No exile here. I’d risk a tendril around my neck in the woods before I allowed that exile to happen. I wanted to find her a solution, to dig out that one parahuman in a hundred thousand that could do something about her situation, resolve the Weld issue—make her feel like herself again.

If only there were time. If only there were quiet, if the monsters would just… stop.

Did that take something like me saying what I’d said to give Harbinger Two permission? Something more?

I thought about what Paris had said about Cradle. That we would want to shoot, that Paris had taken measures to ensure we couldn’t. I had a bad feeling, hollow in my chest.

That feeling only grew more intense as we reached the edge of woods. Cradle had a building out here, more like a factory than a home. Big, with a lot of open space within. A hangar for his robot hand-mech, potentially.

There were guards stationed around the outside, taking shifts. There were capes. I recognized some from my research.

Rachel approached, stopping at the edge of where forest met road, hugging the trees. Others were well behind.

We waited, and we watched.

There were more within. They came out regularly to check on the other shifts. Patrols seemed to be loose in how they were structured, random, numbers differing. Unpredictable.

The others caught up. There was a brief exchange of info, and then we made our initial scouting foray. Sveta used her power, tendrils and face slipping beneath snow. I flew over, dropping out of the sky.

There was no signal to tell me that the guards were agitated or responding to anything.

It meant I could check the window.

A small army was gathered within, all huddled around a fire. Groups of men, each with capes. I remembered Contender talking about the Russian cape scene—he’d toured over there in his mercenary work over there. Over there, military and powers were woven into one another. One squad leader with powers or one cape as an adjunct to a squad, adding to their capabilities. Capes were rarely allowed or encouraged to get along.

It felt like that. Not like they were Russian, exactly. They didn’t look it. But maybe Lionwing and Cretan, Noontide and Contender had been organizing things in that direction.

As I checked another window, however, I saw Cradle. Or at least, I was fairly sure I did.

An orb, a sphere fifteen feet across. Slices of meat and body parts were suspended in air, forming a puzzle-work lattice with barely any light leaking through. All was held up in the air by Cradle’s machine, multiple sets of mechanical hands, large in scale, all joined at the wrists.

An egg. A shell, stasis-sealed, protecting the people within. Love Lost. Cradle. Colt.

My first thought was Chastity. Her sense for physical things.

You won’t want to shoot.