Disparate parts and pieces of technology knitted together into something big. Some tinkers specialized in the big stuff. Others worked toward it for a long time. In Boston, the original Damsel had faced off against Blasto’s big project. At Gold Morning, String Theory had unveiled her own, apparently. The tinkers had collectively built one.

Now this nest of arms was forging something else, and by the looks of it, the glow of individual energy cells powering on, it was nearly complete.

I could remember the files, the information only for team leaders and Wardens. Information on the Endbringers, provided in retrospect, only after Gold Morning when the Endbringers cooperated against Scion and the attacks stopped.

“We can’t get through.”

Sveta looked, and I saw her purse her lips. Too many limbs, and too much tinkertech had been used to complicate the way through, riddle it with hazards.

“I don’t think we can, sweetie,” she said, barely audible. The kids were yelling, pointing at what Sveta and I had already noticed.

I shook my head. It wasn’t time to give up like this.

“Get—” I managed, pointing. “Him.”

Cradle.

From Within 16.10

The tinker device the thing above us made was spinning up, producing a metal-on-metal sound that grew louder by the second.

Too much of me was numb, and the rest of me felt like it was still on fire, the skin still bearing residual heat that hadn’t faded. When I moved, most often involuntarily, I found myself in contact with grit, pushing it into the wounds. Every breath was a labor, and that labor was made worse by the fact the rest of my body was struggling too, offloading issues to body parts I needed to breathe. Gorge rose in my throat, interrupting a breath in process, and receded just as quickly, leaving only acid in a windpipe that had already been in a sorry fucking state. I coughed, and that made everything else hurt.

We come full circle, I found myself thinking. Shitty circle when it starts and ends in burns across most of my body. Acid from Crawler, now burns from… this.

Acid in the throat, burns on the body, acid on the body…

If I’d been on the way to a coherent thought or deeper understanding, which I probably hadn’t, the pain that seized me derailed all thinking.

Sveta grabbed me, pulling me into a hug, with emphasis on pulling. I could feel her hands drag across skin that might as well have been attached by mere threads. I grunted, guttural, my thoughts dissolving into incoherent animal panic and—