The Loop

Quintain’s assertion that things would get ‘hairy’ had turned out to be extremely prescient. The room we’d been in with the emergency security console and secure outside line had been about halfway down a long hallway that contained myriad small offices, utility closets, server rooms, break rooms, and who knew what else. We were now nearing the far end of that same hallway, fighting as we retreated from the shadow that advanced upon us unerringly.

Christine wanted to push back against it more aggressively, but the more we learned about it, the less wise that seemed. All of us had had a tough time with the idea of leaving the unpowered humans in the rooms along the hall to their fate, but thankfully a more urgent alarm than the silent one that had greeted us had started blaring out as Pitch’s darkness started down the hall, and they had all retreated to other more secure areas of the base. And anyway, Pitch was paying them no mind. He seemed solely focused on us, on revenge, on … I didn’t know, couldn’t tell what his exact motivations were. My telekinesis barely breached his shadow, and my telepathy was no different. The only thing I had going for me was that I’d held a bit of his mind inside my own brain for a while and so had Angie, and that experience had left me with a better ability to navigate his alien mind now than I’d had before, at least when he was in physical form and near enough to the front of the advancing shadow for me to feel his presence at all.

“Ganzfield,” said the winged woman, Peregrine, “I think Dynamo is right, we should push the offensive. I think if I got in there, I could borrow his power, maybe push back against him with it.”

I didn’t have time to explain to her how bad of an idea that was. I mentally coordinated with Dynamo and Flare to create a giant burst of light and then focus it on the shadow, using my own power to push against the aspect of the darkness that felt physical, like a fog or a mist. My contribution was minimally effective; it was clear that my telekinesis wasn’t meant to work on fluids, least of all ones as insubstantial as this. But the others had a small and temporary impact, forcing the darkness back long enough for us to slip through a door we’d passed a few seconds before, Ms. Y and Luisa confirming that it was the right way to get to the surface.

When the shadow had started advancing down the hallway, Christine, Ms. Y, and Peregrine had run back to us to find Trojan and Mr. X both unconscious and fitted with the power-inhibiting devices that Mr. X had had on hand to use on us if need be. Christine had been behind the other two, ready to act if they rushed into the room on the offensive, but to my surprise they’d taken the whole thing in stride, adopting a pragmatic outlook.

“Knew how his power worked from the start,” Ms. Y had said. “Everyone did. It wasn’t a secret. Never really questioned it, though. I always just assumed he was right.”

“And now?” I asked her cautiously, still on edge, still ready to knock her out like we’d done to her boss. She gave me no reason to, though. She even kept her fear aura turned down to the point I couldn’t feel it unless I concentrated very hard. From a brief glance in her mind, I saw that she couldn’t turn it off completely.

She’d shot a look at Luisa before answering. “Now I don’t know. He hasn’t handled everything perfectly. And that feels strange to admit, but … Now that I really think about it, a lot of what he said and did didn’t really make that much sense. It was like he was telling us his goal was one thing, while he was secretly working toward something else.”

I’d felt around in her brain a bit more, saw that she was being honest. I wondered if his power had less of a hold on her for a reason I could qualify, or if she’d always just been hanging on by a thread, and without him constantly checking in, constantly reinforcing his ideas, she was able to think for herself.

No, I realized. That’s not it. It was satiation. Like repeating a word over and over again makes that word start to seem unreal, having his power of influence pushing into her mind constantly had eventually started to have a counterproductive effect, actually causing her to feel less confident about it rather than more.

I supposed it would happen to anyone who spent long enough around him. Maybe that was what had happened in my last life, that had caused everything he’d built to start crumbling and caused him to go off the deep end.

I wished I could remember. The frustration I felt at the recovery of my memories of the previous timeline slowing to a trickle was constant and infuriating. How am I supposed to avert the apocalypse if I can’t remember how it happened?

That was a thought that crossed my mind many times a day.

“What other goal?” I’d asked, realizing that I’d left a massive gap in the conversation during which everyone had been staring at me expectantly.

“No idea,” she’d replied. “Except that he sometimes talked wistfully, especially when drinking, about his college roommate, and about time travel, and about saving the world, and about fate. If you can piece those things together, have at it. My brother and I were just onboard for the capturing-Hype-criminals-and-bringing-them-to-justice thing. It seemed necessary, and like the perfect place to apply our specific powers. Might not have even gone the heroic route if not for Trojan finding us and giving us that purpose.”

“And you?” I’d asked, looking at Peregrine.

