Some of the capes were leaving their stations, gravitating their way. There were over a hundred Case Fifty-Threes present, now.

“You saved my life, those years ago,” she said, quiet. “Anything and everything you want, I’ll back you up.”

“You won’t betray me?”

“Never.”

He nodded, feeling those feelings hardening inside him. Less negative than confident, cold. “Same, then. Thank you. Do you think you could find others?”

“Other what?”

“Others we can trust, no matter what.”

“I think I would be scarily good at that,” Blackforest said. “Bijou would be on board. Hexie. Some of the non-Bet cases. I can think of others, put out feelers.”

The last time the world had ended, Sveta and Weld had taken the choice away from the Case Fifty-Threes.

Now they were trying to do it again. A different way, but the same course. They fought so hard to keep Case Fifty-Threes from becoming monsters, that they de-fanged them, would sooner put them down than let them do anything that mattered.

They fought it so hard they were barely distinguishable from Cauldron. Cheating, infiltrating, pushing their ideals.

No.

“We don’t do what they did,” he said. “We don’t divide the group. Just keep quiet about what Weld is doing, we keep flipping people, quietly, and when the time is right, we ask the group the question.”

They had options. Digging for the roots of the powers, maybe. But better than that, more important…

⊙

The Titans fell. With them, the capes fell.

Egg cracked. Yolk spilled out with blood. As his body struggled to knit together, it did it wrong. Overlapped too much, leaving zig-zagging seams behind.

Sveta, nearby, wasn’t doing much better. She’d fallen to pieces.

Blackforest, hiding under rubble, was breathing hard. Her tiny core was straining to breathe as the body temporarily became a cage around it, instead of a vehicle.

He went to her. Helping by prying at the flesh, feeling his fingers break as he exerted too much pressure. He reached for Rhea and found Gobbles instead. He had to reach past something that wasn’t Rhea, wasn’t Gobbles, and wasn’t Hurk, before he found his familiar companion, almost buried beneath the others. Rhea extended pink wingtips through the shell of his body, leveraging insane strength that dwarfed his own, dwarfed most people’s.

“Thank you,” Blackforest whispered. “That helps.”

“It’s getting better. Powers are coming back,” he murmured. Yolk dribbled from the corner of his mouth and he spat.

She only nodded.

“Any word?” he asked.

Blackforest looked down at the ground, as if she could look through rubble and ice and concrete to what lay below.

“Our body snatchers are in. We’re in.”

Past the cracks, the other world, the guts of the system. The ‘dream room’, as Faultline and Weld had explained. In the guts of the system.

Just in time for the fight against Contessa.