Interlude 1: Contessa Rides a Motorcyle

"Don't!" Faultline shouted the moment she knew what Newter was planning, but he acted before she got the word out.

Contessa locked eyes with Newter, extricated her wrist from his hand.

Then she reached down to her belt, fumbling for a knife. It slipped through her fingers and landed on the floor.

She looked down at it.

"Fucking," she said. She paused, trying to keep her focus on reality. "Sleeper," she added, before staggering backwards and falling onto the couch she'd been sleeping when they'd entered.

Silence fell.

"Trap," Shamrock said, finally. "Trap, trap, trap, trap, trap."

Faultline caught Newter's eye and jerked her chin in the direction of the clairvoyant, who had pulled out his phone. Newter touched him, putting him out of commission almost instantly. Faultline used her own phone to call the rest of her team. "Gregor, I need you two to come upstairs right now."

"Spitfire is not in costume," he said.

"It doesn't matter," she said, and hung up. Then she called Dinah Alcott, who didn't pick up until the fourth or fifth ring.

"Faultline? I thought you didn't need me today."

"We seem to have captured Cauldron's precognitive." She watched Contessa slide off the couch and tip over. "The emphasis is on seem. Odds of her coming after us if we leave now and pretend this never happened, rounded to a whole number?"

"Ninety-eight percent," Dinah said. "We mostly die in those scenarios."

So much for her first choice.

"Odds of our survival if we kill her now?"

"Three percent," Dinah said. "Retaliation."

Not much better, then.

"Do you have a sense of what we'd need to do to not die? I know it hurts, but if the alternative is death . . ."

There was a long pause, during which Gregor and Spitfire came in the room. Both reacted with visible surprise and opened their mouths when they saw the semi-comatose woman at Faultline's feet, but Shamrock made a shushing gesture.

Finally, Dinah spoke. "I want to talk to her."

"Okay. I'll text you the address—"

"Not there, take her to our warehouse. We need to set something up to delay her acting against us long enough she considers another course of action."

"Odds of our survival if we do that?"

"Exactly fifty percent."

Workable.

"Okay," Faultline said again. "See you there. Tell Scrub, too."

She hung up and turned to her crew. "Newter," she said. "You were impulsive and showed poor judgment, not only with her, but by putting off a potential recruit. I'm saying this now because I might not get a chance to properly chew your substandard ass before we all die."

Newter couldn't quite bring himself to meet her eye. "I'm sorry. I thought I saw an opportunity and took it."

"If we survive the next few hours, we can have a longer conversation about that," Faultline said. "For now, we have to move." She stooped over Contessa and started to zip tie her hands together behind her back.

"I am not drunk enough for this, Philip," Contessa informed her.

Faultline straightened back up. "Actually, Gregor, can you take care of this for me?"

Spitfire spoke. "How about we just slit her throat now?"

"We could, but Dinah someone else will kill us then. She also gave us an alternative course of action, which brings our odds of dying from ninety-eight percent to fifty. So, Newter, flip a coin."

Newter suddenly got very busy propping up the clairvoyant on the vacated couch. Faultline suspected he wanted to use the resulting stun as an excuse not to acknowledge her.

Faultline rolled her eyes, then looked to Gregor. "It is done," he said. "I can carry her down."

"All right. We have to work out transportation back to our base. Newter—I know you've already recovered so stop pretending you aren't—you'll still ride with Elle. Shamrock, you're with Spitfire. I'll drive your motorcycle, Gregor, and we put her in between us."

The last thing Faultline did before leaving the apartment was collect Contessa's knife and hat.

They hadn't even started the motorcycles when a blur of white-hot light streaked across the sky and coalesced into a man floating about ten feet in front of them.

Legend, looking very confused.

"The clairvoyant asked me to come help him," he said. He ran a hand through his hair. "I admit this is not what I expected. I think he meant for me to rescue her, but . . ."

"You know my Crew's reputation," Faultline said. "We don't kill. You also know that my people deserve answers, answers that at this point only she can give. Unless you'd like to come with us? You were involved, too."

"I was," he admitted.

His jaw set. "I got to be the dupe."

Then he flew off.

Contessa giggled into Faultline's shoulder.