Will emerges behind me into the murk of the Veins, and although this is in part the magic of the outfits themselves, I can hardly recognize him. A bright mask adorns his face, his hair is miraculously even messier than normal, and he wears a tight lavender suit with a crescent moon across his heart. I recognize the gloves and mask from our own ensemble, to keep our identities a secret, but my eyes are most drawn to the shield across his waistline.

He sizes me up, confidence brimming in his eyes, and he asks, "What's the strap for?"

I reach back and unsheathe my claymore, letting it shine for extra dazzle. It illuminates his face and his golden hair, and the two of us look like a matched set.

"Sword and shield." he whispers. "Huh."

"I guess," I say, resheathing it, but that and his apparent lunar theme are making me uneasy. "So, you have any clue where we are?"

"What do you mean, 'where we are'? Haven't you been in here before?" asks Will. His indignance makes my nostrils flare, just out of habit, but it's teasing, not threatening.

I exhale. "Usually our headquarters kind of appear. I'm not seeing a door."

"We're close to mine. I'm sure Shiloh can make sure your friends get there." Will suggests, taking my hand. "Come on."

I jerk my hand back, "I know how to walk."

"Oh- okay, then." Will sighs. "Look..."

I walk past him--there are no branches in the path, anyways. My face is flushed red from embarrassment, unbefitting of my current situation, and Will hurries to catch up. We're greeted by a dead-end, with a dark door overhead. It's larger than any entrance to Anthem's lair, but Will pushes the doors open anyways and leads me into a two-story area with a girl lying on the floor, amongst the pillows and a suspicious, familiar white animal.

Amanda turns as soon as the cherub breaks from her side, lifting herself onto a sitting position. She raises her hand, unspeaking, gaping like a fish. "YOU!"

"Yeah," I mutter. "Me."

She hoists herself onto her forearms, her huge arm muscles flexing. "I knew you had something to do with it! What did Ignatius-- what did-- what's going on?! What happened to Megan?"

Through another door in the back, Anthem slinks in, tail twitching with agitation. She tilts her head into a snobby stare, and I clench my hands. "Your team will be here momentarily. Serena and Harper will come soon as they can--I've been insistent with them, on your behalf. They will have as many questions as you must."

"We're..." the other cherub starts, its purple eyes wide with shock. It gives me a pout worthy of a puppy about to be euthanized (I'm really in a puppy-killing kind of mood, myself) and it looks sadly at Will.

"Oh, shut up! You knew, didn't you? The whole time, all of us were right next to each other, and you let everything go to shit anyways." I raise my blade, letting it alight. "Give me one reason not to bash your brains out. Come on."

Will grabs my hand. "Because we need them. They're the only ones who know what to do."

"If you'd been a little more assertive, I would have loved to work with you myself, other Rosenbloom." Anthem looks to the smaller cherub, and with an almost human roll of her eyes, explains, "When I told you, Adam, that we seek the most opportune timeline, I was not lying. Shiloh and I- our race- can see, in a manner of speaking, potential futures. We guide you to the most opportune one, though the particulars are hazy... though we could only pick nine children, in total, there were only nine good choices, and a unified team... fell under your utterly brash assumption that your brother is incompetent, if not some other failed judgement in your 'leadership'."

Anthem never lies.

I release Will's hand. Just being close to him right now makes my entire body shake with guilt. I feel disgusting.

Will sucks in a breath besides me. "Shiloh...? Did you really lie to me the whole time?"

The smaller cherub lowers his ears. "You have to understand none of this was my idea, Will. I did what was best for the universe, and indirectly, for you as well. I was honest as I could be, even if I had to... omit things. I can only hope you'll forgive me in time."

"This is exactly the crap I should just expect from you at this point." I mutter.

Amanda finally gets to her feet, snaps her foot against a massive paintbrush, and before I know it she has it in hand and its two inches from my face, dripping in green paint. One drop falls and sizzles through the nice pillow beneath us. "You utter pig, you got her killed, didn't you?"

Serena and Harper barge in through one set of doors, a jacketed African-American girl and some dusty-haired white kid even scrawnier than my brother through another, and then everyone is freaking out. A shadow slams Amanda in the face and a stream of acid just misses my neck as I duck out of the way. The whole group runs into action, streams of paint meeting shadow and several poles thrown rapid-fire across the room, in a chain reaction not unlike a long train of dominoes. Shouts fly through the air, coupled with accusations, and Will yells over what I can only assume are his teammates to calm the group down. "Guys! Let's not kill each other?"

"Team, stand down." I press one hand to my face, trying to get my head to stop spinning, and Serena runs up to me and slaps me on the side of the head.

"Wow, thanks for that!" I shout. "Was that necessary, Ser?"

"Why did you have to be so cryptic, Adam? I thought that Evan was dead, or that he'd killed someone, or that-" Serena pauses to take a breath.

"There was a lot of morbid speculation," Harper finishes the statement. "We're kind of in a position right now where we kind of have to assume someone is dead whenever we get an 'emergency' text."

I extend a hand to the group at large. "Does this not look like an emergency to you?!"

Serena summons a megaphone from thin air and yells, "Everyone shut up," at an almost ear-shattering frequency. Almost a dozen pairs of eyes turn her way and she lowers the megaphone, a cold pout twisting her lips. "So. Adam, care to explain?"

"I don't know, I think Anthem has this." I say, my voice broiling over with self-loathing and boundless hate.

