“Even though Teacher wouldn’t want you to?” Rain asked.

“Of course even fucking though fucking Teacher wouldn’t fucking want me to,” Thane said, and he put enough clarity and emotion into each ‘fucking’ that it didn’t make a mess of the sentence. “I’m wearing one of the damn things.”

He shook his ankle to demonstrate.

“He told Rain and Byron when we took him back to lash him to a light fixture,” Tristan said. “Not that this is the best outcome.”

This. The bombs were ineffective now. The prisoners were free. United under an effective leader.

“We need to save Cryptid,” Sveta said, within the sphere. “And Natalie.”

“Yes,” Lookout said. “Please.”

I could look across the group and I could see the people who had very little fight left in them. Me. Ashley. Sveta. Rain had taken a bit of a beating, but that was usual.

By contrast, Lookout and Capricorn looked fairly eager to go. I knew that they had their own issues. That Tristan was on edge from earlier in the night, still battling some demon I didn’t know the name of. Lookout’s demon was named Lookout, accompanied by a yin-yang extension of that struggle, currently in the form of Monokeros.

“The worst of it’s over. Let’s focus our energies on those two, do what we can to minimize the damage,” I said.

“It’s not over,” Crystalclear said. “Let me… assert my authority on that.”

“Is that your vision?” Lookout asked. “Is it something you see?”

That’s not the authority he means, I thought. He means the master–stranger protocols.

I had to mentally reorient my perspective. This isn’t over? It felt over.

“…if my phone wasn’t broken, I’d really really like to get a reading of how your crystals work and how you see through them, and—”

Rain nudged Lookout’s shoulder with one elbow.

“—and yeah,” she terminated early.

“It’s not something I see,” Crystalclear said. “It seems pretty obvious, but I don’t know how to handle this. It’s freaky to see.”

“It’s not something you see, it’s just that you see as freaky?” Lookout prompted him.

“Yes,” he said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“I’m going to handwave it and say my crystal-vision breaks the rules when it comes to seeing stuff.”

“Oh, duh.”

“You’re leader if you need to be, Crystalclear,” I said. Then, for Monokeros’s benefit, to cloud the master–stranger protocols, I explained, “You’re with Foresight, they were first on the scene. I’m okay following orders. You make the calls. If you say we should back off and make contact with our team another way…”