Try to speak—to tell Lina not to reveal herself, no matter what they do to you.

Your mouth tastes like pennies. The concrete beneath your cheek is warm now—warm with your own blood, a spreading slick that catches the green grow-light and turns it into something dark and arterial. Your vision is a narrow slit, one eye sealed shut by the sheet of blood from the gash above your brow, the other barely focusing on the blurred geometry of boots and rifle barrels and the flickering diamond light that is Lina.

You try to speak. The muscles in your jaw feel disconnected from your brain, like trying to operate a puppet with half the strings cut. Your tongue is thick, clumsy, tasting copper.

"Diam.." The name comes out broken. A wet syllable that barely carries past your own teeth. You swallow blood. Try again.

"Don't... show them." Each word costs you something. You can feel the edges of consciousness fraying, the dark pressing in from every side like water rising in a sealed room. "Don't give... him... anything."

Your voice is barely a whisper. But the greenhouse is large and the sonic hum fills every corner, and you don't know if she can even hear you over that relentless mechanical drone. You **** your one working eye to find her—the flickering, guttering diamond shape on her knees, Marco's gauntleted fist around her crystalline throat, and for one terrible instant your gazes lock.

Her glowing blue eyes are fixed on you. Not on Marco. Not on the rifles. On you—bleeding, broken, half-naked on a concrete floor—and the expression on that alien diamond face is something you will carry with you into the dark. It is not the face of a weapon. It is the face of someone watching the last thing they love drain away through their fingers.

"No matter... what they—" Your voice gives out. The dark surges. Your cheek settles deeper into the warm puddle of your own blood.

Lina's diamond form shudders. The fracture-lines of white light racing across her surface pulse once, twice, and then her voice comes—not the diamond register, not the human one, but something torn from a place beneath both. A raw, animal sound that has no composure left to lose.

"No... Sam... no... stay with me... please..."

She is sobbing. The sound is crystalline and fractured, each syllable splitting into harmonic overtones that ring against the glass panels of the greenhouse like struck crystal. Tears cannot fall from diamond eyes, but the light behind them gutters and dims and brightens in arrhythmic pulses that are worse than tears. Her fingers claw against Marco's gauntlet. Her body strains forward, toward you.

"Please... please don't leave me... not you too... please..."

You hear her. You hear every word. And then you don't hear anything at all.

The dark takes you completely.

---

What happens next, you will only learn later.

Lina William screams.

It is not a word. It is not a name. It is a sound that comes from the marrow of her—a howl of grief and fury so total that it bypasses her throat entirely and erupts outward as a psychic shockwave, a wall of invisible **** radiating from her diamond body in every direction like a detonation.

The two industrial sonic emitters—steel-framed units bolted to rolling platforms, each one the size of a washing machine, connected to diesel generators by thick rubber cables—overload simultaneously. The shockwave hits their circuitry like a hammer through glass. Capacitors rupture. Transformers arc and pop. Both units emit a dying electronic shriek and then go dark, trailing acrid smoke from their housings.

The drone stops.

The silence that replaces it lasts exactly one second.

In that second, Lina's diamond form blazes. The fracture-lines vanish. Her crystalline surface hardens, clarifies, becomes a thing of terrible perfection—every facet sharp, every plane catching the overhead grow-lights and throwing them back as blinding prismatic fire. She is no longer flickering. She is no longer compromised. She is a six-foot pillar of living diamond burning with cold white radiance, and every mind within five hundred feet is now inside her reach.

Seven men die in the first heartbeat. Their heads don't pop—there isn't time for pressure to build. Their brains simply liquefy, scrambled at a molecular level in the space between one synapse firing and the next. They drop where they stand, rifles clattering to concrete, dark fluid already streaming from nostrils and ear canals before their bodies finish folding to the ground.

