Bulwark glowered at the big screen on which D.A.N.I.E.L.’s avatar most often displayed. Even knowing D.A.N.I.E.L. viewed the room from multiple different cameras, it was hard not to look to his ‘face’ when talking to him. Most of the time, Bulwark hoped the AI didn’t find that offensive. That evening he had what he considered bigger problems on his mind.

“You arranged for Macabre to be brainwashed?”

“I would prefer to use the term ‘rehabilitated,” D.A.N.I.E.L. replied.

“In God’s name, man-”

“I am not a man,” D.A.N.I.E.L. replied, the voice simulating infinite patience.

“Not the point. Can you even justify such an action?”

“I take it you will not accept the blunt calculus of innocent life and death.” Which, being a close paraphrase of a moment within an argument between Athena and Death Man when Bulwark was just starting to be accepted into the mainstream of superteam life, prompted a laugh rather than a glare.

After a moment, though, Bulwark resumed. “Your point is taken,” he said. “But statistically, when a villain gets killed, there are more deaths to come on their return. Many more.”

Which was true; violent supervillains got worse when they came back from the dead, and heroes rarely improved. There was a very strange sector of the engineering and architectural industry trying to provide alternative solutions to this problem, and they seldom got the credit their work deserves.

“You assume, psychologically, that if Macabre breaks free of control, she will act as if returned from the dead.”

“Or worse.”

“I assign that a low probability,” D.A.N.I.E.L. returned. “Though greater now.”

“Explain?”

“Macabre is considered one of the most dangerous entities on the planet through her potential as expressed in previous schemes, rather than through intent. Her activity tends to be controlled and focused.”

“Controlled?”

“Yes. Unlike, for example, Trainwreck, it is usually possible to trace intentionality to 80% plus of her victims, with a comparatively small risk to bystanders. Her rage is powerful, but it is visited on those she believes to have wronged her. In the instance of the Mercy gambit, this would be myself, the controller we tapped, and Ms Miracle, who is perhaps the single being on the planet most likely to survive her wrath.”

A pause. “Or it would have been. Now, should she become free, she will assume the entire Justice Guard are aware of what she will perceive as her humiliation.”

Bulwark’s critics, the world over, tended to consider him one of the dimmer and more arrogant superheroes out there. To his credit, this was largely untrue; if you made your case, he would listen. He stood there for a few moments, his face still dark, and then he sighed. “I take your point,” he said. “But I’m not happy about this.”

“I do not expect you to be.”

“I don’t want us to make a habit of this. I…” He sighed, and lowered his voice against the sure knowledge that others on the team had ludicrously enhanced senses. “As you know, I worry often enough about our global mandate as it is. We go against the way other parts of the world would pass judgement often enough. If we start doing this…”

“I do understand, Bulwark,” D.A.N.I.E.L. answered. “And I know if you did not see the damage that would come from it, you would already be arguing that we should release her from the conditioning.”

“Of course!”

“If I might ask - if I had said this was done as a request from the future version of Pallas who visited us two years ago, as a way to stabilise the future, would you accept it.”

“I… don’t know. Why? Was it?”

“No. But I sometimes realise, my friend, that I understand the places where you draw your lines less well than I should like.”

Bulwark’s eyes were full of regret and frustration as he turned away from D.A.N.I.E.L. and headed back toward the medbay.

*

The baby was sitting upright, unsupported, at the centre of the cot, their head held high.

Bulwark peered at him curiously, while Stormcaller, Maxine Power, and Professor Mordecai all waited for his comment.

He looked up and saw them all looking back and laughed shortly. “You’ve already had this conversation.”

“We have,” Maxine confirmed.

“You don’t need me to point it out.”

“I’ve children of my own,” Stormcaller agreed.

“But you don’t have a good explanation, do you?”

The others all wordlessly looked at Professor Mordecai, who shrugged. In the meantime, Bulwark was discovering that when you state the obvious, it’s not for your audience; it’s because until you say it, you can’t stop thinking it. Finally he blurted out “A baby less than a day old can’t do that.”

Mordecai nodded. “I’m pretty confident this isn’t an offshoot of Ms Miracle’s genetic heritage,” he says. “The earliest onset of metabilities I’ve seen arrived in early toddler stage. The whole thing about the brain not being fully formed before 25 misunderstands what ‘fully formed’ would mean, but if there’s a time when a being is not sufficiently fully formed for metabilities to activate, I’d say before they develop object permanence is a pretty good one.”

