“I don’t know what he said,” Rain replied, matching my volume for once. “I just thought if he was giving the merc a pass to leave, wasn’t that too goddamn easy? None of them should feel okay about this. Not puppeteering. Nudging.”

“If you don’t let the ones who hate this go, we either have to—”

I fell silent as I heard heavy footsteps. I’d kind of hoped the people had headed downstairs to investigate. I’d really hoped that with people crowding to one end of the roof, they weren’t noticing the absence of two of their members. Some of their people had gone downstairs, some were up, and discrepancies were easy to miss.

But Sechs, the pisser, the clomper, the one with the most unreliable and careless patrol route, was still patrolling the roof’s edge.

If we don’t let the ones with consciences go, we either have to take them all out, or we let some of the worst ones slip through our fingers.

Sechs stood on the roof’s edge.

He looked down. I wasted no time in going up.

“Oh!” he raised his voice, guttural.

My hand hit his gun, pushing it to one side. My knee hit his chin. Others were reacting and I used my aura. The range I measured out, so it caught those on the roof, and it caught Rain. With luck, it caught Sveta.

Multiple people with guns. The door was shut, and I had to stop them before they opened it and shouted the alarm.

There was barely a need. Sveta was reacting. The ball came free of cloth, and it was hurled across the roof. Sveta’s face appeared and the same tendrils that had thrown the ball now caught three soldiers, snatching them from where they stood.

The ball rolled, people scrambled to move.

My dad and my adolescent self had maintained some very different opinions on what we called some maneuvers. The pineapple had been my terminology. I wasn’t sure why I’d chosen that in retrospect, especially considering I’d since learned that grenades could be termed ‘pineapples’ in jargon, and my dad didn’t have a role in this one. But I had and I still maintained the opinion that ‘bowling seven-ten’ was a mouthful and an artifact of my dork of a dad really liking bowling. A name that didn’t fit was better than a name that wasn’t practical, as I argued it.

People got out of the way of the ball. They didn’t anticipate it becoming a woman, armed with two blades. As fast as the ball had been moving, she was utterly still, blades extended—to the seven and ten o’clock positions, as my dad would protest—two people held hostage. Both were the squad leaders. Not captains—the capes were the captains. But squad leaders.

Bowling for hostages.