Mukade’s centipedes flowed back to him, sliding into the hole in his side.

“Back! Now!” I shouted.

She didn’t budge, her attention on the progress of her tendrils.

No options left, I threw myself into her range with the full knowledge that she’d nearly grabbed me before, and any control she’d picked up from Rain’s power was probably long gone.

She hadn’t shied away from gunfire or having her tendrils sliced, but she shied away from letting me into her range. Slow and awkward, her entire head lurching because she tried to use a tendril she didn’t have anymore to anchor herself.

I closed in, tendrils grazing me, and pressed her face to my shoulder as I flew the two of us back and away. Mukade’s centipedes stabbed through the air behind us in a double helix, then closed up, the openings in the helix scissoring closed, razor-sharp serrated edges making a shrieking sound as they ran against one another, acid spraying and splashing below them.

Sveta pulled away, and I threw up the Wretch. Hoping it wouldn’t grab her, just as she no doubt hoped she wouldn’t grab me.

Red’s power provided the elevator to raise a group of four capes and ten soldiers to the broken rooftop. She stepped away from the group, and had the splashes going constantly now, all in close proximity to herself. One two three, clockwise, while another set marked the same pattern and distance, counter-clockwise, timed so there was something emerging from the rooftop every two seconds or so, always in arm’s reach.

Pieces of metal to be shields, an outcropping of pipes, that she could use to grab and wrench a weapon free. Curved blades that scraped the roof, as if testing the footing.

Soldiers dropped low, raising their guns—

The one closest to the trees seemed to throw himself at the guy beside him. Glass shards clattered down around him, and his head lolled back. Individual lengths of wire stabbed into eyes, eye socket, eyelid, scalp and cheek, sometimes prying and pulling skin or ocular material away, because those wires were still trying to spring back to a rigid, straight length. The guy beside him had one wire stabbing through an eye.

More of the soldiers were reacting now—I’d thought they’d dropped low or bent over because the guys at the far left of their group were leaning so heavily into them, from the force of the impact. But the other shot had gone low much as the first had gone high, both striking simultaneously. Short lengths of wire riddled the hands that had been holding the guns aloft.

Curled up wire distilled in glass spheres?

“Go to the others!” I told Sveta.

“But—”

“They need you!”

Not the level-headed ideal command I’d pictured before.

But Sveta listened.