Emily considered covering it up. Another frame from elsewhere in the house, some ten minutes spent cleaning things up . . . she abandoned the idea. The Hero had likely seen the safe, and it wouldn’t take much searching to find it.

She stepped up to the vault and eyed the keypad, then she squeezed her phone out from her pocket. Three texts from her mom, she noted idly as she swiped over to a notepad app where she had a series of numbers jotted down from her conversation with Cement.

She tapped them into the pad with a knuckle, just in case she ended up being fingerprinted one day.

The safe clicked, and she reached for the handle, then stopped. “Trinity, when you die, you respawn, right?”

“Yup!” Trinity said. “Next to myself.”

“Right, can you open this safe in . . . about thirty seconds?”

The girl shrugged. “Sure.”

Emily stepped out of the room and squashed a kernel of guilt under a heavy load of simple practicality. She moved out of the corridor and found a bear sitting next to a downed Hero, one paw carefully placed on the Hero’s chest.

“She’s coming around,” Athena said.

“Good,” Emily replied.

“It’s open,” the nearest Trinity said.

Emily looked around to make sure things were still . . . mostly sane, then returned. The safe, as it turned out, contained a few file folders thick with loose papers, and nothing else. She tugged them out carefully and opened the one at the very top. The text within was thick and small, written in the boring no-nonsense vocabulary she’d only seen in the worst textbooks. But it was immediately clear that the file was talking about Heroes and Villains. She closed it and searched around for something to put them in.

“Trinity,” she said at last. “Can you find me a bag?” Trinity gestured to the big bag with the dollar sign on it hooked to her belt. “That’ll do,” Emily replied.

She stuffed everything away while Trinity held the bag open. “Oh, oh,” Trinity said. “The Hero lady is awake, and she’s not happy about it.”

“Oh,” Emily said. “Well, I think I’m going to have some words with her. Just . . . don’t call her a Hero. We’ll pretend that she’s a Villain. Can you tell that to Athena and Teddy . . . but discreetly? Without the Hero hearing it?”

“Uh? I guess I can, yeah. But aren’t we the Villains?”

Emily nodded. “Yes, but we’re pretending to be Heroes, so we’ll have to pretend that she’s the Villain, because Heroes wouldn’t fight other Heroes.”

“That makes sense,” Trinity said with a nod.

“Thanks, I think,” Emily replied. She gestured to the bag. “Make sure she doesn’t see that.” Emily reached back and closed the safe, being careful not to make too much noise.

“Got it,” Trinity said.