Someone screamed, as she fought to get free and couldn’t. She wore a costume in yellow and black, almost flipped from my own, a swooping bird icon on the chest with fins at the exterior, all flowing from the lines and patterns of the costume itself. She reached out for a teammate’s hand, her fingertips grazing his, as the two of them were held immobile.

I wasn’t sure what she hoped to do if she did get a hold of her teammate, but I couldn’t go fly to her rescue. That was a trap. Everything was a trap.

This, too, is real. This is what she does. This is why if you’re even thinking of participating in any fights against the Simurgh at any point in time, they’d give you the rundown. They’d prepare us well in advance.

“What do I do!?” Sveta called out.

“Grab—” I started, my voice drowned out by other people shouting, yelling.

My sentence interrupted as the Simurgh flung them. Not forward, not back, but in various directions. I took flight, trying to catch the man the woman in the bird costume had been reaching for.

They tell you in the prep materials that you will always feel one step behind…

I got a firm grip on his hand. I felt the jolt as he jerked, and he roared in pain, the noise joining the cacophony around us.

Sveta was doing more, catching rubble, people… I’d meant to tell her to grab the bits that stuck out. If the Manton effect extended just past her tendrils to any clothing she wore, there was a chance she could impart just a bit of it to spikes, fins, capes, and other matter. The Simurgh, as far as I knew, didn’t grab flesh.

I was trying to track the dangers and see what she was doing in the midst of this chaos when I saw a wobbly golden outline. Unlike so many of the others, it wasn’t moving. A pipe that stuck out of a pile of rubble.

I flew, hard, moving lower to the ground and letting go of the guy I’d grabbed. I had been flying hard enough that he rolled on landing. Rolled on that dislocated arm.

They warn you that you’ll do things that seem callous or inhuman. That she’ll make you do those things as one of her one hundred ways of getting to you…

I rationalized it, telling myself the air resistance was too much, that short length of pipe too threatening.

It twitched, and I thought for a moment it was about to come for me. Then it pulled free, lunging left—

Lunging right. A feint.

Reach! I communicated, prayed, pled.