'Lily!' I'd like to say I burst into my sister's mental space with a stern accusation, but much of the nuance is lost over a purely textual connection.

'Meryll?' She replied, a confused expression on her face in her quarters as she looked up from her tablet.

'Why are you telling the captain to hide things from us?' I demanded.

Her eyes went wide, and she dropped the tablet screen down against her lap. 'Fuck, she told you?'

'She told all of us. Except Mouse. They're catching him up on the radio right now.'

Lily clenched her jaw and shook her head, an unsettled expression on her face. 'No no no, she isn't supposed to do that yet. Shoot, are we still on the same causal path? Hold on, I need to think about this.'

'Lily, you had her lie to us...'

She fretted with the terminal in her lap, nervously flicking the corners of it with her fingers. 'I had her... withhold information from you, yes. Because everything I saw suggested that it was necessary to get to the causal state where you all survived! And I don't know whether or not telling you now means that future is still guaranteed!'

Oh. Fuck. That was a problem. Did our safety seriously rely on the captain holding onto something that critical? What else was she holding onto? How much did Lily know about this situation? 'Lily... do you know anything about what happens on Luna if we don't succeed here?'

Lily grit her teeth and looked nervously down at the floor, going still for a moment. I was about to impatiently send her a hundred pings before I realized this wasn't just her trying to dodge the question. Her eyes looked distant, like she was someplace else. She was having a vision right then and there. It took her another moment before she blinked at all, a quiet inhale signaling her return from a prospective future. Immediately, she replied, 'Meryll, listen. Luna won't be a haven for us if they don't get in there tonight.'

I felt a pit in my stomach as I read those words. 'You're sure?'

'Meryll, I'm never sure. I sure as hell didn't foresee defecting from Foundation and joining you here, I didn't foresee Aisling telling you about this part of the plan, and I don't have every possibility explored. Ever. I see possibilities, not certainties, and it's my responsibility to navigate to the best outcome.' She paused, taking a shuddering breath and trying to let go of tension in her shoulders. 'I know, I don't like keeping you out of the loop either, but this path we're on right now, if we change absolutely nothing, this leads to ruin. That's why I'm telling you right now. Do not let Aisling call off this mission.'

'What? Will we still be safe?' I asked.

'I don't... I don't know, Meryll. We might just be off on a tangent, and we can still get back to that timeline, I'll... I'll try to see if I can... I don't know, provoke more foresight?' She frantically looked around her room, as if she might see something that would invite her powers to work on demand. She grumbled something too quiet for my sensors to pick up, then nodded to herself. 'Alright. Just... get the ground team moving toward the convention center, and whatever you do, do not tell them you talked to me about this!'

I wanted to ask why, but I already knew the answer. Causality demanded that whatever web my sister was weaving be concealed, or else we would be thrust into something beyond her control. Despite her subterfuge, I trusted her. But I was getting tired of the necessary lies, especially now in the middle of an apparently much more dire mission than I had expected when I woke up this morning. I sent back a quick 'Fine! But only because the situation is so delicate. Openly withholding information from us because of your powers, I understand, but dragging everyone else into lying about what they know? We're going to talk about this once everyone's safely on board again.'

'Okay.' She swallowed, frowning down at the back of her terminal again. 'Sure. Fine. Just. Keep them going. Please. For all of our sakes.'

I sighed, briefly opening my eyes to stare into the void, just a brief moment of mental rest; a few seconds spent outside the realities of what we were doing to center myself before I dropped back to the moon and re-entered the security camera the ground team was holding at on the second floor of the office building. "-not keep just blindly following what the precog tells us." Joel's voice was raised. "She's unstable. We knew that from the moment we met her. And now who's really in charge here if you're taking orders from her, Captain?"

"You say that like this is a regular occurrence," Aisling grimaced. "Lily has asked me exactly once to keep anything from you, and here I am defying that. A little later than I should have, yeah."

