“Do you want help?” Hannah asked.

“I would love the help and the company,” he told her.

Maybe this could be a change, too. If they weren’t moving in opposite directions, each handling their own things…

That was a silly, almost teenager-ish thought, when he had many, many other things to dwell on.

“I’ll check on the kids,” Tattletale told Victoria. “The first should be waking up.”

“Tattletale,” Chevalier asked. “I feel like I might not get the chance if I don’t ask now.”

“Uh huh?”

“The drilling. Titan Fortuna was working on something. Is it an emergency? A concern?”

“I don’t know enough to tell you,” she said. “I need information to work with. But it wasn’t drilling. It was etching.”

“Etching? In the dream, I asked Alexandria. She said it was an answer, communication, sending a message. Answers.”

“Ah,” Tattletale said.

“What does it mean?”

“It means she found something she thought was important enough to tell all the rest of her kind about. It makes a bit more of her actions make sense. Probably not the whole answer, but…”

“Is that a concern? A tool we can use?”

“It’s a question for another day. For now, we breathe.”

Last 20.e2

I hate this, Chastity thought. This isn’t what I’m good at.

Her boots struggled to find traction on the sloped, ice-crusted concrete. With a gloved hand, she reached into a pocket, dug for some sand, and sprinkled it down around her feet. Somehow, grit found its way into the glove, through the seams of the fingertips, in beneath her nails, and into the folds of the glove itself. She was hyperaware of it. Hyperaware of the wet and sand that had fallen into her boot earlier. Hyperaware of how cold she was, the sweat, the dark.

The slope of concrete was an exterior wall, part of a prefab segment for a building that had caved in when the building had been partially demolished. Below her were floorboards, equally prefab, churned out by factories with barely an examination, laid out and then coated in resin. Those floorboards were littered with glass, with rubble big and small. The building interior was dark, cold, miserable.

She saw a picture, what could have been a guy and his brothers, if he had very diverse parents. It was more likely they were coworkers, she told herself.

People had lived here.

There was a chance people had died here. She didn’t smell it, but the cold played a role in that.

She slid down until she reached the window in the fallen piece of wall.

“Hostie,” she swore. The window wasn’t broken.

“What?” the call came from above.

“Window!” she called out.

Grit rolled and scraped against fingertips as she quickly undid fittings. Despite the fact she was chilly, she could feel sweat roll down her back.

Sacre. Why am I doing this? To win points with people who don’t even care?