I could deal with her grabbing. I’d dealt with it as the Wretch, but she’d been careful to hold, not to strike out. It had been the product of years of work.

Orange motes began to circle her. I didn’t move a muscle, watching. Tendrils reached. Stone trapped them. I saw ‘her’ react, pulling away, pulling tendrils out and through the gaps provided. Others squeezed at stone, straining to crush it. More tendrils reached, even using the stone as a point to grapple and pull herself forward. More stone trapped them.

Others reached out for the server. On the wall, there was a plexiglass case mounted, with wires hooked into the server.

It wasn’t a fire alarm behind that case.

“Shit,” I said, realizing just how they intended to leave Goddess with nothing. I looked back at Damsel and Rain. I saw Rain look down at the bomb that was still at his ankle. The shackle that kept him in prison, currently quiet and black, but so easily it could become death or maiming.

Tendrils snaked in. I flew closer, and tendrils almost immediately shattered the Wretch. Orange lights danced around the tendrils at the case, but it was too late. The light solidified into a hunk of stone, encasing those tendrils, while more lights solidified into chunks of stone that kept Kingdom Come locked into position, unable to crawl away or mount an effective attack.

Still too late. Within that case on the wall, which contained an emergency button that might easily set off every single ankle bomb, I could hear the plexiglass shatter, crushed.

Beside me, Tristan took a deep breath. I met his eyes.

No time for words, no time for communicating a message, that message being received, the understanding.

Only the understanding.

Tristan became Byron. All of the rock he’d placed throughout the room, on the server switches and on Sveta became a rush of water, swirling and flooding the underground space. Her prosthetic body was shoved, twisted around, and the tendrils pulled away from the button.

Given the choice between every single one of the prisoners being executed and every single one of the prisoners living and being free, we’d made a call, because some of those prisoners were important to us. The server flooded with frigid water that quickly extended from floor to ceiling, and blinking lights went black. As connections were disrupted, lights all around us went out, leaving the space as dark and cold as death.

Gleaming 9.14

I tumbled through darkness, and this time there was no frame of reference, even a wrong one. The water was numbing, the darkness all-consuming, and the water around me was moving, more akin to being in an undertow in a fast-moving river than a pool.

Was that only foreshadowing for what was to come?

The thought was eerily calm, disconnected from the danger and the chaos around me.