A voice crackled over the radio comms. "Maybe you shouldn't have told us, then," Mouse interjected. "We're off-script now."

"We didn't have a script before that girl showed up," Joel gave a dismissive sniff.

"But if you deviated from what she saw, doesn't that mean our guaranteed safety isn't so guaranteed anymore?" Ray asked.

"Who knows if we were really guaranteed anything?" Joel asks, raising his voice again "If she has the captain lying about stuff like this, who's to say she's even telling us any truth? She could just be telling us what she wants us to hear so she can get to... whatever version of reality she wants to get to?"

The stairwell went quiet again, Aisling's brow creased and she pursed her lips staring at the ground in thought, Shaw had a sullen look on his face and his arms folded in front of him. Ray just looked between each of them, trying to judge how to defuse this situation herself. Joel had a pretty good point for once, actually.

But I implicitly trusted my sister. I pinged Aisling's terminal again. 'We'll talk with Lily about this later. I'm kinda pissed at her right now myself. But that doesn't mean we're not already in the middle of a job that needs to get done. Our window is closing, isn't it? We can bicker about this when we get to the observation point next to the convention center.'

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Aisling lifted the tablet, clearly expecting more arguments, but her expression turned up slightly in surprise at my words. She turned it around to show the others and spoke up calmly again. "Look at us. Meryll's keeping her shit together better than the rest of us right now. That's almost embarrassing." Well that was uncalled for, but sure, whatever gets her to do her leader thing and get everyone moving forward again. Onto whatever fated path kept us safe. "Yeah, we got some issues to talk over, but now's not the time. We need to get to the next checkpoint, and we're wasting too much time. For our own good, we probably should call it here and go home. That's the safe move. But the reality of the matter is, we're not gonna have a safe place left if we don't do something here. You're absolutely right, Joel, we didn't have a script before. So let's get back to that, grab hold of our own destinies, and make a difference as we go." Aisling put her tablet away again and started down the stairs.

Joel let out a quiet groan, rolling his eyes and trailing in close behind. "Fucking... sure. Always wanted to be a martyr," he grumbled sarcastically.

Ray breathed a sigh of relief that they at least weren't shouting at each other anymore, and motioned for Shaw to follow as they both stepped down the stairs. I opened my eyes again and let my body go limp. One bullet dodged. Maybe. It was awful hard to tell if things were going our way when one of us was working dozens of steps ahead of the rest and was having trouble keeping track of the 'script', as we seemed to be putting it now.

Things felt like they were rapidly spiraling out of our control, even though everything was ostensibly going to what was left of our plan. I guessed we would just be doing this despite the danger now.

The crew carefully crept into the alleyway between buildings, Ray taking care to stay especially low and hide behind a dumpster while the others peeked out into the empty street. I could only see them from afar, the outdoor cameras still providing poor coverage in this area. Shaw took position at the edge of the alley, awaiting a momentary clearing in the light traffic of the area, and on his signal, the other three burst across the road to the next space between buildings as I helpfully ran interruptions of what cameras might be able to see them. Some were imperfect, the amount of activity across the city impossible to cleanly loop, but there were no alarms on enemy comms, so they must have been good enough.

This happened several more times, the waits for an opening becoming further and further apart as they got further into the city. As they approached the last road to cross before they reached the area they deemed as too dangerous to move in the open anymore, I had to ping Aisling. 'Next alleyway over has someone in it. Down behind the dumpster, between a barrel. Could be sleeping, dead, or just hanging out there, can't tell from the camera.'

Aisling sighed as she stashed her terminal back in her jacket. "Might need to knock out a homeless guy."

Joel nodded grimly and Ray grumbled quiet admonishment toward her, but it wasn't like we could avoid it. The guy was right at the last leg of the push through the city streets. From here they'd be taking more clandestine routes, but they needed to get to this particular alleyway. There was no getting around it, we were probably going to have to make a very unfortunate person's day way worse.

