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Triumph.  Raw, glorious.  [color=f7941d][i]They’re all safe.[/i][/color]

[color=f7941d][i]And they’re[/i] back![/color]  Noel, another she didn’t recognise and…  [color=f7941d][i]Huo Ren’s aide?[/i][/color]  Her mind processed that in a flash – she’d last seen the boy at the conference preceding the disaster at Phnom Penh, mouse-like in his bearing, and had distinctly resolved to try to remove him from the Dragon’s grasp.  That chance had vanished with…  [i]Everything.[/i]  [color=f7941d][i]God, you’ve got a sick sense of humour…  Antiquarian, clearly – what power could your Arm have – what little could you know that made you worth risking here?[/i][/color]

Such questions could be answered later; the [i]satisfaction[/i] of it still thrummed through her.  Noel was back!  Nil was safe!  Their newest teammate – unharmed!

Their foe, powerless, pleading.

Callie felt scorn.  [color=f7941d][i]You wanted to kill them.  You bargained with [/i]thousands[i] of lives.  Why should –[/i][/color]

[color=f7941d][i]BECAUSE YOU CAN, AND SO YOU MUST.[/i][/color]

What was she [i]thinking[/i]?  A person, stripped of any power to harm, was dying in front of her.  No past grudge or crime changed that – such things were the logic of states and armies, not of people.  Not of her.

That resolution coursed through Callie’s mind, seeking thought to actualise it.  The woman ahead of her, clearly, was energy, wounded and bleeding – and energy was information, and information was something she had processed and channelled before.  She could reach out herself, here and now.  Do…  [color=f7941d][i]SOMETHING.[/i][/color]  It might work.

(Some part of her mind, barely aware amidst the [i]weight[/i] of her current impulse, recognised the feeling…  Reverberating.)

But there was a surer way, to be followed by one whose power’s form, not merely its purpose, was already suited to the task.  She knew it.  And she [i]would not[/i] commit even her enemy to sacrifice on the altar of her ego.

And so, with a call of, [color=f7941d]“Myron!”[/color] another portal formed, bridging space between a Feng caught on the edge of death and an intelligence officer capable of capturing her in a form that would not die so easily.