Pushing myself up and jumping to the side, I dodged another punch from Victor, who’d closed the distance in a step.

I fired off two boombots at him. Both hit, throwing him backward into blue/gray metal device shaped like a doorless refrigerator.

I didn’t want to kill him. I also couldn’t think of an obvious way to prevent it. I hadn’t brought many goobots on this mission and didn’t think they’d do much good against someone with Jaclyn’s strength.

On the other hand, I realized, it might give me time to think of something better.

I fired off a volley of goobots, watching the sticky strands expand outward and attach to the “refrigerator” and the ground three times over.

Then I slipped into the next cluster over, not because I thought it would stop him, but because it might give me a second.

Once I was out of his glow, I felt better and had a theory. I tested it by tapping into the power that Artificers used and trying to view Victor and his glowing aura.

I saw nothing, proving my theory correct.

I wasn’t blind, I could still see through my eyes and my technology, but everything within Victor’s glow was gray nothingness.

Whatever the device did, it allowed Victor to obscure himself from Artificers’ view. From how I felt while inside the glow, it might even cut Artificers off from the energy needed to power their abilities.

Why the Artificers left an artifact that allowed people to do that, I had another theory, but no time to think it through. I did know that the Abominators had harvested DNA from a captured Artificer and used it in their army of supers.

And that meant, I needed to say, “Don’t go into the glow. Your powers might stop working.”

I did, the words tumbling out of my mouth, knowing that speed could make the difference between living and dying.

I wasn’t wrong either because Victor didn’t stand still. He pushed himself up and teleported.

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Rachel had been chopping monkey boxes to bits with a great axe I’d made by combining the technology in Cassie’s sword with the nanotech ceramics I used to make our armor pass as clothes.

I’d given her a purse that could transform into not only a great axe but also an electric guitar—partly because she played guitar and partly because guitars are also called axes.

It seemed funny at the time.

Seeing Victor appear next to her did not make me laugh. The sinking feeling in my gut came from the knowledge that the Cosmic Ghosts were Artificers if they’d taken a different path, meaning that Rachel’s ability to go ghostly wasn’t going to do her a bit of good.

Rachel did better than expected.

As Victor appeared, she ran, and Victor must have been off his game at the moment because his first punch missed. Unfortunately, Victor’s strength was in Jaclyn’s league while without powers Rachel was nothing more than a normal human.

She had a suit, but it couldn’t be as good as mine and still fit within the mass limit she could make intangible. I got as close as I could.

I couldn’t move fast enough to block his second punch, but I could fire off bots. I couldn’t fire off bots as fast as Victor could punch, however.

His second punch knocked her to the ground.

A status report in my HUD showed her as alive and still breathing with no reports of a breach in her suit. My bots hit him as he raised a foot to stomp on her, throwing him sideways into a block of Abominator equipment taller than he was.

He pushed himself off, rocking an object that made me think of a jagged tooth, raising his leg to try again. I was already running toward them, but I didn’t make it.

Jaclyn hit him out of nowhere, a purple blur moving at more than 300 miles per hour.

She must have aimed her fist upward because he shot into the air, flying out of the cluster toward the ceiling, head over heels, entirely out of control.

He never hit the ceiling. He disappeared, reappearing next to me and hitting me hard enough that I flew sideways into the wall, my vision going black for a second.

Though my implant informed me that technically it was closer to three-quarters of a second, any fight that included Jaclyn could change in that time.

My implant gave me a recap of what happened, showing Jaclyn rush forward and hit Victor into the air again only this time she jumped after him, grabbing his legs, using her momentum and her suit’s anti-gravity to change Victor’s direction, aiming him into a cluster of Abominator technology.

Victor might have been Jaclyn’s equal in strength, but not reflexes. He hit the equipment with a crash that I hoped wouldn’t release a technological horror. If it did, it wasn’t obvious as he pulled himself to his feet and teleported again even as Jaclyn ran to punch him again.

By that time, I’d caught up and was watching Victor disappear in real-time. When he did, I scanned my HUD, watching in all directions for movement and a purple glow.

He appeared near Marcus, moving his arm backward to load a punch.