So not just a paper pusher, but a paper pusher in a workplace that had twenty employees at most.

“How many capes?”

“Two of us, two of them.”

Correction: eight employees at most. Probably an office with three to five people in it. Fuck.

“I’m willing to follow orders if you want to lead,” I said.

“Are you?” he asked. He sounded slightly surprised.

“Yeah. But I really hope you want to and you’re able,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I don’t and I’m not.”

“Focus on your kids, then. Keep them in one piece. Some are freaking out,” I said.

The pounding continued. The dribbles were now more like brief waterfalls, contiguous along the long horizontal crack above the door. It was ready to fall.

Sveta used her modified arm, slender fingers on a feminine hand moving furniture to stack chairs in the cups formed by the struts and legs of desks. The arm was one piece of a greater project. She was strong, really, and her ability to pull and constrict was being leveraged into mechanical movement. The only difficulty was the lack of balance and how she had to brace most of the rest of her body.

Still, she seemed more happy with having a human limb writ large than she’d been with the tentacles.

Or content, if not quite happy.

I looked around. Side windows had been blocked with rock—Tristan’s work, before he’d joined me and helped at the cell. I could see the food wrappers and half-eaten dinners. The ones that were possibly laced.

I added more chairs to the mix, kicked over some garbage bins, and then stepped back.

The pounding was less sharp than before. The impacts were heavier.

They’d sensed or seen the movement and now they threw their bodies against the wall instead of punching or clawing at it.

“How long since you got the call?” I asked Harris.

“Thirty—”

The wall shifted, the scraping and crunching loud enough to drown out Harris’s reply.

The villains had attacked the Shepherds earlier in the day, and the transformation had lasted for longer than thirty minutes. They’d estimated close to an hour, after talking to the people who first sighted the changed people.

“If someone gets dosed somehow, we need to get them into a cell before they change,” I said. “Harris?”

“We’ll try. They’re already sardines.”

“Better a sardine than dog food,” I answered him.

“It took a while to change,” Byron said.

“I’ve been reading up on tinker transformations and the kinds of drugs they make,” I replied. Again, there was an impact that shifted the whole wall. “They can change it up. Force a faster change, but weaker or less predictable. Or more side-effects for the victim.”

“Why are you reading up on tinker transformations?” Sveta asked.