“Uh,” I said. As Glory Girl and as a member of the Patrol, I’d occasionally run into situations like this, when dealing with people who were wholly unreasonable or hampered in their reasoning. They never got any easier to deal with. “…I’m mostly trying to aim for a happy middle ground between self-trust, being durable enough to be close to the front where we can see what’s going on, and knowing the members of the team. Even if we accept you’re confident, you can’t take a bullet.”

“Mmm. I suppose.”

“Tristan, can you make us shields? One for each of us? More like the shields SWAT teams and Patrol teams have than anything else.”

“It’ll be heavy.”

“Worst-case scenario, it breaks in my hands.”

“Sure.”

I nodded, thinking. “Damsel—is it okay if I call you that?”

“Mm hmm.”

“If there’s trouble, can we count on you to give us a side area to duck into? If you put a hole in the wall, will it be okay? Do you know if it’ll make it more likely to cave in, doing what it does, swirling things around, or will it be less likely?”

“No idea. We don’t lose much by trying,” Damsel said. “Dirtying my prison-issue shoes?”

“Except a possible cave-in of the whole tunnel,” Rain said.

“Give me some credit,” Damsel said, her nose rising a fraction. “If the whole tunnel collapses, it’ll be because I wanted it to.”

“Great,” Rain said.

“And Lookout,” I said. “Any camera feeds down here? Drones you can deploy? The more we know about what’s going on—”

She was already shaking her head.

“No cameras down here.”

Lookout shook her head again. “Connecting down-here to everything would defeat the purpose. It’s a closed, secondary situation and a secret escape route for prison staff in case of emergencies.”

“Not a very good secret,” I observed.

“No. Um! Um, I don’t have any ongoing camera footage down here, but I can find the old footage from when they headed this way. Some of it’s dead and it might not have any fancy extra perks like thermal vision, seeing backward in time or physical representations of social relationships—”

“You can get your cameras to track social relationships?” Rain asked.

“She said she can take pictures of the past and you’re focusing on that?” Monokeros asked, dry.

“Uh, yeah,” Rain said. The rest of us nodded.

Monokeros seemed deeply bothered by that. If there was a question to be asked or something to be made of it, it was drowned out by Lookout talking, her voice insistent.

“I’m saying stuff like that. When it’s cameras I make a lot of the time I can get them to pick up other noise and waves and junk, and later if I want to toy with the feed or go enhance, enhance, enhance, then maybe I can.”