As I flew, Cassie contacted Jaclyn and I, “After you help Shift, get back here. We’re okay, but the stupid monkeys and their boxes reformed already.”

She live-streamed a snippet of her firing at the weird, sludgy “monkeys” while Rachel, stumbling but walking, phased in and out, cutting any monkeys that got close to Cassie into pieces with her axe. Cassie focused her attention on the creatures that weren’t close.

They looked like they’d be okay for now, but the way the monkeys reformed, they’d be outnumbered sooner than I wanted to imagine. A little damage to their suits and exposure to the wrong Abominator device had all the wrong kind of potential.

Victor had been there for years and while I wanted to attribute his current mental state to years of isolation, I couldn’t know it. I could know though, that he’d managed to connect to the Abominator lab’s systems.

If he were somehow uninfluenced by them, it wasn’t for lack of opportunity.

For all I knew, he’d been there before the original League showed up, ready and waiting.

We had to end this soon. The distraction of going between the two scenes wasn’t going to help me help them.

As if to illustrate that point, Marcus’ feed showed Victor’s hand reaching back toward Marcus, coming in fast and with more strength than he’d used before. As he hit, Marcus yelped over our connection.

His body thinned and slid out of the spot where Victor hit, but dark liquid remained on Victor’s fingers.

“I’m okay, but that hurt,” Marcus said over our implant connection.

Victor held up his hand, staring at the dark flecks on his fingers that had been liquid and had dried in the thin lunar atmosphere.

“I’m getting closer,” Victor said, the rumble of his voice, carrying into Marcus’ hearing through his body.

Victor said over a public channel our Xiniti implants monitored, “I sense you coming. You’ll want to hurry or be more stealthy.”

Even with the Rocket suit’s sensors, I couldn’t see him in detail, but my HUD showed him as a dot on the peak of the mountain ahead of me. Better, Jaclyn was closer, running up the bottom of the slope with every step throwing grey dust through the air behind her for the mystification of future astronauts.

Then came a visible purple flash around Victor’s dot on the slope along with the stream from Marcus’ camera. They were gone.

It wasn’t instant, but close. The location device in Marcus’ suit reestablished contact with a ping and then the location flashed in my HUD along with a new view.

They stood in an empty plain of gray. It wasn’t completely flat. There were rocks and a ring in the distance around them. They were in the middle of a crater. Worse, they were 1000 miles away nearly on the other side of the Moon.

Jaclyn and I both turned even though she had to be feeling the same way I was. Even if we told the League “jet” to meet us, turned on the cloak, and flew down there, Victor had all the time in the world to kill Marcus. We had no hope of catching Victor without him doing this again.

“Ghost and Cap… Can you make it to the ship?” It would add time, but not much in the grand scheme of things. They were close.

“Maybe,” Cap said, aiming a bright, white beam at a group of monkeys.

Rachel floated to her side, axe in hand, her mouth shut, face blank without any of the playfulness she typically brought to a fight. I guessed she might be pushing her way through pain.

Over the public channel, Victor said, “You can’t catch me. I’m going to kill this one and then I’m going to grab another of you and kill you one by one until you either kill me or you’re all gone. Then I’ll go back to my master with what I know about the device and he’ll do what he will.”

Purple flashed. Victor disappeared and Marcus fell to the lunar soil, reforming into a humanoid form, looking around in case Victor reappeared.

Marcus had good instincts. Victor reappeared behind him, eyes glowing, ready to fire.

Not so much moving as reforming and aiming for Victor, Marcus changed from being a humanoid to a dark ribbon of material expanding toward Victor’s face, entering through his nose and open mouth, exiting through the eyes.

In his way, he’d moved as fast as Jaclyn but concentrated all of that force into a smaller area than she could. We’d talked about this as a possible attack in Stapledon. He’d even practiced it. We’d agreed that a situation where he might use it wasn’t likely to come up.

He withdrew from Victor’s body, remaining a ribbon, poised to dive in again if necessary—if Victor began to regenerate maybe.

Victor didn’t.

He lay on the surface of the moon, his body leaking blood or whatever fluid had replaced it, darkening the gray soil until it dried out.