legged in the attic, she set the briefcase on her lap and entered the combination. Inside was a messy pile of baggies, each with a different burner phone switched off and waiting for the right day.

She started rummaging through the baggies. This was her collection; it was something C.A.L.I.B.R.E. didn’t know about. Something that would certainly have put her in disciplinary if they’d found out about it. The extent of her collection might have meant psychological re-evaluation as well as disciplinary.

Each one of these burners represented a field agent at a different organisation where Karen had built a relationship during contact. Some had come from shared missions where their groups co-operated. Others had come out of decisions in the field, where conflicting missions had created complex scenarios.

She set aside the S.H.A.D.O.W. and GRU phones quickly, narrowing things down to US-based government agencies.

And then she started calling.

The breakthrough had come earlier, when she’d realised she could name Fantasio so long as she wasn’t talking about her own compromised, semi-sleeper-agent status. It wasn’t until after Carmen had left and she stopped worrying about being made to use her as a weapon that she found herself in a state to think ahead again.

She started calling all her old friends. April Powers, the NSA agent she’d worked with in Britain. Jennifer Derevko, daughter of KGB sleeper agents who’d resisted her old trigger phrase after joining the FBI. Monica Blaise, star CIA operative. And as a piece de resistance, Abby Campbell, now one of the CIA’s four Deputy Directors.

The hope was simple. The agencies were always finely balanced against each other. Even at the best and friendliest of times, there was a perception in any given agency that it could handle everyone else’s patch better, too. Sometimes they’d even tried, covertly. But individual agents…

…well, two agents in the field had a lot more in common with one another than either of them did with their bosses.

Karen was hoping that this connection might be enough to change the course of the Shadow War.

“…it’s Pytki,” she told Blaise. “Well, his sister. And-”

“Fantasio,” Blaise replied. “With Pytki it’s always Fantasio.” She sighed heavily. “Fucking asshole.”

“You know him, then?”

“I spent three weeks sucking his cock near the start of my career,” Blaise told her. “Not part of his plans or anything. Not to infiltrate the CIA. Just because the last CIA agent he’d run into tipped the Ascension off on his plan and he got taken in in front of cameras, so the CIA needed humiliating. Obviously.”

“And he chose you.”

“Chose nothing. I was just the first idiot unlucky enough to be in his path.”

Karen could hear the pain in her voice. She made a quiet, sympathetic noise and waited for the woman to finish remembering.

“Can you prove it?” Blaise asked in the end.

“I can if we’re given the time,” Karen said. “But that’s kind of at a premium right now.”

Blaise gave a sharp laugh. “I’ll just bet it is. I know one of our teams went in earlier.”

“I’m actually surprised you weren’t on the team.”

“I refused.”

There was another moment of silence, another few words going unspoken. Karen realised that Blaise wasn’t willing to say it had been due to their understanding, but also that it had been.

“I’m calling Deputy Director Campbell next,” she told her. “Can you hold off the war for a while?”

“You’re going to owe me plenty,” Blaise said. “And so is your organisation.”

“I’m sure Zorn will be happy to pay up,” Karen told her. And she was pretty confident he would, once he had do; Director Zorn understood how the game was played.

She wasn’t sure where he was during this whole crisis, but usually with Zorn that meant he’d gone deep cover somewhere and was busy dealing with some other problem. If Burrows ever ascended to the top seat she’d probably behave a lot more like an actual director.

“Stay out of the firing line, Karen,” Blaise said, and then she’d hung up. Karen powered that burner back down, then set it aside. She said a silent prayer that Blaise was on the level, and moved on to her next call.

*

Fantasio was trying to get away via the front door as the pair approached the house. Colby actually smiled at that. “Fetch him and hold him,” he told Carmen, and she was past him and accelerating, a blast of air nearly staggering him in the aftermath of her passage.

It was easier if he thought of her as a voice-activated weapon, he’d found. After the struggle with Chen nearly blocked them entirely, he’d realised that not using her was creating problems of its own; putting her power to use was the best way to be safe and sure here. If she was compromised they were already screwed after all.

But if he treated Carmen basically the way he’d treated that half-sentient android weapon in Alaska the other year, he didn’t feel so bad about ordering her around. It’d probably come back to be something he dwelled on uncomfortably in future. That was fine. Colby had a bunch of those, and thankfully Dr Hendricks was pretty good at helping get him to accept them over time.

