The message Wildwing anticipated came while Tanya was breaking down the makeshift antenna and categorizing its constituent parts. He had to interrupt her, and call her back from her lab to Drake One’s platform, yet again redirecting her attention.

Now that it was some weeks after Canard’s death, Tanya could not quite tell if Wildwing was doing better, or if he was simply being Wildwing, and had regained enough control that he had shoved his grief somewhere no one could see it. This one of those things that she was bad at discerning. Or, at least, that’s what she told herself, so that she wouldn’t have to think too hard about the answer. She could not ask him directly, because he would do that infuriating thing where he would lie and say he was fine. He would always lie and say he was fine.

When Wildwing had finally stood and relinquished the body to her care, he had done so only out of necessity. He would have sat there longer, perhaps forever, if she had not reminded him that bodies in open air decay. From that moment onward he was apathy. It was not just the schedule that was gone, it was as though Wildwing himself had also ceased to exist. She did not see him again until she informed him of Winterwing’s request for equipment. He had stood up long enough to carry out the duty of telling them what to do, and then, as far as she knew, had returned back to his bunk, and into whatever catatonic state he had found comfort in.

Today he did seem to look genuinely better to Tanya’s eyes, as she scaled Drake One’s platform. He was at least fully upright, and might have even gotten the benefit of a full night of sleep some time in the week prior.

Mallory was the next to arrive. There had not been any formal discussion or organization, not that she was aware of, but Mallory had become the pillar that the mission leaned on, for the moment. It had been her determination that had willed everything back into a recognizable schedule. She found Wildwing’s sudden slack intolerable and reigned it in for him.

The watch they kept over their two newest members had faltered so completely that no one could account for either of them most of the time. Yet, for the lapse in diligence, no catastrophe happened. Winterwing and Emily kept their distance, appeared when called, and vanished again when they were no longer needed.

At least half of Winterwing’s tentative status still hung on Mallory’s decision, and when she called on him for training, Emily had appeared as well. No one instructed her to do so, yet there was no reason to turn her away. Mallory spent hours in the evenings, leaning over Tanya as she tried to order her notes, speculating on whether Emily was being diligent or deceptive. Tanya had suggested that perhaps the fact that no one had taken advantage of Wildwing’s effective incapacitation to destroy them was a signal of good intent. Mallory could not help but find more subterfuge in the absence of malice.

The rest filtered to Drake one from all corners of the Pond, Nosedive and Grin appeared from the elevator that serviced the upper levels, Emily, Winterwing, and Duke from the residential block. The tone was not jovial, but the tension that had permeated the space was finally beginning to dissipate. More monster attacks did not come. The building’s walls did not shift and disappear. Instead there was a tenuous peace, as the eight of them tried to find where normal sat, now.

It did help, somewhat, to have an actual mission again. While Tanya found herself always busy, that was not the situation for the rest of the team, whose skills mostly lay in actual forms of combat. Dragaunus was still a threat, but had chosen to remain hidden after losing his experiment. Drake One stood vigil, looking for signs of his menace, but without the Mask, the search became more passive than active. They were at a disadvantage, and the next move in the conflict would be Dragaunus’s to make.

The threat of Doctor Droid was something that could massage the mood of the last few weeks, and turn it into something maybe not forgotten, but set aside.

Satisfied that they were all there, Wildwing directed their attention to the short video message that they had been gifted.

SQUABBLING INSECTS, Droid declared. The video image was only from about the neck up, and the background behind him blurry. I HAVE IDLED LONG ENOUGH. IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO REMEMBER WHAT YOU TOOK, AND WHAT YOU OWE. PREPARE FOR YOUR IMMINENT EXTERMINATION.

It was short, obnoxious, and exactly what they had been expecting.

Except for the things about it that weren’t.

“Do you suppose he dyes his hair or is it a piece?” Nosedive pondered aloud.

