He wasn’t a killer. Now that I knew Chris was Lab Rat, I could peg just about everyone in Breakthrough, Byron and myself excluded, as people who had taken lives. It was in files. Tristan had taken life in only a loose sense, murdering his brother, and charges of attempted murder had been considered, because that was the closest equivalent they could find in the law.

But for Byron and I, it meant something else.

“I feel responsible,” Byron said. “I know I shouldn’t, I know he’s scum, but—”

“He saw what Cradle did?” I asked.

“He helped,” Byron said, voice tighter. “Fuck this hurts.”

The red lightning had stopped, but the spasms were clearly continuing.

“If he helped, then the Harbingers can kill him.”

I let those words stand. Cold even in the winter air.

They dashed forward. Red lights began to blink across the field, and they were swift enough to be clear of the area before the red lighting happened, legs cutting through the heaped lumps of snow where bushes or crops had been, skipping over the divots and dips where irrigation ditches had been. They were faster than some would be on flat ground.

My first mind was to playing defense. Etna was hurling globs, and her intent clearly wasn’t to hit our group. She wanted to herd, to take the group that was struggling and force them into continual retreat, deeper into the patch of traps.

But her aim wasn’t perfect. One splash landed close, and it splashed, gobbets flying toward the group. One hit Byron’s armor, only missing his eye because he ducked his head at the last second. Another hit my mother, a quarter-sized lump.

I caught and blocked the next. I could see her floating above the field, a heat shimmer surrounding her, the air steaming.

Swansong’s power blasted. As I went high, she went low. I went right, and she seemed to watch me, darting left. She stumbled, used her power, skidded and almost tripped over irrigation. But she was closing the distace and helping to apply pressure. Etna threw one globe at each of us, but in her haste to do so, her aim sailed widely off the mark.

It hit everyone present like a truck. In one moment, I could hear the grunts of pain and frustration. The bursts of power. Sveta and the Harbingers were focusing on Paris’s main group. It was noise. Flashes of power and light. I could see Capricorn’s constellation.

Then it was silence, just for an instant. A flicker of an image across my mind’s eye, a blip in the senses, and my power went out from under me like collapsing scaffolding.

As I fell I could see Paris lurch forward, catching one of the reeling Harbingers. I saw Swansong fall, reaching out to use her power to counter-balance and not finding it.

I saw Sveta go utterly limp, too close to the enemy.