Anthem says to the assembled group, "There were always two groups of Diosite wielders in this town. We expected that the inherent pressure to secrecy would keep you from telling each other, though your vendettas were an equally useful tool, and apparently we were wrong. All of this was done to prevent you all from tearing each other apart, upon which occasion the world would end, and to be frank, our expectations for your competency were only underwhelmed by your actual performance. Do what you will with this information, but I warn you that you will find yourselves unable to kill us and attempts to leave will be just as treacherous for you as they were beforehand, maybe moreso that I am involved instead of my fully incapable mess of a twin."

The word twin makes me bristle with anger. It's too ironic to even be a joke.

"This is your cherub? And I thought Shiloh made me want to stab myself." says the darker-skinned girl. "Karen, by the way, the nerd next to me is Garrett, the nerd with a shield is Will, I'm sure Adam has told you all about him, and the one on the floor hyperventilating is Amanda. I spent all night trying to make a phone call but unfortunately I was driven out of my own mind instead-"

"I couldn't let you do that, Karen." Shiloh says, and now I have two white, fuzzy beasts of hell I want to drop kick across the room. Anthem's disatisfaction burns within me.

"I'm Harper." Harper says, drawing her cloak across herself shyly. "That's Serena, she can generate objects from thin air. Sometimes? She's trying. Adam's got a sword that can slice almost anything and get extraordinarily hot. We're the Alpha team... we're what's left of the Alpha team."

"Team Omega," Garrett raises his hand. "This is getting freaky."

"You don't say," I whisper.

"Stop." Serena runs her fingers across her forehead, sinking into her hand. "I can't even process this... none of you are panicking?"

Karen shrugs. "I'm past the point where I can feel emotion, honestly. Garrett's panicking, though."

Garrett raises his hand. "C-can confirm."

"I've reached my freak out quota for this lifetime," Harper says. "Now, if only someone was to tell us this was all a joke and we could go home now, maybe live our lives in peace, bring Megan back and save Evan..."

"Megan." whispers Amanda, suddenly standing. "What really happened? Please, I just have to... I need to know." There's as much pain in her voice now as at the funeral.

I lower her brush. "Yeah. We did. The Sanguine Delegation- it was a tough mission- Evan stabbed her."

Her knuckles go white, and she almost breaks her own brush. "Evan Drake? I'll stab him-"

"No!" Serena and I shout at the same time.

I clarify, in a heartbeat, "Evan's being mind controlled. I know you must be furious, but you can't hurt him. Please. He's all I have left."

"Were you three... a thing?" Amanda asks, almost bemused by the question.

I feel my throat tighten, the weight of it in front of all these people- people I don't know- my adrenaline kicks in. I need them there with me right now, to do this, but there's nothing to grab. "Next question." I suggest.

Amanda swings the brush to Will, holding it beneath his chin. Never has a paintbrush seemed so horrifying, and I get the feeling she doesn't just use it like this in battle. "How did you never work this out? You two live together!"

For arguably the first time in my life, I step in to defend my brother. "Hey, you and Megan never told each other, even though you were pining over her all year. Don't you think open communication is part of a healthy relationship?"

Amanda swipes the brush to the side, and I catch it an inch before it hits my head, trying not to betray the intense pain of hitting a wooden projectile slung at the speed she moves the handle around.

"I'm her ex too." I say, my heart cracking at the hard x, "Don't act like you have any kind of ownership over her, her thoughts, or her actions."

"Let's not get into this right now," Serena suggests.

"Right. What's a 'Sanguine Delegation'?" Karen says, air quotes and all.

Oh, I can only imagine what Evan's response to that would be.

"Dad cult." Harper says, with finger guns. When this elicits no response, she continues, "It's a bunch of middle-aged people in masks inside an abandoned power plant tricked out with insane machinery. Sometimes we fight robots, sometimes it's people, and they have a machine that lets them brainwash people now." Harper looks to Serena and I, face tense with concern. "It's kind of scary when you string it all together like that."

"I've got intel on that. We attack the day after tomorrow." I say.

Serena adds, "What's your holder like? The three of us can adapt our strategies to help with him."

"His name is Ignatius." Will starts for his flabbergasted teammates. "He lives in the suburbs and tries to kill us with plant demons, but we're kind of... wrapping that up now. We really just needed a push."

"Seriously?" I ask.

"What do you mean, 'seriously'?" Will asks.

"That took you six months."

"Yours did." Karen snaps, and Amanda confirms it with a sharp nod.

"What do you think all these missing persons reports came from?" I yell. "In case you haven't noticed, because clearly, Will didn't, we've fighting been eight times a week just to stay afloat here, for near a month, and hell knows how many missions we went on before that. How many times did you try, three?"

"He killed someone!" Will yells back.

"Someone as in one person? We're dealing with a cult currently in the process of converting our whole town, bit by bit, which will then probably go on to stealth take over the world." I say, standing head to head with him.

Serena grabs my hand, Karen grabs Will's, and our teams stand across the room from each other, sizing each other up. Shiloh and Anthem, intertwined in the midst of the calamity, watch us and Anthem glances to Shiloh, her eyes sharp with disappointment.

Forget this.

"We take him out tomorrow, then, no holds barred, fuck the Delegation up." I say.

I'm not contradicted by anyone- I take this as a yes and stride out. The air in here is making me claustrophobic.