Goddess finished talking to the team she had just recruited. Arms folded, she surveyed her soldiers, and her soldiers, even the roughest of them, seemed to look up at her in turn. She turned her head and looked over to the horizon. Earth Gimel’s Megalopolis glittered.

I watched with a heavy heart and a growing feeling of trepidation as Cryptid and Amy joined a small handful of others, forming something of a line. Amy at Goddess’s right hand. Cryptid a couple of spaces over, growing black feathers, his neck extending. He looked at us, and then he looked away.

Mute, yet capable of saying everything with a single look.

I looked back at Lookout, and I saw that she’d been happy to confirm the others were okay, and now she was geeking out with Rain and another cape I didn’t recognize. They were pointing at the prosthetic suit of Sveta’s I still carried.

Only Sveta was really paying attention like I was, watching Amy and watching our teammate. She had been traumatized on a level by what had happened with the Irregulars.

That story was repeating itself, at least on one small front. Betrayal, inexplicable.

Communicated in one look: he was with Goddess, as we were, but he was no longer one of us.

Gleaming 9.15

We had enemies here. We had put Monokeros in an extended time out, and there was nothing saying that any of our enemies here could decide to do the same thing to us, or worse. There were Fallen, tertiary members of Prancer’s group, old Birdcage villains like Monokeros who could be a danger to anyone, and any number of ex-prisoners who might have unkind views when it came to heroes.

The rain wasn’t as intense or driving as it had been before, but it was still a factor, still freezing most things. Prisoners were using forcefields to shield themselves, because they didn’t have jackets, and the prison uniforms, while warm, weren’t outdoor clothes. The ground was hard with frost and ice, except for where the passage of dozens of feet warmed it and turned it into mud.

I glanced at Goddess’s makeshift platform. The portal that led from Gimel to the interim world had been set on a hill with some lesser structures on it, the land leveled out. The platform was a large rock that had been cleaved in half, forming a flat sheet of rock with a crisp edge that would dull with a few more winters and rainy seasons. I could see the top half in pieces further down the slope, now serving as seats or perches for various capes in Goddess’s battle line. The rain traced a loose fractal pattern as it wicked off of Goddess’s bubble of telekinesis.