One of the men helped her crawl free. The aperture squeezed shut, like a sphincter closing, the closing pressing juices up and out, until they washed over and obscured the view. As fluids found holes to drain back into, another space opened, a sphincter covered by glistening skin thinner than paper, a foot sticking up and out against it.

The giant woman who had just emerged, I saw, was pregnant. Most or all of the women were. All of them, it was hard to tell at first because many were moist from having emerged in the recent past, or they were crusted in frost because the moisture had frozen, were glistening from inner thigh to heel. The men were violently erect. Like, stab one of those things with a pin, and I imagined the resulting blood spray could cut you in half.

They were still, unmoving, except for the occasional figure shifting its weight or getting comfortable.

A third screen showed Dauntless. Kronos. The titan. The Simurgh wasn’t on his shoulder, but flapped lazy circles, flying in a way that didn’t feel intuitive with the flaps.

Dauntless was moving. A screen below that image showed the plotted paths and positions.

Four marks on the screen, black circles with red crowns, were placed on maps. Two in Shin. Two in our city, one of those two with a dotted line marking its course.

One mark, Dauntless’s old symbol, a helmet framed by a ring of lightning bolts, and its own dotted line. Moving to intercept.

We took it in, watching, seeing what was on the screens, how the people there reacted.

Swears felt out of place in this formal setting. Conversation was hard to initiate. The more I paid attention to the little details, the people who were standing alone or sitting alone, like Armstrong, the more I felt like this wasn’t so comparable to the situation room meeting about the Slaughterhouse Nine back in Brockton Bay.

At least there, there had been a sense that things would be horrible, but we could get through it.

Narwhal spotted us.

She talked to my mom and Crystal first, “It’s unfortunate that you arrived with Victoria.”

“Why?” my mom asked.

“Because Victoria is a security concern on three fronts at the moment, and by associating with her you’re a concern too. We’re in communication with Flashbang, who is acting as mediator, and we’d be happy to have you step in to talk to him. Now we can’t.”

“Three security concerns?” my mom asked.

“Her activities last night, for one, against Warden counsel. We can’t enforce hard laws and the warning was brief and not elaborated on, but discussion on the subject of Breakthrough and their actions is pending.”

“With distractions, it seems,” my mom said.