It took several more tense minutes as the group waited for traffic lights and foot traffic to line up just right for the four to surge forward into the street, where the street lamps along their path happened to flash off for a few moments as they moved through. Joel took lead, and when he got to the dumpster, he immediately reared his rifle back to slam it into the poor man's head, but hesitated. He squinted his eyes at something, and lowered his weapon as Aisling and Shaw gathered around to see what was going on.

"Nice patches. Deimos?" He asked the man.

The figure turned his head up with the exhausted lethargy of a world-weary man who'd seen too much, and didn't flinch at the heavily armed people standing over him. He was a weathered old man, or time simply hadn't been kind to him. I couldn't make out much of what he looked like in that moment, but he sounded awfully calm for someone being threatened by what looked like a small militia out of uniform. He made a gravelly scoffing noise. "Served my time for it..." he murmured hoarsely. "Leave me be, already."

"Fight's still on." Joel clapped him on the shoulder. "We'll show 'em."

Something about him seemed to light up at that, and I heard something like a weak laugh cut into the mic. "Right on, brother. I'm done, but show them fuckers who's boss. Bastards tore up my camp for this bullshit."

Joel nodded and moved further into the alley, motioning to the others with a resolute, "He's clear."

Aisling gave an apprising look at the man, nodded and moved toward the small courtyard between buildings with Shaw. Ray glanced down at him with a look of pity, which was returned by a surprised, wide-eyed stare. The man had probably never seen or perhaps even heard of, a Mammon before, and he was struck with a certain mix of fear and awe at the woman standing far over him. "Holy shit," he finally muttered, just barely audible enough for Ray's comms to pick up. "You... You kick their ass, especially."

Ray couldn't help but give him a smile, a moment of levity in the sea of uncertainty we'd somehow found ourselves in, and moved to join the others.

As they came into the courtyard, Aisling spoke "Meryll, make sure that guy doesn't go sprinting to a cop or something." I was already keeping an eye on him, and he seemed to have settled back into his resting place, a bit more nergetic-looking with a pleased look on his face.

"He won't." Joel assured. "Guy's legit."

"Ah, the comradery of a failed rebellion." Shaw mused, meandering to a stop as the others walked toward a door locked with a chain at the back of the building.

"Had setbacks. Became a different kind of battle. Wouldn't say we've failed yet." Joel grunted as he stepped in front of Shaw, grabbed the lock around the old chain and gave it a yank, finding it unyielding despite the wear. "All yours captain." He stood aside and let Aisling step up, pulling a couple lockpicking probes from her pack.

"And the irrepressible spirit behind that rebellion." Shaw said more quietly this time, perhaps a touch more respectfully until he opened his mouth again. "There's a bit of romance to it, don't you think?"

"Wouldn't call it romantic..." Joel leered at Shaw. "Bloody. Exhausting. Completely unfair. A massive pain in the ass, no matter how much it's worth."

"Perhaps it's different from the outside." He shrugged and began walking away, back toward the street. "And this, my friends, is where we finally part ways."

"Friend is pretty generous." Joel muttered.

"I like to think we've grown pretty close." Ray suggested with a wry smile.

Shaw gave a quick laugh and shoved something into Ray's palm as he passed. She lifted it up to see the pistol Aisling had given him. "Don't give me that look, they'd never let me in with it. You lot do your brute force entry, I don't need a firearm where I'm going."

"Through the front door?" Ray asked, stowing the gun away behind her.

"Where they least expect me! You three have violence, I have something that can make grander strokes in the game of political intrigue," he declared as he turned the corner. "Finesse!" He called out dramatically as he straightened his jacket and turned the corner back to the city proper.

"I hope he dies." Joel grumbled.

"Such a fucking ham." Aisling can't help but smile as something clicks inside the lock in front of her, and she pulls the chain through. "Pile in, we got a long way to go," she called to the others as she pulled the door open, revealing an old staircase down into a maintenance tunnel.

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