Marco's exoskeletal gauntlet glitches. The servos in its fingers spasm, the grip loosening for a fraction of a second as the electromagnetic pulse from the emitters' ****-burst cascades through its circuits. He feels the fingers opening—feels his control of her throat slipping—and with a snarl of pure animal panic he rips his hand free and flings the sparking gauntlet away from him. It skitters across the concrete, trailing blue electrical arcs.

Lina rises.

She doesn't stand up so much as she unfolds—a slow, deliberate straightening of her diamond body that carries with it the weight of six months of rage and grief and ****. She is six feet of crystalline annihilation, her platinum-white hair cascading down her back, her electric-blue eyes fixed on nothing and everything at once.

The remaining seven guards see her rise. Three of them turn to run. Their heads burst—not the liquefaction this time, but the pressure variant. Skulls detonate from the inside like overripe fruit, spraying bone and grey matter across the greenhouse's glass panels in abstract patterns that catch the grow-lights and shimmer. The sound is wet, concussive, final.

The other four simply collapse. Brain flowing from their noses in thick ropes that pool on the concrete and steam faintly in the cool night air. They fall in sequence—left to right—like dominoes, and the sound of their rifles hitting the floor is almost rhythmic.

Tomasz Bruk—the man who hit you—makes it three steps toward the northeast exit before his legs stop working. He drops to his knees. His hands come up to his temples. A thin line of blood traces from his left nostril down to his upper lip. He opens his mouth to say something—a prayer, a curse, a negotiation—and then the pressure builds behind his eyes and both orbital sockets rupture simultaneously, the eyes pushed outward on stalks of hemorrhaged tissue before the skull cracks from ear to ear with a sound like a ceramic plate breaking. He pitches forward onto his face and does not move again.

The greenhouse falls silent.

Bodies everywhere. Fourteen men reduced to cooling meat in under ten seconds. The air stinks of blood and cordite and the green vegetable smell of crushed plant stems where bodies have fallen into the grow-shelves. Broken glass panels let in the night air—cold, carrying the distant sound of traffic from the street below.

The only living people in the room are Lina, Marco, and you.

Lina turns away from the carnage. She walks to where you lie—her diamond feet leaving no sound on the concrete, moving through the spreading pools of blood without acknowledgment—and she kneels. She kneels beside your broken body and gathers your head into her lap with a gentleness that seems impossible from hands that just killed fourteen men. Her diamond fingers, cool and smooth as polished stone, cradle your skull. Her thumb traces the gash above your eyebrow, wiping away the drying blood with infinite care, and a low sound comes from her chest—a keening, almost musical vibration that resonates through her crystalline body and into yours.

You don't feel it. You are somewhere far away, in the dark, where nothing reaches.

Behind her, Marco scrambles to his feet.

His charcoal suit is ruined—soaked with the blood of his own men, one knee torn, the white shirt beneath stained red and brown. His slicked-back hair has come loose, hanging in grey-streaked strands across his forehead. The gold rings on his left hand—his right is bare now, the gauntlet sparking uselessly ten feet away—catch the grow-lights as he raises both palms outward in the universal gesture of surrender.

"Wait," he says. His voice has lost its measured calm. It is the voice of a man who has just watched his entire world emptied in the time it takes to exhale. "Wait—listen to me. Listen."

Lina does not turn.

"There's a basement," Marco says, talking faster now, the words tumbling over each other. "Under the greenhouse. Reinforced vault. Gold bars—forty of them—and cash. Three million, maybe more. It's yours. All of it. Take it. Take everything. Just—" His voice cracks. The composure he has worn like a second skin for decades splits open and underneath is nothing but a middle-aged man who is very, very afraid. "Just let me walk out of here. Please. I'll disappear. You'll never see me again. I swear on my—"

Lina's head turns.

The movement is slow. Mechanical. The diamond facets of her face catch the light and throw it in cold blue shards across Marco's ruined suit. Her electric-blue eyes find his, and Marco's words die in his throat.

