The brute chuckled, and climbed down from the roof of the truck, and in the doing, he put himself between me and Blindside. It blocked my view of Blindside, and it gave me a chance to get a glimpse of him. The ground smoked around where his boots touched pavement, and the smoke solidified into formations that looked like branches and twists of metal, all in an ashen white-gray. His entire body was made of the stuff, as if he wore armor made of white-gray bandages made solid and immobile by resin, all of the ends curling up and away from him in horns or branches.

I knew him, even just seeing his legs. Or I knew of him, to be precise. Yeah, based on what I knew of Fume Hood’s group, they might be outclassed.

The big guy was the Lord of Loss. There were two ways a cape could go with a name like that. The most obvious was to fuck up just once, and forever after have people wondering out loud what he was thinking, taking a name like that. Being called a loser.

The other way was to succeed and ascend the name, to take that name and make it a title. The Lord of Loss had managed that.

He had been one of the villains in a big city on the West coast, and now he was one of the villains running a settlement on one of the corner worlds. Was it Earth-N? Not far from here, if it was. He wasn’t top tier, as capes went, but he was A-list.

He was a brute with breaker flavor. He cloaked himself in abstract forms, with a set selection. I knew one resembled a bird, which he would have been using to fly alongside the truck. He was versatile, big, strong, and his breaker power multiplied his efforts over time. That multiplication played into how he flew, how he grew, and back before Gold Morning, a few occasions where he’d been able to slug away at a bank vault until he’d torn it open, or even drag a smaller vault away with him.

He turned his attention toward me, turning around and approaching me as the others backed away from the cloud of gas. My chin jerked toward my chest as Blindside stepped out to the side, back in my field of view.

I would’ve rather had just about anyone else step close enough for me to get my hands on them. It had to be the guy I couldn’t take out of the fight.

“Miss,” Lord of Loss said. “Are you injured?”

I couldn’t pretend to be unconscious—I’d just moved because of Blindside. I settled for an inarticulate, small moan.

Lord of Loss knelt beside me. “Can you walk?”

I shook my head, keeping the movement small.

“Is it because your back is hurt? Can you feel my hand, here?” he asked.