Tanya was elbow deep in a tangle of wires when Wildwing and Mallory found her in her lab. From the soldering iron in her hands rose a small wisp of smoke, and the room had taken on the smell of hot wires. She turned at the sound of the door opening, saw it was them, and went back to her work with half of a curt greeting. From anyone else he might have taken this as rudeness, but for Tanya, this was her most welcoming self, when she was busy. Had she not wanted to see them, she would have simply turned them away.

Wildwing had a vague awareness, that being in a state of constant hypervigilance was going to do lasting damage to all of them. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, it was the lack of time to put the self back together before the next crisis arose. He had been finding himself walking the halls with only a vague idea of where he was going, a zombie on his feet. He was tired, tired enough his joints ached and he could hear the auditory tricks of a mind on the verge of sleep, but also increasingly afraid of being asleep. It seemed that, when he closed his eyes, there was the red starfield on the other side of the barrier of consciousness, full of claws and teeth. 

“How’s Canard doing?” Tanya asked.

“I don’t know,” Wildwing lied, and then caught himself. “Bad.”

“Yeah,” Tanya said, unable to offer anything more comforting. Her answers were temporary solutions, stopgaps of anti-anxiety cocktails and careful monitoring. It would not fix the problem. Even if she did manage to find a way to stop the creatures, and the strange behavior that produced them, it would not fix that Canard would be terrorized, perhaps forever, by their specter.

“Do you think he’s right?” Mallory asked. “That hole full of things is Limbo?”

Tanya paused in her work, seeming for a moment to mumble to herself, staring straight ahead at the wall as she worked through the question. “I wish I knew,” she concluded, shaking her head as if to dismiss whatever it was that only she could see.

“But, it’s plausible,” Wildwing prompted.

“That doesn’t….” Tanya suddenly seemed irritated, dropping her wires and clippers with an abruptness. “That-that doesn’t work the way that it should! There shouldn’t be anything in there, there shouldn’t even be nothing in there! It exists outside the boundaries of space and time. I don’t know what you were looking into but there shouldn’t be anything alive in Limbo. Not for any definition of ‘alive’ I have. And you certainly should not be able to look into it.”

“But the Saurians-”

“The same tech that allows Dragaunus to move dimensions would allow them to exist in a self-generated piece of space time. If they ever left it, they should just disappear. The matter that makes your body loses cohesion and evaporates. Like we all would, like Canard-” And she seemed to realize her words and stopped speaking abruptly.

Like Canard should have, Wildwing finished for her mentally. She had been a little too honest, after she had spent the last year deflecting his questions with maybes. She had always known that Canard was never going to be retrieved, and had let Wildwing believe. He had known, he had known the whole time and let her lie.

She carefully picked her work back up and tried to recover her place in its tangle. “I… I guess if that’s wrong, I… the creatures don't follow the known biology. A totally different ecosystem would produce totally different adaptations to match it.”

Wildwing was quiet for a long minute, and Tanya simply worked at her wires, ordering them and soldering them in place.

“I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do with him,” Wildwing admitted.

“I don’t have a lot of good advice for you,” Tanya said. “There’s not going to be anyone who can relate to what he experienced,” she pondered this for a moment. “Maybe the scholar, wherever he got to.”

“What, Winterwing?” Mallory coughed.

“Whatever he and Emily passed through to get here doesn’t sound like a gateway. But,” she switched off her iron and set down her work again, this time with care, “maybe look at this first.” She cleared away scraps and tailings from a blue pad that had been forgotten, and handed it to Wildwing, its screen slightly stained by rosin. “I still don’t have a clear energy wave to work backwards from, so it isn’t perfect, but I was able build an algorithm to undo some of the corruption it causes in data.”

What Tanya had handed him was the feed from the kitchen, from the first time a shift had happened. The very first time. The angle was not great, but it showed well enough what he had wanted to see: Their two guests, Winterwing and Emily, in the moments after the door had chosen to no longer be a door. There was no audio, and the recovered quality was not good enough to make a guess at the conversation. But, it caught exactly what he had hoped: the moment that Emily went from on the cusp on death to perfectly fine. Whatever the process was, it did not survive the corruption of the image, and resembled nothing so much as a blue smear on the screen.

Wildwing turned the pad over to Mallory to have a look for herself, and grumbled more to himself than anyone else “She told him first. Weeks ago.”

It wasn't that he felt any sort of betrayal. They had already known that something was amiss. It was more that somehow the confirmation bothered him, that he wanted to be proven wrong.  It was still plausible that what he was looking at was two people that were far in over their heads, unwilling to ask for their aid.

“She did tell Grin, eventually,” Tanya said, more gently than he was expecting

“When she thought it might benefit her to do so,” Wildwing corrected.

“I don’t know,” Tanya said, “I’m-I’m not good at these things, but it is fair to point out that we’ve been… I don’t know what you’d call it. Grin got more out of her just from sitting down with dinner.”

“So, what do I do about it?” Wildwing said. “Put out a meal every time Emily feels like being difficult?”

“Works for Nosedive,” Mallory muttered, and then hid her smile when Wildwing glared at her.

“And when it turns out I trusted her too much?”

Tanya shook her head and gave a single polite laugh, “On your worst days you still do better than the rest of us.”

“The amount of faith you put into me is closer to superstition than loyalty.”

“Oh, you just don’t understand the full extent of the chaos when you’re not here, that’s all.”

“Whether or not we allow either of them to be part of the team—and I mean the team, not just occupying space down here—that’s for all of us to decide, not just me.”

“You want to say no,” Tanya said.

“You don’t?”

“Lab’s cleaner than its been in ages because Winterwing spent the time untangling every knot and sweeping every speck of dust he could find. Well. Okay, it was, until he sneezed and dropped half his body weight in feathers on everything,” Tanya said. “Maybe they just want to feel useful. Ma-maybe it’s better to have more allies than few.”

It did seem that the room was in unusually good order, beyond the workstation that she was currently using, where a slowly moving tsunami of wire clippings and discarded tools were starting to creep out from her position.

“If they’re allies,” Mallory interjected.

“How would you decide?” Tanya asked.

“I don’t, I don’t know,” Wildwing said, frustrated, raking hands through hair. “It took months before we were all comfortable around each other.”

“Then then answer is the same, isn’t it?” Tanya said. “If its going to take months to decide if you trust them, then that’s just what it has to be.”

“I’m not comfortable with that, not when its our safety.”

“This isn’t just about our trust,” Tanya said, and pointed to the display pad still in Mallory’s hands. “If they trusted us weeks ago we could have been much closer to understanding what that thing even is.”

“You think Emily’s going to have your back if your life is on the line?” Wildwing asked.

 Mallory surprised him and made a deep, exasperated sigh. “She already did.”