Aiden? Chicken Little was behind her, and his mask turned her way as she looked back to check.

The Eagle of Haast was with him. Delivered from another world, it was thirty-nine pounds of prehistoric bird with eight and a half feet of wingspan. Her belated birthday present to him. Other birds collected nearby, including a raven on Chicken Little’s shoulder.

He was with her, but he hadn’t even struck puberty yet.

And Kirby. On the surface, he was indistinguishable from the mercenaries. He wore and carried the same gear. Coil’s man—she’d kept more than a few of those. Among them was an excellent sniper team, qualified leaders, experts in various fields, and two cape hunters that had earned their name stalking and killing capes for kill order money.

Kirby wasn’t like those others. He was always apart, always keeping his head down, because everyone hated his guts enough that they would take the slightest of excuses. He’d gone from military court to release on a technicality, straight to Coil’s employ, where he’d worked as a manservant. Driving, running errands, and keeping all of Coil’s secrets.

Now he kept Tattletale’s. The arrangement was more or less the same. As all of the mercenaries shuffled off, he remained where he was.

This wasn’t Prancer’s deal. This wasn’t an alliance. An alliance would never work. Capes in large groups tended to tear each other apart.

This wasn’t that, and if it had looked like it was going to be, she wouldn’t have attended.

March hadn’t arrived, she noted. Her power fooled her there—she’d been eighty percent certain. Was March up to something?

She would have asked her power for input, but she was conserving it—had been since the group had gathered and moved out, ready to board the trucks and head to this… gathering. She’d wanted to have everything available for when she saw this.

Gathering was the wrong word. A riot without the riotous action?

“I don’t give two cents about what you’re all doing,” Little Midas intoned, his voice loud. He was obese enough that he had a team to carry him, his mask and armor gold, shaped to cover his prodigious belly and face. “This is irritating I’m going to stop holding back.”

‘This is irritating’; couched emotion. Recently had a big loss. Asset forfeiture.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Tattletale said.

“I’ll end them,” Little Midas said. “Then it won’t.”

“It’s going to calm down on its own. If you guys have any sense—” Tattletale tried.

But her words were drowned out. Angrier, louder voices.

A little more riotous now.