“The other obvious,” he said. “It’s… seven-something o’clock? Almost eight? It was six when we left in the three teams, thirty to forty five minutes to get to the locations, move between them. Then this.”

“About right,” I said.

“It’s not all that long before I get knocked out by the dream room,” Rain said, quiet. “Erin says I’m almost dead, I’m so unresponsive.”

“You think it’s a time window to go after them?”

“One of ours and three of theirs get knocked out. It’s an edge.”

“And their mercenaries are possibly disrupted,” I murmured.

Precipice nodded.

I put my hand on his shoulder as I left him behind. Byron was sitting in the chair next to Swansong, and even though I knew he hadn’t been touched by the whip, he’d presumably felt Tristan’s wounds, and it was clear from posture that he wasn’t bearing down well under the situation. Swansong had barely moved an inch, except for that dark look in her eye to intensify.

Situations like this could bring out the worst in us—

Rain joined Lookout, bending down to see how the camera had been set into place. Aiden raised a hand to bump fists with Rain, a relatively small hand meeting a smaller, mechanical hand.

Not just the worst in us.

⊙

Sine-squiggle. Guncheck. Greater-than symbol.

N. O. D. E. A. T. H. S.

I spelled out the letters, tracing them.

After a pause, a response.

Circle with a diagonal line through it. Square with wobbly side. Arrow. Trident. Less-than symbol. Circle with a vertical line through it. Equal-sign with line drawn through it. Parallel vertical lines.

There was no pattern I could discern. There was no point, either.

But I couldn’t bring myself to stop, either. So I traced out words. The response came back, garbled, encrypted. I wrote down the symbols as best as I could. When I called it quits, I could go to the others, pass it to Rain or to Kenzie, and see if they could work out how the scrambling happened, and if there was a way to counter it.

I doubted it was easy. I doubted it was possible. There was no point to this, no pattern, and no way I could bring myself to give up, because giving up meant going back out there and—

—And I’d hit a wall.

I hunched over the sink, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. My notepad—actually a tall pad of sticky notes with lines on them—was balanced precariously on the sink, threatening to fall when and if I wasn’t careful to put the part I was writing on over the right inch and a half of sink.

Backwards two. Two overlapping circles. Backwards two.

The door to the bathroom opened. I tensed.

I didn’t untense when I looked in the mirror and saw who it was.