Snippet #1254120

Seated at a nearby table, Citrine eyed each occupant of the room surreptitiously. After a moment, Vermillion replied internally, and despite the situation, she could not help but smile a bit. Most people still had the instinct to speak aloud to her, even when they later realized it might have been a bad idea.Crimson is with them. Silver... as far as I know, he manipulates gravity. The radius is fairly small, so if you keep at a distance, it should not be impossible to avoid. Please remember our directive-

At this point, several things happened at once. A painful noise began to build in her head, causing a splitting ache to blossom behind her temples, and momentarily severing every mental contact she had in the place, even the one with Sable. The woman's eyes flew wide, and she fought hard to reconnect, trying to push past whatever was interfering with her engine. Sable! the shout was loud in her own mind, though if it reached the girl at all, it would likely be the faintest of whispers. Panicking at her enforced silence, Citrine focused all she had into remaking the tenuous link between herself and the dark young woman upstairs, to the detriment of being able to communicate with anyone.

She could not 'talk' to Sable, but she could still track her, and that would have to be enough. Citrine's eyes snapped to Azure as he appeared and made his proclamation. Vermillion seemed about to comply, and his present partner lamented her enforced voicelessness. He's baiting you. Of course you know that, so why the Hell won't you forget about your damn grudge and remember the real objective here?! Spectrum's daughter realized that her hands were beginning to smoke, and made a flash decision.

Glaring pointedly at both Azure and Vermillion, she bolted out the door ahead of them, in hot pursuit of what she could feel as Sable's dimming presence, fading from her mind as the girl and whomever she was with got further away. Dammit! Not again! I won't lose you Sable. Just hold on a bit longer. Years of physical conditioning made her well-suited to spending inordinate amounts of time at a breakneck sprint, and she was counting on that to help her out here.

Rounding a corner, she could see the two just ahead, and Citrine summoned a flame to one hand, swearing mentally when she realized she could not let it loose without risking hitting Sable, and that was not a risk she was about to take. Healing properties or not, the girl could still feel pain, and it was the furthest possible thing from the blond woman's mind to even think about it. Her father spoke sometimes of acceptable collateral damage, and she had to admit it was an area in which the two of them had never been able to come to an accord.

There was no such thing as acceptable collateral damage.