He knew one of them, he was shocked to see. Elaine Chapo.

Another, dusty and unconscious, was a man. The name on his Patrol uniform read ‘Roux’.

“You can’t do this without…” Rain was saying.

As the layers wove over one another, the ribbons blurred. Letters intermingled, rearranged as ribbons moved. Chox. Rhao. Rap. Roo. CRa. Chx.

Searching for and struggling to find a working order, by whatever logic they operated by.

Faces changed, like the woman was trying on different proportions of features.

When she was done, or done enough, she pulled off her jacket and tossed it away.

Tossed it to the doll girl, apparently.

He had to walk around to see the reflection of the doll girl in the same pillar, that showed them putting their faces on, so to speak.

The doll head, forcing its way into the mouth of a civilian’s corpse, dusty. Fingers pried and dug into flesh, cracked bone, and drove wedges in, parting the face down the middle as she squeezed in. The ‘rookie’ he’d seen in the house, before they’d all gone under and come here.

“We’re not going to hurt you or get in your way. If you want to stop her, you can,” Matryoshka–Valentin said. “But we need to do this. It may be our last chance.”

“If you want to do this at a time things are sane and there’s no risk of collateral damage, you can,” Rain said. “I will bring you along next time. I’ll swear it to you. Sveta is my friend, I know how important it is.”

“You yourself said we need distractions,” Cox the doll girl said. “We had a close call with the ‘security’ on the way here. Someone’s agent.”

“Please don’t do this,” Rain said. “You can’t build, you can’t make things normal by cutting away. We’re working with crude tools in a material we barely understand. I wasn’t willing to work on Love Lost because she was too deeply integrated. How integrated do you think powers are if they’re bound into people’s skin, hair, or hearts?”

“We might be running out of time!” Kelly called out. Late to arrive. “People are signaling! Things are getting bad over there!”

“It’s our choice to make,” Matryoshka–Valentin said. “I know enough Case Fifty-Threes who would roll the dice, if those dice included a chance of dying and a chance of being normal.”

“You have work to do,” the doll girl said. “You might have an opportunity to send some signals, make some last-second changes. You should leave us to do this.”

“You’ll regret it forever, if you end up killing these people you owe so much to,” Rain said. “I know I have no place saying this when you guys have life harder, so much of the time—”