“Any other information you could provide would mean a lot,” he said. He didn’t look at her, but at the ground between them, his fists still clenched. “I don’t have a lot of cash, but I will pay if I have to, and I’ll go into debt if you need me to, I’ll pay you later if I can’t pay your fee now.”

“We can chip in,” Chicken Little said, piping up. “Right?”

“Right,” Darlene said, sounding a little less confident or willing.

Tattletale sighed. “You don’t need to pay. Neither of you.”

“Thank you,” Chicken Little said, quiet.

“Even if you could fight it, you’re not going to kill it,” Tattletale said, indicating the monster on the screen. “It’s going to bounce back from just about anything you could do to it. Prepare for it to have a few tricks up its sleeve, because it’s an extension of a species that plays the long game and that knows we don’t have it in us to permanently stop it. So don’t underestimate it, don’t assume it’s shown you everything it can do.”

I frowned.

“It isn’t human, and it never was,” she went on. “Don’t expect it to have human rationales. Do expect it to have a program it follows, a set goal that may or may not be one hundred percent clear. It’s going to be somewhat predictable, but powerful enough that the predictability isn’t reassuring or an easy answer.”

“Does it have weaknesses?” Capricorn asked. He’d joined the conversation.

“Yep. I’m betting it can’t go much further than the room. If you can get through that gap—”

Tattletale walked over to the projected image, where two thirds of the room were cast into ‘shadow’, before indicating the far wall.

“It can’t follow?” Rain asked.

“I’m thinking… ninety percent odds it can’t,” Tattletale said. “But you’re going to find other stuff on the far side, a little less consistently solid, and from what Damsel said, it’s going to be a bit like everything’s gone breaker. They like structure and they like redundancy, so expect details pulled from host awareness, specific and collective. When you don’t have structure, you’ll have vast amounts of connective tissue.”

“Valleys that are simultaneously mountains?” I asked.

“You got it,” Tattletale said, sounding like she was having far too much fun. “That stuff on the far side? Doesn’t move far beyond its confines. Be ready to run. If your tricks to try to force waking up don’t work, you just need to live for long enough to time out.”

“Talking to Colt and Cradle, our best guess for how long we’re in the room is a little under forty minutes,” Rain said.

I couldn’t help but glance at the clock.

Eerie, that he said that, and the clock showed 35:12, 35:11, 35:10… counting down.