“You’re kind of right,” Tattletale told Sveta. “Him mentioning that got me thinking about the team and about where we stand. But I don’t think it’s wrong to think about leverage and reputation. The more we know, the more power we have when the diarrhea hits the fan. It means they’re more likely to listen to us, instead of telling us to fuck off and then fumbling around for a week to figure out what we already know.”

“I don’t disagree,” I said. “We might have seventy-five percent of the answers, as you put it, but having eighty percent is better.”

“And,” Tattletale said, actually enthused, “Anything they do to fuck with us, like Bluntforce back there, it gives us more information than them not doing anything at all.”

“Really,” Sveta said.

“You know, you remind me of someone,” Tattletale told her. “My old teammate, Grue.”

“Really,” I said. “That is not the first, second, all the way through to the twenty-fifth name I would have thought of.”

“I feel like I’m being insulted,” Sveta said.

“No, no. This new you?” Tattletale asked. “Coming into your own.”

“We should focus,” I said.

“Sure,” Tattletale answered, shrugging. “Will this new Tress be joining us for the meeting with Engel, Egg, and Scraping?”

“Did they respond?”

“Yeah,” Tattletale said. “At Miss Treat’s. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“It has reputations. It’s actually a hangout spot for Parian, when she can make the trip, and if certain people she’d prefer to avoid weren’t there. You didn’t answer my question.”

“You asked a few.”

“Are you coming in?”

Sveta bit her lip, glancing out the window, then down at the Old Man.

“You know them better than I do,” Tattletale said.

“Is it neutral territory?” Sveta asked.

“No.”

“Because that’d be too easy,” Sveta muttered.

“Is this the villain bar? Swansong mentioned one,” I said.

“It’s not,” Tattletale said. “But there’s overlap in clientele. This is more rogues and weirdos, but that last bit might be me being judgmental.”

“You? Never,” Sveta said.

“Be snarky after you decide whether you come in,” Tattletale said.

“What about him? Aren’t we taking him to a hospital?”

“No,” Tattletale said. “If we took him to a hospital they’d separate him from us, and he wouldn’t survive that. I don’t trust back-alley doctors, so we’re going with the next best thing. Miss Treat’s.”

I looked at my watch. Twenty-one minutes left.

“There’s nothing we can do about it, Antares,” Tattletale told me. “It’s going to happen. It’s just a question of where we are when it does happen.”

“I could message Dragon.”

“Might hurt more than it helps.”

I looked out the window. I could see the portals.

“Do you mean hurt us, or hurt everything?”