Chapter 25: Hidden Treasure

"I can't believe this is here," Catra said, stalking through the corridors of wire-rack shelves, each filled with research equipment. Evelyn's old lab was a marvel. "How did you manage to keep all of this hidden?"

"It wasn't easy," Taline said, walking with her. "The Enclave gutted this place shortly after Evie and the rest of her team first rebelled against the emperor. They closed it off and repurposed the station…built it out to be an administration hub like you see today. What they didn't know was that Evie programmed back-door access for me. She left a recorded message saying as much among her things in the new lab she had occupied with the Daiamid."

"So, all this stuff is from the second lab," Catra asked, playing with the antennae of a piece of robotic equipment that looked like a bug. "Not the first?"

Taline nodded. "After she died, that second site was to be ransacked just like this on. The emperor wanted everything catalogued and transported to his personal storage facilities in the Heartlands. Diallo was actually in charge of the team that did the cataloguing and shipping—I met him shortly before and recommended him for the job when it turned out we worked well together."

"If the emperor wanted everything stored in his personal vaults, how did all this stuff end up here?"

A sly smile spread across Taline's face. "Diallo has no real love for the emperor either. Not really. He helped me secret a portion of the equipment away here. We managed to smuggle almost everything I wanted, everything of real or sentimental value. There was just one thing we couldn't find no matter how hard we looked."

"What was that?"

"The original sample of the Beast Evie researched. It wasn't among her things in the second lab. I'm pretty sure either she destroyed it, or had Corynth do it for her before they left for Archanas." Taline had grown somber and, as if suddenly realizing it herself, she shook her head and snapped out of it. "Anyways, almost no one knows this first lab even existed to begin with. Anyone who does, believes it is both empty and permanently sealed. Only I, and now you, know that it's here and know what's inside."

"Wouldn't Diallo know as well since he helped you?" Catra asked, leaning in closer to a shelf and trying not to get distracted at something sparkling up at her.

"He only knows this equipment was never sent to the emperor's storage facilities," Taline said. "He doesn't know where I sent them to, and he doesn't know this place exists. To him, they just disappeared into thin air after I got done going through them. Probably thinks I destroyed them just so the emperor couldn't have them."

"Entrapta would love all this stuff," Catra said, studying at each piece of tech individually as she went. "Now I understand why you insisted on having your office here in the embassy instead of up in the executive level. And here I thought it was just because you found everyone up there to be too snobbish." Catra wrinkled her nose and Taline chuckled.

"I do think they're snobbish too though," she said with a smile. "My office right outside here used to just be extra storage space. It wasn't until after Etheria, when I was assigned here permanently, that I turned it into my lobby and office."

"The emperor thought it'd be a kind of cruel, practical joke to assign you to your sister's old station, didn't he?" Catra asked, frowning as the reasoning came together in her head. "He might not know about all this equipment, but he would be one of the few people to know of the station's history."

"Yes, I guess he thought, if he couldn't get me executed or expelled, the next best thing would be to chain me here and force me to relive her memory every day without ever being able to say a word of it to anyone else." Taline gave a rueful laugh. "The joke's on him though. Didn't need his help to do that to myself almost every day on my own."

"What do you mean?"

Catra gave her a questioning look, and Taline beckoned for her to follow. They threaded through the shelves until they opened up into a small, open, central area. An intricate rune twice as large across as a person was burned into the floor.

"Recognize this?" Taline asked, pointing to it.

"A mark rune?" Catra traced over the incalculable number of flourishes and diacritics inside the circle with her eyes. She had no ability to cast magic herself, but Glimmer had practiced these enough she knew what one generally looked like. It was just that this one looked so dense…

"You got it. It's more complicated than most others, though, because it accounts for a vastly increased range of efficacy."

"How far can you go and still teleport back here from?"

"Anywhere in the galaxy."

Catra nearly choked. "A-anywhere in the…?" She took another look at it. The outright majesty of its design suddenly hit her after understanding exactly what it was capable of.

