Right. I remembered that from the attack on the bank. Dean had remarked on it after. Rachel was the kind of peculiar where emotion powers didn’t always produce intuitive responses. I’d used my own power to scare people only to make them angry, yes, but I’d also run into people who had been seemingly unaffected outwardly, except to become more friendly and submissive, and one rare case who had been the horny kind of submissive, possibly helped by the substances he’d been partaking in. No parahumanity involved. Just… wiring.

I had to ignore her. I’d already noted just how open and vulnerable that emotion blast had left me. Rachel was in a serious fight with Nailbiter, and she needed cover.

In my effort to keep a good distance from the breaker, I’d flown up. I was working on the assumption that the power emanated as a rough sphere or ovoid, or it had a singular target and a range that target could be affected at, and the effective zone of control had that spherical or sphere-ish shape to it. Either way, the arc of my flight was like the arc of a rainbow, putting the curve of the sphere beneath me. I closed that rainbow arc, flying down, straight for Nailbiter.

Her fingers and teeth had elongated, and riddled the mutated dog, plunging through face and exiting the top of the head, and plunging through chest and forelimbs, exiting the other side. The animal was suspended mid-pounce.

But Nailbiter was suspended in a way too. I saw the whites of her eyes as I came down.

Limbs extended, torso and head morphing to stretch out further, adjusting her position and making my target a narrower one to hit.

I did hit her though; while she was impaling that dog, she had to extricate herself to move anywhere. The hit was a glancing one, and I didn’t bend, break, or apparently bruise anything I hit. I landed on the road behind Nailbiter. Above me, her head couldn’t move while her teeth were in use, but her eyes did move, tracking me, staring down.

Pinky and ring fingers withdrew from the dog, hands straining and adjusting the lengths of wrists, fingers, and palms, just so she could get those fingers curled around and lance through me.

My instincts warred with one another as I collected myself post-landing, taking in the scene. Throw up the Wretch, one instinct said. Protect against that imminent attack. Never use the Wretch while in close proximity to another living person, another instinct said. That instinct told me to fly away. A third instinct was that I had to start resolving things, because a breaker scenario I couldn’t change and a changer I couldn’t break would just tie us up until the rest of Breakthrough and the Undersiders were caught.