I looked back for Natalie, and saw her in the company of the other staff that had been taken into custody. It was a dangerous atmosphere, with the guard-prisoner relationship reversed, and a lot of dangerous prisoners around. Monokeros was of a certain kind of evil, but she wasn’t the only evil person around here. If one of those people decided to hurt Natalie, would anyone stop them?

“Breakthrough,” Goddess said. She looked at Damsel, who was approaching. “In a sense.”

“Most of us,” Lookout said. Then she leaned over to greet Byron, Rain and me with a, “Hi.”

“You can have a luxury vehicle, and you can get your luxury vehicle with all of the extras,” Damsel said, raising her chin a little, claws moving at her side. “Both are good.”

“I don’t care,” Goddess said, annoyed. “My danger sense is telling me something’s coming, and it’s not the kind of danger I have a lot of experience with. Destroying the drugs didn’t help. I think Teacher is doing something, and you have the most information about him and what he’s doing. Solve it.”

“We need more information than that,” I said. “What is your danger sense telling you? How does it function?”

“My power is a feeling,” she said. “It can come from a direction. It tastes of intent. It has flavors depending on the kind of danger. This tastes hollow, and it feels big. There’s no direction to it. The opposite, the lack of direction is the danger.”

“Have you felt anything like this before?” I asked.

“I felt something roughly this big once. It was when the world was ending. The golden man.”

I drew in a deep breath, looking at the others. They seemed about as alarmed by that as I was.

“You said it’s big. World ending… but this is a small world. One penal colony,” Rain suggested.

“When I was pulled into a battlefield, that world was small too, Precipice. The scale is similar.”

“Broken trigger?” Byron suggested.

“The powers that have gone wild?” Goddess asked. “It could be. But even that would feel it has direction. An enemy, or a power source.”

“We’ve heard of incidents where one person became a very large-scale effect. The kind that would cover this whole colony, and then some,” I said. “I think the catch is that most precogs and danger sensers can’t see triggers coming, even broken ones.”

Goddess shook her head, but she didn’t offer anything specific that would clarify matters. I felt my heartbeat accelerate some, just from seeing her this concerned.