Refuge in the scholastic. “They don’t think we suffered any changes that couldn’t have happened on their own. With training, or mood, or meditation, or anything like that.”

I landed near Tristan. He was breathing hard, but he was in one piece.

“How are you managing?”

“I heard you as you floated down,” Tristan said. “The shifted powers. I don’t like my new power. Maybe it’ll change again.”

“Too aggressive?” I asked.

“Too… temporary,” he said. “I’d rather build walls right now. Especially with that Stranger.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The position we were in wasn’t great, when I considered it from the big picture. Titan Fortuna was too far away, Ophion was limping away, so to speak, and the Stranger Titan was behind us, unable to be seen, yet capable of stealing our sanity away from us if it got a good look at us. Possibly permanently, insofar as ‘permanent’ lasted, when most of the affected seemed to take their own lives at the next opportunity.

And the Nemean Titan was too close, hurt too, but fast, and threatening to get at our flanks.

“I’d like to get back to Sveta,” I said. “Regroup.”

“Give me a second,” Crystal said.

She produced her forcefield, bright against the dark sky, angled so its two-dimensional shape was almost invisible.

Not for us.

Turned it off, then created it again.

A purple forcefield appeared. The square, which disappeared, then a smaller square below it.

“She’ll be a second,” Crystal said.

“I don’t remember those,” I said.

“You don’t make forcefields.”

I grunted in mild annoyance.

“Let’s go to Sveta,” she said. “She’s mobile again, she told me to go to you.”

And I asked you to stay. Which means she had a more compelling argument. One you agreed with.

Do I really look that shaken?

“So weird,” she said, quiet. “I already said my goodbyes.”

“Your mom?” Tristan asked.

“Yeah,” Crystal said. “I feel shitty even trying to articulate this thought, but… it’s like it would be easier if it was anything else. If she stayed gone, if she was back here in full, or just the human side of her. Not better, necessarily.”

“Easier,” Tristan said.

“Yep.”

“Yeah,” Tristan agreed. “An old teammate of mine’s back. Almost all the way back, I think. And it’s undeniably better, a bright point in a really dark time. But it’s not easy.”

“We need a group,” Crystal said. “What do you even call something like that?”

“Un-survivors anonymous,” Tristan said.

“That was fast.”

“I’m not just a pretty face,” he said, with a humor that didn’t reach his voice.

The others were regrouping behind us. There were still defensive lines, but they were more like walls that people were standing guard at than they were front lines in any way.