"We can still catch her," Dead Drop says, already moving toward the ruined doorframe. Her chains are coiling back around her, reforming from the scattered links and bent rods she used to tear the door apart. "She's on foot. You're faster than--"

  "No."

  The word comes out of my mouth before I even think about it. Dead Drop stops, turns, looks at me like I just sprouted a second head.

  "No?" she repeats.

  "No." I'm still leaning against the wall, trying to get my breathing under control. My nose is dripping blood down my upper lip and I can taste copper in the back of my throat. Something in my ribs is screaming every time I inhale. "We're done. We got what we came for."

  "We came for her."

  "And now we know why that was a stupid fucking idea." I push off the wall, wince, and immediately regret the decision. My left ankle is doing something it shouldn't be doing. Sprained, maybe. Probably. "She's in the building, Ren. The building with hallways. And rooms. And doors that close."

  Dead Drop's jaw tightens. I can see her working through it - the adrenaline still pumping, the instinct to pursue, to finish what we started. She's not wrong that we could probably catch up to Maya before she hits the street. She's also not thinking about what happens after that.

  "She wasn't even trying to kill us," I say, and the words taste worse than the blood. "You get that, right? She was leaving. We were in her way, so she moved us. If she'd actually wanted us dead..."

  I don't finish the sentence. I don't have to.

  Dead Drop's chains slow their agitated movement. She looks at the doorframe - the twisted metal, the hinges half-ripped from the concrete, the magnetic lock that she sheared through with brute ferrokinetic force. Really impressive stuff!

  "You aimed for her head," I continue, limping toward her. "Gyroscopically stabilized. Lethal velocity. I watched it cross into her space and just... stop. Like a bouncy ball hitting concrete. And she wasn't even really focusing on it. She was busy squeezing me into paste."

  "So we get her outside. Open air. No enclosed spaces."

  "And then what? She throws herself into a car. Into a building. Into a fucking phone booth. Any box with a door becomes a kill zone. If it's fragile, she crumples it on us like an implosion. Or scrunches us like an accordion." I reach the doorway, brace myself against the frame, and look down the stairwell. Maya's long gone - I can feel her with my homing sense, already at street level, moving east. "We're not equipped for this. Not right now."

  Dead Drop is quiet for a long moment. A small trickle of blood leaks out from her nose, orange and thin. Way better than mine, the worst she got was a mouthful of the spicy stuff.

  "This feels like losing," she finally says.

  "It's not losing. It's intelligence gathering." I try to grin. It comes out wrong - more of a grimace. "We know what she can do now. Pressure manipulation, not weather control. Indoor spaces are death traps. Projectiles are useless once they enter her range. She can probably create vacuums too, if she wanted to get really nasty. And she carries a taser and mace because she's a paranoid bitch who plans ahead."

  "That's a lot of intel."

  "It's great intel. Monkey Business is going to love it." I'm overselling it and we both know it, but I need to believe it right now. I need this to be a win, even a pyrrhic one, because the alternative is admitting that we got completely outclassed by a city councilwoman in a sweater.

  Dead Drop sighs, and I watch the fight-or-flight drain out of her posture. Her chains settle into their resting configuration - two at her hips, two at her shoulders.

  "Can you walk?" she asks.

  "Probably. Maybe." I take an experimental step and my ankle screams at me. "With assistance."

  She moves to my side, lets me put an arm over her shoulders. It's better than trying to navigate six flights of stairs on what's increasingly feeling like a fracture.

  "For the record," she says as we start descending, "I told you this was a bad idea."

  "You did. You were right. I'll tell Monkey Business it was entirely my fault."

  "Damn right you will."

  The drive back to Camden is quiet. Dead Drop keeps the radio off, which is unusual - she normally insists on having some kind of background noise, even if it's just static. But we're both processing, I think. Running the fight back in our heads, cataloging mistakes, trying to figure out what we could have done differently.

  The answer, I'm increasingly sure, is nothing. We played it about as well as we could have. We had surprise, we had numbers, we had positional advantage. We caught her outside, in the open, distracted by her weather working. We got chains on her, hands on her, she was on her knees at one point.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  And she still made it to her kill box. Still turned the fight around in the span of a heartbeat. Still walked away clean while we limped back to lick our wounds. The only thing more we could've done is just shot her in the knees, but would that even have worked? God damnit, she's got me doubting myself like a fifth grader now.

  "The blood," Dead Drop says suddenly.

  "What?"

  "When I hit her with the chains. The links that got through." She's gripping the steering wheel tight, knuckles white. "She was bleeding. I saw the cuts open up. But the blood didn't... it stayed on her skin. Beaded up like water on wax."

  "Pressure differential," I say, the physics clicking into place. "She's maintaining a field around herself. Anything that enters it gets crushed or stopped, and anything trying to leave - like blood from a wound - can't escape. She's basically wearing armor made of air."

  "That's horrifying."

  "That's Kingdom's third-in-command." I shift in my seat, trying to find a position that doesn't make my ribs want to kill me. "Makes you wonder what numbers one and two can do."

  Dead Drop doesn't respond to that. Neither of us wants to think about it.

