Chapter 32: Ground Zero

The enormous spires and steeples of Scavria's capital city of Tir loomed in the distance.

Plumes of smoke rose from the skyline, which stood proud in front of the expansive, snow-capped mountain range—also called Tir—from which the city derived its name. A great, rocky steppe, littered with pockets of tall grass and piles of stones, spanned the twenty-mile distance between the city and the evacuation compound Glimmer was stationed at. The staging area before her was packed. A small army of junior soldiers worked as gently as possible to corral the throng of refugees there, guiding them into roughly twenty ordered lines that fed into the processing stations lining the fenced-off entrance to the compound proper.

A shiver and a chill shot down Glimmer's spine, and she wasn't sure from where it had come—either from seeing the sheer number of living bodies she and the team still had to process after days already working nonstop, or from the actual, physical chill of the cold morning air that whistled over the mountains and in from the city. It was probably both, if she were honest; this cohort of people were even larger than the first that came three days ago, and the wind sounded vaguely like a thousand voices moaning low in agony all at once as it blew. None of this was pleasant.

Every evacuation she had been part of before had been similar: them setting up on the outskirts of a once thriving community that had been reduced to essentially a mass grave, scrambling to process in the fraction of the population that survived the initial Beast wave and shove them into titanic megaliths—ships ready to take off at a moment's notice should the effort to retake whatever city had been hit fell through. A strange coldness had always permeated the air, smelling vaguely of death and despair. One could almost sense the life and color and potential for growth that had once been there, all but drained dry.

Maybe this time, it was the fact Tir was once a population of several hundred million before disaster struck, or maybe it was because this infection had started so close to the mid-rim, but for some reason, the feeling of destruction and hopelessness pervaded far deeper than any of her previous assignments. This, despite the fact they actually stood a decent chance at saving the city this time, unlike others.

Glimmer finished processing in a family, gestured for them to continue past her station to the gates beyond, and a new pair—a young man and woman, both Scavrian like the rest—shuffled up to her. They looked up and over her roofed stall, toward the megaliths oriented behind her in the compound, beyond the fencing.

"Hi there," she to them, putting on the most inviting smile she could muster. It wasn't much, considering she was halfway through a double shift without much sleep the previous night.

They didn't respond, both still staring beyond her, wide-eyed and a little overwhelmed. Glimmer had seen this reaction more than once; on top of all the chaos these people were going through trying to evacuate in the middle of a Beast incursion, the megaliths themselves were a colossal sight to behold. Each were multiple stories in height, taller than even some skyscrapers over in their capital city, and as spacious as several stadiums put together. Usually there was only one, maybe two. The fact there were six of them this time, arranged in a circular pattern around a hastily erected courtyard in the compound, likely only made things feel more dire. It certainly did for Glimmer.

She cleared her throat, finally garnering their attention. "If you'll please provide some kind of identifying information, I'll get you through the intake as quickly as possible so you can get settled aboard a ship."

The male, likely in his late teens or early twenties, hardened his expression. "We don't have any documents," he said. "We evacuated so quickly there wasn't any time to grab our belongings. All we have are the clothes on our backs."

"That's not a problem," Glimmer said, keeping her tone light. Tir in particular had been a rushed operation, since the task force believed they could save the city if they moved fast enough; people coming through without even a spare change of clothes let alone their official documents were the rule rather than the exception. She pulled out a portable palm scanner from her station's equipment drawer and held it over the countertop for them. "We'll can do a basic biometric read and that should be more than sufficient for intake."

His expression hardened further, and he traded a quick glance with the girl at his side. Except for their vaguely elfin features, and for a pair of second eyelids that displayed only under extreme stress or illness, the Scavrians didn't look all that different from Etherians, or any other humanoid races of the empire for that matter. That only made it easier for Glimmer to realize they were obviously terrified about something above and beyond just evacuating. That in and of itself wouldn't have been an issue—she had seen a lot of second eyelids since landing planet-side—but this felt different. They looked they were afraid of her more than anything else.