"It took me six months of work to put this together, burning it into the floor on my hands and knees with fire and lightning spells. Anywhere I go in the galaxy—whether to the core worlds in the Heartlands or to the very far reaches of the outer arms—if I concentrate, I can feel this mark and pull myself back here to this very spot."

"Why in Mara's name would you need something like this here?"

Taline smirked at her. That was Glimmer language. "Because I was convinced that a ghost would turn up here one day," she said. "And I didn't want to miss it when it happened."

Catra turned and looked at her. Taline's expression shifted. Was that anger in her eyes as she stared at the markings in the floor? No, there was regret and guilt mixed in there as well.

"You thought a ghost would show up here? I don't understand what that means."

Taline sighed and walked over to a nearby storage cabinet. "I get my own set of nightmares too, you know. They didn't start during the war. Only after." She pressed her hand against a scanner on the locker, and the door popped open.

"Do they spike around a particular time, too?" Catra asked. She was curious about the contents of those nightmares but knew better than to ask. "Glimmer and I have different ones, but they spike around the same time. Now."

Taline nodded. "Mine come every year around the anniversary of Evie's death." she pulled the door open wider to reveal stacks of shoe-box sized containers filling the inside of the locker. "I always get a second spike shortly after Diallo's visits too, but I haven't had the heart to tell him. We spent so much time together after she died, I think my brain just associated him with her."

"That seems like a difficult way to keep a friendship," Catra said, watching as Taline pulled a number of boxes out and set them on the floor, only to dive back in and reach further to the back for whatever was crammed back there. "I don't know if I'd be able to accept visits from someone if they triggered night terrors and a week of sleep deprivation."

"It's not really his fault," Taline said, leaning forward to grab something at the very back. "It's actually much more manageable now that he's a System Governor. He used to work on this station as a staffer in the executive levels above, and would always make it a point to come see me every time I visited. It was part of the reason I got him the Governor job in the first place, aside from him being a truly competent pick for it."

"With him off station, you didn't have to see him every time you came," Catra said. "Smart."

"Doubly smart now after I got assigned here," Taline said, pulling a large box twice the size of the others out of the back of the locker. "I might have gone crazy if I didn't push him to take the job, and then have had to see him every day."

"I don't understand what that has to do with ghosts and this rune though," Catra said, eyeing the box. "What's in there?"

Taline opened it. Inside, was a mask—the same mask Catra had seen time and time again, on dramatizations, media, busts, paintings. In fact, she had just seen that same mask rendered on the statue in the embassy lobby on her way there.

"Is that…that can't be Corynth's actual mask, can it?"

Taline nodded. "Our team found two things when we touched down onto Archanas after the final battle. Corynth and his Daiamid had delivered Evelyn's payload to the Beast and sealed it away. Among the ruins and calcified Beast remains on the surface were her body and this." She hefted the box.

"What happened to the bodies of the other Shapers?" Catra asked, marveling at the mask.

"Well, we counted over two hundred scorch marks roughly in the shape of humanoid bodies," she said. "All the Shapers wore masks like these. Why Evelyn's body and Corynth's mask were the only things left in-tact, no one knows. And for years—years after that day, I obsessed over finding him. I thought him still alive. I saw not just my sister in my nightmares, but Corynth as well. Any whiff of something out of the ordinary coming through on interstellar channels and I'd already convinced myself it was him."

Catra saw the own madness she had been cured of a scant three years ago reflected briefly in Taline's eyes as she spoke. She had nearly destroyed a planet trying to grab at Adora, after all. Taline's words to her back on Etheria echoed in her head.

It's okay if it takes you a long time to focus on something in your life other than her. But at some point, you have to move forward. If you don't, you'll end up like me.

"Maybe it was someone breaking in where they shouldn't have been only to escape without a trace," Taline said in the present, jolting Catra out of the memory. "Maybe it was an encrypted message sent between the stars that couldn't be decoded. Whatever it was, if it was a mystery people found difficult to solve, I immediately left to investigate. I thought I'd wander into a room one day and see him just standing there, waiting for me."

