"How long does it take to undo a simple knot?!" Lucy snapped, straining against the rope still biting into her wrists.

"Say one more word and I leave you on the floor," Christopher shot back through his teeth, fingers working fast at the knot without looking up. "And who the hell tied this in the first place?! Rebecca? Figures. The one time she decides to be thorough about something and it’s right after she makes a mistake."

A sound from across the room cut through everything else.

Christopher’s head came up fast. Sydney had her arm pulled in against her chest, teeth clenched, the kind of expression that meant something hurt more than she was letting show. A tentacle had caught her across the forearm and she was absorbing it, badly.

"Stop trying to block them!" Christopher called out. "Just move! Get out of the way!"

"If I move she goes for the woman behind me!" Sydney shouted back, already shifting her weight to intercept the next strike. "And these things are...they keep pulling at my focus, it’s like you know that hentai animeI watched that one time? The one where the tentacles—"

"What is she saying?" Lucy stared at Christopher with speechlessness.

"I don’t know, and I don’t wanna know..." Christopher said, keeping his eyes on the knot. "Don’t engage with it. Just let it pass."

He felt the last fiber of the rope give way, grabbed the broken chair leg, and wrenched Lucy upward out of the wreckage in one motion.

"My wrists are still—"

"No time," he said, putting a hand between her shoulder blades and pushing. "Move. Go."

Lucy didn’t argue. She broke into a run, arms still half-bound, heading for the door.

"Sydney!" Christopher’s voice cracked across the room.

Lucy turned instinctively at the shout and immediately wished she hadn’t. Sydney was struggling, one wrist caught in a coil of yellow, her face tight with the effort of pulling free.

BANG!

The gunshot split the room. Christopher had put a round through Penny’s leg without hesitation, without wind-up, without a single moment of deliberation. Penny dropped to one knee with a sound that wasn’t quite a cry, more like a mechanical interruption and Sydney tore her wrist free in the half-second of disruption it bought, throwing herself back toward the wall.

Christopher swung toward Lucy.

"Why are you still here?!"

Lucy broke from her momentary stupor and ran.

She made it three steps before the air in front of her changed.

Penny cleared the distance between them in a single jump, a distance that no person with a bullet in their leg should have been able to cover and landed directly in Lucy’s path with a heavy crack against the floor. Lucy veered hard right, twisting away, but the tentacle was already moving. It caught her square across the side and the force of it was like being hit by something solid and heavy moving at speed. She left the ground, hit the floor rolling, and came to a stop face-down with the wind knocked clean out of her.

She tried to push up. Her arms buckled.

Penny was on top of her before she could try again, straddling her, one hand pressing down between her shoulder blades, the weight of her enough to pin Lucy flat against the floor. Lucy’s wrists were still half-bound and her arms had nothing to push from and she was completely, helplessly, terrifyingly still.

The tentacle rose.

She saw it in her peripheral vision, yellow and terrifying and aimed directly at her head. She knew what it was. She knew what came next. She closed her eyes and pulled in a breath that might have been the last one and felt her whole body brace for something that she’d always known, in the back of her mind, was coming for her eventually.

Blue light.

The impact that landed wasn’t for her.

Sydney came in like a projectile, the blue flash of her speed leaving a smear against the air, and her kick connected with Penny at full velocity. Penny left Lucy’s back and hit the wall across the room with a crash that shook the plaster and left a visible depression in the surface.

Sydney landed and immediately folded slightly, one hand pressing hard against her ribs. Something had shifted wrong in there, she could feel it with every breath, a grinding wrongness sitting just below the surface of each inhale.

"Sydney! It’s coming back!" Christopher’s shout snapped her head up.

Penny was already off the wall. Whatever the bullet in her leg and the impact against the wall should have done to her wasn’t applying. She was moving, and she was moving fast, and her eyes were still that empty, burning yellow.

Sydney set her jaw and her body lit up blue again. She launched forward to meet her.

Christopher covered the distance to Lucy in four strides, grabbed her by the arm and hauled her upright. She was still dazed, still catching her breath, and she let herself be pulled without fighting it.

"Christopher!!"

Sydney’s warning voice came from behind right after. Christopher didn’t hesitate and pulled Lucy down and dropped his own body over hers, covering her.

The impact hit him across the back and side like a whip cracked at full extension. He let out a short, involuntary sound, pain hitting fast and sharp and held himself over her.

"W—What—" Lucy was staring up at him, shock written across her face for the first time since this whole thing had started.

Penny then appeared standing above them both. A tentacle coiled back, poised, aimed downward ready to kill struck down both of them.

Lucy read it before Christopher did. She shoved sideways one hard push, rolling him clear. If someone was dying here, she wasn’t letting it be him.

It was she who was targeted to begin with.

She shut her eyes again.

The tentacle never landed.

Something drove into Penny from behind with the sound of splintering impact, a wooden spike, driven clean through her chest from the back, punching out through the front with a wet finality that stopped everything in the room at once.

Penny went rigid.

The yellow drained from her eyes the way color leaves something dying, all at once and completely, replaced by the return of whoever she actually was underneath all of it. Her eyes found Lucy’s face in the last moment of the fall, wide and full of shock and something raw and real that Gaspar’s influence had been sitting on top of this whole time. Blood came to her lips, thin and dark, running down her chin.

She fell forward revealing Sydney gasping behind.

Lucy caught her or tried to, her still-bound hands making it graceless and they went down together, Penny’s face coming to rest inches from hers, close enough that Lucy could feel the shallow, irregular pull of her breathing.

Penny’s mouth moved.

What came out wasn’t her voice. It had her throat behind it, her lips forming the shapes, but the sound itself was wrong, flattened and hollow, and distorted.

