Sydney carried Christopher the whole way to the Whitesun Hotel without putting him down once.

She could have asked for help, Cindy and Daisy were right there, keeping pace beside her, both of them ready but she didn’t ask and nobody pushed it, not like she needed help anyway. There was something in the set of her jaw and the way she was moving that made it clear this wasn’t something she was prepared to hand off.

The lobby was the obvious choice. Enough space, enough light, accessible from every direction. Cindy read it before anyone said a word and was already moving, she grabbed a nearby table and shoved it into the center of the open floor, and together she and Sydney lifted Christopher onto it with care.

Ivy was already listing what she needed before Christopher was fully laid out. Cindy and Daisy split without discussion and went in different directions, pulling together everything Ivy called for, supplies, cloth, whatever was in the medical stock they’d been carefully maintaining since before anyone could remember why it mattered.

Ivy stood over Christopher in the quiet way she had. Still and unhurried. Looking at him the way she looked at most things, like she was reading something written in a language everyone else had forgotten.

She reached down and lifted the hem of his shirt.

The wound was visible now under the dim lobby light, dark at the center, bleeding in the slow, steady way that meant it was real but hadn’t hit anything immediately catastrophic. She looked at it for a few seconds in silence. Then, without any preamble or warning, she pressed her index finger directly into the wound.

Christopher’s whole body responded. He came half-awake in an instant, a raw, choked grunt tearing out of him, back arching slightly off the table before gravity pulled him back down. His hands reached for something to grab and found nothing. His face was sheened with sweat, pale as candle wax, and whatever consciousness he’d surfaced into was clearly not enjoying the trip.

Ivy didn’t stop. Didn’t speak. She kept her finger in place for a couple seconds.

And then she withdrew it.

Her finger came back out slowly, bloodied to the second knuckle, and wrapped around the tip of it, coiling with the slow movement of something organic being pulled away from where it didn’t belong, was a tendril of yellowish residue. Thin and faintly luminous.

Ivy looked at it in silence for a moment. Her expression didn’t change. Then she lowered her hand and turned to wait for the others to return with the supplies.

Sydney had been watching from a step back, arms crossed over her ribs where something still ached badly from the fight. She frowned at where Ivy’s hand had been.

She could have sworn the wound looked deeper than that. Could have sworn, when she’d first rolled Christopher over in that room, that she was looking at something that should have been significantly worse than what was on that table right now. She replayed it in her head and came up uncertain. Maybe the adrenaline had done something to her perception. Maybe she’d misjudged.

She filed it away and said nothing.

Cindy and Daisy came back with everything Ivy had asked for within a couple of minutes. Ivy went to work without ceremony, hands moving quickly.

The wound, when cleaned and examined properly in better light, wasn’t as catastrophic as the room had suggested. Deep, yes. Real, yes. But not the kind of thing that ended a person.

Cindy let out a long, slow breath from somewhere in the middle of her chest that she’d apparently been holding since the lobby.

Sydney’s frown deepened.

"Nuhh—"

Christopher was awake. Or something close enough to awake that it counted. His eyes were open, barely, and his color was still somewhere in the neighborhood of a blank wall, but he was looking at the ceiling with a unfocused gaze.

"Don’t talk," Ivy said, not looking up.

Christopher closed his mouth.

"You got dropped by a tentacle," Sydney said from where she was standing, arms still crossed. "Try to cope with that with dignity."

"Sydney," Cindy called glaring.

Christopher made a sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh. It came out as a weak, strained exhale, but it was there.

"What happened to them?" He asked, voice thin and rough around the edges. His eyes hadn’t moved from the ceiling but the question had enough focus behind it that it was clearly directed.

He meant Lucy and Penny. Both of them.

The room fell silent at his words.

"Rest," Sydney said.

She caught Cindy’s eye from across the room and tilted her head toward the door. Come with me.

Daisy, watching the exchange, glanced between them and quietly chose to stay where she was, settling into the space on the opposite side of the table from Ivy, keeping her eyes on Christopher’s face.

"Are you alright?" She asked him, concerned and also grimacing seeing the sight of blood.

"M..more or less," he managed.

"Don’t talk," Ivy repeated, and punctuated it by pressing something firmly against the wound.

"Yeah!" The grunt came out involuntarily and Christopher’s jaw went rigid. Daisy winced in sympathy and took a small, instinctive step back from Ivy’s side of the table.

Sydney and Cindy were outside in the night air within a minute, walking a few steps away from the entrance before Sydney stopped.

"What exactly happened in there?" Cindy asked. "Walk me through it."

"Penny went under," Sydney said. "Gaspar got into her remotely somehow, she was fine one minute and gone the next. She went straight for Lucy." She shook her head slightly. "Not for us. For Lucy."

Cindy turned that over. "She went for someone on her own side?"

"That’s what I said," Sydney nodded, and the frown was back, sitting heavy over her eyes. "We kept them in the same room because we figured even at her worst, Penny wouldn’t go after someone working with Gaspar. She’d go for us. That was the logic." She exhaled sharply. "Wrong."

That didn’t fit. And they both knew it, standing there in the dark, turning it over and finding no angle that made it clean or simple.

They made their way back to the other building a few minutes later and found Rachel and Rebecca still in the room, Penny where she’d fallen, Lucy against the wall with her arms limp at her sides and her eyes somewhere else entirely.