Diallo had mentioned her habit of once dropping everything and leaving in a starship to pursue leads. "You never found anything, did you?" Catra asked.

"Never once," Taline said, shaking her head. "This rune is here because I always thought, if I didn't find him first, then he'd eventually make his way here. The only other person who'd even know of this lab's existence would be him, so if the alarm ever tripped, I would know the lab had been breached and who had breached it. I put this here so, if that were to ever happen, wherever I was in the galaxy and whatever I was doing, I could come back here and face him."

"What would you have done if you ever found him?" Catra had a feeling she already knew the answer.

"I'd kill him." Taline said it with the same gravity as someone talking about what they ate for lunch that day. "He's the one who dragged my sister into the war. He decided to prey on someone fresh off their vocational education. Someone wide-eyed and naïve, working their first real job, in a black-site military research center of all places because they truly thought they'd be able to change the world."

Taline's posture turned wistful, and Catra was certain she wouldn't have heard the next words out of her mouth if she didn't have the hearing she did. "He preyed on us both."

"They saved everyone, Taline," Catra said, swallowing down hard the feeling she was staring at a mirror image of herself from years ago, pining after Adora. "You admitted it yourself…none of us would be here if it wasn't for what they did."

"Yeah." Taline grimaced and spoke in a low voice, all trace of wistfulness gone. "They did. But that doesn't change the fact he took my sister from me when he could have picked anyone else. I don't care if he's a war hero, her blood is on his hands just as it is mine. If I had seen him again, I would have killed him myself. I'm almost upset the enemy got to him before I did."

"I thought the effects of being touched by the Beast were random?" Catra said. She didn't want to stoke the fires of Taline's passions any harder, but this was a rare conversation for them. She felt close to Taline in the moment. She wanted more. "Back on Etheria, when you first told me she could see into through time….it sounded like that just happened to be the side effect she experienced when she came into contact with the thing. Are you saying that's actually something Corynth used her for specifically? Planned for?"

"I can't say for certain," Taline said. "I can't prove it. But it's the only thing that makes sense. Evelyn didn't have powers to begin with, remember? She couldn't draw a rune to save her life let alone make it work. But Corynth? I fought that man when he first revealed himself. The things he was capable of doing…how the words he spoke could worm their way into a person and change them forever…I had never experienced or seen anything like it before in my life. It makes more sense to me that her future vision was a product of his manipulation than something natural or random."

Catra frowned and considered that. All this magic stuff flew way over her head, and even though she got the gist of what Taline was saying, she also got the distinct feeling Taline wasn't being one hundred percent honest with her.

"Glimmer has mentioned in passing you've taken an interest," Taline said. "Do you linger on the statues too? Wonder what's behind the mask? Stare at the eyes and wish they weren't just stone sometimes?"

Catra's first instinct was to deny, but then she caught sight of the way Taline looked at her and knew she could see right through her. She was paralyzed, unable to do anything except swallow and nod and then hang onto every ticking second afterward, waiting to hear what Taline would say next.

"If a statue of him holds that much sway," Taline said, each of her syllables spooling out almost like a confession of guilt, "then imagine what seeing him face to face while he was alive, looking him in the eye might have been like."

Catra caught it then, in that same laser-focused look Taline kept leveled at her: she wasn't just seeing right through her, but telling her more, almost like she hoped Catra could understand what she was trying to convey just like she could glimpse the emperor's memories when he went digging around in hers. It was all just out of reach for her—she couldn't read it. Catra and Glimmer knew how to communicate with looks, hold whole conversations almost. But her and Taline?

Catra hadn't visited enough for that.

"That was the old me," Taline said with a sigh, sounding exhausted, jolting Catra out of yet another trance. She set the mask aside on a nearby table, rather than putting it with the rest of the boxes on the floor near the locker. "The more crazy witch hunts I went on, the less confident I was that he was actually still alive. I think I was just giving myself something to do other than face my guilt over letting Evelyn be manipulated like that—giving myself any excuse to not grieve.

