“I don’t know, Chicken Little,” I told him. His birds had taken to the air, and his huge-as-fuck eagle was unnerving me with how close it was flying. I wasn’t sure if it was an anxiety thing. He might have hoped it could catch him and slow his descent if he fell.

I secured my grip.

“All I know,” I said, “is what we were doing before wasn’t working.”

What the hell had we even been doing, before?

No, that was a stupid question. I knew what we’d been doing, and why. Fighting, because we had to.

But this was a problem with a lot of moving pieces, and some of those pieces were so big they were hard to wrap my head around.

I thought back to lessons with Uncle Neil. Lessons I’d learned in handling my mom. I thought of Dean.

Tattletale had mentioned a thing, when I’d described scenes I’d seen, throwing out the word ‘submission’, and it had rankled, felt wrong. Imp had laughed.

That wasn’t the word. That wasn’t the idea. It was bigger than that.

“I think… I might have an idea,” I told him.

“What is oh we’re dropping okay,” he said, all in one breath.

The eagle flapped its wings to control its descent.

“We’re safe. I’ve got you,” I told him.

With a free hand, I grabbed the rope that Byron had used to make his way down the canyon side. A just-in-case, that Aiden could see. My feet skidded along the wall, not so much to slow my descent as they kept me and Aiden steady.

I looked at my team and I could see how weary they were. When they looked at me, there was a deer-in-the-headlights look to the quality of it. I was left to wonder if it had been there for a while, and they were on the cusp of breaking. Had I looked like that?

I approached them, and I saw the image on the wall.

The Simurgh. She had taken off earlier in the evening, after perching on Titan Fortuna for a while. Now she wasn’t on Titan Fortuna.

The Titan was wounded, a crack dividing her upper body. The wolf-heads that had been a wreath around her shoulders were separated by the cracks, and they were twisted, the black color bleeding away to silver.

The Simurgh perched in the crack, her wings around her. And the ragged edges of the Titan were becoming wings, gold and black became white and silver.

Every other Titan had gone still. The ones that weren’t were moving toward the group. I saw Titans I hadn’t seen before, but I could recognize some by the design of them.

One, shadowy and wrapped in what looked like a cloak of black and jade, had a winged helmet with only shadows beneath the helmet’s ‘face’.

She was bent, hands out and cupped.