We all recovered fairly quickly. I had a cloudboard under me before I had reached the apex of where the explosion threw me. Nat and Kat had done the same. Jack didn’t recover so much as bounce off the cloud about fifty feet away. Where he had exploded was now a spherical divot in the cloud, like someone had taken an ice cream scoop to it.
“What the fuck was that?” Jack asked as soon as he righted himself. “Why do I sound funny?”
“You sound fine to us,” Nat said.
“Why are you talking like that? How are you talking like that? Step off the reverb switch.”
“Fucking Christ!” Kate swore. “He’s hearing double, just like Reilly did.”
Nat and Kate turned their attention to me, and by attention, it was twin gazes of contempt and hatred.
“I have no idea what I did,” I said in defense.
An explosion sounded as Jack tried to fire off lightning in my direction.
“Two of them, now.” Nat sighed.
“I say we leave their asses and get hammered,” Kate said.
“Really tempting, right now, but they’ll probably kill each other.”
“Having trouble figuring out why that’s bad. Not like they’re any good to us like this.”
Another, albeit lesser, explosion sounded.
“Oops,” I said.