I wouldn’t have given any thought to the man if I’d seen him on the street—brown haired, shorter than average, wearing red sweatpants and a white t-shirt that advertised a brand of pop.
I might have had a question about the sweatpants. They had stains.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Jaclyn and the final mobile Cabal soldier. Somewhere in the middle of our fight, she and the Cabal soldier had stopped facing off and started fighting.
He couldn’t put a finger on her, but he wasn’t slow either. He angled himself to give a sideways profile and moved enough that her hits slid across his body.
Though Jaclyn was strong enough that even her grazes would rupture a normal person’s organs and break bones, the guy grunted and went deeper into his stance.
She put up with that twice before moving to the side and punching him in the face multiple times, a cascade of blows he couldn’t dodge or defend against.
I heard his jaw crack. That was a new thing. When we’d first fought the Cabal, the only person capable of hurting them seemed to be Cassie when using her sword.
We’d had significant training since then and it had done the same for Jaclyn as everyone else.
The blows left his face bloodied, skin broken, and his jaw hung lower on the left side than the right.
It wouldn’t be long before he started to heal if he was like the rest of them. Short of cutting him with my laser or shooting him with Cassie’s gun, we didn’t have a way to stop that—and even then it was just slower.
Slow as in days instead of hours or worse, seconds.
He fell over.
Before I could even ask myself if I were willing to mutilate him, Rachel appeared, pulling something off her utility belt and wrapping what appeared to be a string around the man’s lower legs. Then she did the same to his arms.
They turned transparent, but on a gradient, becoming more solid the further away from the point where the string was wrapped around.
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His body was completely solid. As he became aware of something beyond how badly his face had been hurt, he held up his arms, noticing the string. He reached for the string on his left arm with his right and vice versa.
His hands when through each other. The same thing happened with his legs and the ground.
I stepped forward toward where Rachel stood, “That’s pretty cool.”
She shook her head, “It’s not much more than futuristic handcuffs. You know how Marcus compares the Cosmic Ghosts to the Green Lantern corps? He’s not all wrong. We use these when we want to handover someone we’ve fought to the local authorities. The string fades away after a few hours, but by then they have them in custody.
“I don’t know what we’ll do with these guys, but I’ve been wrapping their limbs when they’ve gone down long enough for me to have time.”
“It is a cool idea,” I stared down at the dim white glow of each string, “Do you think the Ghosts would mind if I reverse engineered them?”
Rachel shook her head, “I can ask, but I doubt it. They don’t believe much in sharing. Besides, you need to be able to phase out in order to touch it. Even if you can, no one else on the team will be able to.”
I shrugged, “I might be able to get around it. You never know.”
Rachel eyed me, “Wait until I give the okay before you try anything. They’ve been good to me. I don’t want them to feel like I’m giving away their secrets.”
I nodded and that was all the time we had for that conversation.
Urin waved for our attention as Ruthie Shaw said, “We need to get out. Once they start coming, they keep on sending people.”
Haley crossed her arms over her chest, “Were you going to tell us more? It sounded like you might.”
Urin shook his head, “We’ll find a way to get it to you, but Zoli was the one who knew the most.”
He waved his hand, indicating the dead and damaged, “I’m going to send us all back before something else happens.”
He murmured a few words and hit his staff against the ground. In that moment, the whole scene disappeared and we found ourselves sitting around the table in HQ.
It would have felt like a dream and I might have wondered if it had even happened except that we were all in costume and all of our costumes were spattered with blood.
Noticing it, I found myself thinking about the fight, about Zoli’s death and the other dead bodies. What had we even gotten out of that?
I felt like we knew a little more, but basically Urin had told us to go ask our grandparents what they’d done with the device. Most of our grandparents were dead. The rest were probably right in believing that they couldn’t help us without consequences.
So the upshot of all those dead bodies was that we should go through the team’s records and find out what they’d done with it.
They could have texted us that.
“It’s not much,” Daniel said to the group, “but I did catch something from the orange giant’s head after he transformed back into a normal guy. He talked directly to Magnus before being sent over. He’s scared of something. The guy didn’t know what, but maybe we can find out more. I also got his name.”