“What I’m asking is probably simple for you—take out the people who are trying to kill us or hide all of us or maybe move us somewhere else? I don’t know. A teleport would be ideal.”

She didn’t say anything but I could feel flickers of her emotions, much as I felt Daniel’s when I was back home. It wasn’t a telepathic connection or maybe it was, but if it was it felt different—bigger—a forty room mansion instead of your standard four bedroom house.

That’s a terrible metaphor, but I don’t have anything better than “bigger.”

We still had an implant connection, but she’d stopped using it, unwilling, I assumed, to risk standard communication methods.

I glanced around us and everything stood still, frozen at the moment that I’d tried to get her attention.

“I can’t risk it.” On the surface, her voice stayed level without growing higher or faster with emotion, but through our connection, I felt a flicker of fear.

Without showing any emotion that she wouldn’t have if she were teaching a college physics class, she continued, “If I hid all of you, I’d have to keep on hiding you until they left and I can’t be sure they would. If I moved all of you from one place to another, something would notice. Maybe my people wouldn’t notice right away but they would in time.”

“What about Marcus? He’ll die with the rest of us if it all goes wrong here.” Even as I said it, I felt hints of fear and anxiety that I knew wasn’t all mine.

“I’ve been running for millions of years now.” Her voice seemed to fill my entire being, reminding me that Daniel had told me that being in Lee’s presence could be mentally painful for him.

“I don’t want them to find me. I have so much more to do.” She said it matter of factly as if we were talking about the weather.

“Are you just going to let things happen if you don’t help us?” I watched her face as I asked the question.

She stared ahead of herself, but then she said, “I don’t know. I try to do what I can when I have the chance.”

She looked down.

I tried to catch her eye. “Look, if you can’t do something yourself, can you give me the power to solve this?”

That earned me a look. She stared at me as if she’d never looked at me before. She said, “No. It’s too early. Let me think.”

Then I stopped feeling her emotions and the world around me went forward again.

Blasts of energy flew through the air. Ascendancy soldiers rushed in. A beam hit the plant’s pot. He did his best to dodge, but the beam hit and the pot fell to the ground with a crash.

Cassie took two beams to the back. She fell to the ground, but rolled over and began firing back with her gun. As long as she didn’t get hit in the head she’d be fine, but I wondered how long that could last.

A wave of soldiers surrounded Jaclyn. I couldn’t see her, but every now and then blood would shoot into the air. I assumed she had to be alive.

I fired my laser, punched, and fired the sonics as fast as I could, unsure as to how long I could keep it up. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Ascendancy soldiers pointing their weapons at Marcus and Tikki. Marcus had been stretched into a shape I thought of as “sniper Slenderman,” but now he’d contracted into a roughly human shape and was firing his particle accelerator rifle while smacking soldiers with tentacles that he’d grown.

Tikki stood next to him, surrounded by her bubble, seemingly doing nothing, but then everything stopped again and I was in contact with Kee.

In that moment, I felt something that reminded me of when I’d pulled a flaming sword out of nowhere using Lee’s power or arguably maybe through a combination of his and my own small hint of power.

This wasn’t me, though.

I felt small trickles of power opening and knew without being sure how I knew that they were Kee’s doing, that there were many of them, each of them a different source, and that they weren’t going to me. They were going to her. A part of me wondered if I could somehow tap them, but doing so without instruction or invitation seemed rude at best. At worst, it might be deadly.

Either way, it was unnecessary. The power flowed toward Kee and as her bubble absorbed it, it grew, expanding first to include Marcus, the nearest Ascendancy soldiers, Then the bubble grew faster, including me, Cassie, Jaclyn, Kals and the entire camp before I had time to notice, much less time to get away.

She was on our side, but I remembered what had happened to Agent 957. The bubble wasn’t a safe place to be.