A pulse of my aura encouraged him to keep speaking. He babbled instead. “If anyone asks we were going to say we were with Tattletale until she bit it. We’ll say—we were going to say, we only joined these guys when it was all over.”

“What are they up to? What are they doing?”

“They’re retreating to another world, taking hostages with them. That’s Cradle and Love Lost. March is gunning for the finale.”

Not Finale, but the finale.

“The time-stop and time loop effects?” I asked.

With circles under his eyes, his expression a little wild, our captive mercenary nodded his head. “Exactly. As far as they’re concerned, they’ve won. You just haven’t gotten around to realizing it yet.”

Blinding 11.10

We picked up the three mercenaries, lifting them into position on a dog’s back. Each was out cold.

Sliced and diced a bunch of your buddies.

Sveta.

The others were caught.

“Do we go after her?” Precipice asked.

“March?” I asked. I had my phone out and was typing one-handed as best as I could. “I don’t like how our guy here phrased things about slicing and dicing—”

My fingers weren’t hitting all the keys right. My hand shook annoyingly.

I kept my voice level. “I’m texting Vista. We’ll see what she can do. If she thinks their team can handle it, we might have other options.”

“Them thinking they can handle it is different from handling it,” Foil said. “It’s March.”

“We’re going after the others?” Precipice asked.

“Gut feeling? Yes. We know where they are. The disc should be working now that we’re out of Nursery’s range. We get to them, maybe we can get enough answers to steer things. There’s no telling who exactly is where, though.”

“You’re thinking they’re dead?” Rachel asked.

“I’m thinking worse than dead,” I responded. “You didn’t hear what happened to the Navigators?”

She shrugged.

“Chopped up into cubes, but not allowed to die,” Foil said. “They might have done that to some of ours.”

Rachel’s expression hardened.

“I know,” Foil said. “I’m not good with this stuff. I can suck it up if I have to, but I swear, if it happened to the kids? To any of our friends?”

“I’m getting flashbacks to the Fallen attacks on the portals,” Precipice said. “The stakes, the distractions.”

“Some of the same people are involved,” I pointed out. I put my phone away, tapping the disc on the arm. Still, my hand shook. Only our team red was findable, but the setting was screwed up. Lookout’s team tracker seemed to be working under the assumption that the entire team was together. Our team red was split in two, which meant it was very, very zoomed out.

“We could try going after March. Resolve the hostage situation after,” Foil said.

“Do you want to?” I asked. “Really?”