Whatever the tome of poetry was supposed to be, it was disinterested in telling Winterwing. He had disassembled his copy of it (the real thing locked away somewhere that he was not privy to), and spread it out. It stated as clearing off the low table in the rec room in front of the couch, and then, as he ran out of table and no one came upon him to stop him, it began to encompass more and more of the couch itself, and then the floor space around it.

As the collection grew he worked his way through the mire, moving pages around and grouping them by theme, or color, and then rethinking it and moving them back. It was a pointless exercise and it did not matter how much he moved them around, they did not suddenly become comprehensible.

It was Grin that finally found him, some hours later, looking doubtfully around the room as if it were a great affront. “Is this… chaos necessary?”

Winterwing stood in a gap of papers, stymied, muttering, half to himself, “What an amazing question.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be…supervised?”

“Tanya,” Winterwing agreed. “I was told to leave.”

Grin looked at the papers on the floor. “Did she disapprove?”

Winterwing held up a finger for quiet, and gave a theatrical cough, sending up a cloud of feathers and dust.

“Impressive,” Grin observed.

“I’m allowed back in the lab if I ever stop molting,” Winterwing looked back to the scattered piles on the floor. “Does it matter, anyway? You folks have a camera in every corner of this place and I’ve got the tracker on me.” He gave a dismissive gesture to the communicator on his wrist that he had never once used.

Grin considered this a moment too, and then moved a little closer observe the papers on the floor, frowning. “Has your chaos proven fruitful?”

Winterwing sighed and looked at the collection on the floor, “I don’t think it’s ever going to be.” He swept across the room with an arm. “These are all historic documents, someone somewhere will be happy to take them off your hands. But, I think I’m ready to say this is never going to help us.”

“Because of the language?”

Winterwing shook his head. “No, no, it’s simpler than that. Every page is illustrated to match its verse, very carefully drawn and painted. It’s skilled work in more than just calligraphy, the pigments are all natural and gathered at great expense.” He looked to each pile in turns. “Yellows, reds, greens, browns. Some blue, but not as much. However it ended up in your saurian’s hands its older than the Empire, before printing presses.”

He held up the remainder of the pile, that he had been gripping in his free hand the entire time. “Here’s the four pages with the hidden instructions for… whatever that fucking thing is.” He let them drop to the floor, perhaps a little dramatically, and they wafted as they fell, landing randomly around him.

“Bright, synthetic colors,” Winterwing said, exasperated. “Purple, why didn’t I notice before it was purple? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a natural purple? Purple that stays purple for a thousand years?”

Grin came closer and inspected the four outliers on the floor next to the rest of the pages, and then scanned the rest of the room. “They’re unique.”

“They were made by an entirely different hand and the book was rebound to hide them,” Winterwing said, “by someone that mimicked the style, but either didn’t understand the tools or didn’t have them. The four pages are all there is to find, and they’re so offset in time from the original book that the language in one won’t help comprehending the other.”

There was a long silence between them, where he had little to do but stew in internal fury.

“What will you do now?” Grin asked.

Winterwing looked over the sea of color. “You voted to let Emily join.”

“I did,” Grin agreed.

“Why?”

“….Is that your concern?”

“It’s going to get her killed.”

Grin nodded, infuriatingly. “It may. It may not. That is the choice we all made for ourselves. It was fair that she gets to make it as well.”

“Maybe that’s true if your worldview is you get more than one try at being alive,” Winterwing said.

There was the briefest of moments, just a hint of annoyance passed by the much larger drake's face, a little dark cloud. It was gone almost the second it arrived, a flitter of imagined shadow, and Grin continued past whatever thought had occurred to him, wrapping back in that strange stoicism that he practiced.

“You would prefer that she did something less dangerous,” Grin said, waving to the collection of copied manuscripts, “like your saurian poetry.”

“Yes,” Winterwing said, perhaps a bit more forcefully than he should have.

“And has that managed to keep you out of danger?” Grin asked, knowing full well that the answer was Winterwing had been chased alongside the others in the lost hallway. 

Even as he had worked, he had found himself conflicted about his lack of supervision. He did not have any illusions that being alongside someone else was going to keep him from being eaten by a creature apparently unphased by armaments, it did somehow feel better to know you’d be eaten alongside someone else rather than alone.

Being wrong just made him doubly annoyed, doubly invested in arguing about it, even as he knew it would accomplish nothing.

“There is a little death, when the world ends,” Grin said. “When someone comes and takes you from your home. You know it too, now. I had was an opportunity to give back a little of what was lost.”

