“It doesn’t work that way. Twenty-three minutes is twenty-three minutes. You can’t say ‘I’ll be there in fifteen’ and make it happen.” Tattletale waited, shifting her weight from foot to foot, her breath fogging as she sighed, her eyes rolling. “Then I’ll expect you to turn up in twenty-three minutes, irritable because you weren’t here in fifteen.”

“Aunt Rachel,” Chicken Little said.

“She turned up at the meeting place. The team got taken down. Love Lost was where March was supposed to be. No sign of March. Because she’s here.”

“She overheard? Saw something? How do you know that?” Capricorn asked.

“I know. The good thing is that March isn’t where Foil and Parian are. The bad is that someone else is, and the people we’re up against are confident in their abilities.”

“A trap?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said “Right now, we’re surrounded. Nine to ten parahumans and three unpowered are here, already in position. One to three more are on their way here as reinforcements.”

“Aunt Rachel’s on her way here too, right?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said. “Battle mode.”

“We’re choosing fight over flight?” Capricorn asked.

“They won’t let us fly,” Tattletale said. “Battle mode, I am not joking.”

Blue lights began to appear around Capricorn. Tress shifted position, dropping to all fours and bracing against the ground while the long arms with the slender hands moved. One provided some light cover to Aiden, Darlene, Juliette and Amias.

Darlene reached into her coat, pulling out a mask. Imp had supplied them, and they were all built around a theme. Darlene didn’t even remember Jean Paul, but apparently that was the style that they were matching to.

It made Imp happy, at least. Darlene looked at her mask, which had silver forming a kind of tiara shape, extending up the nose across the forehead, and down the temples, where they curled around to the cheekbones. The lips on the mask were silver, the eyes of the mask black. She fixed her hair around it.

“We should get inside,” Tattletale said. “Can you, Tress?”

“Yeah. I can’t do narrow hallways, but if it’s an emergency, I can ditch these arms.”

“Can you ditch them now?” Tattletale asked.

“Let’s wait until they get in the way or slow us down,” Tress answered.

Inside. The building at this area of the university was a concrete fixture that had a lot of stuff underground, based on the way it almost immediately had a four-times-normal-width set of stairs that went down, with stairs on the far left and right that went up to a higher level. Artwork was mounted on the walls, people that Darlene was pretty sure she was supposed to recognize—a male scholar and a female scholar. There were people inside, standing or sitting on stairs, and they reacted with alarm as they saw the gathered group, with Tattletale, Chicken Little, Tress, and Capricorn all in costume.