"It's a routine scan," she said. "It's really about accounting for missing persons instead of anything else. If the worst happens and we have to evacuate, any of your loved ones you might have gotten separated from can search the intake logs and see which megalith you're stationed on. And even if we don't have to take off, many people still rely on the manifest to make sure whoever they're looking for is safe." She left out the part about how anyone not on the official intake list were marked officially dead or missing after a time.

"Please don't split us up, ma'am," said the girl. She couldn't be older than fourteen.

Glimmer was taken aback, and was about to ask why that'd even be an issue when a high-pitched screech roared overhead.

She looked up and caught sight of a large personnel transports on approach. By habit, she glanced down at her PDA and checked the air-traffic logs she had bookmarked. That was a transport, not a warbird, so it definitely wasn't Kyle flying. Him and Lonnie and Rogelio were likely still clearing out the Beast from one of the last infected sectors of the city. But still, she had to check, and she didn't let it go until she confirmed that vessel was just carrying a fresh batch of refugees in from Tir.

Her relief was palpable. Kyle, Lonnie, and Rogelio had found out Glimmer had rejected her command before they even touched down on Scavria's surface. Glimmer had no idea who leaked the decision to them before she could tell them personally, but she had a bulleted list of things she'd do to that person if she ever found out who they were. Lonnie's reaction was the only one she had seen, and she had been livid. So livid, in fact, Glimmer was worried about running into them again, afraid of seeing the same anger and disappointment on Kyle and Rogelio's faces too. Weren't reunions supposed to be happy?

The entire operation had been placed on a communications lockdown too, meaning Glimmer could neither check in with Catra or Taline, nor could she vent to them about what had happened. She was stuck out here alone, and had never felt lonelier.

"Is everything okay here?" said a voice off to the side.

An Imperial soldier, clad in the white munitions armor of the enlisted forces, had wandered over from his nearby post. He likely had seen Glimmer taking much longer than usual with the two Scavrians in front of her and had come to investigate.

"Everything is fine," Glimmer said, careful to keep her tone neutral. "There's just so many we need to process, bottlenecks with the system are bound to happen. Return to your post, please."

The soldier nodded and ambled off. The two refugees watched him with barely concealed panic. Glimmer was happy she had successfully monopolized the soldier's attention; if he saw how they looked at him, or if she were a little too quick to answer him, he might have sensed something going on and asked more questions. Glimmer studied them, and when they realized her attention was back on them, they balked and shuffled their feet under her gaze.

"We can pay you," the older one said. "We have some money. How much to let us through without scanning us?"

Glimmer laughed. She had gotten that question more times than she cared to remember, but this was the first time it had come from someone who looked genuinely harmless. Everyone else seemed like they belonged on some unsavory blacklist.

"Look," she said, leaning in and lowering her voice so no one else could hear. "We're sworn to take in anybody as long as they aren't terrorists or escaped convicts. The prisons have their own way of evacuating inmates. I don't care who you are, but I do have to know you aren't a danger to the rescue effort or other refugees." She held out the bio scanner to them. "I'll do only a basic outstanding arrest warrant check," she said. "If you're caught up on some petty theft charges or something then I won't make a fuss about it, but you can't get in until I issue you a certificate. If I promise not to dig further than the major police reports, will you agree to be scanned?"

The two exchanged looks once again, blinking their second eyelids at each other in rapid succession. Glimmer had a feeling a there was far more conversation exchanging between them than she was privy to. Finally, the male turned to her and gave a curt nod before extending a four-fingered hand and placing it on the scanner.

The readings came back empty, and they looked to each other in confusion when she told them so.

"I don't know what it is that you both are so afraid of, but you are clean," she said as she worked at the terminal for a moment. When she pressed a button on the console inside her booth, two plastic cards dispensed from a machine behind her and dropped into a tin catch with a clang.

"These are your boarding passes," she said, handing them over. "They're not new identities—not really, but they'll get you around the megalith without anyone asking you too many questions. You can transfer whatever money you were going to bribe me with onto it and use it like a debit card for purchases."

They took the cards from her and stared wide-eyed at them in their hands. "Are you certain you haven't saved our information anywhere?" the girl asked, more skeptical now than scared.