He groans. A thick, guttural sound that he clearly did not intend to make. His hands fly from their surrender position to his temples, pressing inward as though trying to hold something together that is coming apart from the inside. Blood appears at his left nostril—a thin trickle at first, then a steady stream, dark and viscous.

"You killed my sister," Lina says.

Her voice is the diamond register—low, resonant, utterly without mercy. But underneath it, threaded through like a wire through glass, is the human voice. Lina's voice. The voice of a twenty-three-year-old girl who lost her twin and spent a year screaming into a void that offered nothing back.

"Jane William. You remember her? Small girl. Brown eyes. She found your little factory in the basement. She was going to tell people." Lina's diamond eyes burn brighter. "So you had her killed. And then you bought the judges. And you erased the evidence. And you went on living."

Marco makes a sound that is not language. His knees buckle. He drops to the concrete, mirroring the position Lina held minutes ago—kneeling, hands at his head, blood flowing freely from both nostrils now. His eyes are bulging, the whites shot through with burst capillaries, turning them red.

"You don't get to buy your way out of this," Lina says. "Not with gold. Not with money. Not with anything."

She increases the pressure. Not all at once—that would be too quick, too clean, too much like the mercy she showed his men. This is different. This is personal. She presses against the folds of his brain with the precision of a surgeon and the patience of someone who has imagined this moment every night for a year. Nerve clusters ignite. Pain receptors fire in cascading waves. Marco screams—a raw, shredded sound that bounces off the glass panels and comes back multiplied.

His left eye hemorrhages. The iris floods red as blood vessels burst behind the lens, and the eye itself seems to bulge outward slightly, pushed by the mounting intracranial pressure. He claws at the concrete floor, his gold rings scraping grooves in the surface, his body convulsing.

Lina watches. Her diamond face is perfectly still.

"That's for Jane," she says quietly.

The pressure peaks. Marco's skull does not burst—there is no dramatic detonation, no explosive finale. Instead, there is a soft, wet sound. A settling. The resistance behind his eyes gives way and his brain liquefies in a single catastrophic instant, the grey matter dissolving into fluid that pours from his nostrils and ears and the corners of his mouth in a thick, dark cascade that spatters the concrete between his hands. His body locks rigid for one second—spine arched, fingers splayed, mouth open in a silent scream—and then collapses forward, face-first into the spreading pool of his own liquefied mind.

He does not twitch.

The greenhouse is utterly silent.

Lina kneels beside you in the ruins of Marco's empire—surrounded by bodies, by blood, by the shattered remnants of sonic emitters and the smell of fertilizer and ****—and she holds your head in her lap and strokes the blood from your face with diamond fingers that tremble.

Something stirs in her chest. Not the cold satisfaction she expected. Not the closure. Something rawer, more ****—a surge of emotion so powerful it floods through the psychic bond and reaches you even in the dark place where you've gone. The adrenaline of the kill, the terror of almost losing you, the grief and rage and relief all compressing into a single white-hot point of energy in her crystalline core.

She gathers you into her arms. You weigh nothing to her diamond form. She stands, cradling you against her chest, your blood smearing across her crystalline surface in dark streaks that catch the grow-lights.

The teleportation charge builds. It shouldn't be possible—she was at zero, depleted, empty. But the emotional surge has done what hours of rest could not. The energy crystallizes around them both like a cocoon of fractured light.

The greenhouse vanishes.

You land on something soft. Your bed. Your apartment. The familiar smell of your shampoo and instant ramen and the faint chemical trace of your lab equipment hits you even through the unconsciousness, somewhere deep in the animal brain that recognizes home.

Lina lays you down with the same impossible gentleness. She reverts—the diamond receding, the six-foot crystalline goddess shrinking back into a five-four girl with dark hair and brown eyes and trembling hands. She is naked. She is covered in your blood. She is alive. You are alive.

She climbs onto the bed beside you and presses her face into the curve of your neck and holds on to you like you are the only solid thing in a world made entirely of water, and she does not let go.