“Me? I just got here yesterday. He seemed like he had some good ideas, but … Maybe right now we should focus on that thing coming down the hall.” She shrugged.

“Right,” I’d said. “Let’s get moving.”

“Moving?” Christine had said. “Surely you mean ‘fighting’.”

Chris, I’d thought. He swallowed Adversary, and I think his power is recreating him, somehow. Do you know what that means?

Not really, she’d thought.

“Just trust me,” I’d said aloud, pushing past her and leading the group down the hall, ushering Angie, Luisa, Cerebro, Shannon, Oneiros, and Lincoln ahead of me. Those six were carrying the two unconscious Hypes between them, aided by a little boost from my telekinesis to lighten the load. Cerebro’s team was short one member—Ingress—who’d opened the portal for them to come through, but hadn’t come through herself. That was just as well, as her power wouldn’t have been very helpful in this fight, and I didn't want to have yet another person to be responsible for. Although it would have been nice to have someone who could make us an escape on demand if need be.

The rest of us—Flare, Quintain, Christine, Peregrine, Ms. Y, and myself—brought up the rear, placing ourselves closer to Pitch and his encroaching shadow. We were the only ones who had any hope of holding him at bay, much less actually doing any damage.

He’d grown in power since we’d fought him the first time, to a degree that would have been inexplicable if not for the thing he’d put inside of Shannon. The thing he’d reclaimed as soon as we gave him his power—and his mind—back.

The thought made me nauseous and I turned my mind to other things.

We had a variety of powers at our disposal, but most of them were not really designed for a direct confrontation, especially with something as hard to fight as Pitch's shadow form. Even Quintain, with her preternatural hand-eye coordination and incredible throwing strength was better equipped for battles against enemies she could actually physically interact with.

There were so many of us, yet I felt as impotent as ever. So instead of fighting, we’d retreated, hoping to get out of the base and regroup.

Now, we marched down yet another seemingly endless hallway, and I marveled at just how huge this place was. I understood, obviously, that they’d had the help of a lot of Hypes to build the physical structure so quickly, but there was more to it than just the physical space. They’d had to recruit hundreds, maybe thousands, of workers, and get them up to speed on protocols, rules, office culture. And no doubt they’d had Hype assistance in all of that, too, and Trojan’s own power would have been immensely useful for keeping everything on the rails, keeping everyone on the same page, but I understood there were other, smaller, facilities like this one spread across the country, and the maintenance of that kind of infrastructure was mind-boggling no matter what powers you had at your disposal, never mind that the whole thing had been summoned up out of thin air in a matter of months.

Humans couldn’t have done this, I thought. There was an unwelcome arrogance looming in my mind, like I’d had anything to do with it, like merely being a Hype let me claim some of the accomplishment as my own. How long before Hypes more powerful or less ethical than me started taking that arrogance and turning it into the subjugation of unpowered humans?

Ms. Y had been right; a place like this, an organization like this, was necessary. It just needed someone other than a Hype with the ability to manipulate people into doing what he wanted in charge.

“Up ahead,” said a male voice I couldn’t place. It took me a minute to realize that Mr. X had awoken. “If you’re trying to get out, there’s an emergency stairwell about thirty feet ahead.”

I looked to where his feeble arm was pointed and saw a door with an emergency exit sign above it.

“So you’re helping us now?” asked Flare. “You’re not going to make us knock you out again?”

Ms. Y looked at Flare for a moment too long and something between annoyance and anger flashed across her mind. Her brother only sighed.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “My mind was playing tricks on me. For a long time, actually.”

“Is the fact that Trojan has been fitted with one of those devices the reason you three are free from his influence?” Cyberspace asked.

“It’s probably a factor, yeah,” said Ms. Y. “But I also think, like Luisa, we were already starting to have our doubts.”

We turned into the doorway and our unpowered or non-offense focused members led the way through and up the stairs. I looked back in the direction we’d come from and saw that the shadow had fallen behind, no longer hot on our tails.

What’s he playing at? I wondered.

“That’s weird,” said Dynamo. “Is he giving up?”

“No,” said Virtuosa. “No. He’s doing something else, some … plan.” She still sounded weak. I didn’t want to think about what he’d done to her, about the violation. I especially didn’t want to think about my role in keeping it from the others. From her.

At the beginning of all this, the night we’d rescued her, I’d felt the thing inside her and tried to snuff it out, but as time had gone on and I’d realized it was still alive, I’d had a voice in my head telling me to ignore it, to leave it be, to wait and see what would happen. My greatest shame was that I'd listened.

