He was with others. I barely recognized them. The heroes in particular took me a second. The kid who looked a little bit flamboyant, hair gelled back, wearing what was almost a crop top, a beast’s upper face with fangs pointing down at his chest, the lower jaw and fangs on the belt, with diagonal slashes worked into either side of both parts of the icon, painted on his abs in a faint color that might have been missed in dimmer light. Tempera with more of the white paint on her, a bit of blood. Fume Hood was using one hand to press a bandage to her shoulder. Crystalclear was missing more than a few chunks from his head. One of his eyes was exposed now, peering from between one chunk that grew from the bridge of his nose and one that grew from his temple, very blue.

They looked frightened of me.

That was what my aura did, really. Another of those contextual emotional things, like the Stockholm syndrome. Awe and admiration if they liked me, fear if they didn’t.

Just fear, here.

“S-stop.”

Not my voice this time. Jasper’s.

I stopped.

I trembled as I made myself get back to my feet. I wiped my cheeks where they were wet. My hair was a mess from being thrown around. I used numb fingers to pry at it, undoing the tie.

“Christ,” Mar said.

For the first time, Jasper didn’t shut him up.

The building shook. Daylight reached parts of the indoors it wasn’t supposed to. This would be their plan B. Property damage indeed. Lord of Loss was tearing off the roof.

“We need to go,” Tempera said.

I nodded. I looked back for the hole I’d made. I saw the teenagers in uniform in the trashed room. They’d opened the hole the rest of the way and filed out. Now they stood as far away from me as the room’s boundaries allowed.

They would have seen me throw the bed.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded hollow.

The partial uniform I wore, still without the vest that I’d left outside, dusty blood-spotted, it didn’t fit me anymore. I felt choked by it, because I knew I’d just lost my job.

I led the way down the stairs. I stumbled in one place where a trace of Nursery’s effect made the stair a different shape, carpeted when it shouldn’t have been. Flight helped keep me from sprawling.

“You’re Glory Girl,” Landon said.

I’m not, I thought.

“People said you died when the Slaughterhouse Nine attacked Brockton Bay back in twenty-eleven.”

“Landon,” Jasper said. One word.