Infrared 19.5

Gold letters, lines, times and symbols appeared in my right eye’s field of vision. Reinforcements were incoming, with capes stepping up, capes from the distant corners and back lines of the city were being pulled in, and Rain was awake, on his way to us. I couldn’t even nod my acknowledgement or comment on the subject, because I wasn’t sure it was good or right to be inviting capes into this.

This was bad.

My gun beeped to tell me the battery was low. Between the darkness, the brightness of the laser, and the golden images appearing across my field of vision, it was getting hard to parse what I was seeing. Phantom images, capes moving and doing weird things in darkness, and the natural vagueness of a dark, ruined city made it hard to get a clear sense of the battlefield and where things stood. The cracks were everywhere, now. Navigating the points closest to Titan Fortuna had to be like fighting in the middle of a briar patch. Worse, considering the areas one could fall through.

Navigating rooftops wreathed in barbed wire.

I wasn’t in that boat, but I still felt cornered and trapped. My thoughts were going in circles, and that meant they covered a surprising measure of mental territory, treading near thoughts I really didn’t want to have. Amy’s face in a memory I’d kept locked away.

One of the rare times that I might have found myself on the same page as my sister. Neither of us wanted to remember that, and our individual reasonings were very selfish—there was a degree of self-preservation in Amy not wanting me to see her disregarding my wishes, and those two moments of ‘shushing’ me where she’d altered my mind in real time to cancel out my protests—

My skin crawled.

I wanted those memories gone because they got in the way of me thinking in a straight line, and they made the days where I didn’t think as much about this stuff fewer and far between.

But they were necessary. As a warning, as a general awareness of what I was up against. They were context that, for some reason, got me thinking about Contessa, who I was watching now, standing there and healing while the Titans in her network fought on her behalf. Chess pieces in the hands of a machine that had solved the game and knew every permutation.

And we didn’t have the pieces or the knowledge of how to play the game.