“It would have to be me,” Rain interrupted.

“Yeah. The idea is they’d have to be you and they’d have to know what you know when it comes to the password and they’d have to meet some of the other context checks, which is complicated and messy to get into, but you know, don’t shake up your schedule too much on any day you’re paying a routine visit, or send messages to people you don’t normally talk to, or—”

“I get it,” Rain said.

“I’m changing your password. Hang back and wait until everyone’s passed through, it’ll flash the images in front of you. Everyone else, masks and helmets on, or flip your projections on.”

As she talked, red dots appeared around her face. I would have thought Capricorn was using his power, except his dots were more orange-red, and these motes of light expanded into discs, while white and black crept around Kenzie’s face and head to form the helmet’s design. She didn’t have her hair in buns, but the helmet projection seemed to assume she did, and covered up the lower ends of kinky hair that was parted and set in place with a combination of hairband and hairclip. Her costume gradually covered her body too. There were places the clothes extended beyond the projection, and those places were blurry, like bad artifacting from video compression, but it worked for the most part.

Sveta had a mask that curled at the edges, tendril-like. Not much of a change, and kind of pointless, but we’d decided to focus a bit more on formality. She’d liked designing it with me. Rain had his old costume at least for today, with a slightly updated tech-style mask that encapsulated more of the sides of his head, a serrated kind of edge around the perimeter, almost like it was damaged, but in a sculpted way that wouldn’t look cheap.

Tristan’s armor was recently repaired and updated. The changes were minor, with a focus more on the application of layered washes. A dark wash had filled in the grooves and made the designs in the armor pop more, while a red wash gave the armor more of a tint. It was the kind of thing that was easy to miss.

We passed through.

The building we were exiting was small and somewhat narrow, and as of right now it was largely understaffed. This was the real headquarters. A building still under construction that would be impressive when finished, despite the fact it wasn’t being made to impress in the same way the old Wardens headquarters had been.

The real impressiveness came from the two Dragon-craft that were set in close proximity to the building, one on a hill off to our right, and another—

I floated a bit as I turned one hundred and eighty degrees around. It loomed over the portal, weapons bristling.