Glimmer sighed. "Look around you," she said, careful to not seem exasperated. "We're optimistic about saving the city, but we still have thousands of your fellow citizens to process into the compound just in case the ships need to take off. What I did would cost me my job if anyone found out about it, but my priority is to help as many people as I can. If you aren't on the list of the empire's most wanted or aren't an escaped serial killer, then it doesn't really matter to me who you are or who you may have pissed off." She shrugged. "All of us are the same in front of the Beast. We're food. I'm not going to get any of you in trouble, since you don't even show up on the warrant scans. I didn't even check your names. Just don't mention that I did this to anyone, okay?"

They nodded their heads, looking equal parts relieved and grateful. Glimmer made a 'get going' gesture with her head and they shuffled past to the compound beyond. One of the guards at the gate scanned their new ID cards and ushered them through. Another set of refugees had already approached her station, but Glimmer didn't turn her attention to them until those two were fully through.


Several hours later and the work still hadn't let up. The train of people she processed was endless, and soon, even the words of comfort she spoke to those walking scared past her station—the one part of the job she actually enjoyed—grew stale and meaningless in her mouth. She wasn't even sure those words were coherent anymore, although the Scavrians on the receiving end seemed to relax and grow hopeful at hearing them.

That pair from earlier hadn't been far from her mind as she worked, and every opportunity she could, Glimmer checked her PDA for Kyle's flight log as well; even though everyone was no doubt still furious with her for turning them down, now that she knew they were on this deployment with her, she couldn't stop checking in on them—checking that they were safe.

Scavria's orange star flew high in the sky. It was almost lunchtime, and she was excited to go on break. Everything else notwithstanding, she had been thinking hard about how she might reconnect with Bow after he didn't send her a message with her monthly download from Etheria, and she thought she might have finally figured out something. Her lunch break would be the perfect time to draft it up, and from there, once she got it queued for Salas, it was only a matter of waiting for the communication lines to open up for that message to go through.

Unfortunately, she made the mistake of looking over at the crowds again before clocking out. They seemed to have doubled since the morning, and she slumped against the back wall of her station, all excitement having fled from her. Then she noticed something: a young boy, no older than six, eyes wide in panic and cheeks streaked with tears, darting in and out of the refugees lined up before them. She watched him shuffle forward with the group he had fallen in with, then retreat further back into the crowd once he got to the front. He'd then poke around there for a while until inevitably finding his way into a different line, beginning the process all over again.

Poor boy must be lost, she thought. She left her station before another refugee group could monopolize her and marched out toward him.

"C-can you help me find my p-p-parents?" the boy asked her between hiccups and sobs the moment she crouched down in front of him.

"I sure can," Glimmer said. "What's your name, big man?"

"Newton," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Newton Durange."

Glimmer nodded, offering her hand to him and guiding him past all the lines back to her booth, asking him questions along the way about why he had been wandering around alone.

He had gotten separated from his family, it turned out, when they were evacuated from deep inside the city. Newt—the nickname he asked her to call him by because "all my friends call me Newt"—couldn't tell her much else. But, judging by how shaken up he sounded, Glimmer got the impression he was evacuated directly by one of the Battlemage and Vanguard combo squads combing the city streets. That was the only way she could make sense of how frantic his rendition of events seemed; he likely had been pulled directly from an active hotspot, rather than somewhere further away from an epicenter. The fact his parents still hadn't turned up didn't bode well either.

She propped Newt up on the desk in her booth, ignoring the way the other Imperial soldiers and even some of the refugees looked at her for cutting him to the front. His feet swung free, high off the ground, as she turned around to access the computer. Nothing popped up on when she put his last name through the system.

"Looks like your parents haven't been put in the system yet either," she said to him with a frown.

"What does that mean?" He had calmed considerably and no longer cried, likely because someone was finally paying attention to him.

"It just means that you got here before they did," she said, purposefully leaving out the fact there was a good chance they might just never show up.

"Will they get here soon?" he asked, another hiccup trailing after his last word.

"I'm sure they will." She smiled. "Tell you what, I'm about to get off for lunch. Why don't we go get something to eat? And then I'll take you somewhere you can meet a lot of new friends until your parents come."

