Chapter 38: The Eye of Shukra

Adora adjusted herself on the couch in the Garden's back room, trying to find a comfortable position sandwiched between Vasher and Kal. It barely fit the three of them, and while there was a spot wide open in the couch across from them, Adora hadn't trusted herself to not faceplant to the floor the moment she tried to get up on account of Lysithea having grabbed a second drink for her when she first ushered them all into the back room.

The bass of the music outside pounded away, muted, and for the third time in the half hour they had been back there, Lysithea stopped pacing. She took one hand from her hip to grab the Eye of Shukra from the low coffee table in front of them, then held it up to the musty halogen lights above to inspect it.

"So, let me get this straight, again," she said, the light filtering through the crystal casting a spackled pattern across her face as she rotated it. "Pip tried to read this thing and she just…what? Broke?"

"More or less," Kal said. "I'm not sure what happened exactly, but her internals are a mess." He leaned forward, pulling out the same puck-shaped projector Adora looked at back on the ship and placed it on the coffee table. It powered on, displaying the three-dimensional hologram of Pip's source code for all of them to see.

"What the hell did you do to her?" Ly said, her eyes going wide she saw the display, saw the pockets and craters of missing data spread throughout.

"I didn't do anything! I told you, one moment she had the entire fortress under control including the AI connected to the place—"

"Light Hope," Adora said. She felt more than heard the ends of her syllables beginning to slur.

"—and then the next thing you know, she starts glitching out, disappears completely, and then the whole castle attacks us."

Lysithea squatted down eye-level with the hologram and used her free hand to pan the display. By the way she lingered on some areas and "hmmm'd" at others, Adora got the impression she was making several deep inferences far faster than Kal had, tinkering with it for the several days she had witnessed him doing so.

"Well, it looks like none of the bespoke programming got touched," she said. "Whatever she came across in the Eye was enough to wreak havoc on her systems, but she had either enough time or enough sense to block off everything irreplaceable."

"Which means what, exactly?" Kal asked.

"It means the thing that makes Pip distinctly her is still preserved," Ly said, pointing to the islands of code still in-tact. "It's only the scaffolding and boilerplate code that was either corrupted or deleted, at least from what I can tell from a first glance. It looks very deliberate…she must have felt whatever she came across start to affect her and made the decision to guide it to only the replaceable parts of her code."

"Can you fix her?"

Lysithea shrugged. "I'm not sure. There are a few things I could try, maybe, if I had the right equipment—which I don't. What I'm more curious about is what caused this in the first place." She looked again at the Eye. "If this is supposed to hold whatever original calculations or mathematical foundations the Eternians intended to put in the Barrier in the first place…why would something like that corrupt her instead?"

"Do you think maybe it was too dense for her to churn through?" Vasher asked, drawing their attention. He looked Lysithea in the eyes. "I remember how frustrated you and Evelyn and everyone else got trying to reverse engineer the current algorithm…the long nights you all spent running Pip through iterations of it to mature her. Maybe the original is just too complicated?"

"I really doubt that," Kal said with a frown. "She was telling me how amazing everything looked when she started digging into it…said she really wished she could show me what she was experiencing, and only started to panic after about a minute or two in. It sounded like she was trying to warn me of something she found, not that it was overloading her from the start." He frowned, casting a quick glance at Adora before fixating back on the Eye. "There's no ignominite in that thing," he said. "Adora and I have actually been able to reach in out and feel around. There's something there, Ly, we both felt it. We just can't tell what it is or why it may have corrupted her like that."

Lysithea's eyes got wider and shinier the more Kal spoke. "Interesting," she said. "Able to contain some sort of entity inside without using ignominite? It's far more complicated than anyone could have guessed if that's true, but I also think Kal has a point. Complexity wouldn't corrupt portions of Pip's code like that. In fact, complexity would have barred her from being able to double back and protect her code once she felt something was wrong, or prevented her from feeling something was wrong to begin with.

"Can someone explain why this thing is so important?" Adora asked, drawing all eyes in the room to her. Suddenly feeling exposed, bashful, and maybe too tipsy for her own comfort, she lowered her voice. "I'm hearing things about Barriers and algorithms and crystals that I only sorta understand. I just think it would…y'know, be kinda nice to get the whole picture, maybe."

"You understand how the Barrier works, right?" Ly asked. "How it seals the Beast?" Adora nodded. "Our team researched enough of the Barrier to bring it online. The only problem was, the math behind getting it to lock correctly wasn't there. We…well, mostly Evelyn and Pip…they did the best they could to come up with a replacement, but we were on a time crunch. It's imperfect."

