Tell her you trust her, then spend the day together until evening when she teleports out for the .

"I trust you," you say.

The words come out simpler than you expected. No caveats, no conditions, no scientist's need to qualify. You set your empty plate in the sink and look at her—perched on your kitchen counter in your clothes, a smear of butter on her chin, her bare feet swinging two inches above the floor.

"You've survived everything they've thrown at you. You've survived everything I threw at you." You cross the kitchen and stand in front of her, close enough that her knees bracket your hips. "Go end it. I'll be here when you get back."

Something shifts behind her eyes. Not surprise—she expected you to argue more. But a softening, a quiet exhale through her nose, and then she reaches out and hooks one finger through the waistband of your boxers, tugging you a half-step closer.

"Good answer," she murmurs.

The rest of the day unfolds with an almost unbearable normalcy.

You shower. She showers after you, leaving the bathroom smelling like your shampoo and filling the mirror with steam. You lend her a clean t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that she has to cuff three times at the ankles. She complains about your lack of real food and you walk together to the corner bodega two blocks down, where she buys instant ramen, a bag of sour gummy worms, and a six-pack of sparkling water with absolute seriousness.

Back at the apartment, you watch half a documentary about deep-sea creatures on your laptop, sharing the sofa, her feet tucked under your thigh for warmth. She falls asleep against your shoulder around noon and you sit perfectly still for forty minutes, listening to her breathe, feeling the faint psychic hum of her presence like a second heartbeat layered beneath your own.

She wakes hungry. You make ramen. She eats two bowls and pronounces it "barely edible" while scraping the pot clean.

In the afternoon you sit on the bedroom floor and she tells you about Jane. Not the ****—the life before it. How they used to finish each other's sentences. How Jane could never keep a secret from anyone except, apparently, you. How their mother called them "the Williams twins" like it was a brand name. How Jane once ate an entire watermelon on a dare and threw up in the bathtub.

You tell her about the Jane you knew. The way she'd hum off-key when she was concentrating. How she always stole the blankets. The time she locked herself out of her dorm and climbed through a second-story window rather than call campus security.

Lina listens with her chin on her knees, arms wrapped around her shins, and sometimes her eyes go glassy and distant, and you know she's feeling the shape of your memories through the bond. Neither of you mentions it.

At six, she starts stretching. Quiet, methodical, like an athlete warming up. Rolling her neck. Flexing her fingers. You watch from the kitchen doorway and don't say anything.

At seven-thirty, she stands in the middle of your living room and strips off the borrowed clothes. She folds them neatly on the arm of the sofa—your t-shirt, your sweatpants, your boxer shorts—and stands naked in the lamplight, small and human and mortal-looking.

"Don't wait up," she says. And then she transforms.

The change is instantaneous. Her body surges upward—five-four to six feet in a heartbeat—her skin hardening into faceted crystal, her breasts swelling to heavy DD curves, her hair bleaching to platinum white. Her eyes blaze electric blue. She is no longer Lina. She is Diamond Girl, and she fills your apartment like a cathedral fills a parking lot.

She looks at you once. A glowing, alien face that somehow still carries the ghost of a smile. Then she vanishes—a sharp crack of displaced air and a shimmer where she stood.

The apartment is silent.

You clean the kitchen. You wash the dishes. You fold the clothes she left on the sofa and set them on the bed. You sit on the couch and stare at the wall. The clock reads 8:17. 8:34. 8:51.

Nine o'clock.

Nothing.

Your phone is silent. The psychic bond hums at the back of your skull—distant, muted, like hearing music through a wall. She's alive. You can feel that much. But the texture of the connection is wrong. Strained. Thin.

Then it happens.

A sound splits the air of your living room—a raw, animal shriek that you feel in your teeth before your ears process it. A blinding flash of prismatic light erupts in the center of the room and Lina materializes—diamond form, towering, her crystalline body flickering with hairline fractures of white light running across her surface like lightning through ice.

"SAM! HELP ME!"

Her voice is distorted, warped, the diamond register cracking into something shrill and ****. Her glowing blue eyes are wide with a terror you have never seen in her—not when she was chained, not when she was helmeted, not when she was bleeding on your bed. This is something else. This is someone who has encountered something she cannot beat.

You don't think. You lunge forward and grab her hands.

Her diamond fingers close around yours like a vice and then the world tears itself apart.

A sensation like being pulled through a keyhole—your vision whites out, your stomach inverts, every cell in your body screams in protest. The teleportation is nothing like she described. It is violent. Wrong. As if something is dragging her backward mid-jump and you are caught in the wake.

You hit concrete. Hard.

The impact drives the air from your lungs and sends stars cascading across your vision. You're on your side on a cold floor. The smell hits you first—soil, fertilizer, the green reek of living plants, and underneath it gunpowder and copper. Your ears ring with a high, sustained whine.

Shapes move around you. Boots. Legs. The muzzles of rifles catching overhead light. You count—six, eight, more—dark figures arranged in a loose semicircle, all facing the same direction.

You lift your head.

The Rooftop Greenhouse is larger than you imagined—a cathedral of glass panels and steel struts, rows of potted plants and grow-lights stretching into industrial shelving. At the far end, elevated on a makeshift platform built from shipping pallets and draped in what looks like expensive upholstery fabric, sits a heavy wooden chair.

Marco sits in it.

He is exactly what the security footage suggested—broad-shouldered, silver-streaked dark hair swept back from a heavy brow, gold rings gleaming on thick fingers. He wears a charcoal suit that probably cost more than your apartment. His expression is one of absolute, practiced control.

His right hand is closed around Lina's throat.

She is on her knees before his chair, still in diamond form—six feet of crystalline brilliance **** down, her prismatic surface catching the grow-lights in **** flashes. His grip shouldn't be possible. His hand shouldn't be able to restrain her. But something is wrong—her diamond skin is flickering, the facets dimming and brightening arrhythmically, and a low mechanical drone fills the greenhouse from somewhere you can't see. Sonic emitters. Industrial grade.

Lina writhes against his grip, her diamond fingers clawing at his wrist. Her mouth opens.

"Sam—SAM—"

"Sam... wake up..."

"Sam..."

Your vision swims. The edges of the greenhouse blur and darken, collapsing inward like a closing iris. Lina's voice reaches you as though traveling through honey—thick, distorted, each syllable stretching and warping. You try to push yourself up. Your arms won't cooperate. Your cheek presses against cold concrete.

The last thing you register before consciousness narrows to a pinhole is Marco's voice—calm, unhurried, addressed to someone you can't see.

"Bring me a chair for our guest."