My hope was that by having Goddess there, we could seal her in and scramble the signal. We had people on the inside we could reach out to, but my real hope was that her power would be of the wide-reaching sort that didn’t reach through dimensions. If we could cut off the flow and close the doors… maybe this alleged influence would slip away. Breakthrough would be free.

Dinner was being canceled relatively quietly. Relatively because the prisoners were complaining, balking. They wanted their grub. But Foresight had the assistant warden in their corner, and he’d made the calls necessary.

“Computer screens at one end of the prison are flickering,” Kenzie reported. She hit buttons. The super-low-res copies of the security screens in question were blown up large on one wall. They showed what had to be at least third-hand video feeds. Computer screens caught on one security camera above them, viewed through another daisy chain of security apparatuses, and then displayed on our wall.

Sure enough, one computer monitor blacked out, fritzed, and then went normal. A moment later, an entire row flickered, one by one, left to right.

“He’s sending his army in. They know something’s wrong,” Kenzie remarked.

“We don’t have eyes on them?”

She shook her head. “I think… they’re out on the outskirts of the prison.”

“Alright,” I said.

We didn’t have Goddess in our net. As wrong as that felt…

I glanced over at Byron. He met my eyes.

“Shut the door,” I said. “He’s got just enough of an army in there to lose all plausible deniability.”

“Shutting the door, blue-green tint. We’ll see how fast his hornet’s nest of underlings figure out what we did.”

Door shut. Ankle-bombs disabled for now and with nobody really in a position to want to use them, provided things stayed peaceful. Teacher’s forces were caught with their pants down and no communication or way back to their leadership. Hero teams were on the periphery, with eyes on the suspicious, primed to join in if they needed to quell riots.

This didn’t feel over.

The door opened, and my first thought was Cryptid. Our messenger.

It wasn’t him. Everyone in the room stood up a little straighter. Natalie backed up a step.

Goddess was as dry as a bone as she stepped into our headquarters. Amy was a step behind her, looking less confident than I’d seen her yet, before or after everything.

“I’ve been told it’s done. Everything’s ready for my arrival?”

“Yeah,” Byron said. “I guess it is.”

“You’ll all come to the prison, then,” she said. “You. You have no powers?”

“N-no,” Natalie stuttered.

“You’ll come as well. Witness.”

“But—”

“It’s not a fucking request. Don’t try my patience.”

“Okay,” Natalie said, not sounding happy about it.

“Why are we going?” I asked. I met Amy’s eyes. She looked away.