Naphtha getting close enough meant I felt the oil touch my skin, as it touched everything in a certain radius of Naphtha. He pulled it away from me as it touched me, but my skin crawled with the memory of the feel of it.

“Another crisis. Similar to the others. Going to announce it to the dining hall,” Naphtha explained. “I don’t suppose any of you feel brave enough to go up against Sleeper? Absolute invulnerability better than Alexandria’s, special brains, absolute annihilation powers?”

“Ha, no,” Tristan said, genuinely amused. Then his face fell, “Wait, is he moving?”

“Yeah. But not fast enough to matter right now. It’s another thing demanding attention, focus, and manpower.” He was already leaving. “If you can, put in some hours helping to evacuate. It helps if we show our faces, even if we do nothing else.”

“After,” Tristan called out, “Recovering from injuries and a death in the team.”

Naphtha was essentially out of earshot already, still moving quickly toward the dining area. He gave us a thumbs up at Tristan’s comment, which felt jarring, but it was also one of very few ways to effectively communicate we were still on good terms. Maybe I would have done a salute or something, I wasn’t sure.

Evacuating. We’re conceding, I thought. We’re facing this looming threat and we’re having to cut and run. To take this city we devoted so much to and let it go.

And every step of the way, we were running into obstacles. Gary had been a big one, we had petty criminals, monsters, broken triggers, and our hands were continually tied by other obligations, by this new fragility at the center of the city, where any intense power use could break things or catalyze disaster.

Villains had been told, and villains were apparently holding back enough that alarms weren’t going off and we weren’t being told it was all hands on deck.

But collectively? We weren’t that good at that. We made mistakes. We had people with issues, or buttons to press, or agendas. We had fucking Teacher, waiting in the wings, and he’d made his agenda perfectly clear.

I wanted three things. I wanted this team to be okay, because even if Jessica had shifted focus and career away from this, I’d made my promise to look after them to myself in addition to my promise to her. I was trying to do that now, because it was at least something I could do without draining myself, sustaining more wounds, or getting sicker.

Thing number two was answers. I wanted to know more. Which led me to open the manila folder Sveta had handed me earlier. I had my hopes about what it was, and those hopes were exceeded.