If I’d known from the start that that voice was his, maybe I’d have done things differently. But maybe not. Like Mr. X, Ms. Y, Luisa, and Peregrine proved, just knowing you were under the influence of something or someone else didn’t automatically allow you to break free of it.

I felt like throwing up.

“How are you holding up?” I asked. “Virtuosa? Angie?”

Shannon looked at me and shook her head, saying nothing.

“Fine, just want to get out of here,” said Angie.

Our first instinct when Oneiros had found his way back to us had been to use his power to escape, but he couldn’t transport people who were already unconscious into the Dreamworld, which meant we would have had to leave Trojan and Mr. X behind. My second idea was to at least get Angie and Shannon to safety, but when Oneiros had tried to use his power, something strange had happened; the three of them had flickered in place for a few moments, halfway to collapsing on the floor, before reappearing in the room with us.

“No use,” Oneiros had said, breathing hard and with a sheen of sweat visible across his entire face. “Even being this close to the shadow, something’s fucky. Maybe my head injury? I don’t know. It was harder than normal to get out of the Dreamworld, but getting back in feels impossible. Like pushing against a brick wall.”

“Interesting,” Cerebro had said, but didn't elaborate.

Now we were a little farther from the shadow and getting farther away still.

“Do you think your power will work yet?” I asked Oneiros. “It would be good to get anyone who might not be of much use in a fight out of here.”

Keeping them safe wasn’t my only motive. I also worried about what would happen if Pitch caught them, if he absorbed them like he had Adversary. No reason to give him more ammunition than we had to.

I took stock of his powers and how they’d changed. In our first encounter, he’d been able to transport people into a sort of shadow world full of inky blackness that existed outside of our own dimension, not unlike Oneiros’s Dreamworld. He could release them at will, and certain powers, mainly those that involved creation or manipulation of light, had allowed us to hurt him, to force him to release prisoners. It’s how Christine had managed to force him back. My own powers had been more effective against him then too.

Now, based on what I’d seen in the few moments we’d looked at the security footage of his escape and fight with the other villains, he could absorb Hypes into his shadow and bring out dark, gaseous imitations of them. I thought of the solid black figure that I’d seen walking behind him in the footage. If those imitations were under his control, if they still had their powers …

One thing at a time, I thought.

By way of answering my question, Oneiros started flickering in and out of reality again. He seemed to spend more time out than in than he had before, but he still wasn’t making the seamless transition to the Dreamworld we’d come to expect.

“Fuck,” he said, panting. An object popped into existence on the ground beside him: a golden helmet. A piece of the costume he wore while inside the Dreamworld.

“What the—”

“Did you just bring that out of the Dreamworld?” I asked. “I didn’t realize you could do that.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t. My head feels scrambled.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. A shift in powers like that was unprecedented. Or it had been, until I’d seen how Pitch’s powers had changed. Was it possible that Oneiros’s knock to the head had changed his powers, too? Or a combination of that plus his interaction with the shadow?

I wished I could ask Trojan, who had probably spent more time looking into powers and power interactions than all the rest of us combined, and with government research money backing him up to boot, but he was still unconscious, snoring gently while Mr. X, Luisa, and Cyberspace dragged him along.

We trudged up the stairs in silence for a while, each thinking our own dark, private thoughts. I didn’t intrude on anyone else’s; my own were more than I could handle already.

“When we get to the surface,” I said, “we need a plan. If we can’t escape using Oneiros’s power, which it’s starting to seem like we can’t, we need to figure out a way to keep the most vulnerable members of our group safe.”

Christine and I had the same thought at the same time. “Ingress,” we both said aloud. I felt incredibly stupid that it had taken us so long to think of her, but we'd both been preoccupied with other things.

“Why didn’t she come with your team? I asked Cerebro.

“She had her kid today,” he said. “It was all we could do to grab our costumes when Cyberspace contacted us and get her to open us portals to get together and then another one to the coordinates that Cyberspace sent us. She was a bit annoyed to have to spend a few minutes of her day off doing Hype stuff. We figured she could sit the mission out.”

“We obviously underestimated how much firepower you would need,” said Quintain. “Cyberspace made this sound like a walk in the park compared to when we stopped Adversary and Gethsemane. Bit of a liar, that Cyberspace,” she said with a small and not altogether pleasant laugh.

“We could call her,” said Cerebro. “I’m sure she can spare another minute if it’s just to open a portal and get a few people out.”