"I will kill your brother," it said, "if you come back."

Lucy’s body had gone completely still beneath Penny’s weight.

The tentacles were gone. The yellow was gone. The only sounds left in the room were Sydney’s labored breathing.

"Damn it," Sydney said under her breath, looking down at Penny with an expression that had guilt and pain fighting for the same real estate on her face. The spike. The decision she’d had to make in under a second with no good options attached to it. She’d replay it later when things were quieter. She always did.

She turned toward Christopher on the floor behind her.

"Hey." Her voice came out rough. "Christopher. You done playing dead over there?"

Nothing.

No dry comeback. No groan of mild irritation. Nothing.

Sydney’s expression changed.

She dropped to her knees beside him in one movement and turned his body over, and the blood on the floor registered first, the dark, spreading stain soaking into the concrete beneath him, wider than it had any right to be. Then she saw the wound. Deep in his stomach. One of the tentacles had found him when he’d thrown himself over Lucy, when his back had been turned and his focus had been entirely on keeping her covered.

He’d taken it without making a sound.

Sydney’s hands were already pressing against the wound before she’d fully processed it, her face draining.

"He needs treatment! Now!" Lucy was on her feet despite her bound wrists, whatever animosity she’d been carrying in this room completely gone from her voice. "That wound is deep—"

"I can see that!" Sydney snapped, not at Lucy exactly, just at the situation, at herself, at the two seconds she’d wasted not looking where she should have been looking.

"What happened—"

Rebecca appeared in the doorway.

She’d come to check. She’d heard the sounds from down the hall, the crashes, the gunshot, the silence that followed that was somehow worse than the noise and she’d run. Now she stood in the frame looking at the room with the wide, rapid eye-movement of someone trying to take in too many bad things at once. Penny on the floor. The cracked wall. The blood.

Christopher on the ground.

"Rebecca!" Sydney’s voice rang loud right after seeing her. "Go get Ivy! Right now!"

Rebecca was already gone before the last word landed.

Sydney turned back to Christopher. His face was pale in a way that had nothing to do with the light. She put a hand on his shoulder and shook once, not hard.

"Hey!" Her voice had dropped to something quieter and considerably less like Sydney. "Hey, say something! Christopher!"

He made a sound. Small and pained and barely there, but it was something.

She exhaled.

Several minutes passed that felt considerably longer. Then Ivy appeared in the doorway.. Her eyes swept the room once, calmly. They passed over Penny’s still form on the floor, noted it, moved on. When they landed on Christopher her brows drew together by a single degree which, from Ivy, was the equivalent of visible concern.

"Get him out of here," she said, already turning to clear the path behind her.

Sydney didn’t need to be told twice. She got him on his feet and held him moving away.

Lucy had gotten to her feet and was hovering at the edge of the room, hands still half-bound, looking between Christopher and Ivy and the door with the expression of someone who desperately wants to do something useful.

Sydney caught her eye as she moved toward the door.

"You stay," she said.

Lucy didn’t argue.

"Sydney! What happened?!"

Rachel came in from the hallway at speed, hair loose, eyes scanning the room the way they always did. When they found Christopher’s pale face against Sydney’s shoulder the blood drained from her own.

"Penny lost control." Sydney said with clenched teeth. "I had to kill her." She didn’t stop moving. "Christopher took a hit protecting Lucy. It’s a bad one. Just watch Lucy for me, and Penny too, just in case. Please."

Rachel nodded, her eyes tracking Christopher all the way down the hall, worry carved openly into her face.

Behind Rachel, more footsteps. Cindy and Daisy arrived together, they’d been close, maybe already awake, maybe pulled by the noise and the moment they saw Christopher, Cindy’s hand went to her mouth and Daisy went very still in the doorway. Then they were both moving, falling in behind Sydney and Ivy, as Sydney started explaining in short, clipped sentences what had happened and what she knew and what she didn’t.

And then they were gone down the hall, and the room went quiet.

Rachel stood in the middle of it. Lucy stood against the wall. Between them, Penny lay still on the floor where she’d fallen, the spike still in place, the blood beneath her dark and spreading slowly and then stopping.

Neither woman spoke for a long moment.

"What happened?" Rachel asked finally, looking down at Penny.

"I..." Lucy stopped. Started again. "I don’t know exactly what triggered it. She just...she was fine and then she wasn’t. There was no warning." She looked at Penny with an expression that was complicated in ways she wasn’t volunteering. "One second she was there and the next she was gone."

But there was something else sitting behind her eyes. Something that had been put there in the last few seconds of Penny’s life and was still living in Lucy’s face whether she wanted it to or not.

Those words. That voice.

"I will kill your brother if you come back."

Not Penny’s voice. Penny’s mouth, Penny’s throat, but the voice that had come out of it had been Gaspar’s, reduced to a signal, a transmission, a message delivered through a dying woman’s final breath.

It was definitely Gaspr.

Lucy was sure of it.

He had used Penny until the very end to first kill her and then when he couldn’t he just threatened her...

She hadn’t said that part out loud.

Rebecca had drifted past both of them without either noticing, moving slowly, like something was pulling her toward the floor. She went down onto her knees in front of Penny, her hands resting loosely in her lap, her eyes on the woman’s still face.

"Rebecca—" Rachel started, instinct moving faster than reason.

"Sister." Rebecca’s voice came out small and strange, and also trembling. She looked up at Rachel with an expression that was trying very hard to hold itself together and not quite succeeding, eyes too wide, lip caught between her teeth. "She’s dead."

Rachel didn’t have anything to say to that. She opened her mouth and closed it again.