My family had come to the hospital. They could have come for a visit every day and I still would have felt abandoned. Sure, they could have handled it better, but it was a me thing as much as it was a them thing.

With Mapwright’s power informing me of room layouts, I found a lab, checked it was empty, and then opened the door, bringing Byron in behind me.

Cryptid practically squeezed past Byron in his eagerness to get to the nearest computer chair, hurling an oversized rat-man body into the seat, pulling himself over, and booting up.

“Do you have anything?” Byron asked Cryptid. “Injections for fast healing?”

“No. I might need them.”

Byron seemed like he was going to say something, then fell silent.

“How are you managing?” I asked him.

“Uh. Managing?” he asked, like it was a tricky question.

“Dizzy? Delirious? Feeling the blood loss?”

“I know what blood loss feels like. I’m… no blood loss.”

I disengaged from my forcefield, leaving it behind while I went to cabinets, pulling out the canvas bags with the ‘first aid’ icons on them. Red on white.

Images of tattoos danced through my head. Of costume. All of New Wave had claimed their own colors. I was gold and white, my dad green icons on white, my mom orange on white. Aunt Sarah was purple on white, Crystal magenta on white, and Shielder blue on white.

My sister had been red on white.

She’s out there. You know she’s on edge.

It was like a whisper, formed out of environment, paralleling my thoughts, except there was no environment to it. An idea running through my head like I’d formed the thought, but like a teleporter arriving at a location, the process of getting from A to B wasn’t apparent, only inferred. My thoughts felt like that. The fact that the journey could be made made sense. It was just too fast, too disconnected to feel natural.

The screaming was still there, fading in and out.

I pulled the stuff out of the cabinet.

“I’m not squeezing you too tight?” I asked Byron, as I handed the first aid stuff to the Fragile One.

“No.”

Blood sucked at my fingers as I pulled my hand away from the wound at my shoulder. I kept one eye out to try and keep coordinated as I had the Fragile One unpack the first aid kit. I floated over to check the severity of the wound by sight.

Fuck, it was not a pretty one.

“No sign that it’s bleeding too badly internally. The pressure seems to have stopped it,” I observed. “If you have any input, any details you need us to know, let me know.”

Byron shook his head.