Some had a need for something environmental, like a water breaker who needed a body of water to manipulate and absorb. I could scratch that off the list. I could almost assume it was a lack of environment that drove her, given her tendency for staying in the air, but she’d been close to the building she’d hacked up and she’d been on top of me when she’d shoved me to the ground. Not… power driven from being in the open air.

There were others. The ones who needed people, the parasite-breakers and those who drank up emotion to fuel themselves. Not that emotion was something so physical, but the thing that supplied the power liked and valued the emotions they churned up and the reactions those emotions got. It would be the kind of thing they wanted to set up.

I flew to keep forcing her to cut me off. Her back was to Hookline, who was whirling the hook around him in a figure-eight. If I could land—wincing at the pain in my foot as I did, I could put myself close to the ground and compel her to match my level. Could I manipulate her into getting into the way of Hookline’s whirling hook? Was she that dumb or unaware?

I saw her turn her head slightly. She’d heard the hook whooshing through air, probably.

Damn.

Fuck me, what else? Think, think! You call yourself a powers geek!

As was becoming reflex, I turned my head to check to see if Precipice was there. The windshield was pointed my way, and Precipice was on the other side. More importantly, Foil was climbing out the window at the top.

Think, I thought. You wanted to study this in university.

Powers. Environment, people, and powers. Was there a possibility that she was like the Pharmacist’s purple fire, that burned powers? A breaker form that relied on powers, in a trump-like way? Was she drinking in nourishment for that form every time that I used my flight or pushed out with my aura?

Would that tie into her having similar powers? Similar powers to me, at least in the loosest sense of the flight and ‘aura’? But how or why, when I hadn’t been anywhere near when she’d taken the form, and she seemed to have this narrow suite of powers. She had no strength at all. It suggested something too selective, picking at random instead of drawing on a theme like Spright did.