She’d chosen to communicate across those lines, targeting those specific areas.

“Does Colt have any intuition why?” I asked.

“No, but it would be worth figuring out.”

“Every move we make is one she’s guided us to,” Tristan said. He sounded like he was going to say something else.

There was only the noise of ongoing fighting.

“We’re still getting new Titans,” he said, and it didn’t sound like that other thing. “We just got four more. Mystic Magic Impaler, Shortcut, Drillbit, and the Custodian.”

I looked at him in surprise.

Somehow I hadn’t thought she could be ‘gotten’ like that. Caught by the cracks.

Some of the others didn’t surprise me.

“There’s going to be more,” Tristan said, his voice quiet. “Soon. So I’ve got to ask. Are any of you vulnerable? Are any of you at risk of cracking? Because this is going to be a hard fight. It’s going to be ugly. I need you guys to self-assess, and to assess each other.”

If we’d had the grace of silence, I would have said that the silence was damning. Instead, there were percussive sounds, distant dull thuds that made clouds move and stirred up dust and snow half a mile away. The sky was lit up by lasers, artillery strikes, and slashes of gold and red. Some of those things made noises. There were the dull, wordless cries of giants, straining to fight against the Titans with a temporary strength. Vat-grown and then blown up by multiples of their original size, with new added capabilities, if I was to judge by the Gibborim Knight’s scales.

I could have called out any member of this team, with Chris as the only possible exception.

Except they would have turned around and said the same about me.

It was much the same reason I didn’t ask Chris about what he’d done at the prison, or his other skeevy behavior. On the flip side, it was why he wasn’t mentioning it to me, even though he couldn’t usually resist the urge to hit someone where it hurt and create more safe distance between himself and others.

No. He was scared because he was a child and however he dressed up his voice and his body, or whatever monstrous form he wore, that didn’t really change. He was scared and he wanted to deal with the source of that fear. He wanted to take on these monsters.

The only true surprise, I felt, was that Natalie didn’t say a thing. She wasn’t so complicit. She could have, should have, and would have said anything, and that would set off the storm of debate and denial we couldn’t afford.