Ashley was unmoving, her eyes dark in how white they were.

Kenzie smiled, hands fidgeting. But for the movement of my head to look over at the others, I was still, only my eyes moving. Kenzie’s head was constantly turning, looking to her older teammates for reassurance or guidance. In the midst of her looking at each member of Breakthrough, she looked for and turned her attention to Chris. I heard a faint sigh from her.

And Rain, as odd as it was, seemed most at peace with this. Most focused, and most himself in this alien place.

“We’ll cooperate,” I said, while my head was turned to my team, not the others. Nobody flinched, nobody bucked or rebelled. They knew. We had to.

“I assume Natalie isn’t included in this,” I added.

“She isn’t,” Luis said. He didn’t even have to look at the other groups for input. Because we were being arrested purely because of who and what we were. Parahumans. Ones they couldn’t trust or pretend to control.

The younger Wardens exchanged a couple of words. Vista, Golem.

“Okay,” Vista told Miss Militia.

“We’ll cooperate,” Miss Militia echoed my phrasing.

Scribe-boys scribbled. The room seemed to accept the answer with what I might have called a quiet kind of smugness, not smirking, not gloating or lording over us, but… maybe self-satisfied was the word.

And then there was Amy. Staring at me. How many times had she been at the periphery when things went to shit?

Fuck it. I’d made my decisions. She didn’t warrant more thoughts until it came to figuring out what to do, and when it came to that, it would be the Wardens who had the power to make the decision, and I would make my biased argument, citing my warning to Jessica about Amy.

Past that, I had other things to concern myself with.

The translators finished. A few words were exchanged in foreign tongue. Miss Militia seemed to relax slightly, though calling her relaxed would have been a lie. She’d put the power into our hands because her decreeing it meant something different than us agreeing on our own behalf.

Luis stepped forward, toward the center of the room, and talked in his foreign tongue, addressing the other groups. One of the men in the conservative muumuu-style outfits stepped forward.

It was our turn to be outsiders, needing the translation. Miss Militia supplied it, telling us, “They have different types of prison for different types of criminal, they’re deciding where to put us. Rehabilitative, holding, reconstruction, castigation, devastation. I’m—”

“Devastation?” Rain asked.

“I was about to say I’m butchering the translation.”

“Please tell me there’s a really frontloaded curve that favors rehabilitation,” Sveta said.