The cloth spider and my flight kept the group from having to wade in freezing, ankle deep drainwater. We covered good ground too. There were surprising amounts of materials and pieces of construction material to trip up anyone who moved fast enough that they couldn’t react to the fleeting glimpses of whatever the flashlight illuminated. There weren’t many things that got in our way or that the spider had to slow down for. A wheelbarrow with a broken handle, a collection of what looked like curtain rods or wooden poles.

I checked the disc.

No whole figures. Body parts everywhere. Scattered into air, into terrain. All tinted yellow. Tattletale, Sveta, Tristan, Chicken Little.

“What?” I breathed the word.

I checked the other team.

More scattered parts. Suspended in air, unmoving, flickering like the hologram couldn’t track them. Imp. Ashley. Lookout.

No, it wasn’t possible like that.

Not two teams at once, not so easily or instantaneously.

I checked my phone. The display was flickering slightly. I thumbed for a message to Precipice, the alarming picture on the disc still hanging off of the disc at my forearm, mounted like a buckler.

“Check your phone,” I told Precipice.

“A text?” he asked.

“From me,” I said.

He shook his head.

I tried two more times. I heard the one go through.

He held it up for me. Gibberish.

“We’re being scrambled.”

“Shit,” he muttered. Even with the word being scarcely a whisper, the drain carried the sound. “Could be tinkertech defenses. Keeping Lookout’s cameras out of it.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Candy’s phone flickered, and then both screen and flash went dark. The other two phones died simultaneously, plunging us into the darkness.

It was only because of that darkness that we could see the faint hue of pink. A glow, like light through a curtain, and the sides of the drain were curtains.

In the silence, as none of us spoke, I could hear a dull sound, a hum with no source, and I could hear chiming, discordant, struggling to find its rhythm.

Nursery.

The images on the disc were getting scattered further, blinking in and out, each reiteration putting body parts further and further from the source. The mode switched, and I could see that there were symbols, large and blunt, that Lookout was trying to transmit.

The noises of Nursery’s power effect were getting louder, and they reverberated down the drain. The effect was taking hold too, distorting the tunnel.

No slurps and wet noises yet.

On the disc, there was one last projected image I could make out. Three large arrows, pointing at a single dot.

Three forces converging on one? I had the impression that it wasn’t the signal to mount our coordinated attack. No, this was too ‘emergency alert’ with the big bold symbols.