  Monkey Business is waiting for us when we get back to the safehouse. He's in the main room, standing by the window, half-mask in place despite being alone. He turns when we come in - me limping heavily, Dead Drop supporting half my weight - and I watch his body language shift from curious to concerned to calculating in the span of about two seconds.

  "Report," he says.

  I give him the rundown. The storm anomaly, the tracking, the rooftop confrontation, the stairwell. I keep it factual, stripped of my usual editorial commentary. No jokes about Maya's fashion choices or the quality of her self-defense spray. No theatrical embellishments. Just what happened, in order, as accurately as I can reconstruct it.

  Monkey Business listens without interrupting. When I get to the part about the chain links stopping mid-air, he holds up a hand.

  "Repeat that."

  "Dead Drop launched a spread of ferrokinetic projectiles. High velocity, with a lot of kick to spin them, too, like, uh, rifling. At least one was on target for a headshot. It crossed into Richardson's... field, aura, whatever you want to call it, and just stopped. All momentum gone. Dropped to the floor like she'd switched off gravity. The ones that were tangential could only carve off cuts. The one aimed directly at her hit a wall."

  Monkey Business is quiet for a long moment. I can practically hear the calculations running behind his mask.

  "Pressure manipulation," he finally says. "Not weather control. The atmospheric effects are secondary - a side application of her real power."

  "That's our read, yeah. My passive aerokinesis was interacting with it weirdly. I could tell my body was trying to equalize. I think if it was just Drop in there she would've gotten turned into paste. No offense," I reply.

  She looks at me with a 'none taken' sort of look.

  "Indoor spaces become kill boxes. Projectile weapons are neutralized within her effective range. Close combat is suicide unless you can match her field with your own defense." He's pacing now, short controlled steps. "What's her range? How far does the field extend?"

  I think back. "Hard to say exactly. The stairwell wasn't that big. Maybe... ten feet? Fifteen? The pressure started affecting me as soon as the door closed, but the really intense stuff - the crushing, the air punches - that was closer. Five feet, maybe less."

  "So there's a gradient. Ambient pressure at range, lethal force up close."

  "That tracks."

  Dead Drop speaks up for the first time since we arrived. "She can also use it for mobility. When we broke the stairwell seal, she dropped down the center. Controlled fall, using the pressure to slow her descent. She's not just a bruiser - she's mobile in three dimensions as long as she's got vertical space to work with."

  "You'd think someone like Storm would be a ranged attacker, but no. She's a melee monster," I summarize. "She's not a ranged attacker at all, I think she just lets people assume she is. I don't even think she can summon lightning or throw wind bolts. X-Men vs Street Fighter lied to me."

  That gets a chuckle out of Monkey Business. He stops pacing and turns to look at us. "Can we take her?"

  The question hangs in the air. I look at Dead Drop. She looks at me.

  "Not in our current configuration," I say slowly. "Not without significant prep and the right environmental conditions. Open air engagement only, and even then, she just needs to reach any enclosed space to flip the script. We'd need a hard counter - something that can disrupt her field from range, or someone who can match her pressure manipulation with their own."

  "Or a sniper," Dead Drop adds. "Something fast enough and powerful enough that she can't react in time. Jackpot's lottery might pull something useful eventually."

  "Eventually isn't a timeline," Monkey Business says. "But it's noted." He turns back to the window, looking out at the Camden skyline. "Mrs. Zenith is no longer a viable target for direct action. She's a hazard to be routed around, not an objective to be pursued."

  I feel something loosen in my chest. Validation, maybe. Or just relief that the boss isn't going to order us back into that meat grinder.

  "The information has value," Monkey Business continues. "We adjust our strategy accordingly - focus on softer targets, avoid engagements where she might be present, and file her capabilities for future reference."

  "And if she comes for us?" Dead Drop asks.

  "Then we make sure we're never in an enclosed space with her." Monkey Business turns back to face us. "Get patched up. Rest. I want a full written debrief by tomorrow morning."

  He moves toward the stairs, then pauses.

  "For what it's worth," he says without turning around, "you made the right call disengaging. A lot of people wouldn't have."

  Then he's gone, footsteps receding up to his office.

  Dead Drop and I stand there for a moment, bleeding and bruised and exhausted.

  "That almost sounded like praise," she says.

  "I think it was." I limp toward the couch, every muscle in my body screaming for horizontal. "Mark the calendar. Monkey Business expressed a positive emotion. Truly a day of firsts."

  "You got your ass kicked by a politician."

  "I got my ass kicked by Kingdom's third-in-command, who happens to also be a politician." I collapse onto the cushions and immediately regret it as my ribs inform me of their displeasure. "There's a difference."

  "Is there?"

  "There's definitely a difference. One sounds way less embarrassing." I close my eyes, letting the adrenaline crash wash over me. "Wake me up if anyone needs anything. Or don't. Preferably don't."

  Dead Drop snorts, but I hear her chains clinking as she moves toward the kitchen. Probably getting ice. Or booze. Or both.

  I lie there in the dark behind my eyelids, replaying the fight. The moment the door closed. The way Maya looked at me - through me.

  That was me being polite.