I knew the rule that the badly wounded weren’t supposed to be moved, less because of any medical knowledge I’d picked up, and more because I’d seen an awful lot of people with injuries over the year.

Rain? The rule should have applied. It was the kind of badly hurt that made me worry that any further tampering would break him.

He had a cut on his face that parted his mask and the bridge of his nose, extended through his upper lip, through the lower lip, and down to his chin. His mouth was open as wide as it could go, bloodstained teeth showing, and the cut on his chin was open wider than his mouth. There wasn’t darkness beyond that wound—it was the opposite, with the white of bone showing.

Sveta cradled his head with one hand and arm, even after moving him some, and her hand pressed against the chin, blood getting into the gaps of the prosthetic, the fingers doing very little to hold the wound closed or staunch the bleeding.

I knelt at her side, felt Rain jerk his head as I moved her fingers. I pushed the wound closed, then moved her fingers with my hands, positioning them, holding them firm. I took my fingers away, and it was sticky enough I felt her fingers move as mine did. They didn’t move so much that the wound opened again. Better.

There was another cut at his eyes—eyelid, bridge of the nose again, and the orb of the other eye. Shallower, but the damage to the eye made for a lot of fluid. His good eye was closed, a mixture of blood diluted in damp settled into the creases and cracks. He pried it open, jaw chattering a bit with the effort, and stared at me with one eye that was shot through with blood, but not bloodshot.

More moisture.

“Come on,” I said. “Hang in there.”

“We should go,” I heard the man with the red handprint on his mask say.

“If you try to walk away from this, we’re going to have a problem,” I said.

“Don’t be unreasonable,” Cradle said.

“Thinker,” Sveta whispered. “Combat focused. Cradle hit me with something I couldn’t see. It might have been a laser not visible to the naked eye.”

I nodded, trying to divide my attention between the villains and Rain.

What was I even supposed to do? In any other situation, I would have picked up Rain and flown him to the nearest hospital. The reason I wasn’t was that I was genuinely worried that a firm shake would make what little blood he had in him fall out.

A mercy, maybe, that Capricorn, Vista, and Chris all turned up. Less a mercy that they had to see.

“What did you do?” Capricorn asked.

“And they all turn up,” Cradle said. “You swapped one member out.”