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them hard, and we’d sure as anything took them down. The three of us, we’d been together a long time—a long damn time.
    “I’ve got stories, I mean, we all got stories, don’t we? But we couldn’t do it that time. Couldn’t figure a way out. Just . . . couldn’t, I guess.
    “And I know what . . . I know what it meant to you all out there. I know that you all trusted us to do what was right. Because you’d been with us; you’d been fighting with us for Lord knows how long. Each one of y’all in one way or another had saved each of us. And probably we’d saved you. So there was something to be counted on there, when the three of us . . . when we tried to figure out what to do. We knew that.
    “We all thought there must be a better way. A way to do it so you all wouldn’t have to give up what you did. But, hell, we couldn’t get at it. And there wasn’t that much time, and the world was pretty close to coming to an end. The Blue, that damn wave of energy, digging into the horizon. And I know, lot of us in this room—to a lot of us—that ain’t all that big a deal. That there’s just another day. But this, it felt different, more permanent somehow, I don’t know, just a gut feeling, but we felt it. We all agreed, the three of us agreed, we all felt it.
    “We had to make a decision, and we decided to do what we did. Star-Knight had a solution, and we took it. We needed everything, everything you all could provide that day to put a stop to that thing from killing our world. All your powers to stop that damn thing. And someone had to gather that, take Star-Knight’s flame belt and take all that power and go into The Blue and confront it head-on like, close the slash it was leaking through, stop it from coming. And we knew, whoever went, he’d die, burn up in The Blue.
    “Ultimate, he insisted. I can tell you that Star-Knight and me, well we ain’t shy. To say the least. The both of us were screaming at him to let us be the one to go. But he wasn’t having it. He just put out his hand . . . just, well just like this. Just put out his hand in front of him. And he cut it through the air. We told him that he was . . . what he meant to us. That we couldn’t lose him.
    “But he just put out his hand out, and he cut us off. ‘This is mine,’ that’s what he said. ‘This is mine.’ I don’t . . . well, I’m not sure exactly what it meant, but I knew there weren’t words that needed to be said after that. And then he took the belt and flew off and left us behind. All ourpowers, we gave it to him. He took everything with him, and he left us all behind.
    “And he wasn’t like us; we weren’t his people. He was built, not born. But some men, I suppose, are like that. Some men come to us not from an ideal place. They got a past they don’t like or a father or whatever. They got something makes them different. And some men they let that weigh on them hard like and just drown them. They’re strangers, and they never get to be nothing but that.
    “But that wasn’t Ultimate’s attitude at all, was it? He wasn’t all human. But he didn’t let that stop him from embracing what was best in us, in all of us. I don’t know. Maybe as an outsider he could see it better. Maybe because he wasn’t all too sure how he fit in, he went a little harder.
    “I bring that up now—and I know I’ve been talking for some time, and y’all certainly got better things to do than listen to an old, broken man jaw on and on—but I think it’s important to bring that up, because it does remind me of the people here. You all here today.
    “We all, we’re all strangers, ain’t we? Our abilities—they set us apart. Made it tough to relate to normal life, to just go about our goings about like others do. We don’t like to say that, I know, but that’s the truth of it. We’ve been through stuff, seen stuff, that normal folk can’t relate to really. We come from a place that divides us from them. Ain’t no two ways