But doing that… it meant conceding the issue. It meant doing just what he’d said, holding back the Titans, holding back from the end. It brought us back to square one against an enemy who was a hundred steps ahead. The Simurgh might actually win that way.

This whole plan, the idea was to give them exactly what they wanted. The Simurgh wanted a fight, wanted conflict, everyone on the planet pushing themselves to the limit, testing a system she’d set in motion.

Well, she’d got that. Contained to this one facility. With her as our primary enemy, more than each other.

Now Fortuna wanted to end the world. We needed to help her do that. If we balked, if we stopped… we lost. Hesitation when parrying an incoming strike was death. My early sparring with Manpower had taught me that much. It was especially true when your opponent was a hundred times stronger than you, if not stronger.

No, I couldn’t reach out to the Wardens. I had to hope that whoever was managing the cameras on Riley’s side wasn’t listening and making a phone call here.

I had to figure this out, figure out a way.

“It’s a trick. You don’t make permanent changes,” Sveta told him.

“Oh, it’s real,” he said. “I can make permanent changes. There were people who went to the same hospitals you did that had permanent alterations, left over after the big changes the original Lab Rat put them through.”

“I remember. As monstrous as anything I saw at the Asylum,” Sveta said. “Not them. What was done to them.”

“Not full changes, though,” I said.

“It was always possible. I just didn’t, because I hadn’t decided on one. I needed to decide on a new baseline body, and the original Lab Rat never could decide. In that, at least, I’m different from him. This is me now. Forever. Out of her reach.”

He was tall, crooked, his joints knobby, and his limbs and neck thin. He was covered in black feathers, all of those feathers long, curling at the ends, especially long at the back and the undersides of each arm, draping down.

“No, if it was that easy, you’d have decided long ago,” I said. “This is a bluff.”

“If you really think I’m bluffing, you’re giving yourself way too much credit. At this point, the only reasons you matter to me is that she’s eventually going to win and drive each of you insane, and I don’t want that insanity pointed at me. So Sveta can lose her powers, Rain can never sleep again, the two of you can at least be happy that you won’t be as good at murdering people as you would be with powers at full strength. As for you, Victoria… I don’t know. I don’t understand you.”

“Fucking likewise,” I said.