Sit in silence for a moment, processing everything... Then gets near her .

You sit there. The silence fills the van like water rising in a sealed room — slow, cold, relentless. Your tears dry on your cheeks in stiff tracks. The taste of copper lingers where you bit your knuckle. The green LED blinks beneath the blanket, steady as a metronome, indifferent to everything that has just shattered between you.

A minute passes. Maybe two. You lose count.

Then you move. Not with purpose exactly — more like gravity pulling you forward, like something has broken loose inside your chest and is dragging the rest of you with it. You slide off the metal bench and kneel on the van floor beside her. Your fingers find the edge of the duct tape wrapped around the base of the helmet, and you begin to peel it away. The adhesive tears from the metal with a slow, sticky ripping sound that fills the cargo space. One strip. Two. Three. The tape pulls strands of her dark hair with it, and she hisses softly but doesn't flinch.

"What are you doing?" she whispers.

Your hands pause on the last strip of tape, the helmet loose now, one tug from coming free. You can feel the warmth of her scalp through the gap where the tape has peeled away.

"I'm sorry," you say. Your voice is hoarse, scraped raw. "For all of it. The chemicals. The chains. This... thing I put on you." You swallow. "If you want to make my brain into soup — don't hesitate. Honestly. Life's been... pretty empty without the person you love in it. After Jane died, every day felt like serving time in a cell with no walls. So yeah. If you're going to do it, just... make it painless. That's all I ask."

You pull the helmet off.

The lead casing comes away with a dull scrape, and suddenly her face is there — inches from yours in the dim light leaking through the van's windows. And the world stops.

It's Jane's face.

Not similar. Not reminiscent. Identical. The same warm brown eyes, now red-rimmed and wet. The same gentle slope of her nose, the same full lower lip, the same tiny mole just below her left ear that you used to kiss when she fell asleep against your shoulder. Your breath leaves you like you've been punched.

Lina stares up at you. Her eyes — Jane's eyes — search your face with an intensity that borders on physical. Her lips part. She's crying too, you realize. Silent tears cutting clean lines through the grime and sweat on her cheeks.

You brace yourself. Close your eyes. Wait for the pressure, the heat, the final white-out.

Instead, you feel something else entirely.

It's like... threads. Gossamer-thin filaments brushing against the inside of your skull, delicate as spider silk, probing gently through the folds of your mind. Not painful. Not violent. Just a presence — warm, curious, trembling slightly — slipping past your defenses like water through sand. She's reading you. Not attacking. Reading.

You feel her find the memories. They unspool without your permission — Jane laughing in the campus quad, sunlight catching the dark sweep of her hair. Jane stealing fries off your plate at that crappy diner on Fourth Street, grinning with her mouth full. Jane curled against you on the narrow dorm bed, her bare back warm against your chest, whispering something stupid about whether pigeons have feelings.

"You two looked cute together," Lina murmurs. Her voice cracks on the word 'cute.' Her eyes are closed, tears still falling, but there's the ghost of something soft at the corner of her mouth.

The threads shift. Deeper. And suddenly you feel her brush against a memory that makes heat flood your face — Jane beneath you on that same dorm bed, her legs wrapped around your waist, her fingers digging into your shoulders, both of you gasping and clumsy and **** and—

"Ah — already on the bed," Lina says, and her eyes snap open. "Fuck. I shouldn't be watching this." A pause. Her brow furrows. "Without condoms? Really?"

You lunge for the helmet and jam it onto your own head.

The threads snap like cut guitar strings. The presence vanishes from your mind instantly, leaving a strange hollow ringing in its wake. The helmet is too big for you — it slides down over your eyes, the visor slit sitting somewhere around your nose — and you must look absolutely ridiculous because Lina makes a sound.

A giggle.

Small and wet and broken around the edges, but unmistakably a giggle. It bubbles up from her chest like something she couldn't hold back, and it sounds so much like Jane's laugh that your heart cracks clean in half.

"Hey — those are private memories," you say from inside the helmet, your voice muffled and echoing off the lead interior.

"Okay, okay," she says, and there's something new in her voice — not trust exactly, but the absence of hostility, a door cracked open an inch. She sniffles. Draws a shaky breath. Then, quietly: "Can you... please remove this?"

You push the helmet up enough to see. Lina has shifted onto her back, the blanket falling away from her hips. With her wrists still zip-tied behind her, she draws her knees up and lets them fall apart — spreading her legs just enough to expose the small gleam of the piezoelectric piercing clipped to her clitoris. The tiny green LED blinks between her labia like a cruel little star. Her pussy is still hairless, the lips slightly parted, the delicate pink of her inner folds visible in the wan light. She looks away, jaw tight, a flush crawling up her neck.

"Please," she repeats. Barely a whisper.

You pull the helmet off your head and set it down. Your hands are shaking. You look around the van floor frantically — the first-aid kit, the toolbox, there should be nitrile gloves somewhere—

"Come on," Lina says softly, watching you rummage. "Just do it without gloves. I won't mind."

You stop searching. Meet her eyes. Those brown eyes, wet and exhausted and achingly familiar.

You kneel between her spread legs. Your bare fingers find the piercing — the tiny steel device warm from her body heat, nestled against the most sensitive part of her. You press the release mechanism on the micro-prongs with your thumb and forefinger. The clip disengages with a faint click, and you ease the device free from her clitoris as gently as you can manage. Your fingertip brushes the swollen nub as you pull away, and Lina's breath catches — a sharp, involuntary intake — but she says nothing.

The green LED goes dark in your palm.

For one heartbeat, everything is still.

Then Lina's skin begins to shimmer.

It starts at her fingers — a crystalline translucence racing up her hands, her wrists, swallowing the zip ties like water swallowing pebbles. The transformation floods up her arms, across her shoulders, down her torso. Her body changes as the diamond lattice takes hold — her frame stretching, her proportions shifting, her modest breasts swelling into heavy, voluptuous DD-cups that catch the garage light in prismatic refractions. Her dark hair bleaches to platinum white, fanning out behind her like frozen light. Her skin hardens into flawless, glittering crystal — every inch of her becoming something inhuman, something beautiful, something terrifying.

The zip ties on her wrists snap like wet paper.

Lina sits up. She rolls her crystalline shoulders, flexes her diamond fingers, and brings her freed hands in front of her face. The shattered plastic falls to the van floor in tiny pieces.

She turns her glowing blue eyes to you.

You are kneeling between the legs of an invulnerable, psychic, grief-maddened diamond woman whose sister you secretly loved, in the back of a van, with three terrified thugs on the other side of a sliding door, and no helmet between her mind and yours.