Orion locked the group room door behind him and Bellamy. Its tall ceilings and wood-paneled walls made Bellamy seem even smaller than he looked in the Psychiatry office.

The delicate shape of the intern was still visibly quivering. His turquoise stare was vacant and roving as a muscle kept jumping in his jaw. Orion could see the shock in Bellamy’s features as he tried to process what had just happened. He thought what made him the most angry is that he was trying to confront an administrator he’d met for the first time yesterday. Any sway his own licensure had was broken down by his own newness. He had no idea how he was supposed to help Bellamy and prevent him from getting disciplined by his university. But he was going to fucking find a way.

Orion hurried to the water dispenser and filled a paper cup. He dragged one of the chairs out of the circle and up to Bellamy.

“Sit.” He held out the water cup and nudged the chair into the backs of Bellamy’s knees.

Bellamy dropped into the seat and limply held out his hand. Orion could see small, red half-moons carved into Bellamy’s palm.

As he took the cup of water with a wan smile, Bellamy remarked, “Well this is fun, huh?”

“Bellamy.” The word was a soft rumble.

“Nope.” Bellamy shook his head sharply and gave a hollow laugh. “Nope, I’m fine, okay? This is just… What is Dr. Williams gonna complain about, that I said I cared about ethics and then did her fucking dumb assignment anyway?”

“Right. And I was right there. So if—”

“Stay out of this,” Bellamy snapped. His turquoise gaze was hard as he looked up at Orion. “You’re not taking any kind of fall for me. I don’t know how, but… I don’t know. I’ll deal with Thricevale myself. It’s not your problem.”

Bellamy jumped as the doorknob rattled behind him. He glanced toward the door and flinched again as someone started pounding. Orion remained motionless, watching as Bellamy lurched unsteadily to his feet. This stubborn little shit was scowling through his terror, and it was… impressive.

Orion could only imagine the feeling when Dr. Williams stormed away to get Bellamy in trouble for absolutely no just cause. He knew he was in a position to help prevent Bellamy from facing unjust consequences. The question was whether he would do it even without Bellamy’s permission.

Bellamy looked back at him, rallying his expression and taking a deep breath. He turned and strode toward the door, popping out the lock and pulling it open.

Two valkyries stood in the doorway, twin sapphire-eyed scowls on sculpted features.

Then, a fearless half-vampire woman shoved her way between them. Edie held two carafes of coffee in hand, twirling into the room in a pencil skirt and a gauzy blouse. “Lucia, Frances! Good morning. Why the long faces? Lucia, you take your coffee with just cream, right? And Frances—is it both?”

Lucia’s mouth twitched in a smile. “Not staying. Just escorting. Till it’s my turn.”

“Coffee to go?” sang Edie as she set it on the table next to the water jug.

“Edie, what are you doing here?” Orion asked with a chuckle.

“Oh, sorry, Mr. Pendleton.” Her green eyes darted to Orion, her eyebrows rising to disappear under her bangs. The sparkle in her eye was one Orion knew well from their college days. Edie was making mischief. “Are you interrogating me, too?” She went over to Bellamy and hugged him around the waist. “You okay, baby?” Her voice was quiet, private but not secretive. “You look pale.” When Bellamy murmured back to her, her gaze darkened. Protectively, her grip on him tightened.

Orion’s throat constricted. If Bellamy wouldn’t confide in Orion, at least he had someone.

The size of this room was pissing him off. This space was wasted interviewing individual valkyries. This ludicrous demand was going to take hours. And Bellamy wasn’t wrong: it was crazy that the top two administrators in this organization were prioritizing this imperial sort of behavior over serving their community the way they were meant to.

Orion rubbed his stubble. He glanced at the circle of chairs all set up to serve groups of fifteen or twenty clients. He looked at the two winged women and took a casual step closer. They weren’t that much bigger than him; Frances was roughly his height and shape, minus his pudge of course. Talking to them felt more or less like talking to any ordinary person, which helped him keep his manner easygoing. “I take it the valkyries are pissed about all this, too, right?”

The women exchanged a look.

Frances responded for them. “We should be doing patrol. Not wasting our time.”

Orion nodded knowingly. “We’re in agreement with that waste of time part, for sure. We should all be helping others today.”

