Kurt pulled a cloak around his shoulders, hood up, while Jacob went to the bathroom adjacent to the little bedroom, and began to wash his face. His nose was still bleeding.

The world is expanding, new things are happening. Nicholas made mention of people who know how to hand out powers and the others don’t seem to care. Not enough.

Things were happening, changing. He’d been drawn here and drawn to accept King’s offer in part because he wanted to be at the center of the change. Now he knew that the center lay somewhere else.

He felt his hood move, a sharp flick. He turned his head, peering through the narrow eyes of the mask, his world and the analysis of that world limited to a narrow slice of his reality.

Screamer’s voice began reciting the instructions King had provided, whispering the promise that twenty would die. Kurt tuned it out.

Jacob held what might have been a nail file. He’d extended the cutting edge of it, striking at the hood. The same kind of signal as the fleck of blood.

A reminder of that unspoken agreement.

Yes. Whatever happened next, King would have to die. They would have to figure out a way.

⊙

Adjustments to the landmass made his calculations slightly off. It annoyed him.

Five hopped up to a shard of broken cityscape, then walked across a billboard that had been folded like origami. The City of Angels had been made into a twisted labyrinth before it had been cracked like eggshell.

He had fought here, in this same battle. He scaled up one building that had partially toppled, then hopped down to a hand that stuck out of brickwork, badly worn by weather. He could map out the stress lines, calculate the strength of the material, and work out how many days of rainy weather it would take to bring the hand down. He was utterly unsurprised when it broke beneath his weight—that was another calculation. He remained upright, standing on one foot, that foot resting on the stump, while the rest of the hand crashed to ground.

The hands formed a kind of stairway, and he made his way down. Around a corner, down an alley with more of the hands stabbing out from the walls. There were four blurs of warped time, monochrome, the ground within three of the blurs intact and at the height they had been two years ago. The fourth blur was buried beneath mounds of yellow-white foam, spongy.

The shifting of the earth following one of Scion’s blasts had dragged one wall of the building into that fourth blur. If that continued, part of the building would collapse. As it stood, the mound of containment foam had a deceptive void fraction of ninety-one percent. For a person within, that meant it would be possible to breathe through, the risk of carbon dioxide buildup minimal.

Not that it mattered to its current occupant.