“Sent him ahead. He’s out there and he’ll change soon,” Tristan said. He pointed. North and deeper into the woods. Chris would be closer to the Patrol block guys, then.

Good enough.

We were wordless from that point on. We cut through the woods, and we reached their edge, where tree stumps of varying height speared up from the ground.

Across the clearing were hills with stones piled up around them, no doubt cleared from the fields, and houses, large but rustic. Two of those houses were on fire, and one had been partially leveled.

A blip of something green shot from the sky to the ground, far enough away it felt like it was on the horizon, when it was really on the far side of the settlement. The ground shook where we were in response.

If that wasn’t indicator enough of where the focus of the fighting was, I could hear the distant shriek of Ashley’s power. I made eye contact with Sveta, then Capricorn.

Hostages. Guns. Turning allies into pawns. Inflicting something that serious on someone?

No games here. No illusions of any games, even.

For all the issues of our motley team, where so often we could have three people on entirely different pages, I could look at Sveta and I could look at Tristan, and I could know they understood this. The Fallen in particular had gone off the deep end. They’d abandoned their last vestiges of responsibility as capes and as human beings.

That left us the responsibility of giving them an appropriate response.

Shadow 5.9

A fence gave us cover as we made our way to the nearest house. It had been damaged earlier in the skirmish, to the point that a third of the house was missing, part of the ground floor and part of the upper floor. A good chunk of that part of the building was strewn over the small field behind the house.

The ongoing fight was still far away. I could hear gunfire and see periodic light shows. I would have liked to take a hand in things, but I didn’t want to break from the plan to work the edges of the scene. The innocents first. Evacuation.

“Hey!” Capricorn called out. “Civilians?”

“Try us and see!” was the response, coming down from above. The man was upstairs.

Capricorn looked over at Sveta and I, giving us a dumbfounded shrug.

“We’re good guys!” Sveta called out. “We’re evacuating people who aren’t part of the fight!”

“Yeah?”

“We’ll tell you where to go. There are people in uniform waiting at the edge of the woods. They’ll take you somewhere safe,” Sveta said.

There was a murmured conversation between the people on the upper floor. I could only hear the sound of it. Worried, tense, a word that might have been a swear word from the guy.