“Any clues or guesses about what’s going on would be good,” Rocketround said. He was gripping his upper arm as he stood with arms folded. He’d emphasized ‘any’, which only served to emphasize how little a clue he and we had.

“The broken triggers are pretty out there. Not a lot of consistent points or facts… except that they’re big,” I said.

“Big?” a nearby cape asked.

“They tend to cover a lot of ground. Shaker stuff.”

“Yeah,” Rocketround said. “That’s come up in briefings.”

“Location, environment, and position matters a lot,” I said. “The capes closest to the perimeter were least mobile. I think the further they got from the center, the less flex there was. Until their agents wouldn’t let them move at all.”

“Typhlosis pointed that out,” Rocketround said, indicating the girl with the blindfold.

“We might want to make them stay put,” I said.

“Yeah,” Rocketround said. “We’ll do that.”

Someone else spoke up. A remark about common thread through the powers they’d seen. Others chimed in.

I only half-listened. A lot of images stayed with me. The faces I’d seen midway through the one fragmented trigger, the indents in the car as the phantom limbs had reached out for it, Anne. The lingering sensation of Anne clinging to me, hard, the touch on my face. I didn’t know what she had wanted to communicate. A last kind gesture?

“There we go,” the blindfolded girl said. “Pulse. Nobody else affected.”

“I’m going to approach,” Rocketround said. “Roadblock? I’d appreciate it if you came.”

“Of course,” a cape by the side said. A guy in heavy armor.

“Protect me if we run into any trouble.”

“Only four left,” Typhlosis said.

“Four?” Rocketround sounded surprised.

Laserdream’s head snapped around. Looking at me, looking at Typhlosis.

Typhlosis continued, “Only four alive, still. The rest went down. Eaten by their powers, or they tried to move when they couldn’t, and their brains caved in.”

I squeezed Laserdream’s hand.

I might have been less surprised than her because I’d read up more on how these things tended to go.

“Let’s go,” Rocketround said. “Anyone comfortable joining me, come.”

They speed-marched toward the center of the effect. One hand on another cape’s arm for support and guidance, Typhlosis directed us toward the nearest surviving cape.

“Three,” she said, as we got close enough to see him.

He was a man, mid-twenties. His legs and stomach were buried in a writhing mass of something very similar to the origami road I’d seen earlier, materials made thin, folded many times over, until they didn’t quite seem to be three dimensions anymore. Some of those materials were the pieces of the twenty or so people in his immediate vicinity.

A lone figure, standing on a hill of the fallen citizen workers, caught up in the broken trigger’s effect.

“Don’t move!” Rocketround shouted. “Alright!?”