In the end, Jake chose wisely.

We watched from nearby as a heroine in a skintight costume with a red-and-white harlequin pattern descended on a floating diamond platform—for once, someone I didn’t recognise. A new graduate, maybe?

There was a brief exchange too quiet for us to hear, then Jake stepped onto her platform with his head bowed. The heroine glanced over at us for a moment and spoke, but Jake said nothing.

A moment later, they were flying away, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding.

“Satisfying,” Cat said. She had her arms crossed behind her head and her posture was slouched, but there was a wicked glint in her eyes. Her fists kept flexing, I noted, but her signal was a type I couldn’t get much out of: it was always on. “But I kinda wish he’d resisted more.”

I nodded in agreement. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one feeling indignant at the way people like Jake were treating these exams.

Honestly, I’d been expecting him to try something. He seemed the type. Even if he was faced with impossible odds of actually escaping us, the kind of guy who’d operate as he had surely would’ve held no compunctions over weaving some tall tale to his rescuer, painting us as the bad guys in this situation.

The possibility might not have been so concerning if we hadn’t given him ample ammunition to do so with the way we’d handled him.

My thoughts were still lingering on the sight of Cat’s claw against his neck.

I shook my head as if to physically dislodge the uncomfortable memory. No time to dwell on it. We’d just have to be better next time.

We set off once more when we were sure Jake had been fully removed from the field, running to catch up with the main group, guided by Cat’s sharp senses. Ever since splitting off from the others, we’d settled into a patrolling pattern. Circling the group at a distance, relying on intuition and, again, Cat’s senses to sniff out any unwanted company.

Jake had been the first we’d managed to get the jump on, but he wasn’t the last.

Petty annoyances nipped at our group’s heels, pests constantly stinging, aggravating. After the sudden escalation of the collapsed building, it was almost a relief to see trivial disruptions like people tripping and slipping, doors getting jammed, or tablets going on the fritz. Almost being the operative word, here.

It still made me want to crack some heads. The problem was, there was no way of distinguishing between whoever was causing these mild irritants and the one who’d almost fucking killed someone. For safety’s sake, we had to treat every saboteur we hunted down as if they were capable of collapsing a building with someone still inside it. That meant going full force, no holding back.

Maybe that was unfair. Maybe it meant we’d end up roughing someone up with far more force than they really, objectively deserved.

Forgive me if I failed to feel sorry for them.

Our next target saw us before we saw him. The first indication of something wrong came when Cat, of all people, lost her balance as she was bounding along a rooftop, getting a different view while Billy and I kept watch at the ground level. My heart leapt to my throat as she’d teetered towards the roof’s edge, but she’d righted herself with catlike grace, clinging on to the guttering and swinging herself back upright as if it was all one elaborate routine, nothing to see here.

Then her eyes narrowed and she let out a deadly hiss.

Internally, I echoed the sentiment. If that was anyone else, with another power… a fall from three stories was far from a guarantee of death, but serious injury was almost a certainty.

Tracking the saboteur down didn’t take long. They seemed to have gone into a panic upon failing to dislodge Cat from the roof, focusing all their efforts on tripping her over and over again. From the way she described it in halting shouts, it was like her limbs were randomly gaining a mind of their own for just a fraction of a second. The effect was weak enough that it’d only get a twitch out of her before she regained control, but it still slowed her down, much to her frustration.

Fortunately, this cat had a mouth as well as superhuman senses, and she directed us to where she could hear frantic breathing and rushed footsteps.

We found the saboteur within a minute of his initial attack, trying to duck down a narrow alley, and he wasted no time in changing targets once he realised he was busted. I barely got a good look at him before one of my legs wildly kicked out, sending me sprawling to the floor. I tried to get up immediately, but a cramp seized my muscles and I fell back down with a wince. Billy called my name, but he at least had the sense not to stop to help me. The ground rumbled as he charged the enemy.

I looked up just in time to see our adversary sweep his hand out towards the oncoming juggernaut. It turned out to be a poor decision on his part.

Given how Cat had shaken off his power relatively easily while I had been sent sprawling to the floor, I guessed there was some kind of strength factor to it. The hamstring and calf in my affected leg were cramping up like I’d just sprinted a marathon, but Cat hadn’t seemed to be in pain, just thrown off. Her feline abilities evidently gave her some kind of boost.

But it was nothing compared to what Billy could do, and the flinch-inducing examinee found that to his detriment.

The boy’s legs jerked out from under him and he collapsed with a cry of pain. He swept out his hand again, only for his other arm to tense up.