"The nightmares have stopped affecting me as much. The paranoia, intrusive thoughts, all of it I've learned to move forward with. Evie and the Daiamid…they let themselves be collectively consumed by the Beast. They stalled it long enough for the Barrier to activate and trap it in the next dimension. No one could have survived that much infection, it's just not possible. After I was assigned to this station, I made the conscious decision to go on no more wild goose chases. No more scanning broadcasts, no more combing through hours of news reels. I refused to go looking for things that didn't exist."

Catra looked at the mask still in the box on the desk and traced its outline with her eyes. She glanced down at the rune at her feet. Then she looked around at all the equipment in the room, all the shelves stacked with tech behind them.

"Glimmer doesn't know any of this, does she?" Catra asked. "You said I was the only person aside from you who knows of this place now. Why tell me all of this?"

"I offered to take you with me off Etheria because I saw something in you, Catra. Not just because you reminded me in part of someone I had lost. I can repeat that to you over and over again until I'm blue in the face, but if you don't believe me by now, then it doesn't matter how else I put it or how often I say it." Taline turned back to the open locker and pulled another box out from a lower shelf. "The fact you went to so much trouble trying to become a Sentinel, and the fact you did it for the reasons you did, tells me that this is the right thing to do."

Taline opened the box and revealed a crystal and a vial inside. The crystal glowed a faint red against the cushion, while a fine sparkly powder filled the inside of the vial up to its cork stopper.

"Recognize this?" Taline asked, placing the box next to the mask and holding the crystal up between them.

Catra shook her head.

"This is an apeiron," Taline said. "It's an incredibly rare and expensive crystal, made almost entirely of ignominite. It's similar to the runestones on your home world, except on a smaller scale and with a few more varied uses. It can hold a physical fragment of the Beast, if you want. That's what all the research stations switched too as soon as Evie discovered the mineral—it's what cut fatalities down to almost nothing. Or, in this case, it can be used to store information and memories. You've already been exposed to one in the past."

"That crystal you destroyed on the emperor's citadel," Catra said. "That was an apeiron too?"

Taline nodded. "I gathered as much of what was left of it and put it in that vial. That one held a strong imprint of the Beast, since it was Evie's last memories alive before she was consumed. This one holds my memories, instead." She turned the crystal in front of both of them and Catra watched the light reflect off its facets. "Every painful memory of us fighting, every thought I've ever had or emotion I've ever felt grieving her loss, it's all recorded in this."

Catra's mouth went dry hearing that. If the first apeiron she had been exposed to had subjected her to life-altering nightmares, she wondered what damage this one was capable of.

"I'd come every month after the war for years to sit with this," Taline said. "And after being assigned as Consul on this station, I've come every day for the past three years. I've spent hours upon hours meditating on those thoughts, both to pay penance and to honor Evie's memory. There are no pictures of her, no mention of her in any texts or recorded histories. No one speaks her name…all that remains of her now are the memories and emotions and thoughts of an older sister who didn't deserve her, distilled and recorded in this." Taline extended the crystal to Catra. "And now I think it's time that I let her go. I want you to have it."

Catra's eyes threatened to bug out of her head and she took a step backward in shock.

"I can't…Taline, no," she said, looking anywhere but at the crystal. "I can't take that. I just…I can't." Her thoughts and emotions spiraled. She didn't know whether she felt flattered or overwhelmed or sad for Taline or confused. It was likely a combination of all of the above, although that realization did nothing to help calm her in the moment.

"She's not truly gone, Catra. Not yet at least. As long as I'm alive, there will be at least one person who remembers her. Me wanting to give this to you is more than just a symbolic gesture."

"What do you mean?" Catra still didn't trust herself to look directly at the thing.

