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.

The road was dirt, but dirt wasn’t useful.

The building itself? No. If things got that far, he was out of reach.

I could see the artificial speed bump in the road. A hump of dirt, painted yellow.

My eye fixed on that. Yellow paint where the dirt sloped up against sidewalk, to mark the rise, to let people know to watch their step, and—

I retreated, flying over the cars. The tinker broke away from Sveta, saw me heading one way, and started to take the long way around, the front door in his sights.

I dove for the ground, and I had the Wretch dig its hands into the earth. I couldn’t rely on it to do as I wanted, but I could do something else. Faced with a second me that reached out and lashed out mindlessly, I could deny it, I could allow it to work…

Or I could at least make it lash out in a predictable way. I could lean on the fact that the Wretch outlasted a sustained hurt better than it outlasted a sudden, sharp kind of hurt.

I spun. Each outstretched arm swiped at the earth. A sustained battering, spread out across the Wretch’s limbs.

I carved my way a few feet into the ground near the speed bump, drove my hand into the fissure that cracked the hard earth there, and found my prize.

The tinker had escaped Sveta, and he had escaped Rain. He found his orientation, and he lunged.