“I feel like helping her, because she’s vulnerable and lost but that’s not—not a good basis to act on. I don’t think she’d be easy to deal with. I do think if we give her any kind of pass or help, we could have her as a pest or problem to deal with a month from now. Given past history, keep that in mind. You know her best.”

“I feel like I don’t know her at all.”

“You have more data points than us,” I said.

“Data points,” Swansong muttered. “Geek.”

I elbowed her.

“How?” Rain asked, turning to look at Swansong. “To help her?”

“Colt,” Swansong said, raising her voice to be heard, as we’d walked a short distance away. “You have odd dreams. Stranger than any of the others.”

“Yeah,” Colt said. “Every time it’s my night, it’s a different slant of everyone else’s dreams, depending on my mood or how I push it. Like Cradle pushes it. Except I’m a bit better than him at it.”

“That’s a bargaining chip,” Swansong said, and she said it to Rain, but Colt immediately moved to the corner of her cell that was closest to us. “You can sell or barter that knowledge.”

“Capes and dreams have unusual relationships,” I said. “It’s worth looking into.”

“That’s because… dreams are something they don’t get,” Colt said. “They don’t have enough data or reference points for them. It’s why when they move on, they’ll want a lot of information about dreams and dreaming. It’s why things slip through the cracks in dreams, or get weird, or are spaces where they can manipulate things more.”

“You study this?” I asked.

“I… get it,” Colt said.

Because breakers and reality warpers were often closest to their agents, maybe. Because this particular cluster was built around dreams and dreaming. And because dreams brought things even closer still.

“Lookout mentioned Chicken Little seeing something in his dreams,” Swansong said. She shrugged with one shoulder.

It wasn’t much to go on, but we were dealing with monolithic forces hidden away in inaccessible locations. They gave us power and they ruined us. And whatever structure was there or wasn’t there, whatever organization was missing in how they balanced against one another, that power and that ruin was being doled out in disastrous proportions. In broken triggers and in Dauntlesses.

With what Colt was saying, it was possible there was an area where the barrier between power and person wasn’t just thin, but was something we could get past, and that area was the unconscious dream. That was our door to the machinery we wanted to operate, fix, or even dismantle.

“Let’s go,” Rain said.

“Hey!” Colt shouted.

“Quiet,” Stonewall boomed.

“We’ll be in touch,” Rain told Colt, without turning around.

Still angry.