Newt nodded and Glimmer quickly processed him through. She grabbed his card when the machine spit it out and offered her hand to him again after he hopped off the desk. Someone took over her stall the moment she vacated it, and together, they walked through the security checkpoint, past the gates, and toward the compound in the distance.

The closer they got to the main square and the six surrounding megaliths, the more uneasy Glimmer felt. Newt toddled along next to her—two steps for every one of hers—seemingly oblivious to whatever was getting her hackles up. When they finally reached the center pavilion, Glimmer realized what was happening: a larger than expected mob of people were crowded there among the popup shops, field hospital, and administration offices, kicking up scene with complaints and shouts and jeers. Glimmer found an off-duty clerk she had worked with previously and approached her with Newt in tow.

"What's going on?" she asked the man.

"Typical unrest," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Nothing out of the ordinary, except there's more people here than ever before."

It was true. With six megaliths to evacuate people and over ninety ships in orbit for Tir alone, not to mention the resources stationed at other parts of Scavria, this was by far the most infrastructure that had been deployed to one world since the first war—the most refugees they'd have to handle at once, too.

"It looks like the guards are having a hard time keeping things from spilling out of control this time," Glimmer said.

"Doesn't help that ninety-percent of the muscle is out in the city pushing back the infection," the clerk said, looking over the crowd. She gave Glimmer a pointed look. "Ninety-nine percent, actually. You're the only 'muscle' over here instead of out fighting. Who's the kid?"

Glimmer grimaced but decided not to make a big deal about the comment. She wasn't being irritating on purpose. "Little guy is waiting for his parents to catch up to him," she said. "I was going to bring him to the Crechemaster's office so they could watch over him after lunch."

"Mmm, they're overflowing with other kids whose parents haven't shown up either, though. I don't know if they'll be able to take another."

Glimmer looked down at Newt, thankful that he didn't seem to register their conversation. "That's not going to work. They have to take him, they can't just turn him away because they're running out of space."

"Have you gone to see what it looks like there? If you had, you'd know trying to shove him in there is a bad idea."

It couldn't be that bad, could it? Glimmer was about to ask what she meant when a harsh crack resounded out from the crowd; someone had thrown a bottle and shattered it, and the crowd grew rowdier in response. A number of soldiers, who up until that point had been standing on raised platforms trying to shout and calm people down, started to finger at the rifles strapped to their chests and the handguns at their hips.

"Are you planning on doing anything about that?" the clerk asked.

Glimmer set her lips into a thin line and said, "Yeah," dreading what she knew would come next. "It looks like it will get ugly if someone doesn't step in soon. And who better to get their attention than me, the muscle, right?"

She kneeled in front of Newt, and he fixed his giant eyes on her. "Hey big man," she said. "I'm going to go talk to that crowd and get them to be a little nicer to one another. Would you do me a huge favor and stay here with my friend where it's safer?"

Newt, who had been nothing but docile and compliant so far, squeezed her hand tighter and shook his head. "No, I want to stay with you."

"It's dangerous, and I don't want you to get hurt. Please stay here."

"No!" Newt shook his head and hugged Glimmer's hand with his whole body.

Glimmer sighed. She wouldn't be able to pull apart without hurting him, and the mob was quickly growing louder. They were building to a fever pitch, and unless she stepped in soon then someone on either side of the refugee-guard conflict might do something drastic. There was something she could try if Newt refused let go. It wasn't her first choice but, on second thought, it might actually help calm everyone down faster.

"Alright," she said. "You can stay with me, but I need you to not let go of my hand no matter what, okay? Even if things get scary, you can't let go. Can you promise me?"

Newt nodded. "I promise."

Glimmer rose and, together, they approached the mob, stopping only a few feet from the back of the outermost layer of refugees in the pavilion. The megaliths stood tall around them like six monstrous, looming guardians. Bits and pieces of coherency came through the noise.

"Where is my son? Where is my daughter? Where is my wife?"

"Will we be evacuated from the planet? Where will we go?"

"Why can I not get any answers about anything going on here?"

"How did the Empire let this happen in the first place?"

"Who's in charge? No, not you, I want to speak to whoever really is in charge of this evacuation."

"Why do I have to stay in the compound? My family lives in the next city over and I need to get to them. I thought this was an evacuation center, not a prison."

