Immediately, I started fighting my way back up the ditch, to the road where the traps weren’t set, then I jogged as best as I was able when my arms and shoulders were fighting me, jerking this way and that. I was a person wearing a straightjacket, the strings being tugged and jerked this way and that.

It had been Swansong that had made the… the utterance. Not a word I’d expected from her mouth. Not a tone I’d imagined either, but one that made a profound kind of sense. An order—she’d wanted to be the team’s leader at one point. A plea—she had been a member of the therapy group, and to sit in on a therapy session she’d had to bring herself to ask for help before.

No, a plea… because she cared enough that she wanted to help Sveta much as I did.

I took the path that she’d clearly taken, off the road, into ditch, then into field. Across what had been farmland, ridged with where the irrigation and crops had been. A red light flared to my right, and I veered left, away while still heading forward.

“My arms don’t work,” I told her.

“Neither does my leg. Give me your body,” she said.

She laid a hand across my back, fingers and fingernails digging into the back of my neck, the raw material of her damaged arm biting through the fabric of my costume.

Wasn’t—hadn’t her arm sparked earlier? Was that a danger?

The Case Fifty-Three had Sveta’s face in its hands. It was a weirdly shaped figure, squat bodied, but with a skinny neck topped with a normally sized head. All was clad in what looked like cylindrical extensions of shell, white and ornamented like a castle with crenellations. What the shell didn’t cover was ropy, yellow, and slick with fluids. A notch was inset into one shoulder, making it so one arm seemed to practically float in the air, joined to the body at armpit but not at shoulder.

I was put in mind of a ‘rook’ chess piece, given arms and legs, with internal workings that dripped phlegm. I was especially mindful that the arm that was barely attached didn’t seem strong, but it was gaining strength as its powers returned.

My powers—one fifteenth of what they should be, maybe, if I judged by ‘flight’ alone.

I was Swansong’s legs, her arm at my back and her body lined up beside mine. With an arm that still spasmed—still, and only from a glancing contact with the lightning—I tried to hold her around the waist, to keep her upright.