Unfair of me to confront him, but I’d felt I owed my family that—living and dead both. I’d have asked about Dean, but Dean had been injured early enough that I couldn’t imagine that he’d been swept up in the setup or rendered a casualty that might have been avoided if someone like Kaiser or one of the giantess twins had lived.

Thinking about it and Defiant’s place in it was heavy, so loaded that I felt inarticulately guilty by association alone.

I thought about the information and how we might share it. The old Parahumans Online was there, but it was bare bones, fractured, almost so messy that it was easier to restart than to fix.

“—if I wanted to make something like that, I’d have to make it a cube. I think that would be awfully silly to have a cube flying around.”

“You could make one of several cubes. Or a thousand cubes all strung together.”

“It’d look awful, and the connections between cubes would be weak points.”

“If you want to talk about artificial and abstract constraints, the person you should really talk to is Defiant.”

“Really?” Lookout was coming down the ramp with Dragon beside her, Dragon offering a guiding hand at her shoulder. Lookout looked at the cyborg in green and gold armor by the side of the ramp. “You break constraints?”

“I could help work out ways to minimize the size, the scale of the weak points, limit energy loss, even the look of it.”

“That’s awesome.”

“If you get a chance, on a day we’re not as busy, you should have a conversation with him. He’s not as intimidating as he looks.”

“Hm,” Defiant grunted.

Lookout looked up at Defiant, then turned back to Dragon. “But I want to keep talking to you. I could talk to you forever.”

“Not forever when we have work to do,” Dragon said, giving Lookout a couple of pats on the shoulder.

“Thank you for showing me stuff,” Lookout said, turning around, talking while she walked backward. I put out a hand as a just-in-case, because the ground was uneven, only recently covered in undergrowth, which had been uprooted and cut away to make this parkland accessible to humans.

Sure enough, Lookout tripped. I caught her weight with one hand between her shoulder blades. Cloaked tinkertech bounced against my wrist and forearm.

“It was my pleasure, Lookout,” Dragon said. To Defiant, she said, “We got an alert from Valkyrie.”

“I saw. No rest for the weary,” he said. “Do you want to go? Or should I call?”

“I’ll talk to her. We might have to go, either way. She doesn’t call often.”

“I’ll be out here until you’re ready to go.”

They were busy, so Lookout and I said our parting goodbyes then headed back in the direction of the others.