I felt my heart sink. The moment he’d said he could feel who was inside, I’d kind of hoped Cradle was inside the mech itself. If he was, there was a chance we could get him. Take him away, then do what we’d done to Rain, using Chastity’s power.

“I have to be careful with the soldiers,” Rain whispered. He pointed at the glass. “They get restless when I hit ’em, and when they get restless they head out toward the door. Then I have to hit them harder. It makes them rethink it.”

“Any effect?”

“Some. Have to find the right people.”

I heard a scuff. Immediately, my hand went to Rain’s face, sliding between mask and mouth. I heard more noise, and in the next instant, was dropping out of the air, Rain’s sudden, silent exhalation filtering through my fingers as we went from stationary to a twenty foot drop. I pushed him into the corner between cans and a part of the wall that jutted out.

Drei. Flashlight not aimed down or at any angle I could see, no cigarette.

The gun moved, light shining down around us. It stopped a short distance away. It moved to the cans, a few feet from us.

She moved on.

“That—” Rain started. My hand went back to his mouth.

After the blinding, focused light, it was hard to make out details. Sieben walked at the roof’s edge, a matter of ten feet behind Drei. She had company. A figure loomed tall enough that it was five feet taller than Sieben. A human shape topped it, and about ten feet of tail followed after, lumpy and faintly sour smelling. Like rancid garbage. The height was simply the parahuman raising themselves up. I could see the shape of him move as he dropped down, almost falling. His upper body traced the wall as he flowed down it at a diagonal, a caterpillar body of trash bags and cardboard boxes following after him.

He gathered the body under them, all coiled up, reshuffled, then launched off the wall. His upper body stuck out at the top, while legs and hips were lost in an amorphous blob of detritus. The bags and boxes contained gas, and hoses trailed beneath, each hose producing puffs of that same gas. He took a course that put him some distance from the building and his squad.

Chugalug. Trash changer. He gathered garbage and sewage as a body he could configure into a few different forms. That trash was slowly consumed and turned into a material that would be, as required, solid, gas, or liquid, typically in quantities far greater than what was reasonable for what he’d absorbed. His namesake technique was from how he ‘gathered’ raw sewage to fill out his body. Moose had covered that.

Guy didn’t really associate with his squad, or his squad didn’t want to associate with him.

I withdrew my hand from Precipice’s face. He made a face as he inhaled.