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The gun feels heavier in his hand the longer he aims it, but that’s the plan: Professor Quantum neutralizes the bomb, and Klepto neutralizes every other threat. He manages three shots before there’s a sting in his hand that isn’t as sharp as it should be.

Klepto pulls a knife fast enough the villain doesn’t get to his bomb – and there’s no way this isn’t the guy – but he’s bigger than Klepto by at least a head, and the fight goes quick. Everything goes fuzzy as Klepto thinks to himself: you had one fucking job.

Then the room is bright again. A fluorescent light shines into his eyes. It can’t have been that many minutes, because directly between him and the bomb, this asshole is going full force at Professor Quantum, and she’s losing. She’s not one of the heroes whose suit is designed to hide bloodstains, and there’s one spreading across her side, and Klepto yanks at the shithead’s powers as soon as he realizes why he’s up again so fast, but the asshole’s already sunk his knife in, just shy of the same spot.

The motherfucker’s playing with her. The knife Klepto still happens to be holding – and that’s confirmation if anything is – is the only thing keeping him in touch with reality as he swings out, aiming for the neck, or anywhere convenient. It catches. Just a little, at first, but with Klepto’s power suppressing the regeneration, it’s enough. Blood soaks a little too fast into the cement to tell how much there is, but the villain’s heart is slowing and the blood is still soaking, and Klepto’s powers are clamped down hard over his healing factor. He’s down. Professor Quantum’s down, too, though, and Klepto almost gives himself whiplash, turning to check.

Her suit is slippery as Klepto peels it away, and she has nothing but the standard medkit heroes always carry. She needs someone with training in field medicine. He’s always relied on there being some healing power close enough, because there always is, unless you travel to the sublevels of some hellhole like this. He slaps pressure bandages on.

He injects some anesthetic, too, but the painkillers are pills, and it’s too fucking slow. He shakes out a pair of them, anyway. “Let these dissolve under your tongue. It’s going to taste awful as fuck, but not as awful as it’ll feel not to have them.”

Professor Quantum opens her mouth and lets him drop them in, her voice coming out in a mumble that at least reassures him she’s following his instructions. “He reset the timer. I think he wanted to play some sort of game of whether or not we’d try to save ourselves.”

“It’s fine. He’s down. We have to get you out of here.” Klepto tries to help her to her feet, but the professor pushes him away.

“As I said, there’s no time. I need you to be my hands right now.” She rests one of hers over his like she’s illustrating the point, and the way he can feel her tremble, she is. She’s losing muscle tension by the moment, and he needs to get her help.

But the city needs someone whose hands are rock steady and strong enough to clip wires, and it needs that in a timeframe too short for Klepto to risk looking at the clock again. He tries not to remember what it said. He just lets her powers drift through him, following every instruction with a precision he only manages because they highlight parts of the machine he didn’t even realize were moving parts, traps he didn’t realize were traps, hidden switches and failsafes that prove this is a sadist getting off on it, not anyone willing to die for some obscure cause. Without the professor’s calm descriptions, this would just be glowing. She knows her own power, though, and she talks him through it like neither of them are panicking.

“Have you found the core? Okay, you want to stick that in the pack as soon as possible,” Professor Quantum says, and her voice is as steady as his hands, and Klepto manages to seal it off before checking on her again.

The voice talking him through his task was smooth and gentle and encouraging, and Corinth fell for it. He thought it meant she wasn’t that bad. But she’s barely there anymore when he picks her up, and the fuckface who did this to her isn’t there at all.

He was fucking kidding himself.

Somewhere in there, Klepto let his hold slip. He pulled back because he didn’t want to feel her heart slow to a standstill while he watched.

Klepto carries her out, but he has to do it at a run, and he can only run as fast a normal human can. He secures the bomb, because Professor Quantum made fucking sure he’ll always know that was the important part, and he picks her up, and he takes her back. It’s not really a consolation that her heart stops in someone else’s hands. Nothing short of killing her murderer could really be a consolation.