If she’d gone that far, if we were already there, it was possible there was no coming back from this. There was no getting through this night in such a way that things returned to square one.

That idea shook me. The Warrior Monk faltered. From sixty percent to fifty percent. ‘110%’ so far away it wasn’t worth reaching for.

Behind Lung and behind me, the building began coming apart again. Each chunk that flew away from the building flew toward Lung. Rain hurled his silver blades, but Lung was keeping an eye out for them.

He was big now, but he was nimble. A corner of the building hit the ground and rolled through the fires without breaking up. Lung leaped on top of it, then leaped to another point, the beam that Rain had sliced. It was just the tip, cut at a diagonal, and left leaning against the fence. Lung had one foot on the tip, another on the top of the chickenwire fence, barbed wire crumpled underfoot. No skin showed, his arms, legs, spine and neck were all extended now, and the mass along the length of his body was swelling steadily. He reached up with claws of steel, seized his mask, and tore it free, casting it off.

The face beneath was even less human.

Lung lifted one claw, moving it through the air. Fire swelled dramatically. I could see that the point where he didn’t even need the purple fire anymore wasn’t that far away.

And then what? Were we supposed to abandon the prison? Leave it for Teacher? He would find a way to seal the door, the prisoners would be trapped inside, and he would claim them, one by one.

No, I thought. With the Wretch out, the memory of the hospital was all around me. The helplessness, the lack of hope, the altered mental state. That was what Teacher wanted.

Goddess wanted—

I closed my eyes.

She was scarily close to what I wanted, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was the master–stranger effect that was supposedly in place. One hundred and ten percent. The study of powers. The authority, people organized and listening to her. Even now, she was sorting out the people she’d brought from the apartments.

Lung was leaving the area, moving toward Goddess. He would leave the area beneath Byron’s sword of Damocles, beneath the constellation of stars and the lines that wove them together.

Because it wasn’t enough?

I dove for Lung, the Wretch gripping the beam in a way that was not at all drawing it back for a big swing. I’d deal.

Twenty feet long, give or take, a foot and a half tall. I’d picked up cars before, always an awkward affair, and even this impressive chunk of metal was only a third or quarter the weight of those vehicles.