“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I’m… pretty sure that when it’s close to time for him to wake up, he’ll have all of the mercenaries he hired come back. Any we didn’t disable, any he had elsewhere, anyone helping March, even.”

March—I thought of the situation at the city. The city unfolding.

“It’s what Paris said. We can’t take action without hurting people.”

“Probably. He might have decoys inside, or he might be inside, with people set up. He had to anticipate that we might be in this situation.”

And what happens next? He gets to this stalemate, then… he has plans to move to another Earth? He bails? It’s a lot of enemies to be making.

I had another suspicion, a worry about what Cradle was considering, but I didn’t let myself consider it.

“I’m going to talk to the others,” I said. “Can you keep watch here?”

“I can. Happy to be useful.”

“High five,” I said, putting my hand over the ledge.

She slapped it. More like a whip than a hand, but not too audible.

“Thank you,” she said, quiet.

As I’d flipped through faces like Chris and my parents, I found myself thinking of all of the various capes out there, living and dead. Of the ones who fit categories, from cloning to flesh molding. Blasto. Rattenfänger’s music. Jerky-meat’s puppets. Jamestowner’s radioactive mutant cannibals. Non-options.

What did an answer to Sveta’s problem look like? What gave her Weld and gave me a best friend I could hug when she needed a hug?

“Be safe,” I said.

“You too.”

I waited, watching the flashlight beams moving around the area before choosing a time to take flight.

I hurt. My foot hurt. My hand hurt. I was cold, and the Wretch wasn’t as good as winter clothing. My arms felt like I’d had the workout of my life and then compounded the aches and pains by getting beat around the upper body with baseball bats.

I hurt on other levels. Dealing with all of this, seeing people hurt, it wasn’t easy. Nobody was doing well, except for the worst people.

At one point—at a thousand points, I’d wished I’d been able to participate in the full course of events that had plagued my hometown. I knew, objectively, that I hadn’t been emotionally mature enough to. That I’d had my limitations as a person, my regrets about how I’d acted. But that logic didn’t do anything to combat my other regrets, about the fact that I hadn’t been there.

Well… wish fucking granted, Victoria.

It wasn’t Brockton Bay. But it felt a damn lot like I was picking up where I’d left off. If I hadn’t been hit by that acid, taken out of action.

Dealing with villains who had scary-as-fuck tinker stuff going on. Unreasonable, unreasonably violent, inscrutable.