She was faster for short distances and when traveling where there were handholds. In this environment, though, I could see how she was regularly going for a grip on something and slipping off, or taking a second longer to slide to a stop and be able to reach out again.

Even with that, she was faster than me. She collided with him, and even though he was ninety percent energy, he reacted, conducting along her metal body, and he sprawled with her.

He was faster to recover. No arms and legs to manage.

“Anything that conducts!” I shouted.

Which would hamper and slow him down, but didn’t stop him from making progress.

“Tress!” Rain hollered her name. “Here!”

Having to stop and reach for whatever he was offering or throwing her way slowed her down. I passed her, chasing the guy down.

With Sveta’s extended arms and what looked like folded metal blades in each hand, Sveta made the tinker’s form distend, stretching out as it automatically clung to the metal, then snapped back in a way that seemed difficult for him.

He twisted around, using his lighting hands to seize the blades. The pair engaged in a brief tug-of-war, which I interrupted by diving at him, Wretch active. He flashed in the instant before I made contact.

The Wretch’s hands and feet stabbed into the earth, cracking the frozen ground.

He’d darted away, letting go of the blades. Sveta swung again, and he dodged, moving further away.

Further away, but still making incremental progress toward the front doors. The truck had been parked in the far corner of the parking lot, as large as the parking lot of any mall I’d been to, and he was four-fifths of the way to his destination. There was a real risk that Love Lost would see the flashes or hear the noise and respond.

The primary danger, though, was that if he feinted one way and moved another, it might mean he could reach the doors and pass through, surrounding himself with a few hundred hostages, and a dozen more escape routes.

He was functionally a breaker, and I had a limited sense of what worked and didn’t work for breakers. I’d met and talked with Velocity, and I’d met and talked with Shadow Stalker. I’d read up on others.

He was also a tinker, and I had some idea of the tools that served against tinkers. Not that I’d fought many before Gold Morning. Leet and Bakuda, really, and Bakuda only in that I’d been trying to evacuate people from a series of tinker bombs going off. She had been nowhere nearby.

Still, the others needed the distraction.

Sveta caught him, swinging the blades through his electric body. It bought me a few seconds to look, as I flew down, putting myself between the tinker and the cars.

Cars—I couldn’t use them as weapons. Because destroying people’s property in a lower-stakes encounter like this would do more harm than good, because I wouldn’t hit him anyway. He was too fast, too on guard for it.