Colt shook her head. “I’m being sent away, and I don’t even know what that means.”

I cleared my throat, to let others know I was about to launch into an explanation. “We send you through a portal. We give you everything you need to survive, and the ability to use your powers. At scheduled times, we check on you. But those times may get more spaced out, if you settle in, if you’re healthy and safe. That’s if they decide on that. If we decide on it. Then when your sentence is done, we pick you up again, assess you, figure out if you’re able or ready to rejoin society. Hopefully by then we have the tools to handle it.”

“I think you’d still be in the dream room,” Rain said. “I’d see you every night, and if you had an emergency, I could send help.”

“I’m getting kind of panicky,” Colt said. “What can I do?”

“Talk,” Swansong said.

“I don’t have anything to say. They didn’t fill me in. They offered to let me go and I think now maybe they meant it, because I didn’t know all that much that was useful, and I wouldn’t talk.”

“Can you think back to what they said? Did Nailbiter have a location she liked vacationing in or visiting? Did anyone talk about family?”

Colt shook her head. “I can’t go home?”

She didn’t even seem to get it. Was the disconnect because of something more abstract? Her power?

“You collaborated in chopping people up,” Swansong said. “In chopping me up. You broke a cardinal rule and spilled your guts to the arresting officers and capes, they used that in the trial.”

“Anything about the Kronos Titan?”

“No. I think that was a surprise. But I wasn’t really paying attention when it came up. Its hard to picture it as a real thing instead of some joke or story. Did he kill many people?”

“He hasn’t budged,” Rain said. “But the Simurgh is on a corner world right now and she flew to him. She’s staying on his shoulder, in that world.”

“He’s a living portal,” I said. “Except instead of passing things through doors into other versions of Earth or into distant places, it’s just… Dauntless energy coming through the portal, feeding into him. We had to clear a good long distance around him because apparently portals act to broadcast, scramble, or act as a lens when it comes to power signals. Possibly including hers.”

“You played a part in making a hell of a mess,” Vista said. “Some friends and acquaintances of ours got killed and hurt.”