I saluted him.

“We’ve got company. Officers, I’m guessing,” I said.

“We run, instead of fighting,” Capricorn decided. I nodded my agreement.

Capricorn created cover, orange motes tracing out walls, which appeared just as we reached them. I flew alongside, the Wretch active. What the walls didn’t cover, I hoped Capricorn’s setup would.

Which was fine, so long as we just had the one squadron of officers coming from around the back corner of the building. One squadron, one direction to watch, all good.

But there were others. We approached the building that Lookout’s compass was pointing us to, and I could see the broken window on the ground floor, with no less than four officers lined up along it, guns pointed out.

I had to push hard to fly out in front, my arms outstretched wide and Wretch stretched out wider. A momentary stop, working on the assumption the bullets would be accurate, turning to face one direction while flying the opposite, in an effort to confuse—

The Wretch caught a bullet. In the moment the Wretch was gone, so soon after that I imagined it would have been blocked by the Wretch had it been a tenth of a second faster, Sveta grabbed me by the cloth at the small of my back. She was already pulling herself to a destination, and in the process, she pulled me too.

I went high, because I could, and because I knew the people shooting at us wouldn’t be aiming that high with their initial battery. For a moment, I was kind of Sveta’s kite.

We didn’t get away unscathed. Each of those four officers fired off multiple shots. I saw bullets hit my teammates. I saw Capricorn fall in the wake of one shot.

Metal prosthetic body—not all that durable, with the lightweight metals. As Sveta collapsed into a heap, the three of us stopping at the base of one building. In the moment we passed through some of the light that reached down past the rectangle of a balcony, I could see the groove in Sveta’s body. It looked more like someone had buried a hatchet in her side than anything.

And Capricorn—he crawled to the base of the wall, sitting up, before twisting his leg around. It looked like his armor was up to snuff. Whatever it was made of was denser, and it hadn’t parted or let the bullet through when it had taken the grazing shot. Maybe a deflection, maybe a graze.

“All good?” I asked Sveta. “No damage?”

“Nothing I can tell,” she murmured. “Get me a patch? At my back, actually only a short distance from the damage done. I’ll try not to grab you.”

I found the patch. I had to fumble with it, finding the way it attached. There was a part that went inside the armor, inside the damaged portion—