“Her,” she finished. She turned her head away. “I can’t explain. She says she has hostages. People you know and people who those people care about. You can mess with the attackers, but if you get in the way of the Fallen, people are going to lose body parts.”

Byron spoke up, “Can you take a message back to her?”

“I don’t know,” the biker woman said, sullen. “I don’t—”

She paused.

“What?” Byron asked.

“She says no, no messages. Other stuff. She—”

Her eyes went wide. She looked around, her eyes not focused on anything in particular.

The woman’s voice carried forward, but it was an inarticulate sound, one that became higher, then a warbling shriek, followed by a gasp for air with a sound of its own.

She dropped to the ground, fingers clawing in dirt, twisting like she was trying to get away from everything at once. The noises she made were horrible, and I’d heard some awful noises in my life.

Goatee guy started to approach her. He stopped when I flew a little closer.

“Stop. What do you do?”

“Do? I’m decent with a gun.”

“That’s your power?”

“No. No powers,” he said. He sounded stunned by the question. In the moment, I could see how bothered he was and I had trouble believing he could concoct a good lie.

The woman was curled up now. She pulsed, and with each pulse, dark cracks ran across her body and over her clothes, then faded away.

After a few tries, she stopped trying. She shrieked, and then strangled the shriek.

“Is there anything we can do for her?” Sveta asked.

“We could try knocking her out,” Capricorn said. It was Tristan now. “But it’s not like in movies. That kind of thing does brain damage.”

“I think this does damage of its own,” I said.

“Yeah, well, if you want to try the middle ground of making her brain go dark without breaking her head open, you go right ahead,” Tristan said.

“Let’s not fight, please,” Sveta said. She looked at the thrashing woman. “Shit.”

I flew to the woman. It took me a second of wrestling with her before I could get my hands around her throat. Her hands reached beneath my sleeves and got a few scratches in at my forearm.

I shifted my grip, and I choked her, heels of my hands pressing in. I pulled away when she went limp and the struggling ceased. Unconscious, not dead.

I didn’t need to ask before orange motes began to appear. Restraints, so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

“You’ll need to stay with your friends,” I said, to the guy with the goatee.

He nodded, slumping to a sitting position on the ground. He didn’t even seem to care he was sitting in mud.

Tristan walked away, and Sveta and I both followed.

“Where’s our fourth?” I asked.