Brothers? My mind turned to that particular riddle. Ashley had never mentioned anything which meant she wasn’t talking about blood brothers. She was talking about a different kind of kinship. They’d been cloned, and that meant these two were Slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouse meant—

I went through a filing cabinet in my mind’s eye, a dozen faces and masks making their fleeting appearances.

“Jack?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat. “No. Harbingers?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You were close,” Harbinger One said.

“You were active pre-internet. That’s my excuse,” I said. “Can I trust you?”

“Does it change anything if we say no?” Harbinger Two asked.

I saw a wounded Ashley, knew Tristan was inside Byron, cleaved in half. I had the grisly image of Lookout and Darlene, of Juliette, Amias, Flor… the Navigators. Sveta.

I could see the others. Looking back, I saw Sveta just beyond the portal’s boundary, which was marked in tape on the floor. The tendrils were gathered into a rough human silhouette, many long enough that they had to coil or wrap around her like a spring. Some were weaving into one another to form complex braids.

“No,” I decided.

I gave the signal to the other group. Rain hit the button.

The portal behind us crackled as it shifted. The ‘view’ distorted, a texture like television static rippling across the periphery. I hadn’t even realized it had a proper shape beyond being a rough three-dimensional blob. It had been a building, of some peculiar architecture, it seemed.

I turned away.

“Swansong, there you are,” Damsel said, as we drew nearer. “How clumsy of you, to lose a foot.”

“It’s clumsier to taunt the woman who is very irritated at having lost a foot,” Swansong retorted. “The pain is making my temper short. Don’t test it.”

“Bad mood. I might have to make it worse, not that I want to,” Damsel said.

“Worse?” Rain asked.

Damsel met my eyes.

Oh. She wants to mention the situation in the city.

I beat her to the punch. “March got to one of the time effects. It was the Killington Mayor, in an area that was folded into Brockton Bay.”

“What happened?” Brandish asked.

“Broken trigger,” I said, my voice soft. I could remember the last one I’d been present for. The construction worker’s rally. It had been bad. This was apparently worse by orders of magnitude. “It incapacitated everyone in the ruins of Brockton Bay and left them defenseless while the initial effects took place. They’re calling it a Class-S problem. Not a threat, because that implies a consciousness, but…”

“Everyone on duty offworld and internationally has been pulled to assist,” Harbinger One said.

“Really?” I asked.