I flew to put buildings between me and her. Where were Spright and Prancer now? We’d diverted the dangerous elements, but I wanted to fix things. I wanted to take concrete, measured steps to make things better, now that Advance Guard had shit the bed as badly as they had.

I wanted the world to make sense again. And Cedar Point didn’t make sense.

Two more screams, both in short succession. Anxiety Chris’s scream. I turned to look, and I saw the faint shadow of Nailbiter’s nail-fingers stabbing skyward.

Love Lost was running up the fingers. They were thin, but she didn’t seem to be struggling.

Her mask was off, and she was looking down. Looking for me.

Scratch my earlier theory about her not wanting to provoke me.

I couldn’t get to cover fast enough, so I did the opposite. I headed straight for her. If she thought she could deal with me, I wanted to see what she’d do. I pushed out with my aura for the first time, to make it harder.

She would be resistant, like Snag was. Still, I refused to believe that she could deal with my aura, scream, at me, and take evasive action against my charge while thirty feet above the rooftops.

Nailbiter lashed out. Teeth. My forcefield took the hit, and I carried forward. Love Lost lost her footing, teetering, then leaped hard off of the fingers.

I flew straight down, to put myself out of Nailbiter’s reach, while Love Lost leaped sideways.

She touched the side of Prancer’s headquarters, the claws of her hands and feet finding traction on the surface, and she moved like she was running, claws catching and helping to propel her.

There was the wall-running power. She moved fluidly along a vertical surface, claws helping. Her hand went to her mask, and a hand reached up from below, grabbing her ankle.

Sveta.

Love Lost was pulled away from the building. No longer able to make contact with the surface, she fell at a diagonal, in the direction of the rooftop she’d originally been falling down to. I could see her reorient herself in the air, twisting to put feet beneath her, but she couldn’t stop falling.

Not a terminal fall, most likely, but it’d be a hard one.

In the distance, I could hear Chris screaming as he ran. He covered a lot of ground, apparently, because the scream faded with each passing second.

Good job, Sveta, I thought. Not showing her hand, catching Love Lost by surprise, and staying clear of that scream were perfect. It had taken her a while, but I didn’t blame her for moving carefully and having trouble finding the right position and moment to act.

No, that was exactly what I was wanting to do. It was energizing, in a way, exciting. For all my doubts, I liked that at least one person was on my wavelength.