I kicked it, Wretch-strong, and booted it into the wall, shattering the mechanisms. Cryptid arched his back, suppressing a scream, then letting that suppressed scream become a chuckle instead.

“Bluff,” he hissed, through the chuckles.

“You say you don’t care,” I told him, my voice barely above a whisper. “You don’t give a shit. Fine. But if you fuck with us right now, if you push this hard on this and give them the chance to kill Natalie or Armstrong, then you’re proving you do care. You—”

“Oh fuck off,” he hissed.

“Fine,” I told him. “Your choice. Fuck with us and we find a way to destroy you that doesn’t look like anything Breakthrough could do to you. We destroy everything you’ve built, we expose everything you want to hide, and we make you suffer. Or you can fuck off.”

“Just fuck off. You’re so good at it,” Ashley said. “And it’s so much better than you deserve.”

“I’ll go limp that way with both of my arms shattered, one almost torn off, and I’ll say we didn’t find you. I’m sure they’ll believe me.”

“You can heal,” I told him.

I heard a syringe sink home. The silhouette imaging caught the blood spatter for the one or two seconds it was warm.

“Don’t be stupid,” I warned.

He let go of me.

“You’re lucky I don’t really care,” he said.

He pulled away and straightened. I went to Swansong and, in the pitch black, I helped her to her feet. I got Vista too, and led them down the hall, back to the spot below the storage room, perilously close to guards who stood in the dark, brandishing guns and waiting for the lights to come back on.

Once we were far enough away, safely in the room with the door closed, the lights returned.

Vista widened the hole again. It was barely big enough to drop a quarter through, but as she widened it, we had something us-sized. She went a step beyond and expanded the gap to let us get past the shelf without moving it.

I kept close to the door, my hand pressed over the part of my hand with the pulled staples, listening.

“Nothing,” Cryptid told the soldiers.

“Those weren’t nothing sounds.”

“Our friend here thought he saw something and he’d flush them out. It was an animal. Someone’s office pet. He burned me, we had words. There was nothing. You’re wasting my time.”

“The lights—”

“Was us. Me. I make things, I make light switches. I see better in the dark than you do in the bright, and it slows down anyone running from us. Except it was a false alarm.”