By now Carmen was returning, Fantasio pinned against her by one powerful arm. She’d literally tucked the man under her arm and was carrying him back, going slower on the way back.

Colby stuck the helmet onto his head and ran it for thirty seconds.

“There,” he said. “That’s him out of action for a while. Drop him off with Burrows; she’s got Estevez’ zip ties.”

“I obey,” Carmen said. Colby was trying not to think about the fact she only said that when not in a hurry. It made it sound optional, and anything that was a choice made her less of a weapon.

There was always something weirdly abrupt when a job pivoted to clean-up. He knew he should expect that, but he never did.

He shouldn’t be thinking of this job as clean-up, either, he realised. Pytki was still out there. In there, rather; in the house they hadn’t entered yet.

She might still have surprises for him. On the other hand, this was her first attempt; who knew if she had anything worth counting as a backup plan?

Certainly Chen, acting as her minion, had just panicked when C.A.L.I.B.R.E. got closer than expected. That didn’t exactly feel like good strategy work had been done.

All the same, he’d wait to have Carmen back before he went in the front door.

*

She’d never realised how many women Fantasio had targeted. As she worked her way through the collection of phones, it was getting to be crazy how few of them hadn’t had some run-in with him. She’d thought of him as an equal opportunity controller, but it certainly looked like he had an issue with women who stood in his way.

It was beginning to feel like that might be the thing that saved C.A.L.I.B.R.E. if anything could. These people might be suspicious of her motives; they might fear what could happen if the shadow war didn’t stop all at once, and they might see an opportunity to permanently expand their agency’s portfolio.

But none of them were willing to let Fantasio win.

She finished off the last of her calls. There was nothing else she could do until Fantasio was out of the picture, when she should be safe. Her head was killing her - Karen had pushed her rules to the limit, repeatedly, in order to properly share her story and put the word out.

She lay back on the hard wood of the attic floor and closed her eyes, promising herself she’d just lie down for long enough to get her head together and recover.

Besides, her headache was far too strong for her to sleep.

*

Carmen pushed her hands into the wall, gripped it, and brought her arms out to the side. Even saying she was pulling would be an overstatement; her powerhouse body tore through the drywall like it was paper.

Inside the room thus exposed was Madame Pytki, and she had a gun; there was a sudden series of bright flashes accompanied by loud, echoing booms. All six shots went into Carmen at almost point blank, her skin rippling as the bullets bounced, her chest jiggling and bouncing from the impact.

She reached out and her hand closed around the barrel and cylinder of the revolver, which she plucked from the old woman’s hand. Madame Pytki wasn’t cowering, but she was hunched in on herself in a way which might have looked like cowering if she hadn’t been so proud, so defiant.

Carmen thought idly that she seemed to notice more while in one of her controlled ‘slut’ modes than she did when thinking for herself. She’d never have been able to take in so much about Pytki’s activity when she was thinking about where her next steps might take her.

She stood aside, still holding the gun, her eyes still glassy, and she watched Colby step by her and make his way into the room.

Madame Pytki straightened up. “CIA?”

He shook his head, lips quirking in amusement. “C.A.L.I.B.R.E., I’m afraid.”

She spat in his face. Carmen watched impassively, not wanting or willing to intervene unless told to. This wasn’t her fight, she thought; it was Karen’s, really, but Carmen couldn’t see her as her Mistress’ proxy in the fight. Her colleague seemed like a better match.

“Now, now,” Colby said quietly. “I was hoping we could do this with dignity.”

“Hah! As if you would know dignity if you saw it.” There was a bitterness to the woman’s tone that chilled Carmen’s spine.

“Mm.” Colby made almost no noise at all in acknowledgement; just enough to say he’d heard her and to justify moving on. “We knew quite a bit about your brother, ma’am,” he said. “Almost nothing about you. You seem to have been… quite uninterested in his career.”

Pytki bristled. “He was worth ten of you,” she snapped. “More, perhaps.”

Colby retained his amused air. If he was angry or insulted at all, Carmen couldn’t tell. “As a matter of fact, your name doesn’t show up on any paperwork connected with his old organisation. It doesn’t show up for the US at all. So I wonder - have you been staying under the radar the whole time, or is something else going on?”

