“Foresight is tied up with war stuff right now,” Sveta said.

“They are,” he said.

“Is it possible the key people were tied up, and Mayday talked to lower-level members of Foresight?” Sveta asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“Hold the questions along those lines,” I said. “Good theory, Sveta, but we should get the particulars later. Time’s short.”

“Okay. I’ll check the window,” Sveta said.

Time was short, and the clairvoyants were possibly listening in. There was a degree to which I didn’t want to reveal too much to them, at the same time I wanted to get the situation straight.

Was it a play, then? Or was it bad circumstance?

Hard to know without talking to Mayday.

“Our version?” I asked. “We’ve been juggling multiple teams, trying to keep on the down low, and we’re holding the fort until a team decides to settle in permanently.”

“You, specifically,” he said.

“Us, as a group. We’re setting up as a team,” I said. I thought of the clairvoyants. “We’re getting ourselves set up, we’re still getting costumes and names, headquarters, and a long-term plan. This is an interim job, and it gets us some money, connections, and favor.”

“And you think we bypassed that?”

“You bypassed it. The team is getting paid by people who want a chance to get some practice in and mess with the Cedar Point guys while they’re bewildered. We’re getting resources. We’re draining their resources. They’re spending money to hire help, they’re losing people. They pull favors from major players, get answers or other stuff. What I arranged, my part in this, is that one of those players gives us a cut each time we provoke these guys to call. It drains the bad guys and I can give these guys their startup cash.”

Sveta was walking around the perimeter of the office. She stopped and looked my way. “You’re telling him?”

I’m telling Cedar Point. They want answers, and I’m going to give them Tattletale.

I hadn’t wanted to do it so soon, but it was something in keeping with my warrior monk philosophy. My goal here was stability. To minimize the ripple effects and keep things from pinging off of one another to cause a greater disaster. I wanted things to stop.

“Yeah, I’m telling him,” I said.

I could see Spright consider it.

If this madness continued without a scapegoat or a target, then it would only continue unabated, with endless escalation. So long as Cedar Point thought they knew what was going on, they would move predictably, rather than windmilling their arms around and stirring up chaos.

“You were just talking to me about how the company we keep and our references matter. You’re working with the villains?”