He was dying, he realized. His focus slipped and overall, he wasn’t recouping what he lost. His brain was just… drifting away, sinking into numb darkness threaded through with jolts of pain that made him want to jump or writhe, though he could barely move.

“I’ll go with Tress,” the Harbinger said. “I know ways through.”

“Why, though?” Tress asked. “Why me? You have no reason to care about me, and I definitely don’t like you or what you represent. Sorry if that’s a bitch thing to say, but—”

“I’m Cauldron. I support Cauldron. I’d do my part to do it all over again.”

“Yeah. You’re not even ashamed?”

The Harbinger shook his head. To the Wasp Commander, the movement looked blurry, with severe afterimages and spots in his vision.

“Okay,” Sveta said. She took in a deep breath, then said, “I’m going to keep my organs nonfunctional until I’m far from here and I can get help. It felt like something internal broke. If something happens—”

“I’ll let people know, so you don’t choke your organs for too long. The Harbinger will do the same, if I can’t,” Swansong said. Still more concern in her eyes. For Tress, now.

“We got the thrall commander, right?” Tress asked.

“This one, probably,” Harbinger said, pointing. Not at the Wasp Commander, but, based on direction, Tricks.

“Yeah,” Tress said. “Okay. Not happy about it, but…”

A silence lingered, sentence unfinished.

“How far is it to outside?” Tress asked.

“Not far,” the Harbinger said. “I’ll show you the way.”

Tress and the Harbinger hopped down, landing on either side of the Wasp Commander, their eyes on the hallway, their destination.

“What are you doing?” Swansong asked.

She was asking the Harbinger, and the Harbinger answered, “Tidying up. Taking care of one of a few things to make the irregular regular.”

“You’re so weird,” Swansong said. “You do a disservice to all of us.”

Bitter with the ignobility of it all, the Wasp Commander struggled to organize thoughts that were falling into disarray. He resigned himself to trying to find peace in the—

The Harbinger put a bullet in his head as he walked by. One of his acts to ‘tidy up’.

⊙

“We get through this nightmare,” Mischa said. The echo of his own voice through his headset was distorted. He checked instrument panels, and reached past the gulf that was his own brain and into the realm of another kind of thinking. A realm of thoughts that weren’t his own. If left brain and right brain were two rooms of a house with no clear demarcation to separate them, then this was across the street.