Out of the portal and into another world. An interim world. Here, people were camping or laying out tables and other things they’d taken from the prison. There were a few improvised medical areas, and my heartbeat quickened on seeing them. I had to double and triple check to confirm.

No Amy, for one thing. That was ninety percent of it.

No friends, either. No Ratcatcher with grievous injuries. No Natalie. Not in the medical area, at least.

It was a short hike to get to the other portal. We were offered a ride by someone that had taken a guard’s car, but we refused. The group needed to stay together. It was what Lookout wanted and needed right now.

The prison had been burned to the ground. The interim territory was a camp, a place to fall back to.

This—this was a front line. All of the prisoners were gathered, organizing themselves. The heroes we’d brought along had come around to working with Goddess. I could place them by the teams they belonged to.

Most of them.

I saw Goddess, and I saw that she was talking to heroes. They weren’t heroes that had accepted our invitation.

She’d reached out, using her new power battery.

I saw Lookout wave, and I saw Natalie, gathered with prison staff.

I spotted Ratcatcher on my own. She was standing on the back of a pickup truck, ropes binding her hands to the spoiler. I got Crystalclear’s attention, nudging him, and pointing. I saw him nod.

There were enough parahumans around us that we couldn’t talk. The noise was too much. He tried anyway, saying something about how she was too big a pain in the ass.

No Natalie. No Ratcatcher.

Was it just the Wardens now, fractured and distracted?

Just us, who had barely enough of a sense of protocols to doubt this reality? We could say no to Monokeros, but were the others convincing themselves in the same way I was, thinking of how bad she was for Goddess?

On that topic, of Goddess, I saw Cryptid in Goddess’s vicinity, talking to—to my sister. He wore a monstrous form, narrow but with a chest and spine so distended that it was almost like he was a dorsal fin or clown fish with four legs extending from the sides and planting on the ground, like stout arms mid push-up. His body was writ in mottled pink flesh, with a row of boils down the back. Only Cryptid could be that weird. If I’d had any doubt about his identity, he wore the sash he usually did, to protect his modesty and carry his stuff.

What was unusual was that for the first time since I’d known him, he was changing where people could see. From this to something else. I saw flesh sag and slough, and it wasn’t this fin-shaped plague-disgust thing.