"Oh thank God, someone left ravioli."

  Ida snatched a Tupperware of pasta from the minifridge, the only solid food left inside. She briefly considered nuking it quickly in the microwave just ten feet behind her, but her hunger pushed the thought from her head and she was shoveling the ravioli into her mouth, cold and uncooked and miraculous. It was the first solid food she'd had in four days.

  Lisa lowered herself onto the room's couch and let out a long groan. She'd been struggling to walk, since they'd gotten her off of her combination gurney and cage, and moving seemed to hurt her.

  Not as much as it had hurt her to break out, that was to be sure. She'd agreed to Ida's idea, given profuse permission for her to go ahead, but Ida felt ambiently guilty for what she'd put the woman through to engineer their escape. She had been able to fish the remote for the contraption that killed and resurrected her, from where Steiner had discarded it earlier, and depressed its trigger with her foot.

  Then, while Lisa had begun her excruciating convulsions, Ida had stretched her Field to its limit to overlap it with hers, had just barely managed to reach a tendril over to her and siphon off a chunk of the wave of energy Lisa's body had released as it had gone about healing itself.

  Lisa's healing had slowed, at that, and Ida had been briefly anxious that she'd killed her, but within a few minutes she was conscious and talking again, thanking Ida as she used her newfound energy to scythe through their restraints and batter down their cell door.

  The bunker had been, as she'd expected, essentially abandoned. It had taken them climbing six stories in something that resembled a mix between a freight elevator and a coffin to get to anywhere that had anything more than emergency lights on, and at no point in Ida's scouting did she see any signs of recent human habitation.

  The room they were in now was outfitted vaguely like a break room, though sparser and more utilitarian: a small corner office with a sink, a minifridge, a microwave, and a couch. Ida and Lisa had first taken turns drinking directly from the sink before Ida had discovered the food stashed away in the fridge.

  "You want any?" Ida asked, mouth half-full.

  "No, I'm- Gah," Lisa groaned, winced at some unseen spike of pain. "I don't have much of an appetite."

  "You'll need something to keep your energy up, if you want to be getting back home. Who knows how far out they took us."

  "Is there much of a rush? I don't know if I have much traveling in me right now."

  Ida studied the woman, frowned at her crumpled, collapsed form on the couch. "Hmm."

  "You could go on without me, of course. If you've got people waiting on you."

  Ida shook her head. "I should watch your back. You're right. We should scrounge up some more food, get hydrated, and take the night to rest. Or the day. God knows what time it is."

  "Thank God. Great. I'm going to-" Lisa's voice was heavy with fatigue. Ida watched as her eyelids drew downward, laden and inexorable. "I'm just going to close my eyes for a minute."

  "I'll go take a look around."

  Ida popped the last ravioli into her mouth and wandered out into the corridor. Long, roughshod concrete walls trailed in either direction, dotted incessantly with too-bright white fluorescents.

  She wandered aimlessly for a few minutes before finding a room lined with lockers. Borrowing from the now freely available electrical energy coursing through the wiring around the room, she forced each of them open with surgical blows to the locks and rifled through them. Most were totally bare, but the sixth locker she opened looked hastily emptied, with a handful of loose forms and pamphlets left crumpled inside. She unraveled them, eventually found what looked like part of some employee manual or handbook. In an appendix at the back was a floor plan.

  Six more stories up and just north of them she'd find her exit, apparently. The rest of the floor plan was largely innocuous and boring: containment cells, maintenance routes, employee spaces, barracks, servers.

  One room caught her eye, though, nestled deep in the heart of the complex. It was labeled "CC", the letters bolded and bracketed to indicate that it required top clearance to enter.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Ida didn't know for sure, but "CC" struck her as important. Command Center? Control Console? Whatever it was, it was buried and heavily insulated and deeply central and her gut was driving her restlessly toward it.

  Soon she was in that claustrophobic elevator again, plunging down, down, to the deepest level of the complex. It spat her out into a shockingly neat and well-illuminated hallway, carpeted and recently cleaned. She followed it down its length, found herself outside of a visibly reinforced, keycard-operated door.

  She reached into the card reader with her Field and zapped it, fried its circuitry. The door didn't budge. She frowned, siphoned some more power from the lights above her, and put her hands to the door's cool metal surface.

  Faintly, her Field picked up a distant vibration as she did that. She paused, listening with her hands, interpreting the signals with the preternatural intuition that her Field afforded her.

  Someone on the other side of the door was talking in hushed tones. She couldn't make out what, didn't have the control to transliterate such faint physical vibrations into spoken words, but she could tell that whoever was speaking was doing so softly, urgently, tremulously.

  Buoyed by a sudden flash of righteous anger, she blew the door off its hinges and was promptly deafened by a rattle of gunfire.

  Standing inside, half-concealed by upscale furniture as cover, backlit with a halo of warm lamplight, a pair of soldiers were emptying the clips of their service weapons into the now open doorway.

