I nodded. I wasn’t super happy about her mentioning that we were tired or taking a break to people who might pass that on to our enemies, but I wasn’t going to get on her case about it.

“Can we talk!?” I called out.

After they consulted, it was Bluestocking who approached, stepping over rubble. She had nice boots. Her approach made the creatures back off.

I floated closer.

What would happen if I decked her and knocked her out right now? If I took a hostage, and played as ugly and as dirty as they were playing right now?

Bitter Pill approached too, maybe because she wanted to say something. I looked back and met Harris’s eyes. Best to connect to the real authorities where possible.

Bluestocking and me, with Bitter Pill and Harris as our seconds, I guessed.

I looked at Bluestocking, and I saw—something in the way she held herself, and what I could see of eyes behind mostly opaque lenses, and in her eyebrows.

A familiar attitude. I wondered if I was comparing her to anyone I knew, but when I reached for it, I couldn’t place it.

It didn’t help that they stank. The smell I’d noted before was emanating from them in wafts, worse when they moved. It was, presumably, what was keeping the mutants docile.

“We’ll give you the two capes you want from the jail. With stipulations.”

“Which are?” Bluestocking asked. She looked pissed, by the way she set her mouth and folded her arms. Or was it resting bitch face?

Oh. There’d been a woman at my rehab who’d given me dirty looks. So that was the answer to my little mystery.

That tiny bit of closure was a note of success in a day that had been hard, bloody, and miserable in large part.

“Nobody gets hurt. If you have the ability, you need to return these people to normal now, with no injuries. You can’t take them with you.”

“They’ll be eighty-five percent healed up, unless you’ve punctured a vital organ or something,” Bitter Pill said.

“Not good enough. You can’t go after civilians.”

“Can and did,” Bitter Pill said.

Bluestocking didn’t agree, but argued the point instead, “Cops. Cops are fair game. So are the anti-cape soldiers.”

“We’re not anti-cape,” Harris said.

“And you can’t take them with you. They’re not your pawns.”

“Couldn’t if we wanted. They go dormant, that’s all,” Bitter Pill said. “No need to worry your little head over that one.”

“Fine. That’s stipulation one, you fix them,” I said. “Stipulation two, is you need to drop some money on this place. Make amends, give them what they need to rebuild.”

“Fuck that,” Bluestocking said.

“Stipulation three? Take a fucking break. Back off, don’t pick fights, don’t go after heroes, take three days and stop being complete dicks for that long.”