I floated up, ready to take off, but Tattletale’s hand gripped my wrist.

The Heartbroken were hanging close, but they weren’t in earshot. Everyone else mobilized.

“What?” I asked.

I saw about fifteen different emotions cross Tattletale’s face, eyes behind goggles, lower face behind the clear gas mask. None of them were good.

“That bad?” I asked.

She let go of my wrist.

“What?” I asked.

I saw her expression change, the eye contact slide away. She turned, and it seemed like she was going to go, not answering my question, nor stating what she’d intended to say.

I grabbed her by the upper arm, hard enough to bring her attention back to me. I met her eyes, me looking through my goggles, her looking through hers, the air ranging from milky white to gray.

“This isn’t like Scion was,” she told me.

“There’s more of them. Each one has the full capabilities of the agent that originally worked with the host. All of the powers it could have handed out.”

She shook her head.

“No?”

“Not that,” she told me, voice still muffled by her mask. “Scion was one and done.”

“One and—”

“Beat him, we kind of return to a semblance of normal. Couldn’t do anything about the cycle that preceded him or the stuff that was supposed to follow after. That wheel’s still turning, and it doesn’t turn backward.”

I shook my head. “I don’t…”

“I saw into the cracks. I saw the connections, the glows, I put it together with what I remembered from last night. There will be more Titans, as sure as water flows downhill. If we win every fight from here on out, all we’ll do is hold the line, and every week or month for the next three hundred years, there will be more cracks, more Titans.”

I turned to look at the pair of Titans, and at the pitch black ruin that crawled across the city. Cracks in reality.

“And if we lose, you weren’t lying. We die, they get stronger, they move closer to their endgame?”

“Welcome to the new status quo,” she said, beside me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Don’t tell my team. Don’t tell your team. It won’t help matters in the short term. I’m only telling you because a part of me likes you and a part of me thinks you’re a pain in the asshole. Means you occupy a narrow space where I can share this burden with you and not feel completely awful about it.”

I saw the corners of her lips turn upward behind the material of her gas mask.

“Well fuck you too,” I said, still reeling with the idea.

Titan Oberon chose that moment to stomp his hoof, producing a shockwave larger than any we’d dealt with so far.

Radiation 18.5