Rain looked over his shoulders. Lung’s end of the stage was closest to us, and the Fallen were closest to Lung. They didn’t have much of a ‘tribe’, exactly—the other gangs that they’d roped into their circle to defend against the good guys were too low-level to contribute much to the prison population. Dealers and bikers. It meant that they were mostly limited to a gathering of ex-Teacher followers.

“I don’t think they’ll start anything. You’ve gotta have balls and be stupid to pick a fight when the rest of the crowd could come after you, or if Goddess could get upset. Shitty as he is, I don’t think Seir is that stupid and that brave.”

The Fallen weren’t my only concern. I looked at Cryptid, who was still transforming. More feathers now. It was a form that looked pretty much exactly like his earlier shape. The twisted-up wingless bird with the hooked beak, and a neck that looked broken, head dangling. The point of the beak grazed skin where feathers were pushing through, more spearlike than featherlike as they were slick with moisture, and where the beak grazed, it left a line of oozing blood.

“What’s Cryptid’s form there?” I asked.

“No idea,” Sveta answered me. Others shook their heads.

“He likes birds for the grieving-sad-pensive-thinking realm of things,” Lookout said.

“I’ve never seen him change,” Rain said, observing. “And he’s changed a few times today. Twice earlier in the day, before anything even happened, then to this bird form, he changed later towhatever he was just a few minutes ago, with the ridge of cysts… and now back to this? Did he—”

Rain stopped mid-question, looking at me.

“Did he get help from Amy?” I asked. The word sounded wrong in my mouth. “Panacea? I don’t know.”

“He might hurt tomorrow,” Byron said.

“Maybe,” I agreed. It might have sounded callous to say it out loud, but the pain he’d suffer tomorrow was the least of my concerns. Every time I looked his way, I was trying to find some eye contact, some signal, anything that would suggest he was working with the group. I felt like I was seeing the opposite dynamic at play.

I saw him limp up behind Amy, the head swung like a pendulum, and he had to catch it with a talon-hand to keep it from hitting Amy. Amy said something to him.

My skin crawled.

“Lookout,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I know you hate being left behind, but—”

“No,” she said.

“It would make it easier to gloss over the Monokeros thing if you were with Natalie and not front-and-center in front of Goddess,” I said. Not my only reason.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to split up.”

“Even if staying with the group in the short term means Goddess might get worried again, assigning you another babysitter?”

“Even if,” Lookout said.