“She can’t see the kid. Not easily. Not while she’s juggling everything else. She’s refining her plan against Contessa while she’s juggling a thousand of us. The Kid Cassandra makes that harder, and casts a shadow over everything she interacts with.”

Too hard.

Too hard. Those two words were like a whisper, a product of the environment, except no rasp of rubble on concrete or metal on metal had helped to form the sounds that coincidentally became words.

No, it was the chaotic noise in my head, the half-formed thoughts. Dangerously close to me being unable to distinguish my own thoughts from the words she was putting in my head.

It took effort to think past the screaming in my head. To put together what Tattletale was saying. The screaming was incessant, my every nerve was on edge, the past was regret, the present was stress well beyond what I’d ever thought I could tolerate, and the future was almost certain doom.

She can’t see Dinah. She can’t see us if we interact with Dinah.

The Simurgh shattered Narwhal’s forcefields in the air. Shards struck people who were trying to close the distance, in that twentieth of a second that it took Narwhal to cancel the forcefields and make the shards disappear.

“That’s why I could get the syringe to the giant,” I said. “She didn’t see me to stop me?”

Tattletale nodded. “Think so.”

“If it was that easy, we would have beat her with regularity a long time ago.”

Fuck, my ribs hurt. My collarbone hurt. I shifted position and was left breathless when the bone of one part of my fractured collarbone grated against the other part, making itself felt through my entire upper body and neck.

“It’s not that easy. She knows she’ll be blind, here and there. She collects and stacks the pieces. At a certain point, she’s got so many factors on her side she can make blind moves and still win. That’s where she’s at now. There’s no king for us to take, no weak point to capitalize on, no silver bullet or special trick,” Tattletale said.

“Tattletale, queen of pep talks,” Imp proclaimed.

“You gotta get out there, Vicky,” Tattletale said. “I sent Rachel to protect the kid, but there’s only so much she can do. Tell the Wardens to hold off until—”

“Got it,” I interrupted.

Even the act of going from a resting position lying against rubble to a resting position floating in the air was a little too much movement for me. I didn’t have the buzz of adrenaline and I needed it at this point. My entire body felt heavy, even though I was actively floating.

I flew, gritting my teeth as I shifted position.