“Please do,” I said as we rounded a corner and started up the final two flights of stairs.

Cerebro put his phone to his ear and dropped it back down almost instantly.

“No signal,” he said.

Everyone else pulled their phones from pockets or hidden compartments within costumes. We all looked at each other. We all shook our heads. I had a very bad feeling.

We emerged through a door back into the light and warmth of a beautiful late summer evening. Or, what should have been the light and warmth of a beautiful late summer evening.

For one confused moment, I believed we were still underground, that the door I’d expected to exit onto the pavement of the faux shipping yard masking the base from prying civilian eyes had in fact been a door to yet another underground hallway.

“Oh my God,” said Mr. X.

“I guess that explains why your call wouldn’t connect,” said Angie. It sounded like she was aiming for humor, but landed somewhere around weakness and exhaustion.

Shannon started laughing, quietly at first, but growing louder and louder. Part of me wanted to join her.

We looked all around us, but no matter which direction we faced, the sky was invisible. The entire base was encapsulated within a dome of shadow, of his shadow. And that shadow roiled like a video of passing storm clouds played on fast forward, twisting and shifting and forming shapes that resembled faces and … darker things. The occasional lightning bolt, more like a cut through the fabric of reality than a bolt of blue or yellow electricity, cut across the surface of the shadow dome. And Shannon wasn’t the only one—the only thing—laughing.

From every angle came a soft chuckling, hidden in the sounds of the violent breeze whipping the detritus of our earlier battle around us, hidden in the rumble of the thunder, hidden in the staticy sound that seemed to hide behind all the other sounds and permeate the very air we breathed. It was his laughter.

The shifting mass of black fluid in the wall of shadow I was facing resolved itself into a human face. Or, something close enough to human to be recognizable as such. And finally, after opening and closing his mouth several times, as if so disconnected from his human form that he'd momentarily forgotten how to form words, he began to speak, and his voice was like knives made of ice slicing delicately across my consciousness.

“Seems we have a bit of a party now, don’t we, my pets? But I’ve found new playthings now. I hope you’ll pardon my lack of politeness, but you were growing dull.”

At or slightly above ground level, the walls of the shadow dome started to vibrate and shake in places, small areas moving as if the walls were a thin film and people on the other side were pressing their hands against that film, trying to force their way through. And then they did, an arm here, a leg there. Solid black, human shaped figures began to emerge. They fell to the ground and wriggled around for a few moments before slowly standing on uncertain legs.

We stood motionless at the center of the circle, paralyzed with uncertainty, with confusion. There was a thin, grayish light permeating through the shadow from the outside, illuminating everything in drab monochrome. The shipping containers and boxes were all where they’d been before—indeed, the stairway we’d just emerged from was disguised as one of them—but the whole area looked impossibly alien now. Besides the sounds of our breathing, and the sounds created by the shadow itself—himself—there was dead silence. Even the dark figures moved with an eerie lack of noise.

They were a good ways off, owing to the fact that the dome itself was absolutely massive, and I could think of absolutely nothing to do in the time it would take them to reach us. I was frozen, thoughtless, mindless. Terrified. I was more scared now than when I'd felt the full brunt of Ms. Y’s fear aura.

“The thing that came out of you,” said Cerebro to Shannon, speaking slowly, putting his words together deliberately. “What exactly was it? Some piece of shadow? Some piece of him? A bit of his power that he left behind in you as … what? Insurance?”

She shook her head, staring at the ground. “No, not insurance. More like …”

Apparently Cerebro’s power didn’t need her to finish to make the connection; it could connect the dots on its own. “Like something gestating,” he said. “When we were talking the other day and you guys were telling us about your first encounter with Pitch, you mentioned his obsession with mothers. His own mother, your boss. He kidnapped them, and you, but you lived while they didn’t, right?”

“Right,” said Shannon, her voice sounded a little stronger as the conversation went on, as if just talking it out was helping her come to terms with it, or else discussing it was helping to convert her fear and pain into anger and wrath. “He kept talking about the two bad mothers, and the one good one, even though I'm not a mother … I thought he wanted to … you know … but he didn’t. He never did. I don’t know how that stuff got inside me, but it wasn’t …”

“Not through conventional means, got it,” said Cerebro.

“What are we doing?” I asked. “Why are we having this conversation right —”

“Shhh,” said Flare. “Just let him do his thing. He likes to think out loud.”

