Stonewall’s group stuck close enough to Balk’s residuals that Stonewall could listen in and offer his occasional input. Venarum had shifted focus to look after some of their wounded, in conjunction with a cyborg tinker who was very literally patching people up with temporary stopgaps. I could see a few people who’d had bio-organic plates of armor set over their injuries. He was in the midst of a procedure, setting a golf-ball sized sphere into a hole in someone’s head, where their ear had been torn… not off, but out, to the point that the surrounding muscles had been torn too. He filled in the gap with what looked like biomechanical foam, dispensed out of a can. Little LEDs that were set throughout the foam like chips in chocolate chip cookies flashed red, red, green, and stayed green. Slowly, the metallic blob and the lights around the blob were rearranging into something that fit the lines of his head and face better.

I tested the movement of my fingers and thought about my injured hand. Sveta, seeming to read my mind, nudged me and shook her head.

I waited until we were far enough away to ask. “Why not?”

“Because they’re selfish about it,” she said. “They won’t give it to someone who isn’t a teammate. Part of that is because it’s messy, needs maintenance. Maintenance you wouldn’t get.”

“Fair,” I said. I couldn’t deny that a good, non-healer quick fix might have been appealing.

“Besides,” Sveta said. “Too many nanotech incidents came through the Asylum.”

“Yeah. Oh yeah.”

Rain and Capricorn were talking to Tristan’s old teammate, except her costume had changed. The faceplate with the ears that she’d been wearing had changed from cat to something that made me think ‘weasel’. Her costume was sleeker overall, with smaller ears. Claws had been changed up, and the gear she wore at her arms extended up to her shoulders, with a ??? of linked metal segments stringing between the shoulder plates, a ‘tail’ of the same segments running from the center of the segment, straight down her back to the floor, forming a kind of ‘y’ shape.

That was neat, if her costume updated when she used her power. Either she was deciding on the aesthetic, which earned her some big points in my book, or her power was, which was interesting.

Rain was drawing on the floor in erasable marker. It looked like a very rough representation of the complex. There were some letters written around the end, arrows pointing from them.