Damsel leaped from her perch, blasting to move more laterally than vertically.

A chunk of debris flew at her, and she shot it out of the air. It put her off course, and she had to blast again to break her fall. She landed on rubble, and tumbled to the ground.

I descended, holding my parahuman battering ram. It was akin to flying into a heavy headwind with the Wretch at its least aerodynamic, veering, tugging—

Torso flexed, arm extending forward, like he was going to fucking punch the Simurgh, and the movement combined with the weirdness of Torso’s fluctuating center of balance tore him from my grip. He sailed downward, a top-heavy missile with the exact opposite trajectory of Damsel and her blasts—more down than forward.

The Simurgh floated a matter of feet to the right. Torso slammed face-first into the ground, where it had been reinforced by Byron’s power.

“Fuck!” I swore, immediately regretting the volume of the swear word as my chest erupted in pain.

Torso got to his feet, and began a shaky attempt at chasing the Simurgh, even though she flew well above where he could reach.

Okay, not Torso. Other opportunities—Damsel?

I floated down to her.

“You do not want to be near me right now,” Damsel growled. She tried to stand and failed.

“Want a ride?” I asked.

“I want nothing from you.”

“There’s a truce,” I told her. “The whole idea is we work together. Let me help you kick ass.”

“What’s the point of stopping her if it costs me everything?” she asked. She found her feet. With her claw-tips on the ground, she propped herself up, so she didn’t have to put her weight on her leg. It looked like her knee that was messed up, her dress in tatters where her power had ripped into it at the sides.

“Saving the world?” I asked.

She gave me a ‘get real’ look.

“Leaving a legacy?”

“I’ll leave a legacy on my terms. I won’t give her an inch.”

Her.

She wasn’t talking about the Simurgh. She was talking about Ashley. Our Ashley. Breakthrough’s.

“That’s the vector the Simurgh chose to attack you through?” I asked. “Swansong?”

“None of your business.”

“And from your attitude, it’s working?” I asked. My voice was a little thinner than I wanted, as I found myself catching my breath with the pain of saying more than a few words at a time.

She pointed her claws at me.

I met her eyes with my own. They were entirely white, rimmed with black eyeliner and mascara that one of her teammates had put on her, smudged at one corner, one eye had blood that had settled into the hollow of the socket, like a tear cast in blood and frozen in time.

“Doing this? Not giving an inch? It makes you weaker, not stronger. It’s fragile, being inflexible.”