“But the other—Bill. He called Jace. Reached out. He wants to try doing what Bianca—the other woman—did to him. Even though we’re already spent, we don’t have any days any more, and we barely have power. He was trying to convince Jace to kidnap us. Promised money, safety…”

“We don’t have anywhere else to go. People made Bianca disappear when she became a problem, and we’re not exactly in anyone’s good books since the portal mess.”

“I was barely even involved,” Megan said.

“He got Ysmine,” Tori said. “He’s coming for us.”

This wasn’t fun. It was hardly a game. But to be trapped, March could sympathize. It hit so close to home that she worried it was designed to.

She laid her hand over Tori’s.

⊙

She’d reached the city. A folded-up Brockton Bay. She whooped as she ran forward, leaping, hurling herself at a bend in space.

The bend swept her up. Gravity flowed in another direction.

With hand signals, her teams fanned out. Tori was absent. In two minutes, Tori would fire a blue flare off to one side. It would signal the reinforcements, if the reinforcements hadn’t been wiped out.

“March!” a hero bellowed. He stood on a rooftop directly above her, looking up at her while she looked up at him. Twenty feet separated them.

“Hallo!” she shouted. The bent space captured her voice, made it resound in different ways.

“You can’t do this! You can’t touch the time bubbles! Every person with a power that looks at the future says the result is bad!”

She laughed.

“Stop!”

She laughed again, gauging the bent space, then ran, leaping over a chasm, letting the bend in space redirect her leap, putting her near another rooftop.

Her people were making their way up now. Getting used to the vectors of this particular battlefield.

“You need to stop!”

“You need to get out of my way! I get what I want, and anyone who tries to stop me dies!”

“It’s not a game!”

She laughed again, using one hand and both feet to quickly ascend the light post that illuminated the newest rooftop, dragging her sword against the length of it as she ran; it was the roof where the distance between rooftops was shortest. She stopped, pausing, then leaped.

The leap carried her a few feet up, helped by the fact that the space in the neutral territory between buildings was neither up nor down. Then the light exploded. The blast from the explosion tipped her over to the far end of the neutral territory. She fell up, rather than down.

All around her, buildings began to move. Leaving her less in the way of escape routes.