Goddess walked over to discuss things with Lung, and others were organizing into battle lines and squads, breaking away to go wrangle remaining guards and staff. I saw Natalie among the wrangled.

I hesitated a moment, wondering if I’d do more harm than good, then broke away from Rain and Byron. If I was close enough for Goddess to find, then that had to be good enough. But I couldn’t leave Natalie.

“I’ll be right back. Get my attention if there’s trouble.”

“Sure,” Byron said.

A reality with parahumans was that most who triggered were young—people as young as twelve could trigger, with the upper range being thirty. There was a possibility for a few years of leeway, trending more toward the rare parahuman being younger than a parahuman being older.

The guys in this particular prison clique were young. It was shocking to see people Rain and Chris’s ages.

“Don’t hurt or bother them,” I told the prisoners, my eye stopping on Natalie for a meaningful moment, trying to communicate something to her. That I was on her side. That if she had anything to say, now was the time to say it.

She said nothing. Maybe to avoid drawing attention to herself.

And the prisoners, for their part, were equally silent. I felt put on the spot, and I felt so drained physically, mentally, and emotionally that I could have been bowled over by hard words. Tension kept me upright.

I hadn’t gotten a response, so I elaborated. “Goddess may need them as bargaining chips, or to get access to parts of the prison. If you screw that up, touch them, or scare them and get them panicking instead of thinking rationally, then it screws us all up.”

Believe me, I put my heart into the mental command. Buy this, even though I don’t sound nearly as authoritative as I might want. Don’t make me use my aura in this volatile a place.

“I don’t see why you get to tell us what to do,” a boy said. He had the sharp chin, widow’s peak with a curl of hair at the forehead, and natural bad-boy glare of a classic kid’s show villain, but he had to be my age.

He also, judging by the group’s dynamic, had a few people under his wing. Underlings. He was the leader of this sub-clique.

“Do you really want to test me and find out?” I asked. I sounded more steely now. A bit more of my old self.

He stared me down, then dropped his eyes to my arm. I wasn’t sure if he was seeing an injury, a clue that I wasn’t invincible, until he gestured.

“That symbol on your arm.”

Worked into the metal at my shoulder was a golden circle inside another circle, centered at about the midpoint between bicep and shoulder. The five parallel spikes stabbed up from it.