“I thought I fucked up their guy who was teleporting in reinforcements,” I said. “What the hell?”

“You did,” Stonewall said. Immobile, a man within a costume that wouldn’t move. “It’s been like this every step of the way. They have precogs, clairvoyants, they have morale detectors. They know where and how to push. The big push is because you forced them to play their hand.”

“Great.”

“It’s good. Listen, someone needs to tell my team to retreat and hold the other hallway. We can’t have our injured getting mobbed.”

“On it,” someone reported.

One less person in our defensive huddle. Against an army.

Hundreds. The word had passed through my head and stuck with me. Half of the gallery was now filled, to the point I had to wonder if we were approaching a thousand thralls in attendance.

“They’ve got masks on!” Balk called out. “Be wary of gas!”

Shit. He was right. The front two rows had full-face masks on, eyes glowing, lower faces covered by blank surfaces.

The rows of thralls behind them didn’t, though. That suggested it wasn’t gas.

“Might be flashes, not gas,” I added.

“Might be,” Balk answered.

His squad landed around us.

My aunt, for lack of a better way of putting it, landed next to me. Again, there was fleeting eye contact. The expression she wore was perpetually what I’d seen on her face the day Leviathan had attacked. Before we’d lost Eric and Uncle Neil. Serious, even a little haunted. With purple and black eyes.

She cast a forcefield, then reached back with her other hand, creating a laser. She began to cut through Stonewall’s suit.

The lights went out. One by one. I might have thought it was the shaker from before, the ripple that made the lights flicker as it passed.

It wasn’t.

All at once, we were in darkness. Costume elements and powers glowed, there were a few scattered fires, a few flashes of sparks where wiring had been torn up, and rows of glowing eyes.

“Night vision,” the artillery cape said.

“They did this before. We didn’t see the masks,” Balk reported. “Wait it out, try to take down the ones with masks.”

“They had them then. They refresh the injured or pass on the gear,” Stonewall said.

The artillery cape’s power flickered and flared with light as she created and hurled it. Definitely an aerial sort of attack—as ground to ground it had trouble getting height and dipped downward fast, like throwing paper airplanes built to nosedive.

The riot shields were as useful as anything, when it came to the lighting. The laser and the forcefield were another big help.

Someone audibly tore a chunk of Stonewall’s costume off. He began to climb out, reached out, groping, and found my shoulder.