Glimmer had heard all this time and time again on her other deployments. None of it was new, but it was exhausting to repeatedly address. After checking that Newt was as close to her as he could get, she gave a quick gesture in the air with her other hand.

A purple rune, wreathed in neon, etched itself under their feet. Newt stared at it in wide-eyed wonder, and Glimmer breathed a sigh of relief. She was afraid that might have startled him.

She completed the rune so that its circumference reached about an arm's breadth from the center of their bodies—enough room for her to feel safe they wouldn't fall off, but not so large she had to concentrate in order to maintain it. She gave another gesture, and the rune lifted them off the ground like a platform and floated them over the heads of the crowd toward the center.

The noise died down as more people saw Glimmer flying over them. By the time they hovered over the center of the mob, everyone had stopped shouting, and the few who weren't staring up at her with open mouths were whispering to their neighbors in excitement and interest instead.

"It's the Seraph," she heard one person say. "The Seraph of Archanas is here."

A person nearby nudged them and said, "No you idiot, the Seraph doesn't have pink hair. That's the other one, the Angel."

"If she's here then we must be safe, right?" the first asked.

"I don't know. If they sent her, it might mean we need extra help. Do you see how many ships are up there in orbit?"

Glimmer struggled not to roll her eyes. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the impact she had on the lives of Imperial citizens, but the way many of them practically idolized her next to Taline and even Corynth bordered on creepy sometimes.

She cleared her throat instead, and said, "Excuse me."

The whispering didn't die down, so she cleared her throat a second time and projected her voice louder, all the way to the back. "Okay everyone, please calm down."

Finally, the whispering ceased and she had the crowd's full attention, including the soldiers still stationed nearby.

"I'm sure some of you are already aware of who I am," she said. "For those unfamiliar, my name is Glimmer. I am the only Enclave Battlemage currently assigned to the evacuation site here." She paused, waiting for an interruption she was sure would come. Someone in the back coughed, and the guards continued to fidget with their weapons, nervous.

"I understand your apprehension," she said. "This infection was sudden and violent. Many of you have been ripped from your homes only to come here and receive no answers. I want you to understand that your questions and your concerns and your frustrations are nothing new. As cold as that might sound, please try to take that as a good thing—you are not alone. In my experience, everyone who has made it to one of these evacuation centers and the megaliths in the past has made it out of the infection alive. You have nothing to worry about."

The whispering picked up, and Glimmer knew if she left it at that, it would only frustrate the crowd more.

"I also understand that's not nearly enough information to make anyone satisfied," she said, pushing her voice so it still carried over the noise. "It certainly wouldn't satisfy me. So, I will share what I can with you about the state of Scavria's fight against the Beast."

That seemed to calm people enough she didn't have to fight as hard to be heard.

"I've been part of many evacuations since joining the Enclave," she said. "To put concrete numbers on it, this is my fourth deployment and ninth city evacuation effort. My mentor, your 'Seraph of Archanas,' has also taken part in hundreds of planet-side battles and their ensuing evacuations during the first war."

More whispers traveled around the crowd at her mention of Taline, and Glimmer suppressed the urge to shy away. This was to boost their morale, nothing more. It was fine. She was fine. No reason to panic, although she already felt the beginnings of an attack clawing at the edges of her psyche.

"So far the infection has only hit the capital city," she said. "No other city on Scavria is currently fighting a Beast infection, and we have megaliths and fleets stationed nearby for them in any case. For those of you worried about friends and family in other places, please rest easy.

"Further, this is the largest fleet ever to respond to an infection before, and this was largely because this is the largest settlement the Beast has hit since the first war. We planned for a worst-case scenario and instead received something far less dire. Preliminary reports have come in, and Fleet Command is confident we can retake the city. Our mission will be a success, and it will be a success very soon."

Excitement thrummed through the crowd. Glimmer wasn't certain she was at liberty to share what she had. In fact, she'd surely broken several layers of classified intel security already, but it was far better than letting a mob devolve into violence.