“How’s the mother?” Bulwark asked.

“Asleep,” Mordecai noted. “Although I need to look at that attachment Mercy found.”

“Macabre,” Bulwark corrected. Professor Mordecai shrugged again. To him, it didn’t matter.

“While he’s doing that,” Stormcaller said, “I’m headed back to the comms room. Maxine-”

“I’ll stay here,” she agreed. “Keep an eye on things. Bulwark?”

He hesitated, but finally he shrugged. “Let me know if this gets any weirder.”

“Oh, count on it,” Stormcaller agreed. “I’m weirded out more than enough as it is.”

And with that, one of the world’s most powerful men left the room and the headquarters of the Justice Guard, knowing there was more than enough out happening out there where he could change things for the better, or at least try.

*

The comm system was right there in front of her, and yet Vivian couldn’t dare call her Master on it. It would surely be trackable. And yet she wanted - wanted oh so strongly - to speak with him, to hear his voice. She had all the power in the world and aside from those hypnotic eyes, he had little enough he had to be careful with everyone he spoke to; all the same, though, whenever she was with him, in his presence, or even just could hear his voice, she instantly felt better, more comfortable, happier even.

At the moment, even released from her bonds, she really wanted to feel happier with her Master. None of this was right; she didn’t want to be in conflict with heroes, and Macabre wouldn’t have wanted to be bothered with conflict against heroes over something like this. She would have considered it beneath her.

All the same, Vivian couldn’t walk away even if the opportunity presented itself. Bulwark’s focus had been on her; Maxine Power had headed out too; and Vivian couldn’t help but worry that the Justice Guard weren’t going to have Amy’s health as their top priority.

That wasn’t something she wanted to have to think about, but it felt like a very real possibility.

She’d taken to pacing the room when the comm finally activated.

“Yes?”

“Hello, Mercy.” It was Maxine, but her voice had an unusual sing-song quality that made Vivian smile. Hearing how controlled other people were reminded her how deeply she herself was controlled, and the fetish implanted in her head was all too happy to carry her away on that.

That was her biggest vulnerability in her new life as Mercy, she thought; just how easy it now was to distract her.

She suddenly realised that Maxine had said something else, and she hadn’t registered. “What was that, Maxine?”

“I am calling to tell you you’re welcome back,” Maxine repeated, with the patience only available to someone under hypnotic suggestion.

“Ah.” She smiled. “Bulwark’s gone?”

“Yes, Mercy.”

“He won’t be back?”

There was a pause. “I can’t promise that,” she said. “But I think probably not for some hours.”

“Good. I’m on my way over. Uh - is there anything I should know?”

“Uh - does it have to be something we’re certain of, or is speculation enough?”

Vivian sighed. “You know what, it’s going to be easier to understand when I’m back there.”

*

The baby stood a foot and a half tall, and was looking around at everything with a light of understanding in his eyes that was, Vivian considered, frankly unnatural. Maxine Power loitered by her side, keeping an eye on the baby. Stormcaller, on the other hand, was looking at her, and she shrugged.

“I’m not your problem here,” Vivian said. “Unless you choose to make me one, and I’d rather you didn’t. Are we agreed?”

He grinned, that oddly wolfish grin of his, and shrugged. “If there’s a monster still inside you I’ve got to figure she’s locked up pretty tight.”

“Oh?”

“I know you fought her the most, but we’ve gone round, what, twenty times? Thirty?”

Vivian shrugged. She didn’t keep count.

“I know how Macabre stands. You don’t stand like that, and the costume isn’t restrictive enough to be the reason.”

His open trust was strange enough that she wanted to challenge him on it. “Someone changes their body language and that’s enough to dupe you?”

“Someone might hide their body language when Bulwark’s not fighting them.” Stormcaller shrugged. “If he is, nobody’s going to be able to keep the facade up. I’d believe you were a Kaul first.” The shapeshifting aliens had been a problem even after Professor Mordecai unveiled sophisticated genetic scanners; they were somehow able to mimic the DNA of their targets, while still maintaining their own genetic advantage and not gaining any abilities that DNA should give them.

