“I can,” Byron said. He began drawing a constellation with dark blue motes around the woman. “Just have to be careful not to cut off circulation by making it too tight. Keep going up the stairs if you can? I’ll follow behind.”

The woman screamed, struggled against strength that could lift a cement mixer, and then she disappeared.

No, not disappeared. The camera, struggling to keep up with the changes in lighting and other screwy signals, started tracing her in golden lines that lagged behind her as she dramatically changed shape and size.

She’d shrunk, from human-sized to barely two inches tall, slipping from the Fragile One’s grip. I felt her bump into the Fragile One, unable to detect where the forcefield started or stopped, then she closed in on our group.

“Heads up!” I alerted the group.

The woman was flying, two inches tall, and as she got close enough to Byron, she unveiled a red laser. The range wasn’t much—one foot, but when she shot Byron, she cut through the armor at his forearm and penetrated flesh.

“Augh!”

Cryptid lunged, jumping down the stairs in the dark, one foot on the railing, and punched her. I tried to follow up, bidding the Fragile One to lash out with three arms, but the woman was small, nimble in the air, and slipped between the arms by chance.

I saw two more flashes of the red lasers in the dark, but I couldn’t have the Fragile One act on them, because I wasn’t one hundred percent sure where the lasers began and where they ended. Punching blindly at either terminus point made for a fifty-fifty chance I’d put a hole in Cryptid, instead.

“Brace yourselves, aura!” I raised my voice.

I pushed out with my aura. It was a shot in the dark, in more ways than the obvious one, that I couldn’t see the murder pixie I was trying to slow down, but because I was reaching for feelings I’d never used before. Fear and awe was a dichotomy I’d come to understand early on. I’d hit my parents with it in sparring, and I’d seen the varied reactions in reality.

I could choose what emotions I put out there, now, but it wasn’t as simple as choosing from a tidy little list. Just the opposite. I dug into memories and the rawest, deepest feelings I had. A moment of clarity midway through therapy at the hospital. Moments, my thoughts wandering at night, where I’d jolted awake with a realization. The feeling after I’d smeared my mother against a wall, and realized it was my fault. Each of those memories was like an exposed nerve, and the screaming in my head was salt on those nerves.

I’d wanted ‘wake up’ but the feelings I dug into as I broadcasted weren’t quite that.