To my left was a drop, blocked off by a short railing. Cargo containers were scattered around, some recognizable from Gimel, others a little odd, adhering to different standards.

There were scuffs of battle damage. Abrasions, claw marks. Stains.

“She said that if we took the route that would see Teacher captured, two members of my group would be dead or gone. Paraphrasing there, but…”

“Yes,” Tattletale said. “And you lost one.”

“Option A was that one member would suffer for so long it might as well be forever. I got the answer about that. Precipice, stuck in the doorway or something. The idea was that the city would lose its heroes in a hard fought battle.”

“Makes a kind of sense. Something like what we did last night, but more… obstructive than penetrative.”

I didn’t miss the ‘we did’, as opposed to the ‘you did’.

“Mm,” I made a sound. “Option B was that we let him win. Back off, let him finish his plan. Subvert control over his people, close the portals… I can sort of see how that might have played out, now.”

“I can too,” Tattletale said. “It would have been last night, except we wouldn’t have been in a rush. You at that same crystal near Teacher. No.”

“No?”

“No, not you. Rain. One of the members of our group with a natural facility toward the crystals, instead of your brute mindset of ‘break it’!”

I rolled my eyes.

“Saw that.”

“You can not see that on surveillance camera,” I spoke into the phone.

“I can see enough for my power to fill in the blanks.”

“It would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives if we took option B,” I said, quiet. “Or so she said. She described it as being helpful in the long run, good somehow. Kind of like how she thought Teacher was close to being on the right track. She said so, when we confronted him at the very end.”

“A clue about how she thinks and what she prioritizes. She’s taking a tack very close to that. I don’t think she was lying when she said she was trying to find an outcome that would make our side happier overall. I do think she’s liable to expand out beyond that after a week of mulling things over and expanding her reach and considerations.”

I leaned heavily into the railing, the hard, narrow bar biting into my arm. I looked down at the loading deck below. At the gouges. Repaired parts where Swansong’s power had kissed the metal floor.

“So we’re useful and we get consideration after freeing her, we get to be the pawns but she appeals to our interests in a general sense… and then she moves on?”