“Hurry,” she says, straining to speak, as a man becomes a towering monster, another folds into himself.

She pulls her weapon free, and Ixnay is quick to catch the fallen Jotun.

“Take care of your boy,” she tells him. “We’ll make a run for it while they’re all distracted. Same as the mayor.”

“This is insane,” Shiv says.

She continues hacking. It is Shiv who grows scared enough to act, to offer assistance. In another few short seconds, the arm is severed at the shoulder.

“All of this to give Ixnay the ability to bleed his cluster-mate out?” Tori asks. “We just unleashed—”

All present winced as the glowing tower of a figure shifted position, and the adjustment made their powers hurt.

“That,” Tori says, barely audible with the crackling above. The man with white skin is unfolding now, and they’re forced to retreat as he fills an area, bleeding into the glowing figure above.

“Call me a romantic.”

Heavens 12.5

What the fuck was I supposed to do? I wanted to rage, to tear in there and bring half the building down on them all. I would, too, but it would only make more of a mess of a messy situation, with people and pieces of people caught in the rubble along with dangerous capes and explosives. I wanted to take this egg he’d made to be uncrackable and take it apart, figure it out, unravel the riddle, but there was a small army in the way. I wanted to curl up into a ball like the one in front of me, like my mom could do. I wanted to think all of this through and I didn’t have the time to.

I couldn’t do any of those things.

I studied the scene and the egg. A light glowed within, and a dulled red glow made it through the places where flesh was thinnest, whether that flesh was covered in skin or not. Everything fit together and there didn’t seem to be any seams or keyholes. All was rigid, frozen and held up in space. I was put in mind of Clockblocker from back home. I thought about the fact that something like the broken whip, which I’d last seen in Rain’s possession, would’ve been needed for this. Was this a second version? Something not like a whip?

I’d networked as best as I could, and I’d done it with this kind of situation in the back of my mind. With situations like Sveta’s in the back of my mind.

My thoughts briefly settled on Chris. Lab Rat. They touched on other alternatives. How would a biology-altering power interact with this? No, not if it was effectively Clockblocked, for a lack of a better way of putting it.