But it was tearing up the floor and tearing up the terrain. Where the ground wasn’t rendered almost impassable, it was littered with enough debris that we’d have to be careful where we put our feet.

And it was gathering materials. Rebar, wood.

I wasn’t sure armor counted against a threat like this, but I had seen Tristan fight, I knew he had experience. If we were going to make it through that forest of limbs and get past the guard dog and into the darkness behind it, we needed some experience and we needed to organize by some metric.

“Precipice,” I called out.

“I’m fighting,” he said. He had a length of floorboard that he held like a spear. I didn’t think it would matter, but…

“Grab me one?” I asked. That got me a sharp nod.

Tristan jogged over, Byron’s scale-mail breastplate loosely strapped to one arm, his hand gripping loose straps at the other end. He stood beside me, Sveta just behind me.

Love Lost and Colt were in the jungle of rusty iron beams and concrete, that was the twins’ portion of the room.

I looked back at my section. Panels of tinted glass and what might have been the texture of solar panels, cracked but not broken. Though they were gold, with the more solid solar panel texture having a backing of black beneath that surface level, there was no warmth to it at all.

I turned back to the threat, pushing away the idle wondering as to whether the others were subtly bothered by their own spaces like I was by mine.

Rain tossed me one short spear of wood, and it hit me in the ribs as I caught it. The sensation startled me, and as I looked down, I could see I didn’t have my breastplate. I wore the black hooded top from my costume over the white dress with the watercolor skyline of Brockton Bay across the front. My hair was braided, and it had been… a long-as-fuck time since I’d done that with any regularity.

He handed more wood to Sveta and to Tristan.

“I can’t unfurl,” Sveta said.

“No traumatic forcefield for me, either,” I said.

She met my eyes, and in the gloom of the room, I knew that our sentiments were very much the same. For her to actually have a body with no associations to her power. For me to not have that shadow hanging over me.

I reached out to squeeze her upper arm.

“Tristan and I will distract it, fend it off,” I said, turning to the thing we were up against. I watched as it moved, continuing to tear concrete apart and harvest the rebar. Slow, methodical, I felt like its mannerisms were defined by it keeping three-quarters of its attention on us and one-quarter on what it was doing.