Moose didn’t go down, and swatted in Shortcut’s direction. Shortcut disappeared, appeared again, swinging. This time the blade was more apparent. Moose was forced to take a step back.

Bitter Pill had a group of six men and women around her, toward the back. They looked like zombies. Each had their heads lolling back, and black fluid flowed from their mouths like water from the edge of an overflowing sink. She was giving them orders, her voice lost in the other noises.

Mayday raised his hand, then brought it forward. The entire assembly of villains reacted. Etna, who wore a revealing robe in glossy silk, and a black mask with six horns, threw globs of superheated glass. The robed woman who drew the magic-circle diagrams raised her defenses, only to be caught off guard when Moose, feinting to throw Shortcut off, charged her.

Moose’s charge meant much of Advance Guard leapt to the fray, Spright included, and Bitter Pill gave the order for her zombies to attack. They charged, spilling black fluid from their mouths in the same way someone with a very full jug of water might have water sloshing out.

That was Sveta and my cue to get involved. I flew forward. Sveta snatched out with a hand to pull one’s ankle out from under it, dragging it into the middle of Advance Guard’s ranks.

“Don’t hurt them! They’re people!” someone called out behind us.

I changed direction, as I saw Love Lost get a boost from Snag, which segued into her running up the side of the building. Two long, lunging steps, with metal glittering around her one leg, dangling like extensive jewelry, damaged in an earlier fall or at some point in this altercation.

Still, she grabbed onto a windowsill, twisting around to reach up with her mask.

Sveta’s hand went up. Love Lost shifted her grip, her back to the wall, arms out to either side to grip different windowsills with her claws. She refused to go down.

It did mean she couldn’t remove her mask and scream. I flew skyward, out of the group assembled behind the bottleneck, toward the building’s edge.

Nailbiter was keeping her eye out for me. In the midst of this kind of chaos, with this many witnesses, she couldn’t go for the lethal strike, but she could interfere.

Brutes had a way of gravitating toward brutes in a fight. It was a kind of weird rock-paper-scissors thing, where rock tended to favor smashing rock.

I used my forcefield to swat aside Nailbiter’s claws. So soon after the conversation with Sveta, to bring it out and be acutely aware of it, to think briefly of the hospital, it was disorienting. It made the moment dark.