They showed up so infrequently that Vivian hadn’t even thought to consider the Kaul as an excuse. If she had, she probably would have had a better answer for Bulwark. Kaul couldn’t all be murderous conquerors, could they?

Vivian turned her head back to the baby, whose own body language seemed far more mysterious. “We all agree this is fucked up, right?”

Maxine clucked her tongue, and it took Vivian a moment to realise why; of course, she had just sworn in front of a child. “Whatever.”

“I wouldn’t choose exactly those words,” Stormcaller said, “but yeah, you’ve summed the situation up.”

The child cleared his throat. “Maybe I can help,” he said, and the various assembled heroes stared.

*

He called himself Aitan, which as far as Vivian was concerned might not have been the first red flag, but it was still easily the biggest.

He kept asking to see Amy, who was still asleep, and that jumped to second place in the red flag queue very quickly. She was pleased to know she wasn’t the only one who objected; Maxine seemed dubious but Stormcaller was flat-out refusing.

Which… was better than Vivian had expected.

There were only a few villain teams that lasted more than two or three months, most of the others put together for a one-off scheme, or reactivated intermittently for ideas that needed multiple members’ capabilities and with objectives everyone could get behind.

Hero teams lasted, usually, for a generation or more. That was a blessing and a curse, as Vivian knew all too well; working together for that long was more than enough time to build up irrational resentments.

It seemed like at least once a year that a villain, knowing a particular hero team was on a collision course with them, set up some kind of stunt to break them apart on those resentments and insecurities. While that didn’t necessary work out well for the villains long-term, the fact of the matter was that it worked every time. Sometimes teams broke up after their mission was over. Sometimes people quit, or were fired.

Consequently, Vivian saw hero teams less as groups of people who liked and looked out for one another than she considered them work colleagues with ego and insecurity issues.

She’d half-expected, when Aitan first asked to see his mother, that the heroes would agree in case seeing what happened gave them a halfway-useful clue. Now that it hadn’t…

Vivian asked herself what Mercy would do, using her costumed alter ego once again as a goal to live up to, and concluded that Mercy, knowing the heroes had Aitan under observation, would try to understand the problem better. She went off in search of Professor Mordecai and Amy.

*

Mordecai glanced up as she walked in. He raised his eyebrows, but let no other expression of surprise show. Instead he turned back to the partially-disassembled device on Amy’s back, Ms Miracle lying prone on a table, a breathing mask over her nose and mouth, presumably keeping her unconscious.

“Is she OK?” Vivian asked.

“Well, she just gave birth a few hours ago,” Mordecai answered. “It usually takes its toll on people, even when they haven’t run through the whole pregnancy in a matter of days - which really didn’t help.

“Ideally I’d have her on an IV drip so we could build up some of what she’s lost again, but…”

Vivian nodded. She’d had the same issue once when she contracted a nasty spaceborne fever. “The one real downside of bulletproof skin.”

“Right. I made the call that getting this thing off her - or out of her, rather - was a bigger priority.”

That didn’t sound good. “Out of her?”

For answer, Mordecai placed two knuckles directly under the remains of the dome, just above her bare buttocks, and pushed down. Ms Miracle’s skin dimpled around the pressure, but where the dome was the bond remained in the same place as ever.

“So somehow this has been… inserted? It’s not just stuck on?”

Mordecai nodded. “Right. And I’ve got weirder for you.”

“Someone managing to break her skin to get that in isn’t weird enough?”

“We’re trying to solve several overlapping problems here,” was as close as Mordecai came to acknowledging the strangeness of the situation. “You can see I’ve managed to get some of the outer layer open.”

“Right.”

“That wasn’t possible until after Ms Miracle gave birth,” Mordecai said. “It had some kind of organising field running through the surface which locked the parts together on a molecular level. Now, that’s gone, but I still can’t remove everything.”

She’d had to learn the ins and outs of various pieces of advanced technology for one scheme or another, but a superscientist Vivian was not. “Okay,” she said, and nodded. “But it’s let you go one step further now the baby’s out?”

“Right,” Mordecai agreed. “Although Miracle didn’t.”

That took a few moments for Vivian to unpack. “You mean she tried to stop you?”

Mordecai nodded grimly. “I’m afraid the drug she’s breathing in is for my health rather than hers.She’s dreaming, right now, hopefully a pleasant dream, but the main thing is stopping her waking so she doesn’t take me apart. But if I can’t explore this, whoever’s behind this gets a clear shot at their plan unfolding.”

