“Yes,” Amina confirmed without turning to look at the man towering behind her. “But there’s more. A single pulse bomb is bad in isolation, but not enough to do more than a little damage. With two or more, they work in conjunction. They amplify each other.”

“What happens then?” Pisces asked.

Hime raised her eyes and signed, They blow a hole in the foundation of Cloudbreak. The entire city could crumble in an instant.

“How many were they planning on building?” Caledonia asked. “How many would it take to destroy the city?”

“They only had enough to build a single bomb.” Amina’s answer lacked the reassurance Caledonia was hoping for. “I’m not sure how many it would take. Five? Six? And depending on where they’re placed, it may take less. These things have a way of setting off chain reactions within structures . . . or mountains.”

“That’s it?” Pisces’s expression went slack.

“That’s good though, right?” Nettle was huddled close to the fire, knees drawn to her chin, all her earlier eagerness sapped by the news. “There was only one and we got it.”

No one could return Nettle’s hope, because they were all thinking the same thing: if they almost missed this one, how many others had they already missed?

“Where’s the crew?” Caledonia stood, straightening her shirt and twisting her hair back into a braid.

“Just outside.” Hesperus clenched his fists at his sides. “It was a small boat, so there are only two of them.”

“Bring them in.”

The room wasn’t set up for interrogation, but Caledonia stepped away from the chairs ringed around the fire to stand with her back to the observatory windows. Pine and Sledge returned with the two men and pushed them to their knees on the hard stone, taking positions behind them.

The men were wide-eyed and strained to keep their balance with hands bound behind their backs. One of them was sandy-skinned with a short beard that wrapped his face in ruddy bristles. The other had skin the pale brown of seashells with hair shaved clean on one side.

“Are you both Bullets?” Caledonia asked. “Or only one of you?”

Neither spoke, but the sandy-skinned man seemed to relax ever so slightly. As though now that he’d been caught, he didn’t have to hide anymore.

Caledonia nodded and Pine stepped forward, quickly divesting the man of his jacket to reveal the skin of his bare arms. There, along his left, were four orange scars.

“And you?” Caledonia asked the other man, whose mouth had gone slack with true horror.

“I didn’t know,” he muttered, shaking his head once. “I—I didn’t know what he was doing.”

Sledge had him on his feet in an instant, hauling him away and leaving the Bullet behind.