He didn’t get any further. Whatever command he was about to shout, whatever cry for help he was about to make, it was drowned out by Love Lost screaming.

The scream had collateral damage. Other people on the bench. People across the hangar. They stirred awake, emotions taking over, and rose to their feet, their emotions and their energy level swiftly accelerating from zero to one hundred. Raw anger.

“Don’t hurt them!” Sveta called out. “Not too badly!”

One of the guys on the bench reached out to the person next to him. Hand touched skin and the seam between the two disappeared, as he ‘drank’ the other person into his own mass, doubling in size with only a faint ripple marking the transition’s aftermath.

Shit. Some of the shelved people had powers.

I focused on others, flying down to a strategic point where three of the enraged bench-sitters were facing down our squad. Sveta and Withdrawal. I landed where their backs were turned my way, then gave each a push, sending them sprawling off balance, toward allies. Sveta caught one woman around the ankle with tendrils and began to swing her around in a quarter-circle. She might have intended a full circle, but more tendrils snapped out to seize more of the leg, one cutting through fabric, and she released early, backing away. The woman was sent sliding about ten feet.

Withdrawal leveled a syringe at one of the others who had fallen, to which Fume Hood shouted, “Conserve it!”

And meanwhile, the big guy touched another person, swallowing them into sheer bodymass, a hundred and fifty pounds that turned into a blob of flesh around the hand, then hand and arm, then spread out evenly across the rest of the body. The big guy’s features were dulled now, nose and brow less pronounced, eyes spaced further apart.

I wouldn’t hit him with the wretch or touch him, nor would Sveta or any of our other close combat specialists, but our ranged combatants needed to set up, were too severe, or both. Precipice was out, Swansong was out on all counts, Capricorn did what he could to get ready, drawing blue dots in the air. Fume Hood launched a trio of orbs, all fired in a straight line. They hit the guy in the face, causing his head to disappear into smoke.

Chastity whipped the hand that blindly reached for yet another person to ‘drink up’.

The big guy charged out of the cloud, and went straight for Love Lost, making contact with one of three former bench-sitters that stood between himself and her. Another person gone, another one hundred and sixty pounds of body mass added to his own, a foot of height, a lot of muscle and a little bit of fat, features made even more crude and brutish, eyes spaced so far apart that they looked more out at either side of his head than they looked forward.