“Just tell me the Wardens are doing something to follow up on the action earlier. My teammate almost died putting herself on the line, working with Tattletale to get across to someone very powerful and very ill. I have a trace of hope here. I need to know it’s justified.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Eric said. “You’ve been uncooperative every step of the way. Why should I extend you any favors?”

I stared him down, taking mental note of the situation. Armstrong wasn’t present. Citrine wasn’t on my side. The only other people I could name were Megan and Ysmine, Goddess’s cluster, and Pearce, who I only knew as the person who tended to stick near the computers. She was there now, and she and her underlings were agitated. The only scene that matched that agitation was the ongoing fight against the Machine Army. Soldiers running this way and that, to move rubble and adjust the forward defense. Here and there, they used explosives to deal with larger robots. The flash on the screen drew Eric’s eye, as he broke eye contact first, and I looked too.

There was a machine that was as tall as a house, with spindle legs, and a kind of open coffin for a head. A person was in the coffin, machinery threaded into their eyes and mouth. They groped blindly at the air as the machine spider-walked its way forward. When the giant smashed the machine, it bled from the resulting cracks, lurched back to a standing position, and then began firing lasers from turrets at the side.

While Eric wasn’t looking, I slid my phone across the table. I took the seat next to him.

The machine was hit with a rocket. The person at the head was given a merciful end, but the general shape of him and the giblets were held more or less in place by the machinery that threaded into the mouth, out the other end, all along bones and around organs.

Eric looked away. He seemed surprised when he saw me sitting next to him.

I turned my palms upward, keeping my expression unimpressed.

“I sat. May I please call?” I asked. “This is in the Wardens’ favor, the city’s favor, your favor, Shin’s, mine, and Amy’s. The only logical alternative to this is dealing with her for good.”

“We know,” Eric said. “Your stance on the matter. Your father called us after he talked to you. You asked your father to kill a foreign dignitary?”

Was that it, then? When the going gets tough, the tough get going? Or at least deflect responsibility, deflect everything, set up an escape route from responsibility and commitment?

I just wanted you to go to Mom if you couldn’t hack it in Shin, or get Amy to therapy, or… ensure we didn’t have to worry about Amy ever again.

Damn it, Dad.