“It is heavy,” Solarstare said. “The Bunker needs to be sturdy because it’s all so heavy. We’ve got two portals right now. City center and city east. By next week we’ll have four. A week after that we’ll have seven, they think. Six of those will be places in the city we can instantly mobilize to. Wham, bam, fuck you ma’am. Seventh portal will be our proper prison world we should only be able to get to through the Bunker. Which means if you want to get in or break someone out, you have to go through the Bunker, which we’re loading to the brim with security.”

I nodded. “Which is protection for safe fucking up, fucking with, fucking—”

“Which I still have questions about, Solar,” Vista cut in.

“—and frustrating.”

“Cockblocking,” Solarstare said.

“She had a teammate called Clockblocker,” I said, throwing a thumb in Vista’s way.

Solarstare laughed. It looked almost like her back teeth glowed, like the fluids from her eyes leeched into the back of her mouth by some channel or osmosis.

“My teammate for a very short time too. I like ‘frustrated’ better. Plus it alliterates.”

“Got it,” Solarstare said. “Yeah. Getting there first means no sloppy seconds, and doing it safely means we don’t get fucked.”

“Good explanation,” I said. I knew most of it, not the numbers for portals, or the timeline, but most of it. Maybe the definition of ‘monster’ was something that took me back to uncomfortable memories, and that negative matched or outweighed the gain of the little tidbits I’d picked up, but it served to distract, and she’d clearly been intending to do that.

“Which is my chance to ask, um, what monsters have you been fucking?” Vista asked. “Do I need to worry, Solar?”

“Come on, Vista, it’s an analogy, take five seconds to look past the big bad swear word.”

“If you can use one word for five hundred different situations or contexts, you need to give us a bit more to go on.”

“To fuck them is to deal with them, interact, back and forth. Sometimes you gotta suck ’em off to keep em happy and sometimes you gotta demand your quid-pro-quo. Favor for a favor. And sometimes it’s down to a hate-fuck, which—”

“Okayyy,” Vista said. “You’re embarrassing me in front of my friend now.”

“Don’t act like you’re a prude, Vista. Do I need to talk about what you got up to at High Hill Bravo?”

“I didn’t get up to a damn thing,” Vista said, flushing slightly, “and my friend’s visiting, I only have so long before I’m called to work, and I might not get another chance to talk to her for a bit, depending on how I’m deployed.”

“Maybe she’d like to hear stories,” Solarstare teased. She raised her eyebrows my way.