The strike team operated out of the same abandoned warehouse I’d plucked a merchant girl out of what felt like a lifetime ago. We had a few other meeting places and fallbacks, but this had—once again—become something of a second home over the last few months.

When Kinsley was here, she hadn’t spruced the place up much. Something about the concussions and her father’s kidnapping put a real damper on her aesthetic preferences. The whole time the two of us worked out of this place, it stayed spartan.

It looked completely different now. I’d told Astrid and Astria it was temporary, but that hadn’t stopped them from decorating, putting up posters, bizarre and unconnected art pieces, lamps, a dark-brown pullout couch and several reclining chairs. And of course, a “high-learning” sized white board, which was currently pushed to the corner of the room, half concealed beneath a curtain. I honestly should have come down on them harder for the constant ornamenting—the entire point of using this place was that it looked abandoned—but the truth was I didn’t have the heart.

Especially considering how Astrid couldn’t stop gushing about how nice it was to stay in one place.

Another reminder that I was getting soft.

Then again, I had to remember that Gemini was the star of the show here. The twins brought more collective firepower to the team than Max, me, and even Sae could leverage collectively at any given time. Maybe letting them liven the place up was a perk that came with the territory.

Max was doing basic maintenance on his crossbows in the corner. I turned him towards them. Beyond his previous association with Roderick, his background was a mystery, but he was one of many frustrated Users who had extensive pre-dome experience with firearms and found themselves unable to leverage that skill. That frustration was doubled when you factored that Max’s Estranged Officer class was almost purely informational. His evaluation power was invaluable, but he didn’t have many combat skills. And as someone in almost the same exact situation, I knew crossbows would translate well. Took him a week to get a solid feel for them, after that he’d been upgraded from pure scout to auxiliary ranged.

Sae and Astrid were quietly discussing something in the corner and didn’t appear to be arguing. That in and of itself was uncommon, as outside the field, their aggressive personalities tended to set each other off, and it took a measure of discipline not to send Azure to listen in. There was no reason to breach their privacy. If it was important enough, Sae would bring it to me later.

Astria was talking my ear off per usual. She got nervous pre-mission, and unlike her sister, seemed to place a lot of faith and trust in me, given our history.

“—Taking dual-cast at level seventeen is the obvious choice.” She continued in a stream-of-consciousness that barely required my input.

“Mhm.” I said. We’d already talked about this.

“How… is dual-cast different from what the two of you usually do?” Talia—currently manifested in her darker, shadow form—lifted her head and asked.

“When we cast together, we’re magnifying the same spell. Dual-cast would allow us to do the same thing with either the same spell or two different spells, quadrupling the firepower.” Astria’s eyes twinkled. “And that’s not even getting into the reactions we could set off if we mixed different elements. Super-heated steam, maybe even lava if we do it right.”

“Seems like a wise investment.” Talia nodded approvingly.

“How close are you to leveling?” I asked, trying to re-engage with the conversation and ignore Sae and Astrid.

“Close. We should both tip-over tonight if this one’s worth as much XP as the last one.” Astria said, then her enthusiasm waned. “Won’t matter though. Not if I can’t talk Astrid into it.”

That was surprising. For as long as I’d known them, the twins had been more or less of one mind. Besides the day we’d met, this was the first hint at internal tension I’d gotten from either of them. “Astrid wants something different?”

Astria chuckled nervously, pointedly not looking at me and playing with her hair. “It’s no big deal. She’s just dragging her feet a little.”

I waited.

Talia looked between us in confusion. “I do not understand how this matter involves feet.”

“Figure of speech, Tal.” I murmured, keeping my focus on Astria. “Means her sister isn’t picking up what she’s putting down.”

“Shouldn’t the person who put it down pick it back up?” Talia blinked.

“She thinks we’re focusing too much on offense.” Astria admitted, seeming disproportionally uncomfortable with the statement from the way she shifted and refused to make eye-contact.

I shifted the mask on my face, feeling a degree of responsibility. “If the counter-argument is she wants to boost your defensive spells, Astrid may be onto something. The way the strike-team fights is perfect for taking out isolated, high-level targets—”

“—Assassinations.” Astria chirped.

“Or abductions.” I said, cringing slightly at her wording. “Anyway, ninety percent of what we do is location and timing. The remaining ten percent is unloading as much focused power as we can in a short-time.”