Vivian nodded. “Well, the kid’s talking now. Think it’s the same thing doing that as made her go through pregnancy so fast?”

Mordecai was already shaking his head. “I’m glad you came down here only after I’d properly got started,” he said, “or I wouldn’t have an answer for you. Over here.” He crossed the room, and Vivian followed. The device on the table in front of them both didn’t look like a professionally manufactured, carefully and aesthetically designed piece of kit; rather, Vivian got the impression Mordecai had built it on the spur of the moment using parts from other technology in the lab.

She’d known he was smart, but hadn’t realised how quick he was; given the mind of her friend was at stake, she was deeply relieved.

At the centre of the device, floating, supported in some invisible way, was, recognisably, the outer dome of Amy’s mystery implant.

Mordecai pointed a finger at one end. “When I tried mapping the shape of this, I found several reservoirs at this end,” he said. “What do you store in a small reservoir? Usually chemicals. So I scanned for traces. I found…” He frowned.

“I found something that looks a lot like someone’s built on research I’m doing at the moment. Genetic stabilisers - you know how clones tend to disintegrate within a few years? I’ve been trying to give them the life they deserve.

“Someone’s taken the work I was doing on stabilising DNA and found ways to use it to accelerate development. The gadget must have spliced that into the child’s DNA. He’ll grow as fast as circumstances allow.”

“Does that also explain how he’s talking so fast?” she asked, and Mordecai’s eyes went wide. “He’s talking? First verbalisations?”

She shook her head. “Clear, plain English. He knows his mom is Ms Miracle, too, although there’s every chance someone just said that in his hearing. I don’t consider that a huge deal.”

“You can’t accelerate command of language through DNA manipulation,” Mordecai told her, apparently oblivious to the absurdity of the sentence he’d just uttered. “And I doubt it’s a feature of Ms Miracle’s metabilities.”

“So… something else is going on?”

“Right. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.”

*

Aitan was growing faster now; it wasn’t quite possible to watch him grow, but if you were distracted by something and looked back, a matter of minutes would see him visibly taller. His baby blonde curls had darkened to a gentle brown and straightened out; he was wearing a towel around his waist now, old enough that his nudity had become embarrassing for the two people in the room with him.

“At this rate,” Stormcaller said quietly, “I think he’ll be through puberty inside an hour.”

Maxine let that digest, thinking through the ramifications of such accelerated growth, but she wasn’t so distracted that she didn’t see the smirk on Aitan’s face at that observation. It was a knowing smirk; she found herself on edge just from having seen it. Instinct told her that people who smirked like that inevitably turned into a problem for everyone around them.

“May need to keep an eye on that,” she said. “Chances are his powers are going to kick in.”

Stormcaller nodded. “Right. And he’s not going to know how to manage his strength.”

“I really want to see Ms Miracle,” Aitan said again. “It’s important.”

“Later,” Maxine said firmly. “We need to figure out a few things first, OK?”

Aitan pouted, but Stormcaller nodded in her support. “Nobody wants to just lock you up, kid,” he said. “We just need to find you a space you can fill in this world that’s going to make sense.”

*

“All things considered,” Professor Mordecai was saying, “I think we have to assume every part of this device is intended for something. And this part…”

They had successfully removed another panel, and Vivian was wishing they hadn’t. Beneath it was what looked like crystalline circuitry, some strange, advanced pipe dream of technology made real, but that circuitry entwined and burrowed itself into the living person beneath, wrapped around her spine.

It had to be a neural link of some sort, and they both felt it was unlikely that it was designed to do anything good.

“This part worries me.”

“Me too.” Vivian sighed. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what its limitations are?”

Mordecai shrugged. “I haven’t seen this technology before,” he said. “There were the crystal computrones that Doctor Prologue built, but those weren’t… well, they weren’t this. They didn’t actually work - Prologue just believed that they did strongly enough that his true metabilities made them manifest.”

He sighed. “The man never understood what his gifts could really have done. Always insisted his technology would be blueprints for a future under his rule, but you can’t mass-produce something one person has to will to work, and you can’t build a future on technology that will fall after you die.”

“That’s your big regret?” Vivian asked, amused despite herself.