“What could that possibly have given?”

“The only thing that keeps existence from being overwhelming is the belief that you can exert some sort of control over your own small part of it. That your life is yours and not someone else’s.”

Winterwing’s silence was tactical now, and it was all he could do to hope the molting did not give away that his face was hot.

“She has had very little control over her own destiny. Perhaps for longer than she was willing to say. I can’t mend that, but I can help clear a path to something better.”

Winterwing had no choice but to stand there and feel infuriated. He had no argument, no recourse, nothing but the humiliating understanding that Grin was right. He started to say something that was going to sound more bitter than conciliatory, and was interrupted by the loudest alarm he had ever heard in his life, going off for the second time.

For a moment they two of them both hesitated, looking at the expanse of paper on the floor before them, before Winterwing shrugged it off and turned to leave. The book was worthless, beyond their four pages recovered, and those were saved with digital imaging. He felt no great need to recollect any of it, it held no value that he could extract. Grin followed a few steps behind, somewhat more reluctant to leave the mess. They rode the elevator together in silence, Grin appearing to be completely at ease, and Winterwing in turmoil, leaning against the back wall. When they joined the others gathering on Drake One’s platform, Winterwing lagged behind, the one straggler that didn’t belong there.

The group before him was largely quiet, in the strange way that people were in nervous excitement. It was a bouncy silence, occasionally broken by a clipped whisper or stifled laugh. It felt all the more infuriating that they could be laughing.

“Well… You already know where it is,” Tanya broke the buzzing silence, looking up from her readouts.

“The factory, again,” Wildwing concluded. 

There was a shared look between Mallory and Duke that Winterwing was fairly sure no one else was supposed to see.

“It’s… I can’t tell exactly what it is. A blip.”

“A blip?” Wildwing repeated.

“Is that the scientific term?” Nosedive asked.

“These human satellites are… frustrating,” Tanya complained. “I could get better resolution launching a brick with a camera strapped to it. It’s a few pixels difference in brightness. I still can’t pinpoint what kind of energy it is.”

“Do you think it’s a false alarm?” Wildwing asked.

“Do you?” Tanya said.

“No,” Wildwing said, resigned. “Fine, we’ll go back. Tanya, Mallory, Nosedive-”

“Oh, come on man, I was going out this afternoon,” Nosedive interrupted.

Wildwing tried, poorly, to suppress irritation, “Out.” And something about the way he said it felt particularly grating to Winterwing’s ears.

Nosedive insisted, “Just at the mall. There’s enough of us now you don’t need all of us for a little flicker on a screen, do you?”

Wildwing looked to his team, as if taking a survey of what he had available, and concluding it was still meager compared to what he wanted. “Nosedive-”

“You said I could hang out today,” Nosedive complained.

“I said no such thing,” Wildwing scoffed, but stopped before saying anything else, aware of how many eyes were on them. He tried to regain his authority, “You shouldn’t be wandering off on your own right now anyway.”

“I’m not ‘wandering off’, it’s like ten feet that way,” Nosedive pointed to illustrate.

“Other way,” Tanya corrected, unhelpfully.

“I can go with him,” Emily offered. 

Wildwing stared at her. It was plain enough that he was forming the word ‘no’, but it had caught somewhere and had not yet emerged. Wildwing was about as thrilled to have Emily on the front line as Winterwing was, though for entirely different reasons. The boss was caught between if he trusted her enough to bring her along, or, failing that, if he trusted her enough to stay behind. 

Ten feet away, whichever direction it was, was surely better than whatever they were walking into. 

“She kept my sister out of trouble,” Winterwing offered, perhaps a little more loudly than intended, and several heads turned to look at him, as if they had forgotten he was there. Wildwing gave him an overlong stare, too, and made an irritated noise, aware that he was wasting time while trying to come to a decision.

“Fine. The three of you ‘hang out’,” Wildwing concluded.

“Three?” Winterwing spluttered.

“The rest of you, with me,” Wildwing turned, and that was the end of the conversation. The other five fell in behind him, and when he turned to appraise them again, standing in the elevator, he seemed satisfied enough with the choice.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Mallory suggested, from Wildwing’s side. It was unclear which of the three of the remainder she was speaking to. The doors closed, the elevator left. Nosedive beamed with victory, and Emily seemed to already be regretting the offer.

Nosedive looped an arm through one Emily’s, and the other through Winterwing’s, like an overeager child gathering his parents. “Who’s ready to learn how to dress like a normal person?”

“Why, do you know any?” Winterwing grumbled.