"I've spent so much time with it and imbued it with such strong memories over so many long years that it's intrinsically tied to me. It's like a portable mark-rune. Just like the rune on the floor, I can feel the presence of this crystal should I concentrate on it. And were it to break, I'd be able to lock onto its position in an instant, and pull myself through time and space to appear right next to it in a moment's notice. If you are to become my Sentinel, I want you to have this. Not just because I want to give you my sister's legacy, but because I want to know at all times that I can come to your aid should you ever need it."

Catra blinked and let Taline's words sink into her. Slowly she turned to look up at her.

"I don't understand," she said. "The Enclave rejected me from the program. I'm not going to be a Sentinel."

Taline smirked and shook her head, amused. "Catra, there is no program."

"What?" Now she was well and truly lost. "What do you mean there's no program? What did I apply for?"

"You applied to be a Sentinel, but they didn't reject you because you were unfit for some type of academy or training program or boot camp or anything of the sort. In fact, according to their assessments, you did remarkably. Your combat skills are sharp, your reflexes are sharp, your service record is stellar except for the fact you are habitually late to everything. You were a stellar candidate."

"Why then? Why did they turn me away, and what exactly did I get turned away from?"

"You were rejected because you had no one to officially take you on."

Catra furrowed her brow. "I still don't understand."

"Applications used to be commonplace back in the ancient days of the Enclave," Taline said. "That's why everyone had such a strange reaction to seeing one again. No one had actually applied in centuries. Modern Sentinels share a much more personal connection to their Battlemages than in the past—all of them are handpicked not just for their combat skills and experience, but because of the bond they have with the one they agree to watch over."

"I was turned down because no one wanted me?"

Taline made a face. "You somehow always turn things into that. The answer is yes and no. People were interested, but there's decorum to these things. I not only trained Glimmer, one of the most promising rookies in the Enclave to come around in generations, but did you forget that I sponsored you into the Empire as well? People were interested, Catra, but no one would reach over me and take you on. Even when I told them I had no intention of signing you, many feared straining their relationship with me and decided to hold off."

Catra felt both relieved and saddened by those words. Relieved that people wanted her, but sad that Taline had explicitly said she didn't. "Why wouldn't you sign me when you saw my name come up?" Again, she felt small and hated herself for it, hated feeling things she had no right to. Taline had already done so much.

"Why would I have any reason to believe that's what you'd want from me?" Taline said, sounding irritated for once. "You rejected any promotion or pay raise or commendation if my endorsement came alongside it. I'd get excuse after excuse any time I'd send you an invitation to lunch or coffee if Glimmer wasn't to be there too. This is the first time in three years you've come to me on your own volition, and a very large part of me believes that's only because Glimmer strong armed you into doing even that."

Catra winced and shrank further into herself with every word Taline spoke. It's not that she said it in a way that guilted her. In fact, she seemed intent on presenting everything as neutrally as possible, even if she did sound a little annoyed. But Catra well and truly felt guilty now that she saw first-hand how her treatment had made Taline feel.

"You asked Glimmer to look into this for you," Taline said, "but explicitly asked her not to say anything at all to me, since you would have found out how archaic a practice your application was had you asked. What am I supposed to think after all that? I considered signing you for all of three seconds before I decided that was a terrible idea." She sighed and deflated. "If my help is really that abhorrent to you then…well, it is what it is, I guess. But I don't understand why you'd turn right around and get upset after I finally get the hint."

Never in a million years had Catra thought she'd ever make another person feel unwanted, the same way Shadow Weaver had made her feel. Yet here she was. She took a step forward and shook her head vigorously, wringing her hands raw with remorse.

"That's not it at all," she said. "I just…I wanted to get in and surprise you, like I said. I wanted to be able to say 'look at what I can accomplish' and then planned to ask if I could serve as your Sentinel after the Enclave qualified me." She hung her head and spoke in a small, embarrassed voice. "I'm an idiot. I didn't know it was the other way around. I'm sorry."

Taline didn't say anything for a long moment and Catra looked back up at her, half afraid of what she'd see. She saw her standing there, face tense in thought and mired in confusion. Another beat passed, and all the tension evaporated from her face, replaced with unabashed relief and mirth. Her shoulders shook with quiet laughter.

