It wasn’t a glamorous task, but I had the impression they wanted to be useful, and if I was being one hundred percent honest, it would be a bit of a load off my mind if Lookout and the Malfunctions were all safe.

“Lookout, you go. No joke, no wiggle room,” I said.

She nodded. She had her flash gun at her belt and her belt shifted, slithering around her. The belt buckle unfolded, revealing itself to be the eyehook. She had said she was digging up and repairing old stuff. She reached to her belt and pulled out one of the antenna-eye things.

“Kneel?” she asked.

I knelt, putting my hands on her shoulders not to steady myself, but to ensure I had her full attention.

“Seriously,” I told her, locking my eyes to hers, staring into the eyes of her mask. “Five minutes. You stay safe.”

“I got it. Yes,” Kenzie said, before pushing the device into my eye. I could feel the faint traces of metal against the internals of my eye, eye socket, and the meaty space behind the eye socket.

Tristan took another mask.

“Okay,” I said, straightening. I blinked, and the device came online, giving me information, text, and the ability to view things through the eyes of my team. “Any chance someone made a note of the guns I asked for?”

“Guns?” Sveta asked. I just shrugged.

“No notes, nothing like that was left here, sorry,” the woman with the clipboard told me.

“Alright, thanks,” I told her.

“Uncomfortable under my helmet,” Tristan said, adjusting his mask. He tried talking with it on, and it came out muffled. Nobody who wasn’t within arm’s reach of him would be able to hear. He fixed his goggles, and the eye sockets of his helmet rested against the domed eyecovers.

That would be a problem.

I glanced at the woman with the checklist. Nothing else?

Nothing else.

I could feel the others fall into step with me, Lookout with a bit of a bounce, and a wave back toward her friends. Toward the tear in reality.

The air that blasted against my face was cold. I closed my eyes, and it felt very much like I blinked and found myself elsewhere.

We emerged from the portal with breathing devices and goggles in hand or already around our faces. Into a shattered section of city near the water. There was no ‘south’ here, only freezing water, some of which was frothing violently as it disappeared into a crack on the beach. The froth was kind of startling in how white it was, when everything else seemed painted with a dark palette. The sky was dark gray, overcast and heavy with dust that didn’t seem to ever quite settle. The ground was snow made dirty with the damage from the cracking, once white, now a pale, stained brown-gray with the dust of fallen buildings.