Vista was in play. Vista was getting in her way. They’d had a few run-ins already, when March had paid visits to Foil and had run afoul of the city’s heroes. This city’s heroes, she had to remind herself.

She smiled, and she moved her hand, signaling her team. Heroes were mobilizing, moving across every plane, like a topsy-turvy funhouse, but each facet was a different hero and a different power. Each moved in slow motion. She had time to remind herself of what each of them did. The ones she wasn’t sure of, she sicced her people on. A hundred cans of paint in the midst of being tossed onto surfaces.

When this was done, all would be crimson.

⊙

“I’m so sorry.”

“Shhh,” Tori murmured.

“I’m so sorry. I was supposed to save you.”

“Shh.”

March’s head sagged.

A flashback. A brief and violent struggle. She was good at timing, but she had to know what her enemy did.

And the people of this cluster did so very many things.

A man, heavyset, with a false magnificence that filled her with equally false strength, just to be around him. False enough that she tested and exceeded her limits, hurt herself in mind and body. A telekinetic shield that seemed to parry things just as effectively as her own timing power and enhanced baton did. He teleported short distances, and made the building shake like it was in the midst of an earthquake when he appeared. Power and force and when she finally cut him, he grabbed the line she’d drawn on him and threw it away, like it was a scrap of cloth.

Now… now she bled.

Now a tube in her arm drained her and kept her at the brink of life. She faded in and out and every part of her hurt.

For Tori, who was just close enough for March to touch, it was much the same. Blood drained. She passed out, came to with weak startles.

For Megan… for Jace, for Ysmine.

And he was getting stronger. And somewhere, a disappeared Bianca was getting weaker.

He’d drained March in hopes that he could take her power like he took the others’. He didn’t get the power. Now, instead of killing her directly, he killed her by neglecting to check her vitals, neglecting to ensure he didn’t take too much. She didn’t get the drugs or the food the others did.

So she talked to the ones in earshot. Tori, primarily, when the two of them were awake at the same time and the sedatives weren’t too strong. About love and life and hopes and missed opportunities. About mothers and violins and about the differences between their worlds.