“Let me go,” she said.

“I will. One question though,” I said.

“What?”

“Are you going to regret not being here for this conversation? I can fill you in after, if you need to get away, or I could come with you, if you needed company or backup.”

“You agree with Sveta, don’t you?” she asked, accusatory.

“I like the idea of due process and fair justice,” I said. “I’m not as sure as Sveta that this machine has its cogs in place.”

She stood there. Even with the parts of her bodysuit that stood out to give it definition and decoration, it was very apparent how small and skinny she was. A couple of inches shy of being five feet tall. Fragile, in a completely different way than Rain was fragile, right now.

She pushed past my hand, walked down the aisle a bit, and then seated herself on a seat a few rows behind Ashley, her back to us.

“Outlining our options, Tattletale said she’d keep an eye on Cradle,” I said.

“She says a lot of things,” Chris said. “I’m a bit lost, in all of this. But she pointed Cradle and the cleaver assassin at Rain, right? She led them right to him.”

“It looks like it,” Sveta said.

“Then she pointed us at the assassin guy and Cradle.”

“Yeah,” Sveta said.

“And now she wants us to let Cradle go.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Contradictory,” Chris said.

“She promised an explanation,” I said.

“Damn this fragile healing effect,” Rain said. He sounded angrier than anything, now. “I really want that explanation, now, to my face.”

“I can help with that,” Kenzie said, from halfway down the bus, her back still to us.

I looked at Rain, and then I looked at the boy who had forecast so much of this. Tristan might have been the type for a victorious ‘I told you so’, had the roles been reversed. Byron, however, was quiet, his expression unreadable.

My hand moved, and the ‘crown’ moved with it. I’d exerted too much pressure, and the point of the spike had pierced the bed of my finger, with red blood welling up and a droplet tracing its way down the spike.

I donned the glove, the fabric serving to cover the small puncture wound.

⊙

I’d met with Tattletale before, in a place very similar to this. The city was close to one of the portals, and it was very likely that it was one of the cities that had been supplied with foreign material, and that material was concrete. Underfoot, the buildings, the supporting pillars that ran diagonally from the ground to the buildings.