“Go,” he said, like he was all out of patience.

“Go next door,” I said. “Take Blatherskite.”

She did. Blather followed her, as the pair ducked out of the doorway. I ducked out too, hurrying to get far enough away I could use the Wretch to block any incoming fire from the flanks. There wasn’t any.

Clear, definitive orders for someone who wasn’t entirely here right now. I knew the drill, and I knew that someone in that state needed grounding and direction. Gong hadn’t been helping, piling on more when Tailgate needed less.

“They’re a good cape,” Gong said. “Reliable up until today.”

“Movers tend to trigger from a need to escape, shakers usually trigger from environment. Combine the two and it stands to reason that being trapped would remind her of that event and circumstance.”

“She’s a Cauldron cape,” Gong said. “She dropped out of the PRT when they started cracking down and trying to figure out who was compromised. She tried to make a graceful exit, being open about why, but got detained when she wouldn’t answer all of their questions. Eight months in special detention. She got out, got a sponsorship.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Maybe that people who took Cauldron vials might have been motivated toward certain vials or they might have had the mental groundwork for certain end results, even with the power being from a bottle. But I didn’t know. The cape geek stuff on Cauldron had always been and remained a big question mark.

Sveta could usually be counted on to have some feelings one way or another when Cauldron came up in any capacity, but she was more focused on other things.

The corridor we’d come through was cleared for retreat, which shifted the dynamics of this scene in our overall favor. The formless, sprawling space with concrete and metal decagons spaced out across it, the high ceiling, and stale hair heavy with the smell of smoke and ozone was relatively easily defended, but mounting attacks from the space was difficult to impossible. Teams that fell back to the concrete decagons found that there was too much in the way of no man’s land to easily cross. The speedsters, acrobats, fliers, and other movers could get around or get through that gap, but they couldn’t make a lasting dent in enemy forces while they were out there.

I heard Love Lost scream. Not enough range to reach across the no man’s land.