“We can’t leave her like this,” he says, and he and Red watch what is left of Sybil drag itself across the stage of the Empty Set, dripping something which sloughs off her as she is disintegrating. At first Red thinks it might just be animal survival instinct. But the longer she stands centerstage, steadying herself on the Transistor, she sees that she is wrong. She killed Sybil too fast before, too shocked, too scared, gagging on the look of her, more than eager to put this thing out of its misery before his voice had to urge her. But Sybil is coming to Red.
So Red waits.
She watches the twisted thing that writhes and thinks calmly of its crackling voice. Of Grant and Asher’s cowardly corpses, when she finally found them after chasing them for what felt like forever, believing her answers were ahead. Of the way Royce smiled at her when he announced that he would go first.
Red had been afraid of Sybil. Red had not been afraid of Royce. He’d been too cocky. After all, Red had spent the entire day raging for what had been taken from her. She had been prepared to kill him, blood on her hands. Royce, on the other hand, had not known the consequences of his actions.
She feels the same way this time - the rage - but it is hard to extend that rage to Sybil. Even though it had been Sybil who had wormed her way into Red’s life, Sybil who, to the best of Red’s knowledge, had craved the death of her bodyguard. The reason Red was alone.
Perhaps it was because Royce had smiled, and Sybil, unlike the rest of her compatriots, was assimilated, picked apart like all the lost souls inside the Transistor, and Red certainly understood that that was suffering aplenty.
Red waits, however. She lets what-had-been-Sybil cry and shake and squirm its way towards her. She thinks her bodyguard must be worried about her. He must think it’s the shock, why she stares, and lets it suffer a little longer. She can’t tell him, anyways.
When the thing is reaching for Red’s ankles, she raises Transistor and slams it down into Sybil.
Sybil dies, and Red watches only a moment.
“We’ll be back again someday,” he tells her as they leave the Empty Set.
Red would murmur if she could, but instead mouths the words. I hope not.
She has already done this twice. She does not want to do it again.
She does, however, want Royce Bracket to die.
So she goes to find him.