Her chair scraped against the floor as she stood.

“If we leave the Old Man with them, then they’re going to kill him,” I said.

Tattletale gave me an annoyed look.

“What? It’s true.”

She almost rolled her eyes. “Yes, it’s true. Yes, we should bring him with. If we can work out what they did to him, we can work out something about how they operate. There are resources. Then… how long does his thing last, before the body digests it?”

I wondered if I should lie.

“Long enough,” I said, to be coy.

Tattletale nodded. “Two, three days?”

“Maybe five,” I lied. As far as the PRT figured it out, it was indefinite. So long as he was alive.

“You’re not taking him,” Midas said. “And he does need to die.”

Midas stood. He banished the black table, and Tattletale’s glass dropped. Sveta caught it with tendrils, which brought it to her reaching hand, only a bit slopping out.

Now we had issues.

Sveta didn’t stand up, but straightened to her full height. I used my flight to make the process equally smooth. Minor expressions of power. Posturing.

Midas had started it, with his firm line in the sand.

Sucked that we were in his territory more than we were in ours, but… I wasn’t going to watch a sixty-year-old guy die, when I wasn’t sure just how active he’d been in using his power.

Besides, he kind of represented something major. I could hate him, though I didn’t really loathe him, I could think he was scummy and freaky. I could recognize that he had been a gang member and had perpetuated violence, drug dealing, and a culture of fear.

But he’d survived. Every parahuman I knew who’d been in the game for a while saw enough people die or meet unfortunate ends that they kind of… absorbed it, really. The implicit assumption became that we’d die early. We had other causes and those causes were more a priority than reaching the age where we could get discounts in stores for our age.

I hadn’t exchanged any words with him. I had no idea who he was now, if he was aspiring to control like Teacher was, if he got off on feeding people bits of him, or if he was an angel. But I felt like I needed to protect that.

“He’s essential to uncovering this thing, Midas,” Tattletale said.

“Which means he submits to power testing? Investigating? Scans from tinkers?”

“Something like that,” Tattletale answered.

“And then?” Midas asked.

“And then we pass him onto the guys who have been making the most dangerous villains disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.”