"What's wrong, Amber?" Mom stopped a couple of steps down the road, not noticing right away that Amber had actually stopped. "There's more interesting things to–" She stopped when she saw the scenes on the TV news, and she silently moved back to somewhere she could easily take in the pictures of a mountain villa, smashed open like a sandcastle. Shaky phone-camera footage of holidaymakers crying in panic as policemen in strange uniforms shepherded them into busses set aside for the evacuation. Scrolling text at the bottom of the screen counted off the dead, missing, and injured, but the numbers were too high to give any of them a name.

Mom was saying something else, but Amber didn't hear her. She could only think about what those people must be going through. She wished she could be there, even if there was probably nothing she could have done. Last time had been different, she hadn't even heard the news until people were being more thoughtful about it, the news trying to guess what might have happened, and talking about reconstruction and aid efforts. Now this was breaking news, something happening right now on the other side of the world, and Amber felt sick as she watched the images of the devastated buildings and people screaming.

Mom was tugging at her hand, but she barely noticed. She was in a bubble with the silent broadcast, and everything else was just a dream. She watched people running across a cobbled square, tears in their eyes, and she could almost hear the screaming. Suddenly there was silence. Amber reeled back, and staggered into the crystal wall behind her.

"Pull yourself together!" Jack yelled, his face only a few inches away.

"There's a monster..." Amber stammered.

"There's at least six, in different parts of the world. The Enemy's trying to confuse us with decoys."

"Decoys?" Amber didn't quite get it, her head was still spinning from being dragged here while she was awake, "Distract us from what?"

"From the one that's attacking us right now," Arnie filled in, "Violet and Alex didn't sense it because of all of the others, I was lucky I saw." She turned to Mel as he suddenly appeared, looking around in surprise.

"Mel, you're in the Churchill Arcade? I saw a monster but it's moving away from me. I guess it's homing in on one of you."

"Both of us," Mel nodded, "Monica suggested we..."

"Less talking, more action," Jack barked, "Meet up, and get out of that thing's path."

Amber was falling to the pavement, didn't know where she was for a moment. She'd been in Violet's dream for a short conversation, but it had been less than a second for her body. Mom was diving down to catch her, but there probably hadn't been time to realise her heart had stopped for a single beat.

"Amber!" Mom was screaming. The cheerful expression she'd been trying to hold together cracked as soon as everything went wrong. Amber did her best to get an arm under herself before she hit the ground, but she landed heavily and she knew she'd have a bruise for weeks.

"Sorry, Mom," she muttered, but there was no way she'd be heard over all the other people yelling. Some of them were running, but in opposite directions. The televisions in front of them were now showing a big splash that said "Breaking News!", and reporters talking a lot more urgently about the current situation. The ticker at the bottom of the screen now mentioned an explosion at the Westburton Street markets, and possible structural damage to the Churchill Arcade. They were right in the middle of the chaos now, but there was no mention of an attacking demon. Of course there wasn't.

Mom grabbed Amber in both arms and carried her away, not waiting to see if she was hurt. Tears were streaming down her face, and the only thing she could think about now was getting away. A lot of the people around them seemed to have the same idea, but nobody could tell quite where the sounds of explosions and shrieking metal were coming from. There were people running in all directions, or stopping to check their phones in the hope of more news.

Amber put her arms around Mom's neck and held her tight, shaking with fear. She'd thought she was okay with the idea of fighting a monster, even if she couldn't win. But getting Mom in the middle of this kind of problem was really a different thing. This wasn't what she'd signed up for. Then she closed her eyes, trusting Mom to run in the right direction for now.

She hadn't seen the vivid red flare inside the Enemy when he'd come to find her outside school. She'd had to take Mel's word for it. But now she'd been practising, and she knew she could sense Mel's orange glow if she tried hard. If she knew where he was, or where Arnie was, she was sure she'd feel a bit safer. And just like that, she could see colours glowing in the background, even with her eyes closed. Yellow and purple, and a deep, sickly blue-grey towering over all of them. With a monster so close, it seemed that all of her ancestral powers were magnified, and she knew that she'd be able to follow the others even with walls in between.

"Up there!" she yelled, pointing at a staircase. The arcade had shops on two or three levels in different places, and the galleries were normally accessed by huge glass and chrome escalators at the big junctions. But every shopping centre had stairwells in case the power went out, and those weren't currently crowded by swarms of people trying to get down to ground level.

"We're getting out, honey," Mom sobbed, already struggling with the distance she'd carried Amber.