"Mostly just the two of them?" Adora asked, dumbstruck. The idea of one person and an AI building something that complex was baffling.

Ly nodded. "I don't question it, really. Evelyn could see through time because of her exposure to the Beast, so who knows what wisdom and knowledge she got looking through the timestream like that. It was enough for her to create Pip in the first place. Nothing else like her exists yet, she's so advanced."

Adora's eyes drifted to the hologram of Pip's piecemeal code. Ly hadn't made the AI either…that was all the work of Taline's late sister. Suddenly it made sense why Kal and Vasher and even Ly herself were unsure if they could fix her.

"She warned us the Barrier would fail too," Lysithea said, hefting the Eye in her hand. "Kal believes this contains the original formula—the original algorithm the Eternians made to interface with the Barrier."

"Ignominite was a good discovery," Kal said. "But it was a step in the right direction that happened far too late in the course of the last war. By the time it got built into munitions and deployed to the front lines, the Beast was already far too large to defeat by conventional means. Salas and everyone on Etheria are looking at the Heart project like a be-all-end-all ignominite weapon. They think that once they get the Heart working, it will be no problem to quell any Beast threat no matter how large it gets." He gestured to the Eye. "If we get that thing deciphered, however, and replace Evelyn's old code with it, even at just one of the nodes, it will make the prison trapping the Beast outside our reality ironclad."

"There won't be any Beast incursions anymore," Adora said, everything finally clicking together as she turned her attention away from Kal and back to the crystal. "That's what you meant by bypassing She Ra. We won't need her to fight or power the Heart at all if the Beast can't escape ever again to begin with. We could take care of the existing hot spots and be done with it forever."

"We would also deprive the emperor of a new weapon," Vasher said. "Evelyn spoke of the Heart of Etheria too, before she died. She worried that if the only weapon guaranteed to quell the enemy fell into the emperor's hands, he might withhold it from worlds under threat of the Beast if they did not respect his rule."

Adora hadn't even thought of that at all, having been so consumed with her own role in stopping the conflict. The Eye of Shukra just seemed like a good thing to explore—after all, any method to stop the Beast was worth going after in her books, especially if she was having this much trouble reconnecting with her powers still. But after hearing Vasher's logic, getting the Barrier working suddenly jumped forward in her mental order of priorities. She'd do whatever she could if it meant depriving Horde Prime of a resource. She had broken the sword to begin with after leveraging her conviction to never become someone else's weapon of mass destruction.

"Can you look into the Eye for us?" Kal asked. "And Pip? This station might not have the equipment you're used to using, but anything you can do is better than nothing. At the very least, I need your expertise to tell me if what's inside the Eye is really what we need."

Lysithea met Kal's eyes and held them for a moment. Adora couldn't tell what the hesitation was for; it seemed like a no brainer to agree, but…

"What do you think?" Lysithea asked, suddenly turning to look at Vasher.

He seemed surprised to have been asked, blinking several times trying to regain his equilibrium. "I think we should help," he said. "For once, Kal is not asking for too much. It's what Evie would have wanted."

Lysithea frowned. She looked back at the Eye in her hand, seeming even more conflicted after Vasher's words. Adora didn't understand why was this such a hard decision.

"I can't help you," she said at last, putting the crystal back down on the table next to the hologram puck.

"What?" Adora said, sitting forward.

"Why not?" Kal asked at the same time, similarly sitting forward with a deep frown on his face.

"It's complicated," Lysithea said, obviously uncomfortable and unsure of her answer. "I know it seems like an obvious choice, but there's more to it than me just agreeing to look into this for you."

Kal shook his head. "You were the team's expert on crystal technology. Evelyn's right hand. You were the one that figured out how to shape ignominite into crystals to capture the Beast in the first place. You are the reason Imperial R&D was able to study the enemy safely and ultimately figure out how to imbue ignominite into munitions to fight back. Out of everyone alive in the galaxy today, you are the most qualified to understand what's inside the Eye. How is it any more complicated than that?"

"The Vestamid have been keeping an extremely close eye on the both of us since you left, Kal."

"They aren't going to make you start working for them," he said. "They're insane, but they also condemn breaches of contract no matter how small. We negotiated when we all started smuggling for them, remember? That under no circumstances would you or any of us assist in their business outside of strictly transportation?"