"Be aware, everything will not go back to normal as soon as the city is retaken," she said. "Rebuilding efforts will be strenuous, cataloguing and paying respects to lost loved ones will take its toll. But if we are successful, then you will not have to evacuate the planet. That is my sincere hope, and the sincerest hope of every officer here trying to keep the peace, and every Battlemage and Vanguard soldier out there fighting to retake the city. Please, cooperate with us a while longer. Help us help you retake your planet. We can't let even one more civilization fall to the enemy."

The crowd grew rowdy again, but this time in their agreement with her. Glimmer could already feel how morale soared. She smiled and looked down at Newt, saw him staring out at the crowd with vacant eyes. He seemed to not even notice that they were floating a dozen feet in the air.

"Is there a Crechemaster in this crowd by any chance?" Glimmer said, scanning the faces around for anyone familiar. "This child here is looking for his parents."

The refugees checked with one another, briefly, before one spoke up and said there wasn't anyone there to help, unfortunately. Glimmer figured as much, and she lowered the both of them to the ground when the crowd began to disperse.

"Well, that went better than I thought it would," she said to Newt. Her panic was still there, but it wasn't overpowering as it normally was after doing something like this. "It's lunchtime. How about you and I go find something to eat, and then we can figure out what to do about—"

Newt suddenly jumped up and down on his toes, full of excitement. Glimmer followed his line of sight and saw the pair of refugees from earlier—the ones she had provided temporary cards to after they tried to bribe her—pushing their way through the crowd toward them.

"Ennis!" Newt said, pulling out of Glimmer's hold to run toward the man. Newt jumped into his arms and Ennis spun him around with a smile on his face as his companion looked on.

Glimmer watched this as she approached, intrigued but still a little apprehensive. Both Scavrians looked happy to see him.

Ennis put Newt down and kneeled down eye-level with him. "Go play with Marcie, okay? I'll be there in a minute." Newt nodded, and the girl, Marcie, took him by the hand and lead him off a ways to give them privacy.

"You know each other?" Glimmer asked Ennis when they got far enough away to speak without being overheard.

"We do," Ennis said. "Very well, actually. You said his parents haven't shown up?"

"Nope," Glimmer said, rubbing the back of her neck with her hand and watching Newt and Marcie play nearby. "Poor guy was wandering the crowds outside the compound looking for them. I was going to take him to the Crechemaster's office after we got something to eat."

"What are the chances they'll turn up, you think?"

Glimmer almost asked him why he was so interested, but stopped short after seeing the sincerity on his face. "Not very likely," she said in a low voice. "Once families get separated, it's rare they find each other again, even with the intake logs. There's just too much chaos going around."

Ennis frowned. "We'll take him in then."

Glimmer raised a brow. "I don't think that's a good idea."

"Marcie and I were servants to his parents," Ennis said. "Had been for years. They took us off the streets, paid us a decent wage, gave us a roof over our heads, beds to sleep in, three meals a day…too much to recount. If he's suddenly orphaned, then it's the least we could do to take care of him."

Glimmer narrowed her eyes at him. "Letting you in without a full scan and no questions asked is one thing, but I'm not about to let some lost kid go with you that easily. You tried to bribe me just a few hours ago."

Ennis sighed and his shoulders slumped. "I understand that." He seemed to fight with himself a moment before making a decision. "Marcie and I left their villa about a week ago when the infection first hit. His parents were convinced staying inside the walls of their compound would be safer than trying to leave. They wanted us to stay too, but we grew up on the streets as orphans. Our gut told us that staying was a bad idea, and it was our got that gut that helped us survive the streets in the first place, so we followed it."

He cringed then before continuing. "We…we stole a bunch of their valuables on the way out. Fenced them for some money so that, wherever we ended up after evacuating, we wouldn't be trying to start over penniless like before."

Glimmer raised both her eyebrows this time. She knew there was something they were afraid of when they first spoke and she hadn't pried, but hearing this was still unexpected.

"We were surprised they didn't file police reports on us," Ennis said. "Even with all the chaos going around, Tir's infrastructure hadn't crumbled yet and we figured…well." He huffed, frustrated. "I guess maybe they died before they could report us. Or maybe they didn't have it in their hearts to do it, even though we certainly would have deserved it. Either way, if Newt's parents don't come for him, then we want to be there for him. It wouldn't sit right with either of us if we didn't use some of the money we stole from his parents in the first place to help him, now that he's likely on his own."