Wildwing must have seen Tanya leaning forward in her chair, frowning.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There’s artifacting in there,” Tanya said, and scrubbed backwards through the recording, until she had isolated a frame of black pixelation crossing the image. “That’s digital. Some of the i-in-information is lost.” She allowed it to play again, and noted a few more losses, letting it finish. “Audio is compressed too.”

“Is that significant?”

She shifted uneasily as she considered, working back and forth between the frames. “I… I think so? Last time it was just an analog broadcast directly from a camera,” she looked at Drake One’s controls. Truly, it was an act of perversion to have a file of such tiny resolution blown up on the massive screen. “Why the change?”

Wildwing leaned over the controls and played it again, this time without sound, and squinted at the image himself. “Maybe the poor quality is hiding something.”

There was a silence between them, as they stood on the platform together, and watched the video play quietly in a loop. They did this long enough her eyes unfocused and attention wandered, as all the other tasks she had reminded her of their existence.

“That background is too blurry,” Wildwing concluded, audibly annoyed. “Pretty sure that’s some sort of industrial equipment in the far back, but its impossible to tell what it is.”

“He’s not as clever as he thinks he is,” Mallory interupted. “We should look at his old hiding places.”

“He’ll be building something, an army, a weapon, he’ll need a factory facility for that, again. Or maybe just a machine shop large enough. We can start with where he’s been before and then branch out if we don’t uncover anything.”

Tanya worked through Drake One’s storage to pull up the old recording, of the previous message Droid had sent months ago. She let it play, in full, as a reminder.

ATTENTION ORGANIC LIFEFORMS, THIS IS DOCTOR DROID. WE MACHINES ARE YOUR SUPERIORS IN EVERY WAY. MY BROTHERS AND I SHALL DISINFECT THIS PLANET OF ALL HUMAN BACTERIA.

“Nice of him to personalize the new one for us,” Nosedive observed.

“The backgrounds look the same,” Tanya said, nodding to Mallory. “It might even be the same factory.”

“Is it possible they were recorded at the same time?” Wildwing asked.

Tanya set both broadcasts side by side. The older of the two had much better quality by far, a smooth video image synced perfectly to its audio. The newer stuttered strangely, in comparison. Entire blocks of the image lagged behind as the frame around them advanced. She let them play, centering on certain words and facial expressions, before finally shaking her head.

“The quality is so bad,” she concluded. “Its so compressed I can’t even t-t-tell if its the same voice.”

“It isn’t,” Emily said.

Up until this point, it had been possible to forget that their two newer faces were even there. Emily and Winterwing stood behind all the others, separate from the rest, and neither had said a single thing prior in the whole conversation. It was, for just a moment, as if the team themselves has fallen into old routine and continued on as if nothing had changed. Here was the reminder that plenty had.

Emily shrank a little, when she realized that the scrutiny of the rest of them was on her.

“There’s a word for it?” she said, and implored Winterwing for help. “When the way you say a thing changes the meaning?”

“Inflection,” Winterwing clarified.

Wildwing looked to Tanya, doubtful, but Tanya gave this consideration. She turned back to her console, and tapped out a sequence. Drake One responded by displaying a waveform of the audio under each recording, that it then highlighted in red at certain points.

“Well, there’s a lot of shouting through both of them,” Tanya concluded. “But the new recording does have strange stresses on a few syllables that don’t match up.”

Wildwing frowned. “What does that tell us?”

“I’m not sure,” Tanya shrugged. “Maybe it’s hiding something, like you said. Maybe it’s a symptom of damage from the last time we saw him. I have… a thought, though,” she commanded Drake One away from the videos, instead bringing up a city map. “The new message was sent on a w-w-weak signal. I suspect whatever sent it looks like the antenna we took down this afternoon. It’s not going to be like the city-wide one he sent before.”

Drake One had already pinpointed the location of the new message origin, and drew a rough radius of the signal’s power. Tiny. Barely two miles. She pulled up the signal radius that had caused the chaos during her shopping trip, and overlay it on the map as well.

The two circles were small compared to the urban area around them, but their overlap contained the Pond, and little else, removing any doubt who they were intended for.