I complained about a frustrating experience doing group work in school? She’d ask if I’d taken charge. If not, then she had made suggestions on delegation, told me that even if I wasn’t confident, leading a group with a mediocre plan of action in mind was better than a group with no leadership at all.

Which was a really jarring thought, when I connected it to our plan from earlier—no, I wasn’t going to dwell on it. Not when army-supported capes, screaming bloody tinkers and lives were on the line. A thought for another day or time.

I had a vision of what leadership was, and Cradle was so far from it that it made the scene I was looking at utterly surreal. The man—though he wasn’t so much a man as someone straddling the line between teenager and adult—staggered more than he walked, clearly hurting, even though there weren’t any obvious wounds. He’d screamed, raw and loud, and I didn’t see anyone talking or commenting in the wake of it. He was utterly self-involved and focused on what he was dealing with, and the one hundred plus individuals in the prefab factory building weren’t even a consideration.

I watched Cradle struggle on his own, and I saw him answer something a soldier nearby said. Someone wet a towel with water from a bottle, and then threw it at Cradle. A slice of light appeared, as tall as Cradle was, and the towel struck it. Cut clean in two. Cradle caught one half of the towel in each hand. One dangled limp at his side, dripping, while he rubbed at his face with the other.

Towel still held over face, his hand visibly trembled, clenching into a fist. Wet fabric was squeezed out, clean water running down his arms to his elbows, gathering blood as it went, until congealed globs dripped off of the elbow.

He rubbed his face again, then ran towel against scalp to wipe the worst of the blood off. His straight blond hair was slicked back as much as with any gel, colored with the clotting gore. He lowered his head as he set his mask into place, then stood a little straighter as he raised his head, a little less shaky.

I could get that, at least. The benefit of a costume.

The bloody towel wiped the worst of the mess from his arms and sleeves, cleaning them up to the elbow until the blood was streaking more than it was being wiped away. He turned to using the clean towel, draping the dirty one around his neck.

His head turned, swift enough that I wondered if someone had called out to him. But his focus was on his mech.