One Harbinger ran for it, out the door, toward the soldiers. The other joined Foil, coming my way. They dodged the lines that appeared in their way, though Foil cut it close enough that it clipped her costume, cutting the decorative material where it jutted out.

She threw herself to the ground, back hitting earth, her gun raised high.

Cradle began moving around, making himself a hard target, before settling on a position that let him see most of the field while being clear of Foil’s field of vision. The lines began appearing again. Like the glowing blades of swords stuck into the earth.

The Harbinger used the distraction, leaping onto one of the back hands. The surface looked too sheer, but he found handholds and footholds, the edge of a foot or a finger finding a groove in the metal that I might have thought was a trick of the eyes.

He had a knife that looked like it was made of glass, and used it to slice the head off of a bolt or a screw. Three strikes in two seconds.

“Carol, change!”

“What can we do?” Foil asked. She shot again. The sound was loud, and I could see many people in this antechamber of Cretan’s maze react to the sharp noise.

“Can’t—it’s up to her. She’s moving, if she can just—I don’t think she wants to. Fuck!”

“Why not?”

My dad didn’t answer. I knew. Even after all this time, Brandish hated being in the form. It left her blind and deaf, sensing and tracking the world around her with another kind of awareness. In the ball, she was confined in the dark. And she hated the dark.

She had endured for the sake of the job, and she’d come out of it bitter and hostile enough to drop a barb.

There were too many stories, and recent mention of the breaker in the hospital that hadn’t been able to leave her form wasn’t the only one of its kind. Changers, breakers, and tinkers who emulated those things always had the ‘what if I can’t go back’ problem in the backs of their minds. Tristan was an all-too-recent reminder of how easy it would be to walk that line, and pick the exact wrong moment to use a power.

I leveraged the Wretch, doing what I could to shift the hand, so it wouldn’t fall or strike down near where Brandish lay.