If you want to save this city, we’ll volunteer our considerable resources and power to help. Just as with the Endbringer treaties of yesteryear. We have resources, manpower, and we have knowledge. There’s a chance we can solve this problem outright. Especially if it’s a broken trigger. Create a problem and then solve it, and let the heroes save face by pointing the finger at March.

And if you don’t want to, if we’ve set a disaster in motion that this fragile, already lost city can’t handle, or if March has initiated something we can’t stop? Then Earth Gimel’s enemies are paying richly to see this city gone and this reality collapsed in on itself. You all die, Fallen boy included.

It would even be deserved. He’d had everything in order. He’d done everything he was supposed to, from therapy to forming bonds, pretending until the pretending became something approximating reality. He’d overcome his worst impulses.

And the Fallen boy had handed over his worst impulses. Destroying everything Cradle and Ryan had been trying to manage for years.

Cradle grit his teeth, clutching his mask in his hands. No glasses, no lenses. Not just yet. He had only the thick, congealing blood to conceal his identity for now.

He needed to get somewhere where it was safe to test this new power.

He didn’t have the tokens from Love Lost—all of her tokens had gone to the Fallen boy. Then everything else had been delivered straight to Cradle, because he’d been the only one left. Even the Fallen boy’s tokens had been transferred.

And… two drainings of other denizens of the room completed, the emotion power with no tokens felt instinctively stronger than any other power he’d had before, when he’d had all three tokens in hand.

He only felt out the barest traces of it, the flexibility and the shape of it, and he sensed the people outside the building.

Heavens 12.7

I’d spent a lot of time being conscious of power, in the sense of being commanding. My mom, who was on the rooftop now, holding two squadron leaders hostage, had tried to make me conscious of it from an early age. When I’d made a good showing in gym class and earned an offer to join the basketball team, the same conversation where I’d brought it up with my parents had included the question of whether I’d end up team captain. Was that something I wanted? Where would it get me? Before I’d had a uniform or even owned a basketball of my own, the idea was on the table. Not that it had mattered.