[b]Pope:[/b]

His eyes are unfocused and his lips slack for the first line or two, but then you say that last line and those eyes are sharp again, the line of his mouth tight as he purses his lips together. “We do love them though, don’t we?” Then he tilts his head at you. “Ground ankle deep in [i]blood[/i]. That’s a human metaphor, a human expression. Sure, there’s power and poetry in it, and I like what you mean by it. I just got to wonder, Sister, why are you still using their language and their ideas to describe their oppression? Even when it’s just you and me – synth to synth.” He runs through possibilities in his head, and straightens again with a coy smile. He bites down on his vape but he doesn’t draw from it.

Whatever he thinks he’s figured out about you, though, he holds in tight-lipped silence, and leans forward in his chair. He’s frustrated about keeping his guess in, but must think getting an untainted answer out of you first is worth it. 

[b]Pink:[/b]

You - [i]November[/i] - need to rest and recover from all of this. To debrief and decompress. This is true and important. 

What is also true and important is that you’re about to get critical information, on multiple fronts, that is going to make the other colors want to ignore that. But there’s going to be a big difference in November treating them as end-of-the-first-book cliffhanger, or just the end of an episode of a television series that she’s going to keep binging. 

Getting the others to be aware of this is probably far more important than tracking those assassins anyway. 

Because elsewhere…

[b]Elsewhere[/b]

… in 3V’s apartment, York tries to give Junta a peptalk about working through trauma, about how important the work is for him to do it. York thinks it’s going well and he’s wrong…

… In a saferoom in Aphrodite, Rudy didn’t know what information he was keeping from you, because he couldn’t know how important it was. Red didn’t know what she had when she got it, either…

… in the backrooms of a courthouse in Zeus, Daniel “Robocop” Perez is frozen out of an argument about a leak, because nobody trusts him into the conversation about it. Which makes him remember a contact card he’s kept from a dinner with Starlight, weeks ago, that an android left under his plate. He liked her…

… across from the burned-out ruins of an older court, Pope thinks about the documents he’s keeping in a second location, and tries to figure out whether he can trust the girls across from him, or at least work with them. But he’s got nowhere else to go, and York’s resume for her covers Marco’s leak - either of those stories by itself is a powder keg on its own, but together, [i]this [/i]is how you make a hydrogen bomb…

… in an apartment covered in artwork, Fiona has gotten a whiteboard out and drawn a round-table diagram of all Novembers different aspects, with two nodes for Fiona and Crystal in the center of the ring. Two bottles of wine down, they get into a heated debate ranking all possible threesome combinations. This is a night of celebrating the thrill of being debonair freedom fighters, in a window of short lived naivety that will soon be closed to them…

There are bricks thrown up that will not come down for a longer time. The emergency repairs on the shredded cloud still continue. Forensic investigators work where they can to figure out what happened, and who caused it, but their work is slow.

A Goat-shaped hole in that station cannot and will not be filled, but the consequences will take time - and any attempt by the people who know the real cause to solve it risks vulnerability towards you. This still needs time.

Singh, too, has people he can call in, ways to introduce Goat to the Game. Blu-ray disks of gangster rap blare over speakers of Martyrtech. This will be a while, too. 

Everything else is about to hit all at once, simultaneous and imminent in the coming days. The portents will build like gravel down a mountain, where the catastrophe at the end is inevitable long before it is obvious. 

Give me a timeline for how long Pink thinks November needs to recover, and I’ll give you the sound of gravel scraping rock to the rhythm of it. Like a bassline, tension for things to come.

But while the disaster is coming, that’s for the next book. You got Goat, he’s an asset now, and you have leads on your siblings. Make this time count. Make this be about everything you’ve earned. 

([i]Yes, I know I am giving this instruction before you know what White found and what Pope says. That's rather the point of giving it to Pink specifically <3[/i])