“Cauldron, whatever shape it takes, is an enemy,” Engel told him.

“Like you said before, we don’t know if this is Cauldron,” Egg replied.

It was interesting, seeing the interplay between him, her, and Scraping. He came off like the moody kid brother, her as the wiser, warmer older sister, and Scraping… was the referee? He reined in, chided, warned, and otherwise stayed out of it.

“We talk to them, then we find out,” Engel’s voice was firm.

“Was there a discreet entrance?” Tattletale asked. “You said you didn’t even realize it was Cauldron, which means a big door-shaped hole in reality didn’t lead you in.”

“We went on the water, and under a bridge. I thought at first it was a camouflage bubble. Something to hide the building from planes and spies. Now I think… maybe portal, hidden.”

“I remembered discussions about strategy, approach, how the Irregulars would get in,” Egg said. “It was the sluice, at the base of the facility.”

“Did you dock?” Sveta asked.

“No. We took the boat inside.”

“Then it wasn’t the sluice. The sluice had enough water coming down that it was violent, and a boat would get pulled in,” Sveta said. “Still water?”

Engel nodded. “Mostly. Some trickling flow.”

Egg looked pretty pissed at being wrong about his contribution here. I wasn’t sure Sveta cared at this point.

Sveta was focused on her mental map of the place. “Um. What was it? That would have been the reservoir. Which makes a few different degrees of sense,” she mused aloud. To Tattletale and I, she said, “We had to figure out how we’d attack a facility like Cauldron’s. They didn’t have as many employees as it sounds like Teacher has, and they had less as the years went on, but they did have some. Those employees had regular portals they’d use, in out of the way spots, with simple signals they’d use to ask for them to open.”

“Teacher doesn’t,” Tattletale said. “Teacher has portals. They’re tinker operated and clumsy, they take time to set up and time to take down, and they require power, which isn’t always the easiest thing to obtain. Easier over time, don’t get me wrong, but I would imagine that’s a bottleneck for him. His portals being what they are, if we can find them or figure out how to find them, that could help.”

“If he’s listening now, he could dismantle them,” I said.

“He could,” Tattletale said, and then she grinned. “And he will. But now he needs to devote time and energy to dealing with us, which is risky, or time and energy to dismantling that, which is another kind of messy. Repositioning portals means informing anyone coming in and out about the changes of location, and that’s something we can catch or track. What else?”

She’d asked Sveta.

“Did the lights flicker?”