We went high first, because people didn’t usually look a quarter-mile up in the air for intruders. We dropped down, eyes peeled for soldiers with and without flashlights. Chugalug was out with his squad, jellyfish mode, floating, but he was taking a route that ranged further afield.

“Your heart’s pounding,” I told Precipice. I could feel it through his chest. “Was too fast a drop?”

He shook his head. “Must be involuntary reaction to being so high up.”

He was breathing harder too, but I didn’t get the impression he was being cute or coy—he seemed surprised. Not a boy-girl thing. Mercifully.

A long night, really. All of us were on edge.

We lowered down to the side of the roof with Sveta. I motioned for Rain to hang back.

I handed over the cloth-wrapped ball, only glimmers peeking through. Tendrils wrapped around it, binding the cloth even tighter to the orb.

I explained what was up, what had happened, and what the strategy was.

“Perfect,” Sveta said.

I wasn’t sure it was, but it was the best we’d been able to come up with.

Foil was making her way across the darkest parts of the fields between our group and the building. I could see her because I knew where to look. I was nervous, but I had to trust. She was one of the good ones.

Rain and I, meanwhile, dropped down to the edge of the roof. The window was recessed enough to set a foot down, and Foil had left some pieces of rebar jutting out of the wall. Footholds.

We could look in through the window. We could see the soldiers.

Rain laid his hands against the glass. His breath, even with the mask in the way, was hard enough to leak around the edges and fog against the glass. I motioned for him to back off and keep that to a minimum.

“Low strength,” I whispered. “At least when targeting the soldiers. Keep it subtle.”

“The god-damned irony,” Rain said, under his breath.

“Full strength if you can keep it to the contents of the egg and the mech. Let’s make sure we target Cradle if he’s trying to be clever and hide inside that.”

“Yeah,” Rain said.

He began using his power.

You want to make yourself an egg, Cradle? Let’s see if we can hard-boil it. Keep the shell intact and cook what’s inside.

Heavens 12.6

“Focus on the inside of the bubble,” I murmured. It had been almost ten minutes since I’d felt the need to stress it and felt reasonably confident we could whisper without being overheard. “Not the bubble itself.”

“I can feel them,” Rain responded.

I nodded, holding my finger to my lips.

It was hard to converse, because a patrol walked a route around the rooftop. The group that had been out prior had liked holding the high ground, there was a box-shaped section on the roof that was higher than the rest, encompassing the top of the stairs and the door that led from the building interior to the roof itself. The old group had liked to camp out up there for the view it gave of the surrounding fields and the road that our team was on.