Nosedive had come through the entire confrontation completely unscathed. He should have been interrogated and reprimanded for his involvement in the deception. But, somehow, no one had remembered to do either of these things. The crowd dispersed without giving him a second thought. Nosedive was left alone on Drake One’s platform, to take over the remainder of night shift he was intended to, before the chaos had begun.

He sat down, considering what the next couple of hours would look like for him. He would not mind a snack, but that would require leaving his post, and technically breaking the rules twice in an evening was probably more good will than he had remaining to spend. Maybe he could convince someone to bring him something during the night.

It didn’t matter what he did to pass the time, so long as it did not interfere with what was left of Drake One’s monitoring programs. There was a pile of chips, circuit boards, and wiring laying next to an open panel on the platform, evidence that Mallory had been in the bowels of the supercomputer, though it appeared she had done little actual damage to it. Nosedive found that the broadcast receiver still worked, which meant he had access to bad movies that would bleed into infomercials in the early hours of the morning. No one would fault him for being bored, they all had distractions for their shifts, and it made no sense to have a giant monitor and only use it for official business that could run in a corner. That was just wasteful.

As he worked his way through channel options, the cameras in the building told the broken tale of the team working their way back into what could have been called normalcy. All these views happened in snatches, in between the much larger number of camera angles that he himself and Tanya had both disabled, which only displayed as black nothing or static. Mallory chased Wildwing until he annoyed her enough that she stopped somewhere in the corridor leading to the kitchen. Duke vanished upstairs into the Anaheim night, apparently in the mood for not being down there with them. Grin, with his upstanding taste for order, began clearing remains of bots in a hallway, and did not seem to mind that no one else offered to help him. Tanya vanished entirely from the working surveillance, and Nosedive could only guess she must have returned to her lab, to do what she could to lay their friend to a mechanical rest.

Then the feed tripped over what he was not supposed to see.

In the corner of the residential block that had been set aside for them, Winterwing and Emily stood in full view of the security system, thankfully clothed, but entwined so thoroughly there was no mistaking it for anything other than an intimate moment.

Averting eye contact with someone when you’re having a silent protracted argument about being unwillingly stranded together and averting eye contact with your illicit affair partner looked awfully similar, it turned out.

Nosedive sat, stunned for a moment. He was mistaken. He was imagining it. Every time he blinked they were still there, and they were still in an embrace that was far, far too friendly.

The last time, Winterwing had been there to stop him from saying anything, but now it was just Nosedive, and he knew that this one, this incident he was not going to be able to ignore. Even if it was innocuous, even if it was none of his business, he had to tell them about this new potential motive. When it came to a choice between the team and these two strangers he had to pick the team. He had to tell them immediately because he had already failed to do so once today.

Nosedive didn’t need to stand up, but he was gripped with the desire to not be facing the screen anymore. He bolted out of his chair, fumbling for his personal communicator, and pinging Wildwing.

Wildwing answered immediately. “Nosedive?”

“Yo-” was all he got out, before he tripped over debris on the platform, and landed face-down on the floor.

The bright ready room lights went dark as he impacted the floor, so suddenly and well-timed that for a moment he thought that he had somehow knocked himself out.

The base lights had turned off before, during the little incursions that Asteroth had brought to them, but this was not the same. Every time before, the red glow of the emergency lighting had come on.

This time he sat long enough in the dark that he began to grow concerned that he was going to be stranded in it, alone. He was unwilling to try to stand, unsure how close to the edge of Drake One’s platform he was. If he lost his balance again he might take a journey down its edifice thirty feet to the floor below, strewn with more sharp and deceased metal.

Nosedive grasped at his feet, trying to find what he had tripped on, and found that the most likely candidate was a rod of metal, about as long as he was tall, with an oddly shaped dull blade on one end.

The air turned. It went from its usual mechanical cleanliness, with a hint of recently fried electronics, to something rancid and sickly, cloying. It was a familiar smell. It brought to him an alarm and unease that he could not name, as if some part of him remembered, and was urging the rest to catch up.

Someone grabbed him by the collar of his armor, pulling him upward, with the not especially kind command, “Come on, on your feet.”

He thought he could make out an outline of a person against a dim light, though what that light itself could have been he did not know. It was an unfamiliar, soft glow. The outline moved, turned enough to face him, and Nosedive was slightly calmed to see the familiar red-glow eyes of the Mask.

The Mask that did not exist anymore.

But he could not help his stupid mouth, that formed the question “Wildwing?” before he could stop it.

This was met with a scoff somewhere off to his right. “Oh, this plan is goin’ great already.”

“Up,” the figure said, and it was quite clearly not Wildwing’s voice.

Nosedive scrambled to his feet.

His eyes began to adjust to the dark, and the little bit of light coming into the space was finally enough to define what else was around him. He appeared to be within the walls of a destroyed room that was not in the Pond. A room with drywall and steel framing. A draft of cold air was whispering through. Broken and discarded furniture, crumbling walls, broken glass.

Duke stood in an empty doorframe, his sword drawn, his attention on something else. Behind him, in what might have been a hallway, where the last of daylight was spilling in through a hole in a ruined wall, was the unmistakable hulking form of Grin.

Nosdive’s brain finally stopped trying to resolve the shape hoisting him upward as Wildwing, and the outline became someone else.

He finally recognized Canard.