Chastity, though, was entirely on the ball when it came to rebuttals. “Alternative, Precipice mon chou? Find someone else and show them how hard you can be for them. Having an external pressure release can be very nice.”

Precipice turned his head her way.

“I did not mean me, but I’m flattered,” she said, laying a hand over the triangle of cleavage she’d left strategically in place, with an amused tone that told me she’d wholly meant to imply herself. “I meant our big man there, or the sea of horrific baby-makers that are waggling themselves at us as we speak.”

“Sorry,” Precipice said, apparently one hundred percent believing her. “Yeah, that sounds like a good temporary plan.”

“It helps that Lord of Loss has a punchable face,” I said. “Help me punch it.”

He created a silver blade in his hand.

“That’s part of it,” I told him. “What we just talked about? I need you to use your power. We’ll try it out.”

“Are you fucking serious?” he asked. “Now?”

“When else?”

“In a safe, controlled training environment?” he asked, with a tone like he was almost angry. Incredulous. A part of it was probably that I was reversing course on things I’d told him again and again.

“Fun fact,” I said. “Powers don’t tend to jibe with safe and controlled environments. For every cape that I know who picked up a trick in PRT labs or whatever, there are ten more who figured their tricks out because they had to. You want to make it work? Field test, be confident, be creative.”

“How many tried to pull something inventive and got their asses kicked?” Precipice asked.

“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?”