"They will not make us go against the contract, no," Vasher said, playing with his fingers instead of looking at them. "But if she were to start touching equipment and working on anything in their labs, even just once, they would take that as a breach of contract on her end." He looked up and at Kal. "You and I both know this. It is why she has taken up performing and I have agreed to be an enforcer for them on this station—it is the only way we could repay the debt after they barred us from smuggling for them."

Kal looked away. "Even if they said the contract no longer applied and pressed you into service, they wouldn't endanger you. At most they would stick you in a lab—this Eden's lab, probably—and ask you to research improvements in their mining process or advances in the crystals they sell." A beat of silence passed, then he squared his shoulders and looked Lysithea in the eye. "I have no right to ask this of you, I know, but it'd be a small price to pay for only a short amount of time to save the galaxy. Wouldn't it?"

Ly sighed and Adora could tell she was warring with herself.

"Normally I would agree with you," she said at last. "If doing lab work for the Vestamid here on the station or somewhere else were the only thing I'd get pushed into, then I'd gladly do it if it meant finding a way to shore up the Barrier for good."

"Then what's the problem?"

She rubbed at one arm and bit her lip. It was the first real sign of hesitation and fear Adora saw in her since meeting they met.

"They've been getting bold behind the scenes. I don't know how to describe it concretely, but the volume and contents of the rumors surrounding them have grown and shifted in the past few years. People whisper of experiments and abductions, politicians suddenly cut interviews short or pretend to suffer technical problems or feign indifference when pressed for answers. Not too long ago, there was a huge scandal about an energy system they installed at their primary mining facility."

"Archanas is light years away from here and shrouded in superstition," Kal said, shaking his head. "You and I both know you can't tell truth from fantasy whenever it comes to that place."

"These are specific accusations, Kal, not just idle talk. They somehow got a green light to implement their new project so quickly there's no way they could have gone through any of the normal checks and audits for that kind of thing. No one even knows what the project is, just that it got pushed through all the normal channels so fast there isn't a tangible trail, no checks or balances for what they're doing. People are certain they circumvented the processes entirely and have the Region's governor directly in their pocket. Having free reign to do what they will on a planet like that? Even if it's far away, one misstep could spell danger for the entire galaxy. Again."

Kal scoffed, but Lysithea didn't let it deter her.

"That's not all," she said. "I'm also fairly certain they've cultivated an Abomination here, on this very station."

The mood shifted the moment she finished her sentence, a heavy feeling that blanketed them as soon as the words left Lysithea's mouth. Adora watched Kal's demeanor shift from that of someone merely frustrated, to that of genuine shock and focused concern.

"What gives you that idea?" he asked, voice low.

"A number of things," she said. "Small things. Small enough that if I pointed to them individually, they wouldn't amount to anything at all. But trust me, Kal…if you'd have been here watching the same channels I've been keeping an eye on, you would see it too. It'd jump out at you."

"I'll vouch for what she's saying," Vasher said. "I know it's alarming to hear, but I've seen the same reports and the same clues she's seen. I have no doubt in my mind that's what they've been doing for a while now—trying to craft a reliable process for cultivating Abominations."

"Just one so far?" Kal asked, looking Ly in the eyes again.

"I think so," she said. "They definitely don't have a process in place yet for mass producing them. I think they're using this place as a test site, but I'm almost certain they've managed to successfully create at least one."

Adora heard Kal say something colorful under his breath. "Do you know who it is?"

"Of course not." Ly shook her head. "Even a lab grown Abomination would still be nearly impossible to tell apart from any regular person. They'd still have to reveal themself to you, try and start an infection. There's no way they'd be as strong as a natural-born one either, but even if they're weak compared to the real thing, I imagine it'd still have enough power to tear this station in two within a matter of minutes."

"Well, fuck me," Kal said, grimacing and running a hand through his hair. Both Adora's eyebrows shot up—she hadn't ever seen such a raw reaction from him before.

"Now do you understand why I'm hesitant to get involved?" Ly asked. "If I so much as look at this thing"—she gestured to the Eye—"and the Vestamid take that as me breaking the contract we signed with them? If they press me into service, it wouldn't be me looking into their mining practices or researching more efficient crystals. They'd put me to work on this secret project they've been using this station as a testing site for. It's the only reason I can think of as to why they haven't outed either of us to Prime yet. They want me to help create Abominations for them."

"We've been looking at leaving this place altogether, truthfully speaking," Vasher said.

"How soon were you thinking of jumping ship?" Kal asked.

