“That’s a lie. Whatever. I’d remind you this is me being nice again, but you don’t care. There’s a barn southwest of you. You overshot when you approached.”

I looked. A barn, in the middle of pen fields, with some stone-and-mortar fences separating fields from road, so no car would drive off the road and into the field without meeting an obstacle first.

The rain was only a trickle now.

Vista warped the space, to bring everyone closer. It only served to make my trip there even faster, as I flew.

The first thing I noticed was the blood and the bodies. Animals had been slaughtered, and their parts made for a macabre, eerie picture, with human and animal mixed and blended. The two Fallen bodyguards were dead, and there were a few others, besides.

The second thing I noticed was Cradle in the rafters. His robot was large enough that its hands could touch multiple walls, grip the rafters and touch the ground at the same time. Cradle was perched on the back of one hand, crouching as he stared down. Another parahuman, dressed in black with a red handprint on his mask, was gripping one finger, dangling. He had a cleaver in his hand.

And in the corner, almost impossible to see, Sveta was huddled. Her body was damaged, and tendrils snaked out, gripping herself, none long enough or positioned well enough to do more than snake around her shoulder and chest, twisting at cloth to reveal the painted shell beneath. She was glaring, hate, and in the moment she looked at me, the hate broke, and she looked like she might cry in relief, or in grief.

She held what remained of Rain in her arms, as he gasped out short breaths, like a fish out of water. The damage done—it hadn’t been her.

“Let’s not make this a thing,” Cradle said.

It was going to be a thing.

Pitch 6.5

The weather had relaxed some, but the barn we were in had a corrugated metal roof, and each drop that hit it snapped against the hard, hollow surface. The sound was like dull static, punctuated by Rain’s gasps.

Nobody around. Most of the fighting had moved to the fringes and perimeters. Whether it was upside or downside to our secret plan to get behind the fighting and hit them somewhere vital, I couldn’t be sure.

Had to admit, after seeing Rain, I really would have liked to hit something. It might have been nice to have some regular bad guys around. Something told me Cradle wasn’t about to let himself get smacked around.

He was smiling slightly. Asshole.

I kept an eye on Cradle and his assistant as I got closer to Sveta. She adjusted as she could to put Rain closer to me and further from the crack in her shell where the tendrils were licking out.