“A dream space,” Rain said. “Where we face each other, they exchange tokens, they don’t usually share with me. Except this time, Cradle offered me some, his tinker power, and I was suspicious. Too many weird things going on. I thought maybe it was a trap.”

“’Twas,” Tattletale said, the contraction a result of her being so strained in her speaking. “Not like you think.”

“I think it might’ve been that tinkers get distracted or caught up in what they’re wanting to build, they don’t see reality. The asshole wanted to give me a lot at once, when I’m not used to it.”

“No.”

“Then what?” Rain asked, clearly annoyed.

“You took something else.”

“I was—I think I might’ve been given some without knowing. By Love Lost.”

“You were. It was a signal. A warning.”

“About what?”

“Bleed-through. It comes with the tokens. Cradle wanted to give you his.”

As impatient and vocal as he had been, Rain went quiet, thinking.

“This is my head,” Chasity said, and I couldn’t see the motion she was making because of how she sat in front of Cassie. “And this is the fifty things going a mile above it.”

“He’s scared now,” Tattletale said. “Shaken, because… you gave him tokens?”

“No,” Rain said.

“You got to him.”

“Hitting him with a shame and regret cloud while he was sleeping,” Rain said.

“You got to him. He’s scared, he knows that tomorrow night, you can just give him your things. You can do it every night. He has to stop you. You have the upper hand. He has more people, but you’re winning.”

I folded my arms. “Then we have a game plan. We go to into the town. They’re cooperating with us to some degree. If they’re on our side, then Cradle probably can’t attack like he wants to, we find an angle. Maybe keep using Precipice’s power, push buttons, make it so their group can’t stay together.”

I looked at Rain.

I saw him nod. Delayed, like he’d had to think first, or he was lost in thought.

“And if we absolutely have to, if the town isn’t willing to let us use them to scare Cradle off, we go through, and we lock the door. Stop March, intervene, do what we have to.”

“Lock it?” Foil asked.

I shrugged, then winced at the pain in my upper arm.

It wouldn’t be pretty, but it was an option.

“Doable,” Capricorn said.

Psychologically, even if I didn’t trust Tattletale one hundred percent, hearing that Cradle was spooked was a psychological edge. It shifted things, how I felt like we could approach them.

We still needed to get him into a position where we could question him. Away from his people.