“Move quick, hit hard, get out.” Astria repeated what had become the strike team’s mantra.

“It’s worked for us so far.” I nodded. Even I was surprised at how successful we’d been without a tank, and it’d been my decision to go without. “But it’s a niche strategy. If you go up against numbers or end up in a prolonged, sustained conflict—which will happen eventually—there’s a good chance of burning up your mana reserves before the fight’s over.”

Astria nodded. “Maybe we can put dual-casting off for the next level, then.”

I wanted to inquire further. If Astrid’s hesitancy wasn’t limited to their combat balance. She’d been letting Astria take the lead more, which on the surface, seemed like a good thing. Astria was far more useful now that she was taking a varying degree of initiative than when she’d been following her sister around like a ghost. But what if there was more to it?

“Myrddin.” Max had twisted at the waist and called across the room, still caught up with his equipment.

“What’s up?”

“Got the special payloads mostly figured out, but with what we know about this guy I’m struggling a bit.” He held up two different bolts. One was dark-green and splotchy, the color of mud speckled jade, thick tip forming a variation of the classic bodkin point shape. The second was bright silver with a hollow mechanical tip. On impact, the broadhead would expand, increasing the wound channel.

It was a relatable problem, one I’d been toying with in every hypothetical that involved Sunny. The only time I’d seen him in the field—the night of the tunnel—he’d been wearing plate. Given that, the armor piercing lowhil bolts should have been the natural choice. The issue was he moved fast, faster than a man in heavy armor should have been able to move, and I wasn’t confident the AP bolts could punch through whatever expensive, probably magic-reinforced attire he was using. I’d be more comfortable walking into this if my commission from the Order’s blacksmith was ready, but they were still days away from that.

I opened my mouth.

Max interjected preemptively. “Before you say it, I’m already planning on bringing both. The question is, which do I load?”

I closed my mouth and considered that. Most basic system crossbows worked similarly to their real-world counterparts, sole difference being that the string would mechanically auto-draw. Only the lowest-level, garbage-tier crossbows required the foot-in-stirrup routine. Advanced, higher-level crossbows varied a great deal more. Single-fire, internal chambers, even a few cartridge variants. I knew—because I picked it for him—that Max’s crossbow used a rotating internal chamber. It couldn’t blow through ammo as quickly as a semi-automatic firearm, but it could get bolts down range faster and more accurately than the average sightless bow.

The downside, of course, was reloading. Bolts had to be seated into slots in the internal cylinder one at a time, not unlike a shotgun, and there was no fast way to switch projectile types. They had to be manually unloaded the same way they were loaded.

“How’s your accuracy coming along?” I asked, leaving Astria behind and crossing over the room to his workbench. Last outing I hadn’t seen him miss much, but I wanted to know what he thought of it.

Max shrugged. “Still internalizing the lead and drop at different ranges, which makes hitting a moving target harder than it should be, but in general? Pretty damn on the dot, if I do say so myself.”

I picked up one of the heftier lowhil bolts and spun it on my thumb, extending the fletching side towards him. “Load the armor piercing. I’ll run broads out the gate, so we’ll start with all our bases covered.”

“Fair enough.” Max loaded five bolts then set his crossbow on the bench, turning to massage the shoulders of the young man sitting in Kinsley’s old computer chair. “And I’m sure Renato here will warn us if we’ve got the wrong idea before shit hits the fan, now that he’s finally decided to show up.” Max jostled the younger man, as Renato glowered at him through dark eyes. “Isn’t that right, Renato?”

Renato was our eyes in the sky. Like Max, his ability was informational, though we’d kept the nature of it vague. He was able to monitor events through magical means and give us moment to moment updates during combat.

Or at least that was how I’d pitched him to the group.

In reality, Renato was Azure, my shapeshifting summon. I wasn’t keen on repeating past mistakes, and underutilizing my summons in order to hide connections between me and Myrddin had been a big one. Azure couldn’t just take on any face. He’d gone to great pains to stabilize this human version of himself outside a realm of flauros, and until I reached a higher level, couldn’t change aspects of it easily. His current form was vaguely Hispanic, and like me he had dark hair and dark-eyes. None of his features were particularly striking, keeping him intentionally nondescript as possible.

