We’d cheated some, using powers, but not in such a way that they could easily point fingers at any of it. Not in a way that—I glanced around, looking for cameras, and failed to find any—would play badly in video form.

No, they’d wanted us to bleed and we’d bled.

I saw heads turn, I saw expressions change. People peeled away, moving toward the breakfast serving area, and in their push to get further from us and this scene, they barely left breathing room for one another. The clearing expanded around us and the perpetrators who hadn’t yet backed off. Some guards, some prisoners.

The reason the heads had turned, though…

On one of the raised walls overlooking the plaza, my sister looked down at my injured self.

“What do you want?” Sveta asked her, because I didn’t have the breath. Pain lowered my defenses, this scene kicked what lay behind those defenses in the tits.

“I’m supposed to look after you, keep an eye out for trouble.”

“Fuck you,” Sveta said.

“Yeah,” Amy said. She sounded disappointed.

I tried my best to ignore her, turning my attention to the mess on the floor. Wire lay limp on the ground, and mixed in with it was some general debris, food slop that had dripped from bowls, dust made moist and collected into tiny amounts of mud with the tromp of feet and more of the food, and the blood spatters from our various injuries. Globs of blood dripped from the back of my hand.

“I’ll testify I saw this happen, you did nothing but defend yourselves.”

“That would be appreciated,” Theo said.

I found what I was looking for, tangled in wire. My skin. Only one fingernail attached at one corner, where the finger skin had folded in and stuck all together.

I did not like my flesh being where it wasn’t supposed to be, especially while hearing that voice.

Amy spoke down to us from her perch on the wall. “Citrine is here. She heard about you guys being arrested and she’s working on it. Wardens obviously know too, but they’re wrapped up in a new crisis or something. What do you say we get you cleaned up and see you guys to the visitor center? I’ll crisis manage in the meantime.”

A dozen wretched feelings stirred within me, and combined with the pain and revulsion of the detached bit of flesh, and the stress of all of this, I spat up a mouthful of bile.

“Sure,” she said. “That—”

I spat off to one side to clear my mouth of the remainder of it.

“Sorry,” I said, not to Amy, but to my team. “How’s it, Tristan?”

“Definitely need stitches,” he said, keeping a wary eye on the wall.

“Kenz?”

“I walked into a guard’s elbow, that’s all.”

“Sveta?”

Sveta made a face. Her arm took wounds in a strange way.