  Ida absorbed these impacts effortlessly and smiled to herself at the catharsis to come. Had she been in better shape, less dreadfully tired, she might have considered drawing this encounter out, really teaching these unfortunate tools of the state a lesson, but she didn't have the vim for that at the moment. With two flicks of her wrist and a burst of electrical energy, the two men were slumped, dead, on the spotless carpet.

  Ida padded across the room, gently stepping over the fresh corpses. Behind them, a colossal desk monopolized much of the room, festooned across its length with several monitors. One displayed a cleaner, digitalized version of the map she'd used to find the room. Others showed what looked like news bulletins, reports centered around some sort of military action at the Minnesota-Canada border.

  Another series of monitors was dedicated to something that looked like complicated geometry. Graphs depicted a clump of red circles arcing toward what looked like a representation of Earth. A readout below showed a series of figures: current velocity, estimated mass, predicted time of impact.

  Ida was frowning up at this graphic when something whizzed over her shoulder and detonated with a sharp paff against one of the screens.

  She turned to see Steiner, stepping from inside a closet, levelling a chunky-looking handgun of some sort in her direction. He depressed the trigger again, and Ida leaned easily out of another projectile's path.

  She smiled toothily at him, and Steiner, drained of color, cursed.

  She was across the room in a flash, her hand a vice around his gun arm. With a jerk, his wrist was splintered kindling and the strange gun was discarded on the ground. She kicked the man's legs out from beneath him, held his head at her eye level with her free hand.

  "I tried to tell you," Ida said. "The way you played things, it was always going to end up this way."

  "Fucking fine, do it, kill me." Steiner's voice had an acrid tinge of booze to it. She noticed now that he was unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. "It's all coming apart anyway. Whether it's you or another one of you freaks pulling the trigger doesn't matter."

  "It didn't have to come apart, you useless jingoistic rabid dog moron." Ida slapped him across the face. "I could have helped. If you had just listened to me-"

  Steiner coughed wetly, a sound vaguely reminiscent of a laugh. "Yeah, I'm sure. Rai, the woman who spanned an aircraft carrier like a two-by-four, you'd have talked her down? The guy with the zombie cult, you had a way to get him to listen to reason?" He shook his cinderblock of a head. "What about her, huh?"

  Ida looked to where Steiner had jerked his head: the screen depicting the graphs, the approach trajectory of some object from space.

  "Our little astronaut is on her way back home, with a couple thousand tons of space rock in tow, and she's coming in hot." Steiner grimaced. "You got a plan for her?"

  Ida remembered the footage she'd seen on the tablet, the green-robed figure hovering in the void of space, and felt a chill. "I'm sure I'll handle her better than you could."

  "No. This whole time, you didn't have any idea what we were doing. We didn't have any idea what we were doing. I don't think they know what they're doing. This is beyond all of us. We're a bunch of toddlers tossing around a loaded gun."

  "I couldn't have stopped it, but things didn't need to get as bad as they did, as fast as they did. This," Ida levelled the man's head at one of the screens, where an estimated fatality count for something called the Twin Cities Bombardment Zone flickered. "This is on you. What comes next is your fault."

  Ida tensed her Field to deliver a killing blow, and Steiner's stony resilience broke. He blubbered, pulled against her grip. "Wait. Wait!"

  "What?"

  "We didn't really do it, you know," he panted. "Kill her. Your daughter. It was just a bargaining chip. A- an interrogation tactic. We didn't pull the trigger, we didn't even have a man on her."

  Ida searched his face, felt a bloom of hope in her chest. She listened to his heart, touched the nerves firing feverishly in his head, and decided he was probably telling the truth.

  "You didn't kill her."

  "No." He brightened a shade. "No, we didn't. We didn't!"

  "You just told me you did."

  "It was just-"

  "You convinced me you'd killed my only family," Ida continued. "Made me believe I'd gotten my own child murdered. After you'd imprisoned and degraded me. All because I'd come here, freely and of my own volition, to try and cooperate with you."

  "We-" Steiner heard the ice behind her tone and began to withdraw. "Right. We did."

  Ida nodded, took a breath, and then neatly shattered Steiner's spine. The man was dead before he his head touched the carpet.

  Ida studied the screen again, watched the red blip as it knifed its way toward earth. The chill that had crept into her chest earlier was a frost, now, caking the inside of her ribs, sucking the warmth from the bloom of relief she'd felt at the news of her daughter's survival.

  She bent over and retrieved Steiner's gun. It was blocky, oddly weighted, clearly custom-made. She popped open the magazine and retrieved the clip: a cylindrical tube spring-loaded with round, hollow BBs each the size of a peanut.

  She studied the weapon, felt a brief wave of relief that Steiner had missed her with it, and then stepped over the three dead men and started to make her way back up to Lisa.