My next observation was how easy it was to underestimate Jody’s speed. He went from almost stopped to moving away from Jaclyn nearly too fast to track.

I say nearly because my implant tracked him, and more to the point, so could Jaclyn’s.

She moved in his direction, aiming a kick toward his knee. I couldn’t see if she missed, but deduced it from how he could still run.

He didn’t stick around to fight her, running toward the fence on the northwest side of their base. From the glitter around where his hands would be, I realized that he must have drawn his knives.

He might not have realized that all of our armor had been updated to make the monomolecular edges of his blades fail. Though his knives had failed against me, they’d worked against Alex (who hadn’t updated). On the other hand, he might have gotten an update from Rook.

Worse, he might have learned how to phase blades in once past the armor like Rachel did.

Still, he wasn’t turning to face her, so the blades were more of a security blanket for now.

Jaclyn didn’t give up even knowing that he outclassed her in terms of speed. Still running, she threw a series of small balls I’d designed for her.

They were bots, but since she could throw them at a higher speed than my designs could fly, I’d gone with balls.

She threw three in succession while Jody ducked and weaved to avoid them. Each one was a ball of goo that exploded ten feet in all directions on contact.

She’d thrown them in a pattern designed to cast a wide net and overlap. It turned into an illustration of why speedsters are hard to fight because Jody dodged all of them.

And he really was dodging as opposed to phasing through, meaning that it was probably too complicated or too tiring to run at that speed, fight, and also phase.

He even used the knives, cutting off a section of goo that hit his leg.

Though that didn’t take him down, the combination of dodging and cutting meant he still wasn’t going at his maximum speed—which meant we had a chance.

Throwing the balls may have slowed Jaclyn down, but not much. She continued running, jumping over to the other side of the 20-foot-wide circle of goo threads her weapons had released.

While Jody had more speed to work with, he didn’t have her strength or the option of jumping. Instead, he looked down, stepping in the goo-free spots.

He didn’t do it slowly either, but between the implant and my brain, I could see him even if it was still a little blurry.

While all that was happening, Izzy and Daniel had exited the van. Through our unintentional connection, I could feel Daniel try to grab Jody with telekinesis, but not successfully.

If Daniel could see something, he could take a shot at it, but Jody still moved too quickly for him to zero in.

From the little shifts in Jody’s stance as he ran, I suspected he felt the air around him move in response to Daniel’s mental swipes. Despite having to dodge them, he kept his head enough not to step on a goo strand or fall.

He even avoided coming within easy reach of Jaclyn. She was within ten feet, but not close enough. The moment he hit a section of grass without goo, the change in speed reminded me of Star Trek’s ships hitting warp. He turned from blurry human into a hard-to-define shape moving as a streak across the lawn.

Jaclyn didn’t let him go. She ran after him and even though I knew from Stapledon that Jody was faster, the distance didn’t seem to be growing. Also, she wasn’t alone. While Jody was running and hopping through the goo, Izzy almost made it to him.

She couldn’t reach him, but she was only ten feet behind Jaclyn and gaining.

As the silver blur of Jody’s costume neared the fence, two more of our attacks fired off—Julie’s voice and Cassie’s gun. My sonics picked Julie narrowcasting her voice at him, almost as a sniper might, shouting, “Stop!”

Either he resisted or she missed and I’d have bet on the latter.

How he planned to get over the fence, I didn’t know, but as he closed with it, a blast of light fired from the roof of a nearby row house. Assuming Cassie was sticking with the plan, she was firing to blind and intimidate.

It worked—partly. She didn’t blind him, though he did raise up an arm to cover his eyes. Light hit in front of him and he had to know about Cassie’s gun. He’d seen it burn objects in training and alien dinosaurs to ash.

He turned away from the fence, running parallel to it as Cassie’s beam burned the grass behind him.

Though he might be able to ignore inertia and turn at a right angle, Jaclyn and Izzy couldn’t. Izzy overshot, spinning in the air as she curved toward him. Jaclyn had to jump over the fence, slide on slippery mushroom remains, and run down the road behind and to the side of Jody.

I hadn’t been sitting still during all of that. As the seconds passed like hours, I’d opened the door of the van, jumped out and blasted away with the rockets, using anti-gravity to boost my speed. I had no chance of catching him, but we weren’t done. All I had to do was get into position to help.