The Number Boy hopped down. His landing was softer than even Sveta’s. He carried one end of a cable, which seemed to have been looped around jutting crystals and corners.

Chris made his way down, using a transformed body. Byron took the longest, relying heavily on the cable that had been threaded for handholds.

When he finally had his boots on solid ground, he pulled off his helmet. His expression said it all.

I had to ask.

“Tristan?”

Byron shook his head.

“Ah, man,” Rain said, with more emotion than I’d heard from him in a long while, now.

I looked back at Kenzie, who had frozen, and felt Sveta squeeze me tighter. Hopefully Kenzie had her people, on her end of the camera.

All around us, scenes played. Contessa and Hero. Contessa and Alexandria. Contessa and Doctor Mother’s body. There were capes I didn’t recognize. Words and voices overlapped.

Rain pressed a button. The box shut off.

It didn’t put the images away, but the lack of sound made it easier to let them pass by without notice. I ignored the Number Boy, who felt out of place, and Chris who felt even more ‘wrong’, being here, much as my body had felt wrong.

Rain hugged Byron, clumsy, and Byron just looked shell-shocked.

All around us, images played, reflecting what we were experiencing. Death, endings, grief, pain, and regret.

A trove of information about our most dangerous enemy’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, as we felt and bore our own.

And we were in no place to use it.

Infrared 19.8

Why had we let him stay? Leaving him in a fight without all of his teammates at his side.

He’d had to stay. If he’d been dragged with us and something had happened to his old teammates, he would have been devastated. The end result might have been the same.

Fuck.

“Byron,” my voice cracked a bit, emotion getting to it more than I’d meant it to. Lessons from Mom, age thirteen. No crisis was improved by getting emotional. A shitty thing to hear as a hormonal teen, and a mess of doubt and second-guessing now that I was older and not so sure of the lessons that had been imparted on me.

I was still hugging Sveta, and hugged her tighter, as a compromise to myself in the face of that line of thought. It helped.

“I want to be here,” he said. “Tristan would want me to keep fighting, and do what I can to protect good people.”

I wanted to ask if he was okay, which he clearly wouldn’t be, or if there was anything I could do, which I couldn’t.

“Do you want to refocus, then? On…” I swept my arm out to show the walls. “…this?”