“Chastity,” I said. “Focus on the task at hand.”

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Outside. We might need takedowns.”

She nodded, approaching the door. I stepped around the door of the workshop broom closet.

“All I’m saying is I’m not scared,” Chastity told the Harbingers. “I grew up with hot-blooded killers, cold-blooded killers. I saw them evolve, I know most of the tricks.”

“Vic!”

I flew. Out the door, into the cool outside. Compared to the temperature back in the city, it didn’t feel right to call it cold, but it was borderline freezing out, and a light rain was pattering down.

As I stepped outside, I felt a tendril encircle my neck.

Wretch, the idea crossed my mind. My forcefield extended from my skin, then unfurled. The tendril squeezed, limiting expansion, then released as what it was gripping became ten feet across.

I whistled, one quick sound. To confirm I was okay, and to signal for the teamwork.

The first hired gun was flung our way as if by an invisible force, whipped through the air by one limb, that arm twisting awkwardly as it absorbed the force of the whipcrack.

Chastity stepped out of the building. I put myself between Sveta and her.

No need to worry. The tendril at my neck had been an isolated incident.

Chastity slapped the man who had fallen a few feet from the door.

Two more, one after the other. One was flung by the waist, the other was disarmed, backing away from her, which meant he was moving in our direction. A multi-tendril strike thrust him out as a massive push.

I flew, orienting myself to catch him, then use the rotation of my body and the direction of my flight to heave him more in Chastity’s direction.

Chastity knocked out one more, and was starting to move toward the third when a fourth was hurled at us. Immediately after that fourth were more. Pulled from around the corner.

“Too many!” Chastity shouted.

I intercepted two. Rather than leave them for her to deal with, I hit them while they were airborne. Ribs cracked, leg broken. I winced as I saw the one with a broken leg land with his leg under him. His scream was strangled.

There had been a squad of hired guns just around the corner, to the left of where the main door jutted out of the front of the building, all huddled in a corner where two of the station’s walls blocked off the wind and the overhang kept the rain off.

Sveta wrapped herself around a post. For a moment, in the gloom, she looked like a person of indistinguishable silhouette, her face pale.

Every movement was calculated. Even the distance to the post.

I ventured closer, aware of the range mostly by how aware she was of it. I put my hand out flat, toward her.

“Stop?” she asked, quiet.

“What?”

“You mean stop?”