“Alarms go off, battle-ready parahumans come storming in from all directions. You get interrogated. It changes the attitudes they have toward you.”

“Do not,” Engel told Egg. “I want to make a good impression.”

Egg scowled, face cracking in twenty places, but he acquiesced.

We walked up the stairs, and the hallway lit up with its two-dimensional shapes, running along the wall and floating through the air. Piecing together the password required using the fragments around me to make the image appear right from my perspective. Step one was the five-sided snowflake, bracket moved toward the hollow square, greater-than sign moved to another corner—I was missing the middle part, and I found it on the wall, touched it, and slid it in the direction I wanted, until it was three-quarters of the way down the hall, but centered in the image in front of me.

Confirmed.

Step two for my password was what I’d committed to memory as the ‘upward hourglass’. Triangle, triangle, diamond for the center, then brackets moved and rotated to top and bottom, the ‘prongs’ of the brackets all facing skyward.

Confirmed.

I cleared the five stages of the password, walking forward at a steady, casual rate, and the portal opened at the end of the hall. Beyond, I could see the Bunker. The Wardens’ headquarters, illuminated with spotlights at the exterior. Areas under construction were decorated with yellow ribbons and sashes, blocked off with gray tarps.

“Into the belly of the beast,” the Old Man grumbled. It was possible that the interdimensional stuff was far enough out of his wheelhouse that his composure was cracking. Pain and hurt might have played a part. That the Bunker was a little bit on the imposing side might have played another.

Defiant waited outside the headquarters. On seeing us, he approached, footsteps not heavy in the ground-shaking, clumsy way that I tended to associate with the word, but solid, leaving no room for ambiguity.

“Case Twelve,” Defiant said.

“Apparently recognized from a decades-old case file,” the Old Man said.

“Who?” Defiant asked, finger extended toward me, Sveta, then a general gesture for Engel’s group.

“Me,” I told him.

“Good,” he said.

“Tress helped,” I added. “Kept him in one piece after the villains were provoked. Tattletale thought it was a maneuver from our culprit.”

“Tress. You’re one of Armstrong’s,” Defiant said.

“I—yes. Kind of.”

“I like Armstrong. There was a time I had my eyes set on Boston, and I imagined him and I making a good team, complementing each other’s strengths. I’m… now glad I didn’t get that position, having learned more about who I am.”

“He mentioned you once or twice in passing, I think. Even years later.”

“I hope it was flattering,” Defiant said. “Tell me, is our Case Twelve an immediate concern?”

“No,” the Old Man answered for me.