“How long is this going to take?” asked Lucia, who had a slight lisp.

Orion cocked his head, rubbing his left antler. “Well, I think your commander wanted us to interview you all individually… but look at the size of this room. I bet we could chat with more than one person at a time.”

The valkyries silently looked at each other again. He wondered if they were so well-trained and aligned that there were no need for words. It seemed to be the same with Bellamy and Edie, Orion noticed as he glanced over at the pair standing near the coffee table. They were both watching him with big, sparkling eyes. Under Orion’s gaze, Edie stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth opposite her vampire fang. Bellamy shot her a disapproving glance.

“I’ll run it by the major,” Lucia growled, then turned and left the room.

Frances shifted uncomfortably. She folded her hands into fists. Orion noticed she had a tiny gold stud piercing the skin above her upper lip.

“Frances, is it?” Orion said, going to the nearest chair and sitting down. He gestured to the neighboring seat. “I dig your Monroe.”

“I’m not supposed to have it,” Frances blurted, her head jerking as she clamped her mouth shut. A little bit of a blush colored her high cheekbones. Not supposed to acknowledge it either, apparently.

“Some of my professors warned me about piercings, too.” Orion nodded. “But they’re sort of addictive.” Despite the sideways angle of his shifter ears, he had stretched his earlobes to 11mm and had, at some point in his life, had most of the flesh pierced up the sides, though he didn’t wear jewelry in them anymore. He’d stuck with the gauges, his septum, and a labret now in his stable adulthood.

Edie, who had pierced the bridge of her nose, her septum, and the same upper lip spot as Frances, was suddenly standing by them holding a cup of coffee out to Frances. “She’s got her nipples pierced, too.”

“Shut up,” Frances hissed, snatching the coffee from her. “And thank you.” She took a long drink, stealing a surreptitious glance at Orion, who grinned but remained silent.

Edie giggled as she returned to Bellamy in order to drag him forward to sit with her a few seats away from Frances. Orion wasn’t sure how Edie had so gracefully involved herself in this situation, but it was fairly in-character for her. She was very good at stepping in even when she wasn’t called upon, and somehow always made things better. Frances glanced up at Edie, and her hunched shoulders seemed to relax a little.

“So,” began Bellamy, crossing his legs and folding his hands over his knee, “who went missing?”

Frances scuffed her ivory boot tip across the floorboards. She waited a long time before answering. “A corporal. Ripley.”

“Was she on duty?” Orion asked.

Frances’s foot twitched.

“Ripley is nonbinary,” Edie told him.

Frances rubbed her face.

Bellamy cocked his head. “The colonel said ‘she’. Did she slip up, or…?”

“Colonel Agrippa does not slip up,” Frances said flatly. “Anything she says is exactly what she intends to say.”

Orion and Bellamy traded sour faces. Edie looked unsurprised.

Frances ran her thumb across her knuckles, her head lowered. After a few more long moments, Frances shuffled her wings and spoke softly. “I truly do want Ripley to be able to live authentically.”

Orion leaned back. Then he leaned forward. “But…?”

“There’s a way things are done around here.”

Bellamy’s annoyance flashed across his fair features, his eyes sliding half-closed and his lips tugging down. “That’s great, do you know where they went?”

Frances shook her head.

Edie stood up. “Come on then, Frankie.”

The valkyrie stood up quickly, making her chair wobble and threaten to tip, but she caught the backrest with two fingertips. “Very well, Eadgyth.”

She scoffed, which pulled a small laugh from the valkyrie as they left the room.

“I knew the valkyrie culture was trash,” Bellamy said when they were alone. He stood up. Orion assumed he was going for coffee, but as soon as he reached the table, he turned and started back the other way. He was pacing. “And Edie knows something. That’s obvious. But we have to pretend like we don’t know she knows, otherwise she’s going to get dragged into this too.”

“One thing I love about her, though,” observed Orion, leaning back and stretching his arms across the chairs on either side of him, “is that she can take plenty good care of herself.”

“What are we supposed to do?”

Orion shook his head slowly. To get information about Ripley’s whereabouts would mean putting them at the mercy of whatever would be done to them upon their return. To not get information about them had the potential to prolong this whole debacle and, worse, to put Bellamy into Dr. Williams’s crosshairs.

