“You don’t sound confident,” Tattletale said. “No, correction. You sound confident. But you aren’t.”

“Never one hundred percent with that group,” he said.

“Not dumb,” Tattletale told him.

“Do you want me to say something to Love Lost?” Damsel asked. “She liked me.”

“No. And it would take a while to get there. Have to get to the Wardens’ base, get permission, then get access to the prison. Slower because they’re busy and things are shuffling around.”

“Too bad. I was hoping for a peek.”

“There’s that too, consideration-wise,” he told her.

“I’ve got frequencies for the cube,” Kenzie said. “Once you outlined the room boundaries, I was able to look for something that fits those metrics, in the mess of data. If I map it out…”

The cube lit up. A projection of the room appeared in the center of our hideout, sprawling across the floor in what I had to assume was actual size, all in silvery, shimmering lines.

The image resolution clarified moment by moment, as numbers flew, jagged lines and angles resolving into shapes, then into small details. Everything writ in silver.

A five-sided room with what looked like a crooked sundial in the middle. Two parts of the room were cast into deep shadow.

“There it is,” Rain said.

“Not what I saw in the dream,” Ashley reported. “Except—”

She extended one bladed finger toward a forked line. It could have been a more organic vein, a bolt of lightning frozen in time, or a crack.

“The cracks like veins. Right,” I said.

“I figured that was an image resolution error,” Rain murmured.

“Your brain paves over the gaps and cracks, but they’re there. I’m not sure you can do much about them, but… yeah,” Kenzie commented, working on her keyboard not-cube. “So if I transplant the alter-space that I set up for the Capricorn twins, can you move this cube to the center?”

“That’s not a cube,” Tristan said.

Thank you.

“It’s a cube, trust me,” Kenzie said. “Over there? I’d have to unplug from everything to walk it over.”

Tristan picked it up, moving the not-cube over. Kenzie remained plugged in, with headphones jacked into her computer, wires looped over the backs of her hands. She worked with a set of menus.

The keyboard illuminated, projecting a rough cube shape in roughly the center of the room. The projected sundial toppled, and things throughout the room shifted.

“Wait,” Rain said. “That’s the actual room, not just a sketch?”

“It’s the actual room,” Kenzie said.

The light from the projection flared, so bright it was hard to look at.