Yesterday—it had been a bad day. He, Nicole, and Jonathan had each handed one thing to the other. He’d had Jonathan’s shard of glass.

This—something else entirely. Worse than a bad day.

He had spent his entire life trying to be better. In every respect, he had been repudiated, insulted, injured. His glasses were still broken, and his power wouldn’t tell him a way to build new ones. He’d lost everything, and that had hurt in its unique, small way, except now it hurt in its unique, monumental way, a way that wasn’t selfish, but multifold.

He wasn’t sure he could stay better. Not like this. He’d built a house of cards over almost a decade and that Fallen asshole hadn’t just locked them inside, where they would nearly die. He’d stuck his hands in the mess that followed, scattering house and card alike.

And so long as this process continued, it would keep happening.

⊙

His scream of anguish died down. The fingers of his Megacarpus II made small mechanical sounds as they curled in, positioning to act as stairs.

Pain lurched indistinct in his chest cavity. Bitter, black, self-loathing. He saw some of the things he had done, both distant and recent, and the sting of it was almost as bad as if he’d been the victim, not the facilitator.

He had over a hundred mercenaries on duty here. Thirteen were capes. Almost a year of work, of selling his work, and buying favors, and brokering other deals had bought him three nights and two days of this army’s assistance.

To look at them, at the bloodstains and shredded bodies in one corner, it hadn’t been an entirely smooth night.

He closed his eyes. His mercenaries waited.

Feelings surged inside him again. He lashed out, and the Megacarpus II reacted, one finger slamming into a wall like a battering ram.

What happened?

The new girl, who Love Lost had called Colt. She was the intruder into the dream-space, and she’d wrested control of the dream from most of them.

Breakers had the closest association with dreams. Their triggers were often hallucinations, drugs, mental illness, or disassociation from reality. On a level, it made sense that she could catch him off guard, force a new reality.

But he’d been one step ahead. Before she could do anything with that, his space had started to expand, the space she shared with Love Lost closing.

Now they lay in the palm of his hands, drained to what was nearly the last drop.

Their room had gone dark. Then the Fallen boy, Precipice, had started sinking into the floor, slipping away. Love Lost had thrown her teeth to him, into the cracks and holes around him. The boy had been disoriented or submerged enough in the shadows that he apparently hadn’t noticed.