There was no going home again now, a small voice in her head said. She’d crossed lines. Even within this group.

Home had been destroyed two years ago, another said. The concept had stopped meaning anything back then.

“Come on,” Disjoint told her, stirring her from dark thoughts.

Colt forced a smile to her face, and found her feet.

“We’re nearly done,” Nailbiter said.

Interlude 11.c

Tattletale adjusted the disc. The screen buzzed, flickered, showed the blue silhouettes of Antares’s group frozen mid-run, and then stuttered. A blue line made a circuit around the perimeter of the disc a few times, accelerating as it went, before the entire thing winked out.

The words that popped up in blue weren’t pointed in a direction that Darlene could see.

“Signal lost,” Tattletale said. “I guess Parian’s group found Love Lost.”

“Foil sounded confident that she could deal with her,” Capricorn said, his voice muffled by his helmet.

“She is very good at what she does,” Tattletale said, fiddling to tune the disc to another setting. It looked mostly like static. “She said she can do it, and I believe her.”

Darlene wasn’t sure why Tattletale had to do that. It sounded so insincere, but it was the backhanded kind of insincere where she could use an eye roll or a simple denial to shrug it off if ever called on it. Back when Darlene had turned five, Papa had been in a black mood for a while. From what Samuel had said, Papa had wanted to collect Sidney Saile, the girl from Vancouver, and he failed. That had been when Cherie had left and with Darlene’s mom being gone, she had no immediate family except Papa.

And Papa had had the black mood. More casually cruel than he’d ever been. Tempestuous. She only dimly remembered those days, like a bad dream, but she remembered some. She’d spent a long time having to worry about getting unlucky and having her dad single her out, out of twenty or so people, and a handful of people being kind of shitty. After the black mood, it had changed to the point that it wasn’t about getting unlucky and being that one person in twenty. It had been about being one of the ones who got out of the way and escaped his attention. Everyone had been scared and shitty.

Her sister and some older ‘cousins’ had gone to school. Cherie had. It had seemed like a fairy tale. The girls on television and in movies had gone to school and dreamed of being princesses and singers, even Sidney Saile had. Darlene had just dreamed of going to school. So she’d begged. She’d fought and even went on a hunger strike, until her dad made her eat until she was sick.