Caryatid, who had been starting to move forward, looked at him, then jumped forward.

She went statue-still and immovable, her arm out, to hold up the end of the popper. He leveraged it, aiming—

The head at the top of the pill popper opened its mouth, and it had a punch of an impact as it spat out its shot. A ‘pill’ the size of a football. Modeled after Fume Hood’s power.

He pulled the second trigger. The pill detonated with enough force to knock the kid over, so he landed on his hands, gun below him. A wet crimson mist filled the air.

Crimson was the wrong choice, in retrospect. It looked uglier than it was, like he’d detonated the kid and turned him into a gory mist. A casualty of his categorization system. Red was for compression lube, tech fluid for getting tight things into containers smaller than they were. It was the only fluid he’d trusted to play nice with the cracks in reality he’d recorded.

The kid didn’t get to his feet. He flipped over onto his back, and aimed between his knees. At the closest target—now a member of the Patrol who was running up.

Squinting past the paint-thick red chemical that covered him, he wasted no time in pulling the trigger.

The gun jammed. The Patrol uniform jumped on top of him.

“Pop. Phsseww.”

The tiny detonation flicked the gun out of the teenager’s hand, knocking it into the air. A diagonal shimmer of blue air swatted the gun into a snowbank.

Withdrawal breathed a sigh of relief. He kept the popper trained on the kid until he saw the gun had been taken away, the handcuffs put on. From the looks of it, the fall had shoved the gun into the ground, which would have warped its shape a bit with the compression lube all over things, contributing to the jam.

He set the Pill Popper down. Seven out of nine shots remaining. “Thank you, Cary.”

“That was cool,” Caryatid said, as she dropped her breaker form.

“Yeah,” he said. He watched the ongoing skirmish, but it seemed to have stopped just as much as it started. Some people had gotten out of cars, though, joining the crowd that stood behind the line of barricades, watching. One or two had phones out.

Twisting around, he looked up at Finale, who looked guilty. He checked his indicators. Things were settling down.

“Finale,” he said, trying to be gentle. “Did you do something?”

“I didn’t flip any switches,” she said.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she said. Still terrible at lying.

“I—” he started, then decided knowing was more important than anything else. “I promise I won’t get mad. Just show me what you did?”

The kid was screaming. Still spewing invective.