“Yeah,” Engel said. “They went out at one point, which was when I saw some of the things and labels on shelves.”

“Books with letters and numbers on the cover? Labels taking up half the page?”

“No. Manton’s texts. It rang bells.”

“That might have been their power testing area. It’s where they gave customers vials, when they weren’t sure of the results. Gave all of us vials.”

“There’s no us,” Egg said, under his breath.

“Shh,” Tattletale shushed him, like she didn’t even know she was doing it. “Power testing area?”

“In big, reinforced spaces, like aircraft hangars,” Sveta said.

Engel nodded with some energy, agreeing.

“They’d be in a hallway with… there’d be labs, kind of, but people described them as looking more like they had gym equipment and MRI machines in them, except they weren’t either. They would have been on the left side if the hangar spaces were on your right.”

“There were rooms to the left but they were empty,” Engel said.

Egg was looking more and more disgruntled.

“This is fascinating,” Tattletale said. “You said people described them. Who?”

“Old customers of Cauldron we tracked down. We wanted to know exactly where we were going and what we were doing,” Sveta explained.

“If they moved the equipment they moved it somewhere.”

“Egg and I talked about it, even took notes,” Engel said. She reached into her pocket for her phone. Edges of the phone had distorted to have an oil-slick shimmer where her hand touched it most often. “We thought about trying to find some of the others, who were interested in the Irregulars but who never made it, or who could not be part of the attack.”

“But you didn’t,” Tattletale said.

“No.”

“They might have interfered or got in the way, like they did with the artist L.J.M. and your deal with Semiramis. Keeping you isolated. They didn’t come after you because Egg’s memory is imperfect,” Tattletale said. “He got details wrong and that threw off the scent. Now… with Sveta helping to connect the dots for you, they may be more onto you.”

“You led them to us?” Egg asked. He turned to Sveta. “On purpose?”

“No,” Sveta said. I saw the pain cross her face at the accusation. “No.”

Scraping looked rather upset, where he’d been the calm one before. He put a hand on Engel’s shoulder.

“They were going to come after you whatever happened,” Tattletale said. “But not while it was going to raise more questions and problems than it put anything to rest. Engel is too well liked and Scraping has a family that would ask questions. It’s a good thing that we’re approaching you now and forcing their hands instead of them showing up in the middle of the night.”

Engel wrung her hands.

“I didn’t want this,” Sveta said.

“Don’t,” Egg told her.

“I didn’t!”