“While he was still active, I wasn’t needed.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Colby said it as a challenge. Watching Pytki hesitate for a moment, a fragment of doubt crossing her expression, Carmen felt almost embarrassed, a helpless bystander watching a confrontation she wasn’t really part of.

“I - I suppose, in hindsight, we should have acted together.”

“Mm-hmm. Sure.” Colby wasn’t even looking at her, his eyes were on the helmet he was holding. He was relying on Carmen to intercept any violence, making sure Pytki didn’t have any clues from his expression. He was trying something, Carmen was sure. She just didn’t quite see what. “You never even came out here, I understand. What were you doing instead?”

“I had a farm to look after.” The pride in her voice was somehow almost gone; the little woman who projected so much power she seemed tall was no longer the largest person in the room. She was turning in, nervous, scared, and while she couldn’t say why, Carmen didn’t like to see it.

“Big farm?”

Pytki seemed to relax a little. “Yes.”

“Plenty of farmhands?”

“Oh, yes.”

“You trust them?”

“Absolutely.”

“They’re doing a bang-up job for you right now?”

Pytki had started to relax. Here she hesitated. “What is bang-up?”

“Oh, let’s just say good. They’re doing good?”

“I’m sure.” And she did look sure again, confident, in a way she hadn’t been before Colby abruptly changed the tack of his questioning.

“So you can leave them be and your farm is fine. Why not come out here and help your brother?”

As Enmascarada Roja, Carmen had done a great many things she would sometimes feel guilty about. She’d seen firsthand the way faces could crumple and split open in grief. As Pytki shrank even further in on herself, Carmen watched that again - and finally placed why this made her uncomfortable.

Her reactions to this point, the strange tilt of her head as Colby pressed his questions, the slight squint she’d developed - these were all things Carmen had kind of noticed without really taking in. Seeing the process complete, though, she recognised the similarities with Karen, when her programming had first been pushed to the point that it started to break.

She gasped. Pytki had been manipulated by Fantasio?

Colby looked up at her, surprised by the noise, then nodded matter-of-factly. She wondered when he’d known; if he’d put it together from subtle clues she’d missed, or if he’d always suspected.

“Let me try another angle,” Colby said. “You don’t need to say anything if I’m right, ma’am. Just speak up if I’m not, okay? I know it may be hard.”

Pytki had started to cry, the silent, gaping-mouthed, twisted crying that accompanied some of the worst feelings humanity had to handle.

“You and your brother were just very different people,” Colby said. “No value judgement here. You wanted different things. I don’t even think you spoke that much, especially by the time he was living over here.

“Very much brother and sister though, I’m guessing. Through all this you’ve shown determination, smarts, and focus. And that feels a lot like him. How’m I doing so far?”

There might have been a nod of her head. If there was, Carmen at the very least couldn’t tell.

“I’m thinking maybe the two of you argued sometime early in his career. Went your separate ways.” Colby let the idea hang in the silence for a moment to sink in before he continued. “And I’m thinking this crusade of yours to avenge him is really, really new. Last half a year kind of new.”

He broke off this time when the elderly woman put a hand to her head, groaning audibly. Carmen didn’t think a woman like that would make a single sound if she could avoid it - the pain had to be overwhelming.

“Your lifelong crusade alongside your brother,” Colby pressed on, “it’s pretty new, isn’t it? You’ve felt this way all your life, but you hadn’t felt this way all your life last year-”

Pytki sank to her knees. “Shut up,” she growled. “Shut up, shut up, shut-”

“Do you want the pain to go away?” Colby asked, his tone insisted, his voice raised to cut across her.

She looked up. “What?”

“The pain. I can make it go away. Yes?”

Pytki nodded - and Colby pushed the control helmet down against her head. He thumbed the switch, powering it up, and Carmen relaxed.

*

She was less at ease when, on entering the condo, she didn’t immediately hear Karen anywhere. Carmen hurried from room to room until she stopped finally in the corridor, staring up at the ladder.

Rather than climb it she floated upward, finding the woman who had control of her sleeping in the darkened attic, surrounded by phones. Which made no sense…

She gently lifted the sleeping agent in her arms and floated back down from the attic, heading into the bedroom. She laid Karen down on her bed and moved the cover into place over her.

She stood uncertainly for a few moments, looking down at her, then climbed gently onto the bed and lay down beside her, slipping a powerful arm protectively around her.

She rested her head against Karen’s shoulders, closed her eyes, and went to sleep alongside her.