I tried to capture it, forcing that feeling as I took that precarious step forward, my entire body following after with the sensation in my gut moving out to the rest of me.

My foot found flat ground. What had been a plain of ground like a folding fan stretched partially out was now closer to a somewhat precarious staircase, though nothing had changed visually. I climbed it with one hand and both feet, moving at an angle as I went.

I put Dean behind me, as best as I could, but doubt clawed at me. The blurry image had marked him as Cauldron. Which made sense. His parents were rich.

Which just… I didn’t fault him exactly. I didn’t blame him for going to them, not when it had probably been his dad who’d bought the powers or something. But he’d lied to me.

Why did the list of people I could absolutely trust or look on with fondness seem to grow so short? Especially when those people went and died on me?

I crested the top, and then dropped low. A patch of daylight, spreading out into the faces and facets of crystal, captured in veins.

The landscape here looked like the landscape I’d seen when flying from my Patrol assignments to the ruins of Brockton Bay. Cracked, with ravines where there shouldn’t be ravines. Images that were supposed to be writ large were broken up, out of sync.

And white lights that danced across the landscape hit the ravine and stopped, stuttered, or shook the ground, causing more schisms to form.

Three things like we’d seen in the room of dormant guardians stood there, by a tear in reality. A great white schism in this landscape. The area reflected around it was terrain from the city, captured and folded into the crystal or just there but not visible from my present vantage point.

Images all around me were animating, picking up on what they could glean from me that was relevant. Empire Eighty-Eight, Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Fallen. Violence. Deaths. That was just the nature of the routines and subroutines of this particular neighborhood.

Three agents, interacting with this tear and the cracked sky and ground around it. One looked like a neckless giant crossed with a puddle of oil, shimmering in rainbow hues, features nonexistent. Another like a tall, slender woman in a dress, with a headdress of spikes radiating out for fifty feet around her. The last was barely there, insubstantial, a wisp of pale yellow in a vague centaur shape, with a broad slash of black instead of a face.

And fifty of Teacher’s goons, dressed in white, carting in technology, working to build something connected to this tear. Working with the agents.