The ‘64.2%’ in innocuous, innocent white had become 64.22% when he hadn’t been looking.

His craft thrummed around him, like holding a power tool so powerful it numbed the hands, except it was his whole body that buzzed with it. But the thrum was normal, the turbulence barely touching it.

The turbulence was because they were outside. Out of the facility, into wind and a different air pressure. The landscape that stretched out around them was broken and torn, strip-mined for every material available, left as shattered piles of rock, gravel, and dirt that still had traces of the chemicals that had been used to facilitate the strip mining and separation of materials. The shattered land had weeds and grass growing over it, but the land hadn’t smoothed out.

Mist below, clouds above, and either vertical walls or sloped roof. There were next to no windows. Only a few ways out. A small handful of platforms.

“We get through this,” Mischa repeated himself. Maybe being outside of the complex would help Saint. The crackling was worse, and the vast majority of the interference came from one direction. He reoriented his craft, putting the bulk of the craft and its mass between the source of the interference and the communications array in the lower end. “We get through this and tomorrow is another day.”

Better.

“Mags died,” Saint’s voice was almost inaudible.

“I know.”

“That makes today—” Saint’s voice crackled into oblivion, “—stays with us. We don’t ever leave it behind.”

“It was always going to be a day that stays with us,” Mischa said, but his own voice crackled so much he doubted Saint could hear. That was okay. He was okay if he was the only person who heard it.

Saint would endure.

The intense crackling came from a fight on one platform, higher up. The Yàngbǎn capes had been folded into an attack squad, and that squad was confronting Legend. A forcefield pyramid surrounded Legend, and the squad surrounded the pyramid.

That’s where the dog is buried, Mischa thought. His father’s saying. They’d found the source of the distortions, not that they had been looking.

“Can you fight?” Mischa asked, though he knew the answer.

“Always.”

“Should we?”

“Absolutely.”

And Saint punctuated his statement by unfurling his wings. He struck the pyramid with a projection. Each attack that failed to penetrate the pyramid—and at present that seemed to be all of them—still slid down the sheer surface, raking across the platform, threatening to saw it off and let the people fall down to ground so far below them that clouds up high and mist further below made it impossible to see the jagged terrain.

Mischa swept in, and saw the pyramid distort with the effects of the C-level flight systems rippling through the interdimensional space. There was a single parahuman behind the barrier, it seemed. Mischa focused the camera in on the man’s face. Strained.