“Okay. I think I remember the rules. Who’s our person?”

“Natalie,” I whispered. “Until replaced.”

“Replaced?”

“Byron was affected.”

“I felt it. Yes.”

“Then the first untainted, trustworthy cape we can find. We should keep them unaffected where possible,” I whispered.

“Crystalclear?”

“Maybe.”

The disc was ready. Tristan stepped up onto it, and then he offered a hand to Natalie, lifting her up with no apparent difficulty at all.

The disc levitated—a chunk of ground fifteen feet across that rained a bit of gravel down on the ground far beneath.

I flew. Goddess landed at the midway point of the disc, and she lifted it, carrying herself with the rest.

Another thing to file away. She could lift herself, and she could lift a lot of weight, but in the here and now, she was using that power one at a time.

The rain didn’t let up, and being airborne didn’t help. There were less buildings to break up the flow of the wind, less sources of heat that could warm us up. My costume was covered in a thin sheet of ice before we were halfway to our destination.

Five minutes after that halfway point, my armor began to crack. The weight of the ice was its own downfall, and it came away in Victoria shapes, cascading down to empty streets below.

We reached the first portal and passed through.

The weather was different. The lighting from the now expired sunset, the sky bright even though it was night and it had been raining.

Eerily tranquil.

We approached the second portal in the airlock-like arrangement. Lookout deactivated the scrambler, and we had a clear shot through, the ability to see through the gate to the other side.

With that clear shot, we had a view as well.

The guards, their guns, and apparently prisoners that they’d released to assist them. Capes standing at the edges of the group of correctional officers, ready to back them up.

The wave of telekinetic force that reached out struck at them one by one. It had its own pattern, like a series of numbers that matched to the earlier pattern we’d seen. It swiped over guards and it disarmed them of their weapons.

A moment later, like a fractal pattern cracking the wall before the shape took its form—a pattern not too unlike Tristan and Byron’s power—Goddess tore an entire wall out of the side of the building. People who had been standing ready to defend this place now scrambled to get clear.

“We tear it all down before we leave,” Goddess said.

Gleaming 9.9

When we were children and we were feeling insecure, we clung to the powerful authority figures in our lives. Mine had just torn down an interior wall of a prison.