“We have good cameras,” Tristan said. “We’re not trying to be ominous here. We want to talk and get ahead of whatever is going on.”

A pause.

“Yeah. We’re Breakthrough.”

Tristan glanced at me, then put the phone down. “We can approach.”

“Can we get a camera in the air?” I asked Lookout.

“Yep! I’ve got just the one!”

She pulled the football-sized flying camera out of the case she’d been resting her feet on.

“Is that ‘just the one’ because it’s special, or because it’s your last one?” Rain asked.

“Both! It’s both.”

Sveta opened the door. Rain and Swansong were putting their masks on. Circuit-board face, with circuits cutting fissure-like zig-zags, gloves doing much the same, all black, with lines that glowed dully with a red light from within. A slight change from before. A hooded costume top covered his hair, which wasn’t new.

Using three arms, he slung a satchel-bag over his shoulder as he hopped down onto snow-wet road.

The Palanquin mercenaries were organized in a line along the front of one nice, modern looking building, looking like professionals with how they held themselves, though it was a very different thing from the hired mercenaries we’d seen around Tattletale.

Faultline, Gregor, Shamrock, a thinner-than-realistically-possible Case Fifty-Three, and a woman I didn’t recognize, with bangs cut straight across her forehead.

I’d expected the lines of no-man’s-land to be drawn out as they had with the police visiting the scene. Instead, Sveta just kept walking.

I could see Faultline’s entire lineup tense at that, that the line was so flagrantly being breached.

Then the recognition from Gregor.

He strode forward, and though he wasn’t much taller than an average guy, he still picked Sveta up, hugging her in a way that had her feet dangling.

No man’s land effectively shrunk. There weren’t twenty feet of distance, but instead it was us standing close enough that we could talk normally, not so close that our two large groups became a huddle.

Faultline had updated her costume, I noted. Tinkertech. Tinkertech from outside one’s own team was generally very expensive, because it was temperamental, and there was only one person who could soothe that temper or fix it if anything went wrong. Yet none of her people looked like tinkers.

As soon as she was out of Gregor’s arms, Sveta hugged Shamrock.

“I take it you vouch for them, Gregor?”

“I vouch for Sveta.”

“And I vouch for them,” Sveta said.