“We were stranded up here. Stairs got trashed, and floor looks unsteady,” the guy said. “We’ll take that offer if you help us down.”

Someone else upstairs spoke to the guy, voice tense and urgent.

“We can do that,” Sveta said.

The voices upstairs went quiet.

“I could use my power to secure the building,” Capricorn said. “Making it permanent would mean taking the barricades I made between here and either getting rid of them or making them permanent too.”

I looked back. As we’d made our way between the forest and the first house, Capricorn had erected short walls for cover against gunfire. Some cut into field and road.

It seemed like such a simple thing, but it said a lot about our presence here and what we were doing. The more walls, the safer the route for people to follow as they evacuated, but it also made life harder for anyone who came back here to live in the settlement again. With some of the walls edging into the road, it also created the low-level risk that if Hollow Point was going to end the attack and leave, they’d have a hard time getting out.

Did we want to burn their bridge behind our enemies, when they were fighting something bigger and nastier? The best case scenario here was that the Fallen were neutralized and Hollow Point was left without any true merits to their name. Setting up Hollow Point to find there wasn’t a place to run to? To die? Worse?

No. Not when I’d seen the breaker woman go through the ‘worse’.

“Can you clear away the walls near the road?” I asked.

Capricorn nodded.

He started toward the edge of the broken wall, so he’d be able to see what he was working on. I put my hand out, flat against the front of his armor, stopping him.

The people upstairs were too quiet. After the tense conversation among the members up there, the silence felt off.

I checked to make sure the ongoing fighting was still far away and that our flanks were clear of trouble, put the forcefield up and ventured out first.

At the edge of the broken floor, a pair of men were crouching. What seemed to be two families were gathered in the room behind them, peering through the door. The men and their wives looked more like older teens or twenty-ish, and the kids I could see were four or five.

The floor was shattered, that section of the upstairs open to the outdoors. Slats of the floor that hadn’t been broken when the damage had been done now stabbed out into open air.

“I can bring the kids down,” I said.

“My wife first,” the older of the two guys said. “She’ll look after them as you bring them down.”

“Sure,” I said.