As fast as I’d flown up, I flew down and at an angle, moving in more of a gentle arc than a straight line, to confuse anyone trying to target me.

I’d been the one that had involved these guys. If any ended up seriously hurt, permanently hurt? I swallowed hard as I dropped to Caryatid’s side.

“Did you get her?” she asked.

Costume burned. Her right hand and arm were charred black from fingertip to shoulder, the charred bits surrounded by red flesh—

No. The black was scraps of costume. I could see yellow where the voluminous inside of the sleeve had stuck behind.

She reached up with her burned arm and gave me a shake. “Did you get her?”

“She’s out there. They’re prepping a tinker thing. Maybe evac.”

“Can you get her?”

I glanced over. “I can try.”

“The others are okay?”

“Withdrawal fell badly, but I think so. Outnumbered badly.”

“Then go! Get her! Or help them! Help me stand?”

I got her arm over my shoulder, then straightened to a standing position. As we drew to a standing position, Caryatid was letting her breaker power creep over her. I could see the pattern by which it took over her hand and costume and made the two extensions of each other—the same pattern that the burn had traced. Residual heat had led to the more polyester-like fabrics clinging to skin.

Her body and arm remained utterly still, but her eyes urged me in the moment before her face dissolved into a morass of butterfly wing movements. Then even those movements went still, finer details becoming harder ridged structures, collapsing into a telescope-shaped structure.

I turned toward the yard where the woman and the squad had been. Caryatid’s head oriented, the ‘telescope’ narrowing to a cone, the point facing them, before almost immediately breaking apart.

“They’re making a door.”

Their exit.

There were others arriving. Crackles of electricity, rectangular apertures framing silhouettes, and those silhouettes became people. More in coveralls, moving in fours and fives.

Different guns this time. These ones had bands of teal encircling them.

I took flight, using the same evasive maneuvers as before. Around me, I could see the beams of the teal cannons, if they could be called beams. They stabbed out, glowing and became rigid, transparent and luminescent, not unlike the hard light forcefields my family could create.

Each had spokes, or spurs, like thorns on vines or spikes on barbed wire. Where the beams were close enough to one another, spokes extended, moving around to connect to nearby beams or spokes with a force and suddenness that I could feel in the air, with sounds like whipcracks.