"If you came next month, we likely would have been gone already."

Kal grimaced. "I understand there's a lot at stake for you…but the stakes are even higher if we don't get the Eye figured out. Please, Lysithea. I need your help."

"I can't," she said, refusing to meet his eyes. "I know how important this is, but…but the Vestamid cannot be allowed to use me in their schemes. It could do just as much damage as the Beast or more if they ever figure out a way to manufacture and control Abominations. Going with the Heart may not be the best option, but it may be the safest in the end. Please don't ask me to do this."

"Ly, I wouldn't be here if there was any other way. The Heart is a pipe dream at best, and if we don't—"

"Enough, Kal!" Lysithea said, finally meeting his gaze with a glare of her own and gesturing with her whole body. Anger had replaced the fear and uncertainty in her demeanor, enough to make Adora flinch and press back into the couch. "I've already given you my answer and it isn't going to change. I expect you to respect my choice, unless you plan on forcing me?"

Static seemed ready to spark in the air it was so charged. Lysithea stared Kal down and, to Adora's great distress, Kal seemed to actually be mulling his options over. Then the tension fled. Kal set his jaw and nodded once. He grabbed the hologram puck and the Eye of Shukra from the table and stuffed them both back into the bag. Then he stood, slung it over his back, and headed for the exit without another word.

Adora looked to Lysithea and Vasher, who were both shooting barely-contained disturbed looks at one another. Adora then placed her unfinished drink on the table and thanked Ly for it before jumping up off the couch and rushing to follow Kal. Thankfully, she didn't wobble or fall as she feared she might.

Kal stopped when they both reached the door leading back out onto the main floor and glanced back. Music from the nightclub blared back at full force when he pushed the door open. Lysithea looked on the verge of stopping him from leaving. When another moment passed and she still hadn't, Kal stepped beyond the threshold, and Adora followed.

"I think we should head back to Etheria as soon as possible," Adora said to Kal. They had arrived back at the hotel without a single word having been spoken between the two of them, and Adora couldn't help but voice her opinion as soon as they were alone.

Kal stopped and turned to fix her with a confused expression before stripping the backpack off his shoulder and tossing it off into a corner. "Why?"

"What do you mean 'why'?" she asked. "Lysithea refused to help us. That means the only other people who'd have a shot at cracking this thing would be Salas and Entrapta and everyone back home. We should leave as soon as we can."

Kal chuckled, which unbalanced her because hadn't he just been in a sour mood moments earlier after having been turned away? "Salas and Entrapta wouldn't make a dent in this if you gave them a hundred lifetimes over to try, no offense to their intelligence. No, our only chance is for Ly to work on it. She has the expertise and the experience."

"She just turned you down," Adora said. "Are you seriously considering forcing her?"

Kal shot her a disgusted look. "Of course not. She's going to come around and help us on her own."

"I really don't think that's going to happen, Kal. She seemed pretty adamant about not helping."

That wasn't true, and Adora knew it. She saw how conflicted Lysithea and Vasher had both looked after turning Kal away. She even had an inkling as to why she refused to acknowledge it out loud: the look of anger and determination in Ly's eyes as she made her decision, before the regret and uncertainty came, reminded Adora of someone else—someone similarly close to Adora, who had also dug their feet in the ground and refused to join her, only to maybe regret it later.

When he didn't respond to her and instead started browsing through a nearby tablet that displayed options for room service, she grumbled and marched up to him.

"Look," she said, taking the tablet from his hands and tamping down the swell of satisfaction she got when he looked surprised. "The Beast has been slipping through more and more as time goes on, so we don't have time to waste, right? On top of that there's apparently an Abomination wandering the station. We should get out of here now and head back."

"Ly will come around," he said, resting both hands gently on her shoulders. "You're right, it is dangerous with that thing on the station, but the only thing we're going to accomplish going back to Etheria is distracting them from researching the Heart. That's the last resort to winning this fight against the Beast, and we don't want to pull them away from making progress on it with something I know they won't be able to understand. We'll wait here for her to agree to help us."

A strange feeling worked its way through Adora's chest. It wasn't the words Kal spoke, but the gentle tone of his voice, the reassuring pressure of his hands on her shoulders, and the sympathetic look he gave her. Instead of feeling confident in her own position (it made sense! It was logical!), she felt like she was unraveling.

"The galaxy doesn't have time to wait for someone to change their mind once they already made it up," Adora said. "She's not coming back to you."

