“You talk to rodents?” Rain asked.

“No. Not mush. Only crathy people talk to rodenth. But rodenth talk to me. Very different.”

“Handy,” Rain said.

“Yes. But we don’t need handy. We need firepower,” Ratcatcher said.

“Still?” Tristan asked.

“I’ll come,” Swansong said. “If the rest of you think you’ll be okay?”

The rest of us. Tristan, myself, and Rain.

“Why go?” Tristan asked.

“Because I trust myself more doing this than I do being near that.”

“Can you fight in tunnelth?” Ratcatcher asked.

Above, Damsel shook her head, as if it was already known.

“We’ll find out,” Swansong said, contradicting her ‘sister’. “But I know I’m very good at fighting brutes like Lung. Too good. I don’t want to put myself in that situation again, not this soon.”

“I… can’t argue with that,” Tress said.

“Take my phone,” Capricorn told Crystalclear. “We’ll stay in touch.”

Crystalclear nodded.

As a quartet, Ratcatcher, Crystalclear, Swansong, and Tress hurried for a spot at the midpoint between three buildings. If there was an access hatch, I didn’t see it. Women looking down from balconies hurled obscenities, complained about the delays for their dinner, and shouted to each other, asking what was going on with us being down here and the fires at the gate.

It left Capricorn, Rain, and I as the strike squad. When we reunited with the others, we would have Goddess and Lookout. If there was anyone at the other side of the portal, then we could sure use them too.

But Lung was a problem.

And—I moved as Tristan took a step forward. My hand caught him right in the middle of the chest. He stopped where he was, me in front of him, hand against his chest.

Lung was a problem, but so was Tristan.

My hand moved down to his gauntlet. I grabbed it and lifted it. Had we been on the other side of the portal, the gauntlet would have been cleaned by the freezing rain. It wasn’t cleaned.

“I think we need Byron,” I said, moving his hand so the light highlighted where the blood was. “We can’t have you acting like you did with that guard.”

“He had something going on mentally. Wouldn’t stop,” Tristan said. “It wasn’t as uncontrolled as it looked. I was just trying to apply enough force to get him to stop.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“You told me to rein you in. I’m reining. We need Byron.”

Tristan was still for a long moment.

Too long a moment. The fires were growing in the distance, and there was too much going on.

“No joking here, Tristan. Change.”

“You had to ask like that. Evoking the Tristan–Byron protocol?”

“Yeah?”

“If you ask, I’m switching,” he said. “Just—there’s no guarantee he’s on board.”