“The moment I snap my fingers, get started. Count carefully. We can’t run until we stop enough of them. You—upstairs. There’s a fire extinguisher on the wall. Count to a hundred starting at the finger-snap, make sure you have it by seventy. You’ll want to stick your head and arms out onto the roof on that side of the house at one hundred and start spraying right then.”

That got her a nod. She snapped her fingers, putting the mental model into effect. Timing, visualizing the person going around the corner, up the stairs. She could adjust her mental model, backward, forward, which would be useful when the numbers got larger.

“You—front door. Blockade it, dining room table, should take you twenty seconds. Take four of the people too drunk to count to help lift. Go now. You—

⊙

Ixnay’s waves pulsed through the air, making the air condense into rings, and some of those rings served to stop some of the drones and the ice crystals that were flying through the air. As the waves hit, the things were suspended, rotating slowly on the spot. If released, they would continue their current trajectories.

“Megan, your three!” March gave the order.

Megan turned, hand extending out. She tractor-beamed an ice crystal her way, driving it into the back of a cape that was stampeding toward her.

“Back three steps! And five!”

Megan hurried back three steps as the stampeding cape crashed into the ground. He coasted on icy ground, stopping just before colliding with her. Her trust in March was enough that she’d already turned, was grabbing a drone out of the air, pulling it to her—

The stampeding cape rose to his feet, only to have the drone crash into him.

“About face!” March shouted.

She loved these moments.

Without asking, with trust, her megacluster spun one hundred and eighty degrees. Switching who each of them were fighting, changing targets, shifting priorities.

“Jace, shield, ten!”

Jace half-turned, shield going up.

“Noose, charge!”

Noose, faced with a gauntlet of tinker soldiers dressed up as knights, hesitated.

“Belay that! Turn right and help Matches!”

March burst into a run, straight for the gap that Noose had refused to jump into.

“And for the record!? You would have been fine if you hadn’t hesitated!”

March was a target for the forces defending the Brockton Bay time bubbles because she was so clearly the leader. Now they were finding what they saw as an opening. Two capes came at her from different directions.

She traced a half-circle on the ground with her rapier, then stepped back from it. That covered one flank. The other—her rapier caught a stone on the ground, flicked it into the air. As she pushed her power through the rapier and into the blade, the weapon traced a 9/10ths circle around the stone as it flipped it up.

The ice cape threw ice at her, and as the line on the ground detonated, it intersected the flying shards. Frozen shrapnel scattered across the battlefield.