I stopped instead. There was a limit to how fast and how far they could travel. I had a second.

Love Lost could have hit me with a scream while I was pinned. She hadn’t. She could have seen Sveta and I with her power earlier. The second might have been explained by her thinking we were bystanders, but the first?

Was it that she would have been hitting Nailbiter’s fingers? Not a good idea, to provoke an enemy who was standing right next to you, not when that enemy was very good at hurting people.

An easy conclusion to jump to, but not the only one. I’d been thinking about breakers, the on-off. It wasn’t out of the question that Love Lost could only sense emotion when she wasn’t projecting it. It could be a thing that alternated, with a period of time where she could see, a period she could project, with the mask serving to restrict it. It could be that her scream disabled her sight for a time after using it, while the power gobbled up energy for another activation, the sight only available when the power was primed and ready.

That attack into the alley had been timed to try and hit me, or at least to anticipate me. My flight pattern hadn’t been predictable. I didn’t want to have more nail-fingers in my face the second I was up above the buildings. I wished I was better able to figure this out.

The scream, too. She made people pissed. Irrationally, recklessly angry. When she’d done it to ReSound, she’d been prepared for ReSound lashing out. Maybe she hadn’t done it to me because she couldn’t handle me in a fight?

Sometimes the simplest answer was the right one.

I could call Kenzie and see if they have anything to report, but that might show our hands. We were already showing so much.

I heard a distant scream, terrified, and it wasn’t Love Lost’s. At the same moment, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

Pulling it out, I checked the screen. A text from Kenzie, now listed on my phone as ‘Ls’ for Looksee.

Ls:
coast clearish

I flew straight up, until I had a view of the situation. I didn’t have a thinker power, but a view of the battlefield from above counted for something. If my forcefield broke, I would take evasive action.

What I saw had to be Chris. I was far away, so I couldn’t see him well, but it had to be him. It was a face, six feet tall, three feet wide, with no cheeks or anything but a spine connecting the top half from the lower half, as if the chin and bottom row of teeth were the ‘head’ of an insect, the rest of the head the thorax. The setup was surrounded by a ring of spider-like legs in varying shapes and sizes. They looked like flesh and not chitin, though, muscular meat with a pronounced ‘elbow’, coming to a pointed tip where it touched the ground or face. He jerked and twitched, large eyes wide, and some of the legs seemed to be more focused on clawing at his own face than on keeping him mobile. I would have said it was like someone dragging his fingernails across his cheeks, but he didn’t have any cheeks.