He began spraying. That foam with its void fraction of ninety-one percent began to melt away as if it were candy cotton. They’d put so much on that it was still a long process.

The foam was impractical for use in the field. The balances were hard to strike—the kind of individual with the ability to use it confidently often had other capabilities that were more effective, himself included. His ‘father’ included. The machines that dispensed the foam were large, heavy, and prone to leakage. One stray smack with a wooden bat or the puncture of a gunshot, a sharp tug of the hose, and fluid would begin to leak out, before ballooning into a viscous mass half as large as the person carrying the tank, often incapacitating them or gluing them to the ground. Any reinforcement of the tank or the hose added weight and bulk.

The PRT had struck its precise balances, weighing need with practicality, vulnerability with volume. It had decided for each potential target, was this something the containment foam qualified for? For minor threats, it was a question of expense—the chemical to melt the foam and bring the target into custody had to come from specific armories and depots. If it were too freely available as a fix, then they ran the risk that the true threats would acquire the countermeasure. For major threats, they had to ask if they could sanction sending one brave man with a PRT uniform and a fifty-pound tank on his back into the fight, knowing one wrong move or accident might trap that same individual in proximity to the monster they were supposed to stop.

Who, then?

The foam peeled away as the spray ran down the invisible wall of the warped timespace, and Five could see the man’s face.

Jacob, apparently. Jack Slash.

Five stared at the man, watching his head move, eyes blinking slowly, face contorting, before everything snapped back to its prior position. The light was bright, but it wasn’t the eyes that had to adjust. It was the mind, which would tick forward unimpeded toward a time when this landmass was underwater.

Except… there was nothing there.

Broken, cringing, inarticulate, the man struggled, wincing as an invisible blade dragged across his midsection. The blade was withdrawn, time passed, and the man, no longer Jacob or Jack or anything resembling either, was cut open again.

There were one or two moments where the roving gaze of the man fell on Five’s own eyes. Locked gaze.

I know you, he thought. If there was anything there, I would see it. A microscopic dilation of the pupils. Something. And if you don’t recognize me…

There’s no point. No words that can be exchanged.

Dissatisfied, Five turned away.

“Leaving already?”

For an instant, he thought the voice was Jacob’s. Then calculations asserted themselves, and let him triangulate the fractional difference in the sounds each ear heard, identifying the source. The voice was too familiar.