The downside was he insisted on keeping the worst aspects of my personality.

“Excuse me.” Renato drug his eyes away from the screen, staring down Max with a withering stare. “I had a thing I couldn’t get away from and already pre-cleared it with Myrddin.”

The “thing” in question of course was taking over as Myrddin, showing face at the meeting between Aaron and Tyler, fielding Tyler’s, Kinsley’s, and my many questions about what happened at the tail end of the event. I didn’t have to use him as an alibi nearly as often now that enough people had seen us in different places simultaneously, the earlier morning being a rare exception.

Renato continued. “At least I didn’t party too hard and show up to a mission I was supposed to be at late, with a hangover.”

“Whatever you say porcupine.” Max laughed awkwardly, probably squeezing Renato’s shoulders more than strictly necessary before he turned and retreated to his equipment.

“Greg’s on his way.” Sae announced suddenly, shuffling into the overcoat that hid her more insectile features. “We’re rolling out in two minutes.”

“That’s the contact getting us into the Galleria?” Astrid asked.

“Uhuh.” Sae confirmed. “Friend of a friend, so be friendly.”

“Should I pull the van around?” Renato spun around, and I spotted a barely there gleam in his eye. For whatever reason, Azure really liked to drive.

Sae shook her head. “Stay put. Astrid will teleport us to the subway stairwell. We’ll meet him on the road.”

I coughed. “Greg’s driving?”

“Yep. Said they know his car.”

I didn’t argue, but I wasn’t sure what to think. It made sense Greg had a car. Relatively, it was probably a lot easier for him to make money in the dome than it had been in the world before. And even if he hadn’t bought it, there was no end to the number of abandoned vehicles that littered the side of the road. It was more having witnessed the manic abandon with which he frequently bombed downhill on a shopping cart that was putting me ill-at-ease.

There hadn’t been a suitable moment to break the news to Sae. Not just that there was a cure for her condition, but that someone else needed it more, and it would likely be some time before we laid hands on the second. Telling her now risked distracting her before the mission, a risk I wasn’t willing to take. Still, I needed to tell her tonight if possible.

“Hey, Myrddin.” Sae called out to me, glancing at the wall. “Sidebar?”

I followed her out of earshot of the others.

“You ready to get this fucker?” She asked, as I leaned against the wall beside her.

“Been a long time coming,” I said.

“Are…” Sae hesitated, some of the sharpness in her expression blunting. “Are we sure Nick shouldn’t be here, for this?”

I shook my head.

Sae lowered her voice further. “It’s just stuck in my head. We all lost something in that tunnel. But Nick loved her. Like, really loved her.”

“So did you.” I pointed out.

“In my own bitchy, cunty way, I guess.” Sae huffed a laugh, and wiped her nose. “Still, we’re the survivors, you know? The three of us. It feels weird to not have him here.”

She wasn’t wrong. For the longest time, I’d believed Sunny’s involvement was limited to poor management. That he’d simply failed to keep his people in line at a critical moment. But the more distance I put between myself and that event, the less likely it seemed. It wasn’t that I’d learned more about Sunny and how he operated, though that was also true. More that I’d gained life-experience.

I could say definitively, that the best way to break a group like ours had been was to create the same exact outcome he’d “accidentally” achieved. Swiftly and brutally killing an auxiliary member to your target when you had the numbers advantage was a perfectly efficient manner of breaking morale.

It was something I planned to ask him about, if he surrendered before he stopped breathing.

“I get it,” I reached out to brace her arm. “Then again, it’s not gonna bother me. If all goes well tonight, I’m gonna go home, and probably sleep better than I have in weeks. And considering I the barrage of colorful ideas I had to talk you out of if we had a chance to interrogate him, I’m guessing it’s not gonna bother you either.”

“Probably.” Sae admitted.

“Nick isn’t like that. We bring him along tonight, and that shit will haunt him. He deserves the chance to move on with his life. Leave Sunny’s clusterfuck in the rear-view.”

Sae breathed out, then nodded. “Can’t be the wisecracking hero if you’re buried in self-doubt.” She looked passed me, to where Astria was completing a runic circle that glowed blue. “Teleport ready?”

“Now it is.” Astria stepped back, reviewing her handiwork before she grinned. “All aboard!”

I stepped into the teleport circle first. And the world swirled away.