The humming and chiming swelled, the chiming finding its stride with more coordination, less discordant, now more disconcerting because the off-notes were spaced far enough away to catch the ear off guard.

One of our teams was being attacked, and we were stuck against a brute strong enough he wouldn’t go down unless he was permanently put down, and a shaker–master nightmare I most definitely did not want to fight on her turf.

The disc was flickering to the point that it was off nine seconds out of every ten, and nonsense the last second. Even with that, the broken-up models that put heads twenty feet from the associated bodies were an ominous warning of what was at stake. I had to assume the worst hadn’t happened, because the distorted images I was getting from the disc put body parts in mid-air, and had a computer-glitch kind of logic or arrangement to them.

They knew we were here, they had prepared with stalling tactics and organized assault against one of our groups, they had the device responsible for the Navigators incident, and they had the willingness to use it.

Blinding 11.6

It had been a long, long time since I’d fought with any musical accompaniment. Glory Girl had worn headphones for a little while, to fill the silence while she patrolled, and because she hadn’t been one to have a back and forth with the small fries she was taking down.

Mom had put a stop to that. Situational awareness was too important, she’d said.

Now, the music box chiming came from nowhere, and the dull heartbeat thud was a percussive element overlapping that. Other sounds creeped in, but it sounded like they were mostly aboveground. It didn’t quite come together as a complete musical piece, but that gave it more effect, not less.

Situational awareness was in full effect now.

“Don’t touch the walls,” I said, as we hurried down the storm drain’s tunnel. About two hundred feet ahead of us, there was a section that was open to the air, where the upper half of the drain hadn’t been laid in yet. The mist that Nursery’s power generated was coming in hard, rose-tinted and distorting the surroundings. Where it was heaviest, especially around that open air, it was rewriting things. Curved walls became hallways with straight walls perpendicular to floor. Water with a paper-thin sheet of ice atop it simply terminated, not flowing into the lower ground where there was no water. Just stopping.

“It’s not an illusion?” Parian asked.

“No. Localized reality overwrite. Reality works differently in her nursery-space. Don’t touch the walls, don’t touch the floor where it’s fully changed. And if we run into her, remember that area-effect powers don’t tend to work in the rewritten area.”

“I don’t know if my powers are area-effect,” Precipice said.

“Mine either,” Candy said.