He didn’t wait for the water to finish flowing or moving away. He released that water, disconnecting himself from the lines and then drew out others, low to the ground, pointing up at an angle.

Unlike Tristan, he didn’t gesture to confirm or out of some ‘rule of cool’, as Tristan had put it. It was to signal Moonsong as the water sprayed.

They’d done this before. They’d practiced it with most members of the team. He ceded control.

Sprayed water became ramps. His teammates ran up the ramps, leaped, and were buoyed by Moonsong’s gravity.

To work with her like this, to see the team working with them like this, it lifted his spirits. In everything that he did with Tristan, in eating, in sleeping, in watching stuff, listening to music, there was so little in the way of middle ground. There was nothing the two of them both enjoyed and could enjoy together.

Except this. Finding that teamwork. Ceding control mid-run, as the others bounded forward toward their quarry, knowing Tristan could leap off of the ramp, that Moonsong was at the other ramp, he was okay with it. It—

Tristan reached the top of the ramp, and instead of leaping into the field of reduced gravity, reached out for the lip of his funnel and hurdled it, his armor skidding on the rock with its veins of metal running through it. The water was already flowing out, calf-deep as Tristan landed in it, pushed himself to an upright position, and headed straight into the storage locker.

Not sticking with the team, but taking his own route.

Byron could feel the strain in Tristan’s legs as he ran through the water. He could see the red lights, a row of them ahead of them.

Had he been able, he would have said no, he would have vetoed this course of action. It was too brash, too aggressive.

He could only watch, worried. Tristan’s armored boots stomped through water, Tristan ducked through the hole Paris had made, and he punched into the red lights in a move that Byron had seen him practice, though not with this nuance. Never before to augment his glove and arm with a mass of spikes.

Tristan hurdled boxes, and he emerged from the storage locker that backed Paris’s. Into the fight where the others were confronting Paris. Steamwheel on her knees ahead of him, Figurehead and Tribute flanking him, and Paris in the center, wearing a white undershirt, jeans, soaked sneakers, and his mask.

His arrival from behind caught Paris off guard, but, as far as Byron could tell, it also caught their team off guard.