“…and if you want to know for sure when people are proud of you, when people think you’re amazing then you should know that this…”

I turned away, turning a deaf ear to the scene.

It was for them, not for me.

Sveta was in Rain’s hands. Tristan stood off to one side, keeping an eye on Thane. I turned my focus to Crystalclear. He was standing way off to the side, almost a hundred feet away, staring off into the distance.

“Shouldn’t you be going?” I asked him. “You wanted to get away.”

He shook his head. The crystals caught the meager light.

“No?”

“Over there,” he said, pointing. “That building?”

Three hundred feet away. The building had been hit by something that had caved in one wall, wiping out the floors that separated the first floor from the second, so it was just a husk.

“What about it?” I asked.

“I got that far,” Crystalclear said. “And then… it was like something major had happened. A turning point in history, you know?”

“I kind of know,” I said. I had a whole mess of mixed feelings as I realized what he was saying. Trepidation was about fifty percent of that mess.

“It came from you guys, but it bounced, because I get a feeling it started somewhere else. I can see it with my power.”

“She aligned you.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” Crystalclear said. “Oof.”

“Oof,” I said. I gave him a light punch in the shoulder. “Come on. Stick with us, then. I wouldn’t mind the backup.”

We didn’t hurry as much, now. If there were moves to be made, then they would be leisurely or opportunistic ones. There was no use running, not when we were all tired, not when I was carrying a prosthetic body and Rain had a pair of prosthetic tentacle arms.

Besides, I really wasn’t looking forward to seeing one inevitable individual in particular.

We made our way past the shattered entrance building of the prison. Past looted rooms and parahumans standing watch over scared staff.

I saw the assistant warden we’d reached out to earlier and approached him. Parahumans moved to block my path. They seemed to recognize me and then backed off a little.

“We’ll do our best to help you out,” I told him. “Do you need anything?”

The look in his eyes was haunted as he shook his head. An inmate at his own asylum, with the patients as the wardens. And maybe, just a little, there was a lifelong fear come to life. That the parahumans were taking over and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Keep your chin up,” I said.