I was getting a low estimation of this kid’s intelligence, because he attempted a third time, leaving himself writhing on the ground, back arched.

That turned out to be the end of that. We didn’t need to do much more, since the kid had apparently injured himself badly enough that he clumsily activated his armband before we could even get to interrogating him. A hero arrived to spirit him away, depriving us of the chance to learn his story.

I found that I didn’t care. The chances he was responsible for the collapsed building were infinitesimally low, so I was just happy to get him out of the way and move on.

Cat disagreed. “I didn’t get to scratch him up,” she hissed, glaring as the rescuing hero carried the kid away in a translucent pink bubble.

“I’m sure you’ll get more chances,” I said with more than a little trepidation.

Would she actually do that?

As if answering the question in my head, she sighed and gave me a dry look. “I’m just venting. This shit just pisses me off, okay?”

“You’re not alone in that,” I said.

“Definitely not,” Billy agreed, frowning. “When I saw Emmett go down, I was about ready to stomp that little shit.”

“Was he little?”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“A fuckin’ pipsqueak. Pipe Cleaner arms and a Bieber haircut. I probably would’ve punched straight through him even if I was holding back.”

I winced. “Try not to do that. No punching through people. And no scratching.”

We shared some chuckles, but didn’t linger long. There was work to be done, and it fell to us to do it.

Our efforts from there followed a similar trend.

We circled the main group, always making sure we kept in range to hear if something went wrong, picking routes that would let us have occasional lines of sight. For the most part, our patrol went uninterrupted. Our senses were peeled, but the truth was there were only a hundred or so participants in this test in the first place. Fifty of those had started in our alliance, and most of the remainder probably held little interest in challenging such a force. More opportunists had popped up as our numbers dwindled, but it wasn’t as if every other examinee had been drawn in like sharks smelling blood. Minutes would go by without a single sign of sabotage, let alone the saboteurs themselves.

But where they did pop up, we dealt with them as fast as we could.

Cat was undoubtedly the MVP of our squad, hunting down prey as only an apex predator could. While Billy and I could pull our weight in a fight, we’d never have been able to track anyone down without her superhuman senses, not unless we got absurdly lucky. But we did have her, and she was worth her weight in gold.

As we were crossing between streets to get a visual check up on the group, Cat zeroed in on a church-like building nearby. We snuck close, gathering by a side entrance. With a finger to her lips, Cat pointed upwards, to the church’s bell tower. Nodding, we followed her in.

The saboteur turned out to be the same electrokinetic who’d networked our tablets together in the first place. Something had caused a change of heart, or maybe his heart had been black to begin with, and he had been stalking the group from a distance, messing with our tablets in irritating little ways.

Disappointment flooded me, but I set it aside as we charged up the stairs, throwing away stealth. The boy had nowhere to run and he knew it, shouting desperate pleas from the other side of the locked door at the top. His begging fell on deaf ears.

At least he had the decency to open the door and surrender rather than force Billy to batter it down. I had half a mind to take all his tasks back as punishment for his duplicity, but in the end the adage of the cornered animal stayed my hand. We couldn’t afford to waste time arguing with the traitor, so we activated his armband and waited until a hero came to take him away.

A bitter taste filled my mouth as we watched him go.

“Dickhead,” Billy muttered.

“Complete and utter dickhead,” Cat agreed, with much more venom.

“I think dickhead doesn’t even begin to do that little dickhead justice,” I said, turning to leave once the winged hero had lifted the dickhead out of sight and mercifully out of mind.

Our next target came to us, which was nice of her.

We were moving as a trio down an alley connecting a side road to an open, rectangular square. Usually, we wouldn’t have risked moving through such a clear space, but we were in danger of losing the main group if we took a detour around it. Besides, there were plenty of abandoned market stands, as well as a statue in the centre that had to be ten metres high, so there was reasonable cover.

Unfortunately, cover for us meant cover for everyone else.

We took our time scoping out the square before moving in fully. Cat sniffed the air, listened with her ears panning from side to side like little satellite dishes, and even opened her mouth as if she could taste whether anyone was present in the empty market. She gave us a tentative all-clear, but we’d barely made it out of the alley when a power signal flared up. I didn’t have time to call a warning before the ground beneath us smoothed out, turning from tarmac to the world’s slipperiest ice in a heartbeat.

I went sprawling to the ground, falling hard on my back, and my allies didn’t fare much better. Cat’s lithe grace and impeccable balance meant nothing when there was no grip, and Billy tumbled over almost cartoonishly, like he’d slipped on a banana peel, going heel over head.

