Round 134 Transcript

Silra set down her tools carefully, then straightened up with deliberate patience, though every nerve ending screamed at her to hurry. "Jeane," she said, voice even but sharp as a knife, "hovering doesn't help the structural integrity of this wall any more than it helps my focus. If you're going to stand there radiating impatience like a heat lamp, find something useful to do or step out of the way."

She met Halie's warning look with a shrug that barely moved her shoulders. "Your faith in me is touching, but I'd rather have these modifications fail because of physics than because someone distracted me at a critical moment." Her eyes flicked toward Jeane, who was indeed radiating something—though whether it was impatience or barely controlled need was getting harder to tell. The building's demands seemed to be doing...something...to the succubus' control. The thought sent a shiver down Silra's spine that had nothing to do with the cool air of the penthouse and everything to do with wondering exactly what would happen if Jeane lost her grip entirely in here. She pushed the speculation away—speculating was for after the job, not during it—and turned back to the wall panel she'd been reinforcing. "Status update," she said to no one in particular as she checked the alignment of a metal brace. "Support structure is stable enough that the entire floor won't collapse under us. But without completing the load-bearing modifications on all four walls and the ceiling, we're still playing Russian roulette with gravity." She glanced at Halie. "I'm not stalling for fun here—every piece has to be perfect or we're back where we started."

Her fingers itched to pick up the welder again, to feel the satisfying snap of metal joining properly under heat and pressure. But the tools lay untouched on her workbench as she waited for someone to decide if they wanted progress or a debate about methods.