“Tell them nothing except that their job is done. My team will handle it. If I can’t resolve this, there won’t be anything your coalition can do. Eat the good food you were rationing out, drink. The more you consume, the less you need to take back.”

The wounded man nodded, but he looked worried. He hurried forward to get to the gate and hold it open for her.

The main tent was a gathering place and a dining hall both. People were gathered out front and at tables within. Out front was fine, with only a few oddities, like a handful of people in costume standing up as she approached.

Within the mess tent was a different story. The tension in the room was palpable. The capes on duty took up three quarters of the tent, sitting at their tables or standing nearby. Cards and some of the food from the were scattered across the surfaces. There wasn’t a buzz of conversation, and there was a noticeable gap between the people at the three tables and the denizens of the last table, furthest from the tent’s opening.

Silent stares accompanied her on her way to the far table, aimed at her from both sides.

The people at the far table were hers. Not hostile, but not necessarily talkers, either. They wore uniforms with a fair degree of cohesiveness running through them, but they were more united by the masks they wore.

A woman with striking tattoos around the eyes, in black, red, and yellow, the colors too solid and bright for an actual tattoo. She had been one of the heroes that had come after Valkyrie, back when Valkyrie had been Glaistig Uaine. Glaistig Uaine had broken the woman until she was only barely on the cusp of life, and then pulled the woman’s soul from her body.

A skinny man with no hair on his skeletally gaunt head. She remembered him having hair when she had watched him die. A goon in the Birdcage who had made a mutinous bid for power and lost. He had been turned away by each cell block leader in turn before venturing into the depths of the Birdcage, where prisoners too dangerous for a cell block had been put. He hadn’t survived his first run-in.

A handsome black man had a mark on his face, akin to vitiligo, but not quite the albino white that came with vitiligo. A loose representation of a skull, drawn on his face in a lighter brown.

There were others. Some had more extreme touches than others. A consequence of how information was stored. Longer-term storage reduced things down more, put information such as what people wore on their skin into the same categories as the skin itself.

And there was no storage longer-term than death.

“Cleo, Naja Haje. Voltrage, Third Execution. Edgeless, Forward Facing.”