Mordecai shook his head. “No, my big regret is we couldn’t save everyone he decided was in the way,” he said. “But after we locked him up, I did try to make him see how his talents could benefit the world, while he was with us at the very least. We don’t often bring someone over from your side. I think of the times we do as some of the bigger victories we can offer the world. The biggest net increases in safety.”

Vivian was silent for a while. It would, she thought, be hard to know how to take that, what to read into it, even if she’d come this far in her reformation under her own power, rather than under the power of her Master. She was pretty sure this was Mordecai’s way of letting her know he supported her, but she didn’t know him, couldn’t read him, and was feeling unsure and ill at ease in general.

Vivian hated feeling that way. Her life as a supervillain had been built around never needing to feel like that again. Nobody got to tell Macabre what to do, nobody made her question her certainties. Mercy, and this was perhaps her only real frustration with her new mindset, wasn’t like that, couldn’t be.

It was so strange to have moved from mostly proactive to mostly reactive.

She turned her attention back to the crystal. “Can you tell how long it’s been in her?” she asked. “Aitan - the original Aitan, the guy who manipulated and messed with her back there - he had the best part of a week to condition her and play with her. I’m wondering if this was part of that.”

“I can’t say it isn’t,” Mordecai said. “She’s been through a hyperaccelerated pregnancy and two bursts of travel lately. I could run tests to see how long it’s been there, but I wouldn’t trust the results.” He was drumming his fingers on a monitor screen, although as the images on the monitor continued to update, Vivian suddenly realised that wasn’t true; he was so used to this program and this interface that he could input complex commands without needing to look at what he was doing; muscle memory would carry him along.

“Actually,” he said slowly into the silence, “I think that might be the key to how this thing was constructed.” She looked at him curiously.

“I think we can assume, given our culprit hooked Miracle up to a DNA modification reservoir, that the goal of this was that she be pregnant. Right?” Vivian nodded agreement. “From the little Bulwark told me, the people of the future by and large don’t know the details of our era. But that’s kind of like how you and me don’t know the details of the Roman Empire. There are more records than what the average person knows.

“Some of them might be only available to historians, say, because only historians specialising in the first half of the 21st Century are going to dig up those records. Or some of the forces we’ve fought with might be classified, maybe they’ve come back as bigger threats and my old notebooks talking about how to harness them are considered dangerous, something like that.” He didn’t seem fazed by the idea; Vivian found herself glad to think that he wouldn’t prefer his knowledge be spread to the survival of others.

She frowned. Being infected by Amy’s fetish had been bad enough but it sometimes seemed like her ethics were catching, too. Actually caring was…

…was like a brand new pair of good leather shoes; you could tell it was going to be a good idea once they were broken in, but for the time being they kept rubbing up against you in all kinds of uncomfortable ways.

“We’re into the bits that are harder to prove,” she said, “but OK, sure.”

“Our guy, this - Aitan?” She nodded and he pressed on. “Aitan worked with his era’s Ms Miracle. It’s reasonable to assume he’d have access to the records of her predecessors if anyone does. And especially if there’s any time-travel shenanigans to his own era.”

Vivian nodded again, starting to see his idea. “You’re saying he might have had a clear idea exactly how long she’d be there, and he might have known about it ahead of time.”

“Exactly. So if he wants an opportunity, he has a chance to research it and get everything he needs lined up, and then he knows how much time he has to win her over. And now we have her here and there’s some kind of circuitry directly connected to her spinal column. We can safely confirm your theory of mental manipulation. This is either stage one or stage two, either how he got started or something he added to advance his agenda. Probably stage two, be easier for him to get it into her skin if he had some mental hooks in place anyway.”

“It’s bugging me that we don’t know his agenda,” Vivian said. “What does having a kid in a time other than his own benefit him?”

*

Aitan stood as tall as Maxine now; downy chest hair was sprouting, and his chin sported a thin, fluffy growth of hair. If they’d needed confirmation he had superhuman heritage, the fact he’d been simply standing or sitting in one room for less than a day and as his body reached maturity abs had begun to define themselves would have been it.

Insane to think he’d come into existence only that day. The gangliness his frame had had for a half hour or so had filled out into a man’s full-grown body.

“You know,” he said, “this is very strange for me, too.”

“I’m surprised you have a normal to compare it to,” Stormcaller replied. It wasn’t quite a challenge, but the tone was only a notch or two away. Aitan didn’t look amused; Stormcaller very much did.