Both of Kal's eyebrows shot up at that last statement, and Adora sucked in a sharp breath. She hadn't meant to say that. She hadn't even anticipated it coming out of her mouth—it just…did. Her heart started to hammer in her chest. Something had lodged itself in her throat, and her eyes burned, although tears hadn't yet fallen. She hated the feeling.

"How do you know she will?" Adora asked, pushing through the hoarseness in her voice to pressure Kal before he could say anything else that would undo her. Kal let her go and edged around her. Adora pivoted to follow as he did. "How can you be so certain she'll change her mind?"

"She's my friend."

"She was your friend, and then you abandoned her to do the right thing. Abandoned her to spend three years of your life alone on Etheria, trying to get that crystal and save trillions of lives. It might make all the sense in the world to her, but you think she's going to forgive you and come around? You're going to stake the survival of the galaxy on that?"

Adora crossed her arms and huffed. She felt even more annoyed—her words weren't doing anything to convince even herself. She didn't want to think about how persuasive she was being toward Kal in the moment.

"She's your 'friend'…" Adora rolled her eyes and gave a dismissive shrug. "What the hell does that even mean?"

"It means I trust she'll do the right thing," Kal said. "You heard Vasher when she asked, he wants to help us because he knows it's the right thing to do." By this point, he was by the door to the outside hallway, turned fully toward her with a look on his face that told Adora he was fully aware she was only half talking about Lysithea still.

"Look, Adora…having faith isn't the easiest thing in the world to practice. It took me a long time to learn it, learn that some things were out of my direct control and came with risk…learn that you could be seriously hurt if that risk doesn't pan out. But sometimes, it's all we have to go on, especially at the end of the world. It doesn't always mean believing in a higher power, either. Sometimes it just means believing in your friends, even when things are strained between you." He smiled and put his hand on the doorknob, and the tone from his next words informed Adora he was back to speaking of concrete matters. "The Heart is a viable backup, but taking the Eye to Etheria is a guaranteed dead end. In the meantime, we stay put and have faith my friends will pull through, just as they did in the last conflict."

"W-where are you going?" Adora asked. She couldn't explain why, but she suddenly felt extraordinarily sad. Depressed, almost.

"I'm going take a page out of your book and go exploring," he said. "I need some air. I'll be back in a bit, so try not to get yourself into trouble until I do, okay?" He stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him without waiting for an answer.

The door clicked shut behind him and Adora was alone. She hugged herself, gritting her teeth, still not understanding why she felt so upset. She fought back the tears that continued to well in her eyes and searched her mind for a reason—any reason—for why she'd been struck with such strong emotion.

The image of Lysithea refusing Kal flashed in her mind's eye again, and she was back at Thaymor years ago, staring at the same look in Catra's eyes. She was in the Crimson Waste and at the Fright Zone too, staring, again, at the same look in Catra's eyes.

Kal stood firmly in Lysithea's camp, not even doubting for a moment that she'd make the right decision and eventually come around. Catra had come around…she'd come around three years ago already. She had helped save them back on Horde Prime's citadel, and what had Adora done except abandon Catra because of it?

That was it. That was the reason: Adora felt guilty for turning her back on her friend. And she realized she had never stopped feeling guilty. Not for three whole years.

Adora reached for her power in a fit of panic, wanting to prove that she had made at least some progress with She Ra—wanting to prove that her reason for turning her back on her best friend growing up had borne some fruit. The power bubbled under the surface as it always had, and, as it always had, it refused to come to her when called.

Breath coming through faster and more ragged, Adora jabbed the PDA on her arm awake.

"Please work," she said, whispering prayers to herself as she navigated to Glimmer's contact card and typed out a test message. "Please. Please work."

The message failed once again to send. In a fit of desperate fury, Adora screamed, grabbed the room service tablet Kal had played with earlier from the desk, and hurled it across the room. It smacked into the far wall and she heard the screen shatter when it hit the floor.

Her mind swamed with thoughts, none of them pleasant. She stood there, counting heartbeats until the onslaught died down and she could hear herself think again. Out of instinct, she reached up to fix her braid, only to find that it wasn't even done up to begin with. Adora hadn't put her hair up since her conversation with Salas back on Etheria. She hadn't felt the urge to do it up again until that very moment.

Unwilling to consider what that actually meant for her mental state, Adora instead looked at the bag sitting in the corner, letting her eyes wander across it as a thought entered her mind. Then, making her decision and refusing to think on it any further, she grabbed the bag and left the room.