"Neutronium is too good for you," I say, loading a canister into the prop. The mechanism is simple - rubber band tension, release catch, enough force to send a small cylinder about thirty feet. Amelia made it look like a ray gun. The canister looks like something that could end the world. It's pepper spray. "I think I will give you the infinite pain gas instead."

  Jett's eyes go wide. She's between me and the civilian, arms spread, skin flushed red with Gear 3's heat output. She doesn't know what's in the canister. She can't know. And she can't risk finding out by letting it hit the civilians behind her.

  I aim for the storefront and fire. She dives. It soars through the air with all the grace of a spinning canister of pepper spray.

  And she does a perfect, perfect soccer goalie dive for it. Genuinely, I know my stuff, and I'm impressed. With one hand like a bear paw, she swats it out of the ground, smacking it into Captain Devil's snow wall, where it lodges, fast and impotent.

  Second canister. I load it while she's distracted, pivot forty-five degrees, and fire downwind, as high of an angle as I can. A flash of a physics class whiteboard in my mind - best way to maximize distance is around forty-five degrees parallel to the ground, up. Toward Frankford Ave. Toward the residential blocks.

  "Better chase that one," I call out. "Before everyone downwind develops a fascinating new mystery illness. I hear prions are lovely this time of year."

  Jett's head snaps toward the canister tumbling through the snow-thick air. Then back to me. Then to the canister again. She looks much less friendly when she's not grinning, bouncing on her heels, and having a great time chasing me down. "Everyone get down, get cover, now! Gear Four!"

  The burst of speed is horrendous and beautiful, trying to catch herself against the snow and ice. Her skin turns bright red and the air around her visibly warps from the heat. One step, two steps, and then she catches the ground, hurtling herself like a cannonball into the distance, a blur of blue and red chasing a can of pepper spray like it's a dirty bomb. I have maybe fifteen seconds before she realizes she's been had.

  I turn.

  Patriot has Amelia.

  Not fully - she's twisting, fighting, one whip cracking uselessly against his shoulder - but he's got her arm, he's got leverage, and I can see what's about to happen. His hand goes for her ankle. She sees it too. I watch her face change behind the mask, recognition and calculation happening faster than panic.

  The padding. She's wearing padding on her shins, her knees. He can't get a clean grip there, can't apply the torque he needs to break something that matters. So he goes low, below the guard, fingers wrapping around her ankle where there's nothing but boot leather and bone.

  I reload. Rubber band this time, no canister, just the band itself stretched tight across the prop's frame. It's the dumbest weapon in the world. A rubber band against a peak human. The tippity top of human performance. I fire.

  It snaps across his face, catches him across the bridge of the nose and the corner of his eye. Not painful, not really, not compared to what he's trained to endure. But unexpected. Surprising. His grip loosens for half a second as he flinches.

  Amelia moves.

  A whip comes out - the flat one, the grabbing one - and it whips sideways, not at Patriot but past him, toward a snowbank where I can just barely see a dark shape half-buried. The whip curls, grabs, pulls. The hurting whip snaps back into her hand like it was magnetized. Another flick, another grab - the sparking whip joins it.

  But Patriot's already recovering. He doesn't let go of her ankle. He twists.

  I hear Amelia make a sound. Not a scream - she's too controlled for that - but a sharp inhale, a grunt, something that means that hurt, that did something. Her ankle rotates in a way ankles shouldn't rotate, and she tries to twist with it, to lash him in the face, her eyes squeezed shut. Wisely, I close mine, too.

  The crack is blinding. The whole whip glows, that weird LED-strip luminescence traveling from handle to tip, and then it connects with Patriot's face. Sparks shower across his face, his skin, his cheek, little pieces of flint and metal carving tiny, shallow cuts in his jawline, scattered across him like a constellation. He stumbles backward, hands coming up instinctively to protect his eyes.

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  Amelia's already moving. The climbing whip in her hand - when did she grab that? - thrown at an angle, catching the fire escape two stories above us. She yanks, using simple physics. The leather goes rigid, and she pivots, throwing herself across the ground, knees down, skidding on her smooth, frictionless kneepads. She starts climbing, one-handed, her bad ankle hooked around the rope to take weight off it instead of pushing. It's not pretty. It's not fast. But she's moving, getting vertical, getting away.

