“So I decided the best recourse was to kill you, when and if you ever came after me. I give myself… ninety-five percent odds. Even with the new forcefield tricks.”

I clenched my fists. The clench of my left fist made the skinned portion and the missing fingernail hurt. I could feel the wound from the bullet hole to the bicep, the damage to the collarbone, and the damage to my ribs. The pain helped to clarify my thinking.

My vision shook because my head shook, and my head shook because I was so rigid, so ready to do something, to take his head off. To freak out. Every breath came with pain.

I’d fought the Simurgh in part because I’d wanted to buy time. Time for Chris to build this fucking thing. And he hadn’t.

“Riley,” I said. “If I went and got another tinker, not necessarily a bio-tinker, do you think you could walk her through it?”

Chris scoffed, a hollow, eerie sound through a mouth that incorporated some beak.

“If she’s not a bio tinker, then no. We could try, but… I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Time’s short.”

“Could you do it? We could work out a way of reaching you.”

“And manage distribution at the same time?” Riley asked. “I don’t know. I could.”

“Can you start? And stay in touch?”

“On it.”

“Portals are down,” Chris said. “Little Kenzie’s portal box that she made with help from Dragon is offline. I checked a minute before you came in. Around that time, the Wardens started asking about capes who could manage mass-transportation. No replies, in part because communication is down on multiple fronts. You can check yourself.”

“I will,” Rain said. He looked at Chris. “No offense, but I don’t trust you right now.”

“Finally getting some sense. Never trust.”

Sveta’s voice was low, “Seriously, Chris. I will murder you. If that has uncomfortable parallels with Doctor Mother, then I’ll wrestle with those parallels another day.”

He shook his head. “You might have won this battle, but you lost this war. It’s the way it always is when it comes to her. When the fights go fast, we think she didn’t have time to get things moving in the right ways. When they go slow we convince ourselves we threw enough wrenches in her way to finally derail her plot. You say I have it wrong when I say she wants to keep me alive, but you’re the ones who are misunderstanding all of this.”

I saw Sveta’s arm lose its coherence, and my arm started, before I realized it was my bad arm, I was slow—and I needed to use my forcefield anyway.

It didn’t matter. She held herself back. Just barely. I could see it in her eyes.

“I don’t want to betray another so-called teammate,” Sveta said, quiet.