“Alpine is probably dead,” she said. “They have that look about them, like they’re missing that connection.”

“Fuck,” I said. I felt a pang of sympathy, looking down at them. They weren’t moving all that fast.

“All they wanted was to play up the ‘sports team’ angle of heroes, get people excited about their neighborhood heroes again. Hollow Point didn’t fit that.”

Kind of like the Norfair Neighborhood Heroes.

“You better put me down with them,” Tattletale told me. “You’re giving me a wedgie.”

“There might be some justice in the world after all,” I told her.

Still, I floated down, letting go of her. The Rooftop Champs were looking ragged, two with injuries from the gas that made holes. One with a missing arm, shocks of an inflamed red through the skin that was visible past the haphazard bandaging and tattered costume.

Tattletale paused to adjust her belt and straighten her coat, probably fixing the wedgie in the process.

A guy with holes across his face, a mask that had once been a complex arrangement of ribbons now hung on only by strands and the hardening effect of the gas. He was hunched over, fingers prying inside holes near his temple and hairline. A translucent green-pink maggot the size of a hotdog with bun included writhed beneath the surface, burrowing in deeper, escaping his fingers. A woman with a feathered dragon motif had holes across her arm and front. She stood by him, hand on his shoulder, her bad hand trembling. The other two Champs were digging inside a kit.

“Let me,” Tattletale said. “I think I can get it, able-bodied as I am. We’ll re-wrap that stump.”

“Thank you,” the able-bodied Champ said, quiet. He looked like the rookie of the team. Teenager. “Didn’t expect a villain to help.”

“When shit’s this bad, those labels stop meaning anything,” Tattletale said. She pulled out some needles. “Those are the rules. Let’s see if we can pin that bastard down.”

“Don’th—sthab…”

“Don’t stab his brain,” the feathered dragon woman said.

“Can’t. This gas gets extradimensional. Which is the only reason you’re not dead. Upside is it might mean it goes away and you go back to normal after,” Tattletale said. “Can’t make guarantees, but if it helps, I’ll tell you I’m the person chiefly responsible for figuring out how to make the portal to Gimel in the first place. My intuition is pretty good.”

“Thank you,” the woman with the holes in her arm said. The trembling in the arm didn’t seem so bad. Her hand went to her collarbone, where gloved fingers hooked on the open holes there, some large enough to drop a golf ball into.

I saw a maggot writhe within. I almost pointed it out, but I saw Tattletale glancing that way, and she locked eyes with me a second later.