Back to the first feed.

Alt-tab, and I switched to an overhead map. Advance Guard had sent it to us in a message. It gave a view of the forest and roads, lines struck out for cliffs or other barriers. She’d avoided detailing the settlement itself.

We had the details. Thinkers had always avoided scanning for the Mathers family because using a thinker power on or near them had a way of causing severe problems for the thinker. A strapped to a hospital bed screaming kind of severe.

I alt-tabbed back to the video. Tattletale either wasn’t present, or was in a car, not on a dog. I studied the cars until I was pretty sure I recognized the one from the night prior.

“They’re here.”

I was bewildered on two counts. That I heard Tristan’s voice but it sounded off, in a way that made me think someone had died or something had gone wrong. The other half of it was that I thought he meant the villains. Tattletale. Here somehow at the same time they were clearly elsewhere, on the video on my laptop.

It wasn’t Tristan speaking oddly, but Byron speaking normally. His armor was the same general style as Tristan’s, but it had a blue tint, and it was scale, not plate, with fins and conch spirals instead of spiraling horns.

And it wasn’t the villains, who had somehow traveled the rest of the distance. It was the Wardens.

I smiled. “Good to hear. How are you doing?”

“Nervous. I think the kids are too.”

The kids were sitting with their backs to the side of the building-in-progress. Nobody had come into the parking lot since we’d arrived. Kenzie and Chris were chatting. They’d decimated most of a box of twelve donuts between them.

“Yeah,” I said. How much destructive power was packed into those cars, with those dogs? How much was packed into that compound of Fallen?

I folded up my laptop and slid it into my bag. I deposited it with Kenzie’s stuff.

“Anything I can do?” I asked.

“Do?”

“To help you be less nervous. To make this easier.”

Byron shook his head.

“I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you being here too, Tristan, I know you’ve been part of this since the beginning, but it matters. It matters more that you’re willing to make this leap, Byron.”

“I was a hero once. I wasn’t that bad at it,” Byron said. “I don’t want kids and innocents to get hurt. I happen to think… a big way for kids and innocents to not get hurt is for this team to have never happened.”

“We’re doing something good here, today,” I said.

“And I’m here,” Byron said. He shrugged, and his armor made a sound at the gesture.