Glimmer studied him. More than a few duplicitous people had crossed paths with her in her life, Shadow Weaver not even topping the list, so she had gotten good at identifying liars and cheats. Ennis had none of the 'tells' she had grown accustomed to detecting, but that still didn't mean she was going to let it go that easily.

She pushed up the sleeve of her Enclave uniform to expose her own PDA on her wrist. A notification had pinged her sometime since she last checked the screen: Kyle, Lonnie, and Rogelio were off duty, likely either heading back to or already up at the Omen-Kador in orbit. She cleared the alert and navigated to the portable bio-scanner software included on the device.

"Let me run a full scan on you," she said, holding out her arm for him. "We already know you don't have warrants. I want to see that your story checks out before I make any decisions."

Ennis glanced at the PDA, then at her, then back again. Finally, he reached out and placed a fingertip on the scanner.

Everything came back exactly as he said. He was a servant for House Durange, and had been for a long time. Newt's parents had gone to the authorities before everything collapsed, but not to file a police report for theft; they had filed a missing person report instead. Both for him and for Marcie. Newt's parents didn't want them found for theft, they wanted them found out of a concern for their safety.

"The Crechemaster's office is overflowing," Ennis said. "They couldn't take him, and even if they did, there's a high chance he'd be neglected since they just don't have the resources to watch over all those kids. Trust me, Marcie and I looked." He put his palms together, not even bothering to hide how he was literally pleading with her. "Let us take care of him. You already see he's comfortable with us, and having the three of us together, with cash, to watch out for one another will be much better than trying to stick him in an overcrowded humanitarian office."

Glimmer looked over. Newt and Marcie were still playing nearby. They both looked so carefree and happy, and Ennis had such a sincere look on his face Glimmer couldn't help but feel for him.

"Alright," she said at last. "I'm going to be keeping an eye on you though. And if his parents show up, you have to bring him right away, stolen goods or no."

"Of course," Ennis said. "There's no question about that."

"You're nice for offering to do this, you know," Glimmer said. "I know what living on the streets and fending for yourself is like. Not first hand, but a good friend of mine grew up that way. Two good friends, actually. Most people just…think about themselves and that's it."

"It does teach you to make hard decisions," Ennis said, nodding his agreement. "I do have that mindset sometimes and work hard to not let it take over me. I wish I didn't, truthfully. I still feel bad about fencing their stuff, but I know Marcie and I wouldn't be alive if we hadn't. The streets…well, let's just say that surviving them teaches you how to make decisions, even in the face of fear and death. Especially in the face of fear and death, maybe."

Glimmer gave him a surprised look, her heart suddenly pounding in her chest like it wanted to break free. That's exactly what Catra had tried to convey to her the last time they saw each other, just not in as few words. It's exactly what she struggled to do herself, aboard the emperor's citadel…on Rinne. Her mood plummeted, and she couldn't shake the feeling that even this lone refugee would do a better job leading a team then she might. Ennis at least wouldn't choke under pressure.

"Sorry," Ennis said, shooting her a sheepish look as he yanked Glimmer out of her thoughts. "I didn't mean to get that dark. Your speech was nice. I think having a Battlemage here will help calm peoples' nerves a lot." He turned away from her and gave a halfhearted wave. "Anyways, I'll see you around. You mentioned lunch and I think it best the three of us grab something to eat sooner rather than later."

Glimmer watched him go, waving at Newt when Ennis reached him and Marcie.

Ennis' words were forcing her down another spiral. Thoughts and emotions she had been working for years to overcome surfaced with a relentless energy. This was worse than the panic attacks she'd feel coming on the other times she's had to talk down unruly groups during prior evacuations. She wouldn't be able to stop this one.

First a shore leave cut short, then having to turn down and disappoint Lonnie and the others, and now this. It wouldn't be good for anyone if she had a breakdown in the middle of the square. Just as she felt herself start to hyperventilate anew, she turned and marched off. There was one secluded spot in the compound she knew of, and that's where she needed to be.