"Well, that's a relief," she said. "I was half afraid you'd actually grown to hate me."

Again, Catra shook her head. She'd have spoken, too, but the sting of fresh tears threatened to fall from her eyes, and she didn't want to risk crying again.

"You aren't an idiot either," Taline said. "I understand why believing I only thought of you as a substitute for Evie made things hard. But we've cleared that up now, and can move past it. I will gladly accept you as my Sentinel, if that is what you still want."

Catra couldn't nod her head fast enough. She was going to pull a muscle with all the shaking and nodding she was doing. "Yes. Yes, I want that. Is it really that simple?"

"Sure," Taline said with a smile. "Battlemages are entitled to handpick their Sentinels. There is one condition, however."

"Anything. Whatever it is, I'll do it."

"You have to promise to kill me should I ever become corrupted by the Beast."

Catra faltered. The conversation had taken a decidedly dark turn she was wholly unprepared for.

"You know what happens to someone the Beast touches right?" Taline asked, after seeing the shocked look on Catra's face. "I'm not just talking about the dying part."

Catra swallowed and nodded. "Glimmer might have mentioned something, but she didn't go into too much detail. Said it gave her the creeps. It's not the same for you as it is for regular people, right?"

Taline nodded. "The Beast makes thralls of people it consumes. It doesn't matter if you are a soldier or a politician, royalty or a beggar on the streets. If it grabs hold of you, it consumes you. It takes your mind and adds it to its growing, collective intelligence, then uses your husk of a body as a thrall. That's part of the reason why the emperor didn't commit any of his clones on the battlefield until he was forced to. He was afraid if the Beast took one of them, then it would spread through his interconnected mental web and get to him.

"But if someone like Glimmer or I were to fall victim to the Beast? We still don't understand why, but when the creature comes across someone with magical talent, it doesn't subsume their consciousness into itself. Instead, it imbues a perfect copy of itself into that magic wielder much like a cell undergoing mitosis. It turns that mage into an Abomination—an entirely new, separate infectious center point with its own destructive intelligence."

"Are…are only mages converted to Abominations? Is that how that works?"

"Almost all," Taline said. "There were a few recorded cases of Abominations stemming from people without the talent, but it's almost always a mage."

"That's how it was able to spread so quickly, isn't it?" Catra asked, several more pieces of information she had picked up over the years clicking into place. "That's why you're technically not allowed to be deployed to the front lines, aside from the emperor explicitly forbidding it as punishment. You have no more Sentinels to watch over you."

Taline nodded again. "That's exactly it. Sentinels aren't just there to watch over their Battlemages. With the advent of the Beast war, they evolved the additional responsibility of looking out for the wellbeing of the planets and systems their Battlemages were deployed to. An Abomination suddenly appearing on the field of battle, to this day, is the difference between a strike force being able to fend off a Beast attack to save a city at heavy cost, and having to abandon the entire planet and bombard it to hell from orbit."

"Holy shit," Catra said. Her fingers shook from the mental imagery of hundreds of ships nuking the surface of a planet with orbital cannons from space.

"That's part of the reason why the number of new Sentinels has decreased so rapidly since the first war. It was one thing to serve with honor alongside someone you considered a friend. It's something else entirely to kill that friend should they be corrupted. Most refuse to do so, which is why a lot of the responsibilities an Enclave Sentinel used to possess have gradually shifted to Imperial Vanguard soldiers assigned to Battlemages out in the field."

Catra knit her brow, deep in thought over the implications of what becoming a Sentinel truly meant. It was wildly different from the image she had in her head going while drafting her application, but did that mean she no longer wanted it?

"Like I said before," Taline said. "Nothing would make me happier than to take you on if that is what you want. But I don't want to sugarcoat anything for you either—if I am ever corrupted, for the sake of everyone else around, you must kill me. Are you prepared to do something like that?"

