The corridor we were in was twelve hundred meters long. There was a security office at the eight hundred meter mark. Past the corridor was one part of what Cinereal had called ‘the gallery’. The massive area where they’d staged the character assassination work from.

“Cameras. Can we get any view on the attacker or tech that’s doing this?” I asked.

-No-. The word appeared in the midst of the map that obscured my vision.

We split up. I flew forward. Withdrawal and Sveta followed, with the harpoon guy and Love Lost chasing after. Ashley remained.

I twisted in the air to watch the ripple. I could see more of Kenzie’s message appearing in my vision. My focus was on the others, though. Ashley blasted the ripple as it raced to her, like a car speeding down the highway. Caryatid took it head-on, breaker form active. A spike of it slipped through, but it didn’t look like anyone got clipped.

Kenzie’s message was a restatement of what I already knew. She couldn’t get into Teacher’s security system unless she had help. Any of our phones or any of the devices she’d given Precipice would let her into a system, and maybe with enough she would gain reach. Beyond that, they were too isolated, and too fast when it came to counteracting her and cutting her off. Hack one system, and the remainder adapted.

Another ripple, but this one was a pillar that ran down the center of the corridor. Where it touched floor and ceiling tiles, it pushed them into disarray, and then placed them neatly back where they belonged.

Sveta, Love Lost, and I moved to the left of the hallway, as Withdrawal and the harpoon guy fired out a harpoon and reeled himself into the air to the right.

Mixing it up. Attacking from afar with a shaker effect. Another ring now. The danger wasn’t that it was so hard to avoid, but that it took effort and energy to avoid. A leap, an expenditure of power and attention. Mistakes would happen. Legs would get tired.

I flew, and trusted the others to keep up. Sveta didn’t have a lot of great handholds, except for me, and I didn’t begrudge her. A little added wind resistance aside, it didn’t impact how hard I could fly.

The others kept up okay. Harpoon managed with some struggle. Withdrawal and Love Lost had tech augmenting how fast they could run.

I really needed a better name for Harpoon. The fact he had six harpoons that came out of chest, lower ribcage and belly made me think of a dog’s nipples, which made it harder for me to ignore the fact that two of those harpoons pretty much emerged from his actual man-nipples, or somewhere very close to them.