“I know,” I said, frustrated. I pulled goggles and the small gas filter down and let them dangle around my neck. “Yeah. We can’t waste time debating this. Should have done it earlier. Withdrawal, Caryatid, Finale, if you guys can look after Lookout, escort her to where she needs to be, keep her out of direct danger. Let’s keep to a strict time limit. Five minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Kenzie said.

“Five. These things go by quicker and get hairier than you tend to imagine at first. If we’re playing defense trying to keep these Titans from connecting, whatever that means, we can’t be distracted also keeping them away from where you’re at.”

“But—”

“Five,” Tristan told her. “Or you’re not coming. Antares is right.”

“Yep,” Sveta said.

Kenzie looked like she was going to argue, turning her mask from one of us to the other. Then she relented.

“Do you want a network?” Darlene asked.

“Yes,” I said.

I could feel Darlene’s power seize me. I became acutely aware of where she was, and every physical sensation she experienced, including the thrum of her heartbeat pounding in her chest. I felt Lookout, and Chicken Little, then Tristan, Sveta, and the Undersiders and Heartbroken. The Undersiders were riding the dogs.

Eerie, to mentally parse that I knew exactly how far away they were and I was not on the same Earth as them. It was the kind of thing I understood in a logistics, general awareness sense, but now I could sense it with an awareness that I hadn’t been born with.

This is how they experience the world.

This must be how you experience the world, Fragile One. Seeing around the corner, so to speak, into Earths that I don’t occupy.

“We ready?” Tristan asked.

The woman with the clipboard held out the device that looked like a cell phone had had a baby with an iron ingot, same as the guy further down the hall had given to Damsel. Heavy, with an antenna sticking out the top. There was a loop so it could be worn around the neck or hooked into the costume.

I was, through Syndicate, aware of Tristan reaching for it in the same moment I did.

I took hold of the thing, then passed it to him.

If nothing else, because Tristan needed this, and because I planned to have my hands full.

“Leader of each group gets one,” the woman said. “Try not to lose it. They’re our only reliable communication with the infrastructure as damaged as it is.”

“Got it,” Tristan said.

The Malfunctions phased into my Syndicate-awareness.

“Five minutes, then you evacuate Lookout into a portal. Take her to her team, get her to comms, then protect her,” I told the Malfunctions. “I don’t know if a critical piece of information would call Titan Skadi to the location or what, but… please.”

“Guarding the kids. Okay,” Withdrawal said. Dead serious.