The latter, by some luck, saved us.

Billy hit the ground with a crash like a sledgehammer striking a gong, and the zone beneath us shattered like glass. The shards of grey ice vanished rather than lingering, rendering the ground normal once more. A scream pierced the air, and Cat was off chasing it in a blink, disappearing into the market. I didn’t even have time to call out to her.

I got to my feet. Billy waved me off when I offered him a hand, but he didn’t follow as I gave chase into the colourful stalls. There was no sign of where Cat had gone, but I could hear running footsteps, and I followed them, focusing on masking my own.

The market was a maze of tents and stalls arranged in haphazard rows, disorienting enough without the mix of colours. I focused on making it from one end to the other, trying to cover the obvious escape. Barely half way, Cat cried out, and a sound like nails scratching on glass echoed through the square. A girl’s voice followed, mocking laughter.

Close. A row across from me, maybe.

I ducked low under a table, crouched to pinch the bottom of the tent’s plastic canvas. It was loose. Good.

The girl started speaking, disdain oozing from her words, but I tuned her out. The content of her gloating wasn’t important, just where it was coming from. I waited a few more seconds to ensure I’d got it right, then lifted the flap.

Needless to say, the girl was not at all prepared for someone to grab her from behind and slam her to the ground. Wrenching her arms behind her back, I pinned her down. She yelped, first in surprise, then in pain.

“Surrender,” I growled.

“We can make a deal,” the girl wheezed.

“Not interested.” I reached down and pressed the button on her armband.

The girl kept trying to bargain right up until her slip-field disappeared without her attention, freeing Cat to approach. Whatever she saw in Cat’s demeanour, she couldn’t surrender fast enough. A hero arrived soon after, and she was whisked away, glaring mulishly back at us.

Things continued in that vein. We tracked down three more saboteurs, and though superpowers were always going to pose a unique challenge, we dealt with them.

A tall, willowy boy with the ability to affect air currents had been harassing the main group for a while, and some kind of secondary effect that let him sense his surroundings kept him away from us. He wasn’t powerful, just very annoying.

We cornered him in a small park, where he focused too much on us and not enough on his surroundings. It took some diplomatic finesse to convince him that we weren’t going to beat him up if he got out of the pond, and even more heated negotiation to get him to bow out of the test.

He’d thought I was bluffing about destroying his token, right up until I stomped on it.

I didn’t recall seeing him among our testing group, and he refused to say where he’d come from as the hero carried him off.

Our next opponent was a girl who could manipulate hair-thin strings that grew out of the back of her hands. She’d been using the ability to steal things from packs, lay trip wires, or gum up doors so they wouldn’t open. Little nuisances like that.

The house we cornered her in made for the biggest pain in the ass we’d encountered yet. She turned the place into a spider’s web. We could barely walk a few steps without getting tangled in her strings, much to Cat’s simultaneous delight and frustration.

Billy came in clutch this time. After long, aggravating minutes of picking our way through the living tapestry, getting tied up like tangled marionettes over and over, he simply roared “Fuck this!” and his body gained an inner glow. With his new rictus of power, he shrugged off the strings that had been delaying him, then stampeded on ahead, his footsteps heavy enough to shake the house’s very foundations.

He didn’t even make it to the girl before she cried out her surrender. She wasn’t a face I recognised either.

What’s going on here? I thought as a hero whisked her away.

Last and most certainly least, was a boy whose boogers worked kind of like expanding foam.

I don’t want to talk about it.

The hero who picked him up was the same one who’d rescued Jake, our first saboteur, and she gave us a wry smile as she transported him away on her harlequin-patterned platform.

Once they’d gone, we saw no other sign of saboteurs for a long while, to the point we started to relax a little, and I remembered to check the map. Once I did, I found myself blinking at it in disbelief.

There were maybe a dozen tasks left. We were only a few streets over from the boundary separating the claustrophobic city section from the park surrounding the tower. The end was in sight.

But that didn’t mean we were now on a casual stroll to the finish line.

Swiping at the tablet, I zoomed in on the map, a grim acceptance settling over me.

I couldn’t help thinking it was a bit cruel on the part of the examiners. At this point, there was no doubt in my mind that they knew perfectly well this test was set up in a way that allowed for examinees to take hostile action against one another. Maybe they all were.

So how else could I interpret the huge open space surrounding the tower but an invitation for sabotage?

A sick feeling settled over me, the burden of a premonition.

We were going to have to cross that space, and I had no doubt the guy who’d been willing to kill was still out there.