Catra studied her shaking fingers and ran through her thought process one last time before she made up her mind. She squeezed her fingers into a fist to stop them from shaking, looked up and at Taline in the eyes, and nodded. "Yes. I'm prepared, if it ever comes to that."

Taline smiled wider than Catra had seen ever before, and once again held out the crystal to her. "Then take this and let's not speak of these depressing things again."

Catra reached out, took the crystal from her, and stared at it in her hand. After burning an image of it into her brain trying to immortalize the moment forever in her memories, she put it in her pants pocket and patted it. "I'll find a cord or something so I can wear it."

"Just as long as you have it on you always," Taline said. "There's one last thing I want to give you."

Catra thought she'd just about explode from all the emotions she'd already churned through. What else could there be?

Taline turned to a large box looming next to the storage locker. Catra thought it looked like a massive black refrigerator, except the number of cords and tubes connected to the back of it told her it likely wasn't that. Taline keyed in a quick code on a number pad attached to it before scanning her palm again. A small drawer slid out, revealing a vaguely handgun-shaped object inside. She gripped its handle and pulled it out. It came free with a hiss, like it had been hooked up to pressurized air, and Catra recognized it as an injection gun.

"Hold out your arm, palm up please," Taline said.

Catra held out her right arm, then quickly pulled it back and held out her left instead. She still had Entrapta's PDA attached to the right like always.

Just the fact she did as Taline asked without hesitating spoke volumes. What would have caused her anxiety to spike not even three years ago, she didn't think twice about now. In fact, she remembered a great deal of panic the first time Taline had injected her with something. How far she had come.

"This was a big project Evie worked on before her death," Taline said, pressing the device to Catra's exposed skin and pulling the trigger. Catra felt a pinch and took a sharp breath at the sensation.

"The emperor explicitly wanted it and was so mad when Diallo and I told him we couldn't find it. It's missing a lot of its functionality. I'm not sure if it was corrupted somehow or if she just never finished, but it's incredibly useful despite me not being able to get any information about her out of it."

"What is it?" Catra asked, rubbing her arm when Taline pulled the injector away and stowed it.

"I won't ruin the surprise," she said, shutting the drawer and turning to head out of the lab with Catra not far behind. "It will take a few days to calibrate to you, but you will know when it's ready to go. I think you'll like it."

They exited, and Taline shut the door behind them. Catra felt buoyant, like she was floating above the clouds in pure bliss. So much had happened, she wasn't sure how she'd process it all. But one thing she was certain of was that she was happy.

"Here," Taline said, tossing something to her as Catra turned. She caught it mid-air and opened her palm to look: it was the storage drive Diallo had left on her desk. "Take that to our System Governor friend, will you please?"

"You don't want to destroy it yourself?" Catra asked, turning the device around in her palm.

"Nope." Taline pressed a button on the underside of her desk and the lock on her door disengaged. Catra hadn't realized she had locked it in the first place. "Let him figure out what he wants to do with it. Like I said, I'm done chasing ghosts and going on wild goose chases. I have the station and its people I have to look out for. And now, I have you to officially mentor too."

"This is really happening, isn't it?" Catra asked. "I really get to have this?" She wasn't talking about the drive.

"Of course you do," Taline said. "The paperwork will take time. Lyra is already swamped as it is so I might do it myself, but Moriarty has a campaign speech I'm expected to be in attendance for in a few days. As soon as that's done, I'll come get you and we can hash out a concrete training plan. Once we get your skills honed a bit more, I should be allowed to at least leave the station on a few diplomatic missions. It will be a good chance for you to get out and see more of the galaxy too, instead of just this station."

Catra nodded and bid her an excited farewell. She was all smiles as she waved goodbye to a bewildered Lyra, still trapped behind a prison of stacked paperwork on her desk, and she walked with a bounce in her step all the way back toward the embassy lobby. Diallo wouldn't be too thrilled at having his drive returned to him uninvestigated, but Catra couldn't find it in her to worry about that in the slightest.

She couldn't remember the last time she felt so happy, either.