I wondered if Sveta would be able to catch it.

She hadn’t let herself be surrounded without a trick up her sleeve. The question was whether she’d throw all sense to the wind and go with that, or if she’d take the other route.

It was Bluestocking who responded. “Reduced terms.”

“Let’s talk,” I said. “We give you passage with your prisoners, no fight, no hassle, we’ll hold them and turn them over… you fix the wounded, you pay—”

“—Not the full price. Two thousand.”

“Pretty paltry. Twenty thousand minimum.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“They’re your teammates. You risked all of this for them. Are you now saying they aren’t worth ten thousand each?”

“We’re not teammates,” Etna said.

“You’ll fucking do a few jobs with us if we break you out, okay?” Bluestocking snarled.

“Okay,” Etna replied.

“Three day break from all activity,” I said.

“One day. Twenty thousand. We fix the injured. And you fucking pretend we don’t exist while we wait for the steroid soldier drug to run its course.”

I didn’t reply, letting the others take that in.

“Yeah, probably,” Byron said. I saw Sveta and Rain nod.

“Then fucking leave us alone, and if you try anything we’ll bring hell down on your heads,” Bluestocking said. “Bitter has stuff.”

“I do. For a rainy day.”

“It’s a fucking rainy day when—”

We backed off, leaving them to bicker.

Harris looked more resigned than victorious when he emerged. When I put out my hand, he gripped it firm.

The hole in the wall meant that the snow and moisture were getting in. The water that Byron had created had frozen so the very top layer formed a paper-thin sheet.

The members of the Patrol squads emerged.

“We need help,” I told the instructor. “We need boots on the ground, not just heroes. It’s bad right now.”

“I’ll get my grads on board,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

“We might need seniors too.”

“School-age kids?”

“Seventeen and eighteen-year-olds? Older than some of us,” I said, indicating my group. “The city needs all the help it can get.”

“I’ll talk to parents. I can’t force anything.”

“And other instructors. Any friends or superiors you have.”

I saw him nod. He put a hand on my shoulder as he walked by, going over to talk to the most unhappy and stressed of his Patrol block.

I grabbed a desk that had been tossed across the room and righted it, before sitting on it. Sveta plunked herself down beside me, her giant arm around behind my back and resting on the corner of the desk to my left.

I pulled out my phone, and immediately she pushed it down and away.

“No more,” she said.

I fought her, play-wrestling just a bit, and finally got the phone unlocked. I closed the chat I’d had open, asking for intel on this specific situation so we knew what we were getting into, and brought up the map.