"Why isn’t she restrained?" Sydney asked, looking at Lucy.

"Sydney," Rachel said quietly.

"I mean it. We don’t know why Penny went for her exactly. There’s something we’re missing." She looked at Rachel steadily. "She might know something."

"Ryan told us Penny was being controlled," Rachel said. "That’s all this was."

"Then why would Gaspar use his own controlled woman to kill someone on his own side?!" Sydney asked, and the question sat there with no comfortable answer attached to it. "That makes no sense!"

"Sydney—"

Cindy’s hand closed around Sydney’s arm, gently.

Sydney stopped.

She looked down at the floor. At Penny. At the stillness of her, at her dead body.

Something in Sydney’s face moved. The muscle at the corner of her mouth. The line of her jaw tightening and then releasing. Her lips pressed together once before she turned and walked away, back toward the door, passing through it into the dark outside without another word.

"Sydney—" Cindy took half a step.

"Cindy." Rachel’s voice stopped her.

Cindy looked at her.

Rachel shook her head slowly.

Cindy looked at the door. Then back at Rachel. Then down at Penny, and something settled into her expression, the understanding she hadn’t fully let herself think about until now.

Penny had been a real person. Not a threat, not an obstacle, not a monster, a real woman who had been taken apart by someone with the power and the complete absence of conscience required to do it. She hadn’t had a choice in anything she’d done tonight. And Sydney had made the only decision available to her in the half-second she’d had to make it, and it had been the right call, and it had still ended a life.

That was going to live somewhere inside Sydney for a long time.

Killing someone for real, not in the abstract, not in the distance, not by accident or circumstance, but up close and purposefully and with your own hands was something neither Cindy nor Sydney had ever done before tonight. Cindy hadn’t still but Sydney just did.

Sydney needed space and silence likely to cope with it for now alone.

She turned her attention back to the room.

"What do we do now?" Rebecca’s voice came from the floor where she was still kneeling, her eyes lifted toward Rachel.

"We need to tell Ryan," Cindy said.

"Tomorrow," Rachel said. "He’s coming back in the morning anyway. We tell him then, and we deal with the exchange the way we planned, get Mei home first, then we figure out the rest." She exhaled slowly. "One thing at a time."

"I’m not going."

The three of them turned at once.

Lucy was still against the wall where she’d been standing since Sydney left, but something had shifted in her posture. Her eyes were clear and direct and fixed on the middle distance between them.

"What do you mean you’re not going?" Rebecca straightened up from the floor, something flaring in her voice immediately. "That’s what you wanted, we’re giving you back!"

"It was what I wanted," Lucy said gritting her teeth. "Until Penny told me what she told me before she died." She looked at them. "Gaspar threatened to kill my brother if I come back."

A shocked silence fell as they heard that.

"He—" Rachel stopped herself. Started again. "He threatened to kill your brother." She said it slowly, turning it over, looking for the shape that made sense. "Why? Why would he do that?"

"I don’t know!" The composure cracked, just for a second, just enough to show the terror running underneath all the hardness. "I don’t know what he wants, I can’t get inside his head, I just know that he used Penny’s last breath to make sure I heard it clearly." Her hands were balled into fists at her sides, her voice fighting to stay level. "He wanted me dead tonight so the exchange couldn’t happen. Callighan agreed to the deal, Gaspar didn’t, that’s all!"

"Aren’t they on the same side?" Rebecca asked.

"They’re not actually on the same side," Lucy said. "Not really. Gaspar does what Gaspar wants."

"He is a monster," she continued. "And if I walk back into Brigantine right now, Keith is dead before I make it through the door. Gaspar will make sure of it because that monster won’t lose." She looked at Rebecca directly. "I’m not going back."

"But Mei—" Rebecca’s voice climbed, the frustration and helplessness both riding it. "We need to get Mei back, we can’t—"

"I know," Lucy said quietly. "I know she matters to you guys. I know what I’m costing you. But Keith, my brother has never hurt anyone. He has never killed anyone, never worked for anyone, never been part of any of this. He is the only person I’ve been fighting to protect through all of it. I will not trade his life."

Cindy and Rebecca looked at each other. Neither of them had an answer for that.

An innocent life. A brother who had nothing to do with any of this, sitting somewhere under Gaspar’s thumb, alive only because Lucy had been useful. Send her back and that usefulness ended. And with it, Keith.

Could they do that? Could they look each other in the eye after that and say they’d had no choice?

Cindy’s jaw worked silently for a moment before she looked at Rachel. Rebecca did the same.

Rachel was quiet. Her fists were clenched at her sides, the only visible sign of everything she was holding in. Mei’s face was somewhere in her head, had been since the moment all of this started, would be until the moment she was home. And Mei was so close now. Hours away from coming home. And now this.

Everything had been moving toward a clean resolution and now there was a crack running through the center of it that none of them had the tools to fix tonight.

"Why?" Cindy said under her breath, not quite directing it at anyone. "Why is he doing this? What does he gain?"

Nobody answered. Nobody had an answer.

"Sister." Rebecca looked at Rachel, and her voice had gone very small. "What do we do?"

Rachel looked at Lucy for a long moment. Lucy held her gaze without flinching, without pleading, just serious and exhausted.

Rachel unclenched her fists slowly.

"We wait for Ryan," she said.