The door opened again, barring any further conversation. Edie, Lucia, and a grip of valkyries entered. There were ten of the winged knights excluding Lucia, who stayed by the door with her arms crossed. Edie stopped next to her, copying her stance and her scowl despite the merry way her eyes danced. Lucia didn’t move her head as she glanced down at the half-vampire, let out a loud sigh, and elbowed her in the shoulder. Edie tipped and lost her balance, then wandered off like she meant that to happen.

Bellamy was watching the valkyries with a carefully blank expression, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. Then, with a quick rise of his chest, Bellamy adopted a confident smile and strode toward the valkyries. “Please, ladies, have a seat. Look at all the room we have.”

“We’ll stand,” said one of the valkyries nearest the door.

Orion shrugged and went to get a coffee himself. Not because he was a huge fan of the stale and bitter brew, but to make himself look easygoing. He called over his shoulder, “We’ll have y’all out in a jiffy, okay? We don’t want to waste any more time than has already been wasted.”

“If you really think we will give information to a shifter if we didn’t give it to the colonel,” began a valkyrie near the middle of the line, “then you’re out of your mind.”

Hands neutrally in his pockets, Bellamy asked, “How do you know we don’t want the same thing as you guys?” Orion would have to compliment him on his stance: that was his favorite position for defusing tense interactions.

“And what do we want?” asked another, her voice derisive.

Bellamy glanced at Edie and then tried, “To stay out of trouble and to get this bullshit over with?”

At the door, Lucia chuckled. “Not far off, honestly.”

“I’m assuming the colonel wants the information that will let her find Ripley and bring them back, right?” asked Orion as he returned to stand next to Bellamy with his coffee.

“Yes, but we don’t know where she went,” snapped the same valkyrie in the middle. She had particularly glowing golden hair and extra brass compared to the neighboring valkyries.

“Oh, look at this fancy one,” drawled Bellamy, pointing at her and then turning to Edie. “What’s this one’s name?”

“I am Captain Morgana,” she snapped. “As we have already been over with the colonel, few of us have talked to Ripley since—” She cut herself off, her expression growing guarded.

Orion sat backwards in one of the chairs from the circle, resting his forearms over the backrest. “Since…?” He sipped his coffee. “Since they came out, perhaps?”

One valkyrie, who was an extra step away from her nearest sister, dropped her gaze.

Captain Morgana narrowed her eyes. “It’s just not done.”

“So Ripley came out, and was shunned for it,” Bellamy clarified.

Orion kept his gaze on the decorated valkyrie. “I imagine some of you would be happy enough if they didn’t come back.”

“We want what the colonel wants,” argued the valkyrie near the door.

Bellamy raised an eyebrow. “Clearly Ripley didn’t.”

The captain growled softly, her livid topaz glare fixed on Bellamy. Bellamy glared back.

“Ripley was arguing with the colonel the day they left,” blurted the valkyrie who stood by herself. She clenched her hands into fists, met Orion’s eyes quickly, and then dropped her gaze again. “It was about Guinevere.”

Behind Bellamy, reclining on a group chair with phone in hand, Edie’s features paled and her gaze snapped up. Her eyes went round. However much she had known about Ripley’s disappearance, she didn’t know that.

The captain spun toward the errant valkyrie. “Claudia, shut your damn mouth,” she snarled, grabbing the valkyrie’s bicep. “We agreed we wouldn’t say shit to them.”

The others stepped away from the two of them, subtly edging toward the door.

Lucia swiped her wrist across her nose and sighed, her other hand on her hip. “Morgana, settle—”

“I’m worried about Ripley,” Claudia said to Bellamy as Morgana dragged her toward the door. “I’m worried it would destroy them if they had to come back.”

“Ladies, we’re done here,” snapped Captain Morgana. “We’re going back to our posts and we’re not talking about Corporal Lockhart anymore. That goes for the others, too. Fucking waste of time.” She punched open the door and shoved Claudia out ahead of her.

“Hey,” said Orion with his hands up as the valkyries filed out of the room, “if anyone else is interested in helping Ripley… you know where to find us.”

After the room was empty again, Orion dropped heavily into one of the group chairs and pulled out his phone. He opened a blank text, typed a number he’d never saved in his phone, and wrote,