26. Lockdown
Mina
Sever.
Crack.
The sounds had lost their satisfaction, reducing them to something simple and immediate to focus on, something to stall examining the unfiltered ocean of caustic sludge pouring back in through the breached iron.
Splinter-Aldo was leaping around the Minotaur room as comfortably as if he belonged here, holding off the worst of the Shard attacks, freeing more people than any of us.
I didn’t try to understand why. Shards were supposed to be deranged and unstable.
I couldn’t get to him. Not with that much power. But he wasn’t stopping me from digging through these pods. So I had retreated with difficulty to my shrinking empty mental space, forced myself to attack in a more systematic, less direct way.
With every pod I broke, I wondered if his bluff had be
