"Oh, my God." Nora caught Jena as she crashed into her and cried in a raised voice, "Miss! Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." Jena shook her head. The golden pattern between her feline eyes gleamed brightly beneath the dim hallway lights. She darted around Nora and ran into the laboratory before Nora could stop her.
"Don't go in there, miss. It might be a little..."
Jena pushed open the door, and a blast of cold hit her head-on, nearly freezing even an alien who could survive temperatures dozens of degrees below zero. Only then did Nora finish her sentence: "...cold."
But this was clearly no longer just a matter of cold, because Jena saw Professor Schiller and Victor's students trapped inside ice sculptures. Jena was horrified, but Schiller blinked at her.
It was not cold inside Dense Ice; the temperature simply did not change. Schiller could even speak, and naturally, that was precisely why he had been frozen inside it. Jena saw through it almost immediately.
So she promptly swallowed the long speech she had prepared, smiled at Victor, and said with perfect politeness, "Good evening, Professor Freeze. I brought you coffee."
Victor looked up, finally showing a hint of relief. Jena set the coffee on a nearby table and glanced back at Schiller. Victor seemed to know what she intended to do, so he waved a hand and said, "Get him out of here."
Jena shook her head. "Sorry, my brother isn't here. I don't have superpowers, so I can't move him."
"But there isn't any secret information. I just figured out the connection between these cases." Jena backed away to the doorway, took several breaths of warm air, and only then said, "The problem lies in the South Side."
"What do you mean?" Victor asked, looking up