"Everyone's running down, the atrium will be packed!" Amber yelled, just hoping Mom could hear her over the shouts of the crowd, "It'll be faster upstairs, and there's doors out onto Alder Avenue, by the bridge. I saw Mel up there."

Mom didn't argue, but ran towards the stairs. It must have been a really hard thing to admit, but she knew that Amber thought faster than she did in an emergency. Amber wondered herself if that was just a talent, or something that all of the Rainbow Knights could do. It would make sense, if they'd spent hundreds of lifetimes learning not to panic.

"Amber!" a voice called out, and it took her a few seconds to recognise Arnie. The girl was wearing the same sports kit she usually showed up with in the dreams, but the colours were green and gold rather than faintly-glowing violet. Amber hadn't expected her to be there, after she'd been on the other side of the monster only a minute before. But then Arnie's power was getting to where she needed to be quickly. "Are you okay?"

Mom didn't even think to ask who the girl was. She wasn't thinking at all, except for following the signs to find the fastest way out of here.

"I saw Mel heading that way," Amber replied, "We have to find him."

"This way," Arnie grabbed Mom's hand to lead her along, "It's a shortcut." She ducked into a massive toy store, between aisles stacked to the ceiling with super bouncy balls in a thousand colours, and then past a dizzying array of dolls and action figures. Amber could have got lost for a whole day in there, trying to find all the things she wanted. But right now the only thing she wanted was up a low ramp that connected the store to another building on the other side of the main road, a half level higher. There were vending machines along the bridge, and if you weren't paying attention to the traffic sounds outside you might not even realise that you were running fifteen feet above a busy street. Mel was waiting for them on the other side, wrestling with a door marked 'emergency only' that led into an echoing stairwell. There was a girl standing beside him, a little older than Amber, with features that seemed slightly exotic but not quite distinctive enough to pin down her father's ethnicity. This must be Cherry, the niece who Mel always said Amber reminded him of.

Amber would have been a lot happier if the girl wasn't here. She didn't deserve to be caught up in a monster attack, nobody did. And it was pretty clear that this was Mom and Mel making some kind of plans to introduce the two girls to each other. Amber knew Mom was worried that she only had one real friend. But if her attempts to make more led an innocent kid into the path of the demon, that wasn't worth thinking about.

"Amber!" Mel yelled back as he heard their footsteps approaching, "Arnie! This way!"

"Nuh-uh," Arnie shook her head, and went towards a different door. Amber's gaze followed her, but Mom kept focused on Mel.

"We should make sure that girl's alright," Mom muttered distractedly, completely lost now.

"She must know a quicker way out," Mel let go of the door he was struggling with, and was almost following Arnie when Amber stopped him.

"She's not going for an exit," Amber whispered, not quite believing what she was about to say. "She's going to the roof. We have to fight the monster. You need to get Mom and Cherry out of here."

She closed her eyes when Mel was still trying to figure out the subtext under those words. She could feel a prickling at the base of her neck, and she was sure that Mel would be able to see the light of a green ancestral spirit inside her eyes, as well as her own.

"You're sure you're ready to do this?" Jack's voice asked in the back of her mind, but he knew he wouldn't be there to share his powers unless she was certain. Moving as one, they threw their powers behind Amber's fist as it lashed out. An emergency exit blocked by a janitor's cart wasn't going to slow them down; they hit a knot in the heavy timber, and the door split into three pieces.

She knew Mel would be torn between all the paths, but she was sure he'd make the right choice. He was a diviner, not a fighter, and the biggest thing he could do right now was make sure the mortals were safe. Really, Amber wasn't a fighter either. But she tried to reassure the others by snatching a sword off the nearest shelf as she strode away. It was hollow plastic, in a sickening combination of neon colours that could only appeal to a boy up to the age of five. But it was long enough to trail on the ground behind her as she slung it over her shoulder, and with just a moment's concentration the foam-rubber padding along the blade became old steel, stained in a hundred battles, and with ancient runes starting to glow faintly.

Amber smiled. Making trinkets at the kitchen table was her power idling, a little discharge earthing itself like a static shock. This was the real thunderbolt in her hands now, ancient power that nobody living today could even compare to.

"Except magic," Jack reminded her, an inner voice urging caution, "Remember, the Enemy's power is comparable to all of ours together. I'm only doing this because I know you couldn't dissuade Arnie now. I don't want to lose any of us at this point, especially not when we need the Princess so urgently."

"I know. And I don't need your power right now, you're the backup plan. Don't distract me."