“We need something like this for our headquarters,” Tristan said. “Something that makes it so that if someone tricky turns up, they’re faced with something so daunting the people who work there hate it, they pack up and go away.”

“If you’re paying I can try it,” Kenzie said. “But I’ve got a lot on my plate. At least it’d be easier the second time. Less time needed to figure stuff out.”

“Not lasers,” Ashley said.

“Wrought iron spike portcullises and pendulum blades?” I asked. “Can you make a dart trap sufficiently elegant?”

“Portcullises and pendulum blades would be tacky. You’re better than that, Antares,” Ashley said. “Pick one or the other, and yes, you can make a dart trap elegant. You need to have a particular shape, so it looks attractive even when half of it is buried in the wall.”

“I’m curious. What kind of shape?” Tristan asked. He created a orange mote that floated just past her fingertip, and moved it as she moved her finger.

I looked around, to check they weren’t doing the equivalent of playing with a lighter around smoke detectors and sprinkler systems. But the security system was disabled.

The hallway of projected images was a password that was unique to each individual, requiring a set arrangement of elements every few feet. The apparatus was sensitive to dimensional fluctuations and energy levels, and using the wrong powers in the vicinity either triggered an alert or, if the intrusion was imminent enough, opened a tear between worlds beneath the cube, so it would drop through into another world.

“Dragon poked at this?” Kenzie asked.

“Defiant did,” Golem said.

“Okay. Leaving him some notes. And one of our, uh, what did we agree we’d call them…?”

Kenzie trailed off.

“Finish your sentences,” Ashley said. “If you don’t focus you’ll spend more and more time zoning out.”

“Um. Supervising agents! Yes. She says the payment came through, so, um, I’m releasing the last few locks. Full access. If they want to copy it then they can, though I think they know enough to do it anyway, they’re at least being polite.”

“I’ll let people know,” Golem said.

“Thank you. We’re good. Everything works. One panel slightly misaligned where they took it off and put it back on, which is why we have the flaring at the edges and the noisiness of the portals,” Kenzie said, still fixated on what she was doing. “I left them some notes about that.”

“All of this from a camera tinker,” Weld remarked.