“I’d like to see my mother,” he said again. “It’s important.”

“We can’t let you do that,” Maxine said patiently. “Not yet. But if we can do it safely, we will.”

She wasn’t sure whether she should read the sudden visible frustration in his face, in his body language, as proof of something sinister or of a tantrum. She found herself tensing, all the same, as even if he’d inherited only half his mother’s strength, a tantrum would be no small thing.

The frustration passed, replaced by a look of concentration. Aitan sat back down on the edge of one of the medbay tables, staring thoughtfully off into space.

Maxine and Stormcaller exchanged confused glances.

*

“Anyway,” Mordecai continued, “let’s assume he gets started as soon as he can. He arranges to place himself in Miracle’s path, where he can be useful to her and get into her circle of trust. He hits her with whatever effect. He plants this spinal control chip - I think we have to assume that’s what this is, roughly speaking at least - and then he’s got some more days going.

“He has a rough plan but he knows Ms Miracle is going to be busy, going to head out and try and fight crime. He can’t rely on her being sidelined for long enough to build this up all at once.”

By that stage Vivian was nodding along. “So he’s added this bit by bit, and now it’s done its job - or at least now bits have done their job - they’re disengaging.”

Mordecai nodded. “Although I suspect the control chip won’t. It depends what it’s for - if it’s just to protect the rest of the implant and make her doubt conditioning from other sources, it might be gone by the end.

“Unfortunately, I don’t know enough context to these designs to be able to guess at that.”

*

Aitan’s fluffy chin-hairs had become a firm, shadowy stubble across his lower face. His hair had settled into a long, straight, dark mane. Still sat against the medbay table, he still wore a look of concentration, but Maxine was less concerned by that now.

There was a delightful scent in the air, an earthy aroma not unlike sandalwood, and her head seemed to tingle with every breath she drew in. Her body, too, seemed to be waking up to sensuality in a way she had trained it never to do while working; as part of one of the most prominent legacies in superheroics, Maxine tried to avoid mental manipulation wherever possible, as it was embarrassing.

There were probably questions to be asked about why she nonetheless found herself manipulated so often. She worked on the assumption that the criminal underworld had all been told she was the easiest target in the Justice Guard to mess with mentally.

Why was she thinking about this? She wondered idly how her thought processes had drifted in the direction of her mind being affected. It was probably just that Mercy had hypnotised her earlier; there was certainly nothing else that would make her…

…make her…

She shifted abruptly, her thighs clenching as sensation rolled across her. God, that felt good; better than usual; like all her senses were supercharged, like every pleasure nerve on her body was just standing by, ready to report, to send its blissful signals and swamp her mind in heady, overwhelming arousal.

Maxine bit her lip, trying to keep any sound from escaping. She glanced at Stormcaller, who was reading through reports of other future jumps, and was reassured that his attention wasn’t on her. She couldn’t have made too much noise.

She backed up a step, knowing one of the console edges was just behind her, and attempted to find a way to straddle it that just looked like leaning back casually.

In the end she worried less about looking casual and more about having the solid, cool metal edge of the console lined up perfectly against her costume, between her thighs. To accomplish it she’d had to go up onto tiptoes, bracing herself with her hands against the control panels.

There was no thought to any of this. The wonderful, heady scent she was breathing in had banished all thought. Maxine hadn’t noticed but if she had, she would have been happy to see it go; grinding against the console edge, her lip bitten, she was entirely at the mercy of the pheromones she was breathing in.

She glanced up to see if anyone had noticed and met the eyes of Aitan looking steadily at her, a heat and arousal in his own expression, a smirk on his lips.

It was the same smirk she had seen earlier, been worried by earlier, but now, with his attention fully on her, it was just another button in her brain that, when pushed, drove the heat between her legs and behind her eyes to new heights.

She was grinding away on the console and rapidly coming closer and closer to satis-

“I’d like to see Ms Miracle,” Aitan said again, looking right at her. “Take me to her.”

“Kid…” Stormcaller began, but eagerly, hoping to get a cock to straddle instead, Maxine had already said “Yes.”

Stormcaller rose. “Maxine, that’s going to have to be a no-”

“Take him down,” Aitan said, soft but insistent, and Maxine leaped forward from her grinding post to catch him on the jaw with a punch that had all the power of her name and lineage behind it.