When Wildwing found them, there was already a sizable gathering in the rec room. People had begun congregating there more often. Even though it seemed unlikely to matter, there was a natural urge to seek safety in numbers, and there were few places in the Pond, outside of actual living quarters, that were designed as comfortable living space for multiple people.

They looked up at the sound of the elevator door opening, tense, and then returned back to their business when they recognized him. Grin appeared to be instructing Emily on his game of colored stones, and politely pretending not to notice she was melting in her chair, struggling to stay upright. The remainder of the team gathered around the television, and he did not quite recognize what they were watching, but it was paused as he walked in. One of Nosedive’s tapes, then.

“Emily,” Wildwing said. “You’re in. Mallory and Tanya are going to help you get fitted for something more appropriate.”

Emily looked at him from her seat at the small table, caught in a state of visible confusion. “You’re serious.”

“I’m outnumbered,” he corrected.

Her gaze traveled behind him, a questioning glance to Mallory and Tanya, who had followed in his wake. 

“It was brought to my attention,” Mallory said, suddenly aware that all eyes in the room had drifted her way, “that I would probably be floating in a real mindfuck of a void if you hadn’t stepped in.”

Wildwing suppressed the smile that threatened to overtake his face. Mallory’s elegant wording tickled an amusement that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Emily stood up uneasily, giving an awkward shrug to Grin as she abandoned his game, and turned to Wildwing “I suppose I should say ‘thank you’.”

“Don’t,” he said.”It gets harder from here, not easier.” 

She stared at him, bewildered, until Mallory caught her arm and ushered her away. “So, have you ever actually held a firearm before?”

“What are you, a cop?” Emily countered.

“Your family is kind of messed up.”

The three girls disappeared into the elevator, and the door slid closed behind them.

Wildwing watched the three girls go, and his best to pretend there was not a stone made of dread sitting in the pit of his stomach. Winterwing occupied a seat on the far end of the room, said nothing, but appeared to be quietly smoldering in fury.

“What are you playin’ at?” Duke interrupted his thoughts.

Wildwing shook his head. “No game. Four votes to two. You and I get to say ‘I told you so’ when it goes wrong.” 

Wildwing could have overridden the vote. Could have kept Emily in the medical bay permanently. They would have done whatever he said. But he was the one that had insisted it was not only his decision.

Duke clicked his tongue and leaned back in his chair. “If I survive whatever that thing is, I don’t intend to tempt fate by sayin’ anythin’ to Mallory about it.”

Canard was still watching the elevator. "She's sick?"

 Wildwing gave a thump on his breastplate in the approximate right area for the parasite’s main mass. "Killed at least three people before her."

 Canard gave a careful nod.

 "What's your impression of her?" Wildwing asked.

 Canard seemed to think about this carefully, weighing his response with a tilt of the head, before finally settling on: "There's dark water under that ice.”

 Wildwing and Duke had elected to swap their supervisory shifts, such that he never was paired with Winterwing, and Duke was never paired with Emily. This meant, instead, Emily had spent extended periods of time following Wildwing as he circled the hallways of the Pond. He worked through his checklists, monitoring pipes and bulkheads and doorways, inspecting joints for water damage or seismic torsion. There was even an afternoon they spent in one of the lost sections after a building shift had cut them away from everyone else, and she had said nothing to him the entire time, electing to instead stand at the edge of his vision, and peering into the dark.

 As time went on he realized he had misunderstood her silence. She was not intimidated by him. She was always ten steps behind him, dutifully following as a shadow. As she waited through his tasks, just off to the side, she faced somewhere else, but watched him out of the corner of an eye, with suspicious glances she did not bestow on anyone else.

 For her it was the other way around, and Wildwing was the impostor. She was silent not because she had nothing to say, or that she was afraid, but because she had far too much to say, and held it back.

Dark water under the ice.

 "Maybe I should have given you a vote," Wildwing reflected.

 Canard shook his head. "I don't think she's going to be your problem."

 “My problem?”

 "Somethings wrong," Canard said, speaking urgently, standing to lean over his spot on the couch, staring at him as if he had completely forgotten the others were there. Nosedive watched with widening eyes, and Duke had subtly moved a hand close to the deactivated saber, out of habit. Grin stayed stone still, serene, but attentive.

 "’Wrong’?" Wildwing asked.

 "I don't think," Canard said, pausing, remembering the others with them, and sitting back down carefully, "I don't think I'm supposed to be here."

 Wildwing was supposed to be reassuring. He was supposed to be the foundation upon which his friend could rebuild his life. There was something that made the words catch in his chest, unable to free themselves. Maybe it was that way this Canard rubbed at a temple constantly, as if he had a headache, and peered at dark corners overlong, as if he could see things that they could not.

 "It's what Tanya said, or what’s she’s going to say," Canard said, very carefully, "time is unstuck. You and I have had this conversation, this one right here, a hundred times. Even the part where I tell you it's been a hundred times."

 With the Mask gone, there was nothing to hide Wildwing’s face anymore. The artifact’s perpetually determined expression gone, all that was left was for him to attempt at stony impassiveness. He could tell he was failing. He could not help it. 

 Canard saw his reaction and was crestfallen, as if he had thought he had been making sense and now realized that he had not. He folded his hands in his lap and said “I told you, there is something after you.”

“’Something very old and very angry,” Wildwing repeated the words.

“It whispers in that dark, it whispers all the time, and whether it was a day or a thousand years it didn’t ever stop,” Canard said, raising a finger to the side of his head, to his ear. “It’s still whispering, all the time, about how much it hates you. It hates all of you, it doesn’t ever think of anything else.”

On Puckworld, when Canard had pulled himself and Nosedive from the work line, days before they were to begin the mission, it had struck Wildwing how much his friend had changed. Canard had lost the cheer of the overachieving and carefree college student, and turned into something much more precise and driven. 

Over a year ago, when he had pulled them from the workline, Wildwing had realized that he barely recognized his friend.

He was faced with the same realization now, only instead of being in awe, that stone in Wildwing’s stomach had begun to somersault.

“It’s going to kill you all, it promised me that,” Canard said, speaking urgently. “It promised in a thousand ways, and it’s right, you know. You’re already stuck in the middle of the web. You’re not going to be able to stop it. You don’t even understand what it is, and you’re not going to until it’s far too late.”

“So, tell us,” Wildwing said, surprising himself by leaning in with the exact same intensity, frustrated.

“You are going to die before you believe me,” Canard said simply, with what almost seemed like sorrow, “You’re going to have to.”