Their conversation had an effect on me, too; it helped break me out of my paralysis. I wanted to act, but I still had no plan.

You guys got anything? I asked Christine, Angie, and Lincoln, keeping the conversation mental so as not to disturb Cerebro’s train of thought, which anyway I was having trouble following, even with my telepathy.

Go down swinging, replied Christine, unhelpfully.

Are you kidding me? asked Angie. What do you want me to say, besides mom and dad are going to be soooo pissed that you got us both killed.

Just wait and see what they come up with, said Lincoln. There was a deep frustration in his mind in the few moments he dropped his mental barrier to reply to my question. His mental defenses were up again in a flash, leaving me to guess at the source of that frustration. It wasn’t hard, though: he resented that the power he’d gotten was useless for confrontations like this. He’d never pictured himself as a fighter, anyway, but now that the possibility had been dangled in front of him and then yanked away just as fast, now that he found himself in situations where being a fighter was important, he hated that he couldn't contribute.

What about you guys? I sent to Mr. X, Ms. Y, and Peregrine.

You can take this stupid thing off my head, for starters, said Mr. X.

Right, sorry, I thought, using my telekinesis to lift the power-inhibiting device from his head. Isn’t it your design, though?

Yeah, well, I never thought I’d be wearing one myself. I would at least have looked less ridiculous if you’d grabbed the next-gen prototype from the research floor.

I didn’t know that existed, obviously, I said.

Our powers won’t penetrate through the shadow, said Ms. Y, and I sensed Peregrine’s agreement. I think my fear aura would work on him, if I had unblocked access to his physical body, but alas …

Likewise, thought Peregrine. If I could get close enough to him, I know I could copy his power, but …

And him? I thought, indicating the somehow still unconscious Trojan.

Maybe, all three of them thought simultaneously.

But probably not through the shadow, thought Mr. X. It’s a really interesting phenomenon, actually, he continued. We’ve never seen anything like it in our testing. A power that is simultaneously the user’s offensive weapon, a defensive shield that blocks out or severely diminishes powers, and an obscuring field that blocks sight, hearing, even cell signals. I’d love the chance to—

Jesus, even in a mental conversation he won’t shut up about powers, thought Ms. Y.

Cerebro had been in silent contemplation for a few seconds. The shadow things were massing near the border of the dome, milling aimlessly and moving as if they were just starting to understand how bodies worked. There must have been at least two dozen of them. If they had powers, as I suspected they did, then they didn’t necessarily need to get much closer before they could attack us. Still, they weren't paying us much attention yet.

“The thing he gestated was like a child to him,” he said finally. “A piece of his power, yes, but not just his power. Fundamentally, Virtuosa, your power contains an incredibly advanced ability to acquire and sort through information; it's the basis of the whole thing. When he—and forgive me for using the term—impregnated you with that thing, it was like a child taking on traits from both parents. And when you returned it, unwittingly, to him, he absorbed it like he absorbs anything or anyone that stays in the shadow too long.”

I thought again of the first moments of our encounter with Pitch. The image kept surfacing in my mind and I kept forcing it back down.

Shannon screaming, clutching at her abdomen. Falling to her knees, then onto her side. Her belly swelling, her chest heaving. A mass of black fluid seeping through the pores in her skin, through the fabric of her costume, pooling beneath her, shifting and flowing and floating like neither liquid nor gas. Taking on shape—the shape of a child, twisted and wrong—and standing up. The greater shadow moving in and folding the thing into itself while Pitch laughs.

I shuddered, brought my thoughts back to the present, and listened to Cerebro’s continuing monologue.

“I think he gained a variation of your power, mingled with his own, when that happened. He can absorb massive amounts of information about the powers of the Hypes he absorbs. And just like you can acquire new skills rapidly, he can learn their powers. Recreate them.”

“How does any of that help us?” asked Lincoln.

“I’m still working it out,” he said.

“Work faster,” said Quintain, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. Without warning, she launched a small pebble at the nearest shadow creature. It flew much farther and much straighter than any ordinary human could ever hope to achieve and struck the thing in the head much faster than my eyes could track, and for a moment the shadow dissipated, floating apart into a formless cloud before coalescing back into a humanoid shape. “Work much faster,” she amended.

“Something else happened,” I said. It was an insight that had been nagging at the back of my brain since my first foray into the Dreamworld to rescue Angie. Why had the piece of him that had been stewing in her brain taken the shape of Christine when it came out of her inside the Dreamworld? And more importantly, why had it had Christine’s powers?