  "Don't worry, buddy. Next time we'll bring the real stuff," Amelia taunts from above. I holster my fake prop gun, dig into another pocket on my belt, and toss down a small handful of those firecrackers that snap loud when you step on them, just to discourage following. Like, ten bucks at the fireworks store. Then, it's time to climb, the Remora gloves grabbing like nothing I've ever worn before, the fibers locking against the tension, and I swarm up the rope faster than I should be able to. Below us, Patriot is shaking off the sparks, orienting, figuring out where we went.

  By the time he looks up, we're on the fire escape landing. By the time he starts moving toward the ladder, we're on the roof.

  The snow is coming down hard now. Visibility maybe thirty feet, everything beyond that just white and grey static. Maya's storm doing exactly what she designed it to do. For once, I'm grateful.

  "Can you run?" I ask.

  Amelia tests her weight on the ankle. I see her wince, see the way she shifts immediately to take pressure off it. "I can move. Running's going to be a problem."

  "Then we don't run. We go building to building until we're clear."

  She nods. We just need to get out of here before they can follow. Amelia is able to use her climbing whip to rappel up and down, to take shortcuts she shouldn't be able to. And as long as I can see the gap, it's narrow enough for me to jump normal style.

  Behind us, I hear Jett's voice cutting through the wind, gasping for breath but laughing but angry but exhausted. "It's just fucking pepper spray! They're fucking with us!" I can hear it, and I make a gamble - happy there's no mystery disease canister, annoyed they've been played, funny that they've been played.

  I risk a glance back. Patriot is climbing toward the rooftop we just left. But the snow is thick, and we're already two buildings away, and every second the storm gets worse.

  We keep moving.

  Three blocks. Four. The adrenaline is starting to fade, which means the shaking is starting to set in. My hands are trembling inside the Remora gloves. Amelia's pace is slowing, each swing costing her more than the last.

  "Follow me," I say, knowing exactly how to get home from here, at least in terms of general direction. And I know how to get to school, too.

  Soot's old storehouse. Kate's. An abandoned building like a block away from my school. No central heating, no nothing, but it's shelter from the storm and we've got plenty of hand warmers across the two of us.

  We knock through shit wood boarding the door into darkness and dust and the smell of old smoke.

  Amelia collapses against the wall, breathing hard. I can hear the pain in each exhale. I crouch next to her, pull a penlight from my belt, shine it at her ankle.

  It's swelling already. Not broken - I don't think - but sprained badly. The kind of sprain that takes weeks to heal, that aches when the weather changes, that reminds you every morning that you did something stupid.

  "How bad?" she asks.

  "You're not walking home on it."

  "I figured." She pulls off the Stingray mask, and underneath she's pale, sweating despite the cold. Her braid still looks immaculate. "Did we get her? I couldn't see - the car--"

  "We got her. Miasma drove off with Alice while Patriot was busy with us." I sit back on my heels, let the penlight drop. "It worked. The trap's closed."

  "Good." She closes her eyes, tips her head back against the pillar. "That's good. That's - ow. Fuck. That's good."

  I should feel triumphant. We did it. We got Alice into custody, set up the whole operation, escaped from Patriot and Jett and the entire Argus Corps apparatus. The mission was a success.

  But I'm thinking about the walk here. The Kingdom soldiers we scattered. The reports that were already filtering up the chain while we were fighting. The retaliation that's happening right now, somewhere in Mayfair, while I'm sitting in an abandoned house with my injured friend. I stare at the spot on the ground where I almost got drain cleaner dumped on me by a booby trap what feels like an aeon ago. It's still stained.

  I pull out the burner phone. Three texts from Miasma.

  Package secure.

  En route to secondary location.

  You okay?

  I type back: We're clear. Stingray's ankle is fucked. Need an hour before we can move.

  The reply comes fast: Take your time. She's not going anywhere.

  I put the phone away. Outside, the wind is howling, snow piling up against the boarded windows. Maya's storm, settling over Philadelphia like a blanket. Like a shroud.

  "Sam," Amelia says quietly.

  "Yeah?"

  "That was the scariest thing I've ever done."

  I look at her - She's been a superhero longer than me. She's made costumes for people who fight gods. And this - a fistfight with a guy in flag-themed armor, an escape across frozen rooftops - this was the scariest thing she's ever done?

  "Scarier than Deathgirl?" I ask.

  Amelia scratches her head. "No, actually. You're right. Give me one of those fucking handwarmers, please."