“Lots. But our alternative is that if we don’t up our game then we get our asses kicked here, now. The way this is going we’ll have to surrender or get captured, and we’ll have to deal with a woman who will probably impregnate us as an alternative to handcuffs and a guy who’s so unreasonable he thinks smileys should be appended to every sentence in an email. Not even good ones.”

“If we surrender, they arrest us, not you,” Foil said, her voice low. I hadn’t been sure she was with us at all, she’d been so quiet. “You fly away, get help.”

I looked at her—I would have locked my eyes to hers to read her expression, but she wore a fencer-style opaque pane that covered her face. Her costume was form-fitting, sleek and stylish because of course it had to be when she was partnered with a fashion designer, but that costume was normally adorned with a fanned-out array of spikes where the javelin-like bolts were in her quiver, darts mounted at her forearms, hips and thighs where she could grab them. Most were empty now.

“How is she?”

Parian coughed, hoarse, and her shoulders and arm drew together at her upper body. A length of cloth moved telekinetically, crossed under her mask, wiping her mouth, and came away bloody.

She gave me a thumbs up. Foil, by contrast, was rigid, stricken.

“Foil. We deny them what they want and what they want is you. That’s the job. You and the Heartbroken focus on finding an escape route. Get clear. If you can’t, you focus on keeping anyone else off of Precipice’s back, so he can help me.”

“Okay,” Foil said. She gripped the handle of her rapier with both hands, even though it was a one-handed weapon.

She was in shock as much as Parian was, if not more, but she was pulling herself together in a visible way now that she had strict orders. She wouldn’t be someone who had lived through six Endbringer encounters and the end of the world if she wasn’t.

“Do your best,” I told Precipice.

“Do my worst, you mean?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Nursery wasn’t accepting the help of her henchpeople, but getting to her wasn’t easy either, because her power was thickest closer to her. Lord of Loss was hunched over, his outer body in a state of change where he was all over the place, half-falling apart. It looked like as good a time as any, but appearances were deceptive.

My eye fell on the cabling that Lord of Loss had shucked off and left on the ground.

“I’ll be going where Lord of Loss is now. Be ready. We all move at the same time.”

Precipice nodded.

I took off, not flying for Lord of Loss, but at Nursery. The group started running, the Heartbroken and Undersiders heading the opposite direction from Lord of Loss. Precipice hung back a bit.