Everything snapped into being, except the lines the breaker had altered. They remained where they were, jumping around, wiggling and distorting, before they found a solid form as a spray of rock fragments. I brought my defenses up just in time to deflect the worst of it.

The goatee guy was caught, orange motes around his legs. The breaker waded through it like it was glue.

The stone became water. The breaker no longer waded through it, instead struggling to hold its general shape as the water pushed and sprayed through the smoke. Some of the water was forceful enough to bring small branches down from trees overhead.

As the water’s spray dissipated, the breaker sagged. The smoke was mostly gone. It crumpled, and the segments dissolved into a thicker smoke. As they blew away, one of the bikers was left in the center. A mid-thirties woman with a blue tank-top with a faded motorcycle logo on the front, a potbelly, and a complexion to match the most acne-ridden teenager from my old high school.

“It’s an eight,” I said, quiet and mostly to myself, “But it’s not my eight.”

She started to get to her feet, then slipped in the mud. She remained hunched over.

“We need to have a conversation,” I said.

She spat.

“Your friend. He okay?”

“He gets like that sometimes.”

“Okay,” I said. I tried to avoid looking at the shuffling mass of flesh. Before, it had been only the hands, feet, and head that had changed. Now it was everything but those things.

On a level, I felt bad that I couldn’t look straight at it and that I’d been hurt by others that had once been unable to look straight at me.

On another level, I knew even I’d had a hard time looking straight at me, when I’d been that way. I still did. I’d never really blamed anyone. For abandoning me, yes, but not for not looking.

“You’re going to tell us the layout of the Fallen camp.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Fuck.”

“The anti-thinker measure. Where and who?”

“Can’t.”

The others emerged from the woods. Sveta. Capricorn in blue.

“You’re going to need to give me something,” I said.

“We came to help out the Crowleys. We hang with them sometimes. They’re harmless,” she said. “The—other branch, it isn’t.”

“The Mathers,” I said.

“I’m being told to tell you something. You don’t need to hide at the fringes. You’re welcome to join in, and you’re expected. They—they’ll embrace you with open arms.”

“You’re being told?”

“Fuck them, and fuck this,” the woman with the blue top said. “Not what I signed up for. They got us in here, we were partying last night, and then, out of nowhere—”

“Hey,” the guy with the goatee said.