“Well?” asked Cerebro.

“I think all powers draw from the same well of energy,” I said. “I think that any Hype with powers had, at the moment they gained power, the potential to gain any power. I think that his power is more than capable of fueling and recreating any other, that any of ours would be, given the right circumstances. I think when I stole a bit of him and accidentally put part of that piece in my sister’s head and then she let it loose inside Oneiros’s Dreamworld … I think she created an image of Chr— of Dynamo, because she held onto a serious resentment toward her, and that the piece of Pitch that had been in her drew on that central well of energy that all powers come from and saw Christine’s image and gave that thing the powers it assumed she was supposed to have.”

I was thinking out loud, same as Cerebro, and I was certain that he was the only one there following any of what I was saying.

“So what you put back into his mind earlier had traces of you, your sister, and somehow a little bit of Dynamo, too. An attachment to her power at least, plus pieces of her personality gleaned from your minds. Add to that the shadow offspring thing from Virtuosa, and he may have gained a very significant, very versatile boost in powers.” Cerebro was too caught up in problem solving to sound anything but excited, even though what he was saying was objectively horrifying. I almost wanted to shake him and shout ‘look around! What do we do?’, but I knew that rushing him wouldn’t help anything.

“And Oneiros—” he pointed to the man, who up until now had been largely silent, only trying unsuccessfully every couple minutes to throw himself into the Dreamworld “—your power is being affected even though you're not currently inside the shadow. Why do we think that is?”

It was a rhetorical question, and no one even attempted to answer it.

Cerebro continued, “I think it's because your Dreamworld and his—what do we want to call it? Shadow land? Anyway, I think they're both sort of pocket dimensions that exist as a layer on top of the real world, generated in an area around the user at the time of use— ”

And here he was finally interrupted by someone as excited and into the conversation as he was. “And those layers would normally occupy the same non-physical space!” said Mr. X. “Or at least close enough to make having both of them exist simultaneously at the same point difficult. It was quite an impressive trick how you guys got into the base, by the way. If we hadn't been ordered to fight you, I'd have liked to discuss it with you,” he added to us.

“So what we need to do is …?”

“Those who can hurt him, hurt him,” said Cerebro. “The shadow projections should be about as vulnerable as the Hypes he's creating them from, but with all the villains that were apparently in custody here, he has a lot of powers to play with. Meanwhile, Oneiros needs to force his power to override the shadow space in this area, but he'll need some sort of power boost to do it.”

“I could help with that,” said Peregrine. “If I borrow Oneiros's power, I can probably use it in tandem with him.”

“Good. Mr. X and Ms. Y, your powers might not be anywhere near full strength if you're targeting him through the obstruction of the shadow, but focus on him anyway. It might slow him down or give him pause at a critical moment. Look for your opportunities. Those who can't hurt him directly, focus on the projections and on protecting the more vulnerable members of the group.” Cerebro finished by gesturing vaguely at himself, Angie, Luisa, and Lincoln. I knew it must have been killing Lincoln to be included in that group.

“That was a lot of words to basically say ‘fight him and try not to die’,” Lincoln said drily. Christine nodded her agreement. Lincoln was snippy out of a feeling of impotence, Christine just wanted to punch things. It was easy for her to be so gung-ho—she was nearly invulnerable, though given the developments of Pitch's power, I wouldn't have wagered much on that.

Anyway, I thought Cerebro had offered some valuable insights, some useful strategies.

“I can't borrow Oneiros's power until hers wears off,” Peregrine said, looking at Christine.

“You shouldn't have stolen mine in the first place, then,” said Christine.

“You were kind of intruding without telling us why,” said Ms. Y.

“And to be fair, your mission has resulted in, well …” Mr. X gestured widely, as if to indicate that we were responsible for the massive dome of shadow we found ourselves in, and the dark projections of villains that were now starting to march toward us.

To his credit, we kind of were.

“And,” said Peregrine, “I don't steal powers, I just copy them. Doesn't even stop you from using them.”

Christine nodded. “Points taken,” she said.

“So we hold them off until Peregrine and Oneiros are ready to do their thing,” I said. “And we keep our more vulnerable members safe. And, as Cyberspace said, we try not to die.”

The shadow projections were finally starting to move toward us, shambling at first but quickly gaining speed, breaking into a jog. The gray lightning flashed ceaselessly in the dome above us and the thunder that was more like laughter rolled endlessly from all directions.

Angie gulped audibly. “Easy enough,” she said. “What could go wrong?”