Fume Hood shook her head, rocking on the spot as she tried to find a position where she was comfortable. “You go. Let them shoot me or humiliate me. It’ll be humiliation, that’s their goal. They don’t want blood they want power.”

Too late a pivot to convince anyone. Even Finale, apparently. If only she’d been thinking.

Caryatid moved, putting herself between Fume Hood and the man. She went breaker. Withdrawal partially hid behind his pill popper. A thin shield that wouldn’t do.

There were too many others.

They’d moved because the man with the gas mask and gun was moving.

Fume Hood sat up, hand reaching for Finale’s shoulder.

Her hand was occupied. An orb. She’d created it and forgotten about it.

All of that straining, all of that pain, tension, the muscle activations, whatever it was. She’d been straining and flexing parts of herself that had nothing to do with her body. Her power, by pure reflex.

One orb, with enough condensed, noxious gas in it that it was almost black.

She had made this kind of orb in the past. Purely as an experimental thing. But even in her lowest moment, she hadn’t even considered using it on people.

Because when she’d thrown it, it had swept over grass and trees. It had killed what it touched.

If she got shot now, the Malfunctions, even bystanders—

Immediately, she began withdrawing gas from it, making it dissipate. It wasn’t enough, considering. One percent at best, two percent.

She found strength she hadn’t realized she had. Struggling, hand out, warding the gunman off. “Wait!”

He raised the gun, pointing.

She couldn’t drop this, or risk that it popped. She let her power cast the orb out and forward.

She hit the anti-parahumans. The gunman. Probably a few errant civilians who had been content to watch without outright participating.

Doing the unforgivable, to avoid doing the impossible. She couldn’t hurt the only decent people she knew. Even if it meant betraying everything she wanted out of herself.

She saw people keel over, skin blistering. Eyes turned her way. Horrified. Hateful. Disgusted. In disbelief.

It hadn’t been so purposeful, not any more than spitting on a homeless girl or gassing a pregnant woman.

But that didn’t matter.

Something in her gave, her consciousness missed a stair in the staircase it was descending.

Fume Hood saw the cosmos, and she saw the world she lived on. She saw lives that spread over those orbs like disease, and she saw them extinguished.

She saw herself in the midst of it. The fundament on which her own power was built.

How deep that power went, how big it was.

Something else gave.

Cracks began to spread, starting with her. The Malfunctions backed away as those cracks stretched across the area.

Like the breaking of a window, as a single point of pressure was applied.