All of the emotion I could see in Rain was in his hands, mechanical and real. The face beneath the hood was masked, and that mask was calibrated to be entirely black. The hands pressed against glass, fingers bowed by the pressure.

The impatient soldier said something again, and this time, Red stood up. Everyone present was on edge. Another machinery disaster in the works?

It was Cradle who said something to Red and got her to stand down, before I could figure out how to get Rain to do something similar.

“Fuck,” Rain said. “I could do something here, but I’m pretty sure it would get someone killed.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve got other options, but if they don’t work, we should consider…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

We should consider doing it on purpose this time? Baiting soldiers to kill one another and throw things into disarray?

It was a cape directly below the window who stood up, walking a few feet over, so he had a better view of Red and the other one. His soldiers had been playing cards among themselves, and now they stood too.

“Come on, come on,” Rain whispered.

The cape pointed at the impatient soldier.

“Fuck,” Rain said.

“What’s—you wanted them to challenge Red.”

“Yeah. They defused more than they fused. Which means—”

Cradle’s mech moved, Cradle using his reposition power to put himself on an extended thumb-tip. By position and placement alone, all eyes on him, he should have commanded authority. Instead, he was silent, his head hung for a long moment, one hand clutching at one shoulder. All vulnerability, raw.

I thought again of leadership and power.

I could remember feeling bad about revealing my weakness, the Wretch, to the team. It had ended up helping connect, I was pretty sure. It had been necessary.

Was it something that could hold one up indefinitely, though? I couldn’t imagine there was.

But I found a bad feeling settling in me as I watched it, saw Cradle standing above his assembled army. I’d bitten my tongue once, on an occasion that Dean had come by my place after school. He’d talked with my mom and dad in the kitchen about how he’d be in charge of the Wards for a while, and what he hoped to do. I’d felt at the time that he’d been on the wrong track.

Except now, reflecting, I wasn’t sure what the right track was. There was something in there where I’d worried at the time that Dean wasn’t helping himself by trying to be a therapist or mediator and… that was what I had ended up being, myself. Cradle was the very antithesis of leadership, as I might have defined it, and he was managing better than could be expected.

What the hell was I doing and what the hell was I supposed to do?