“Talk, talk, talk,” scoffed Gracie. “What he does best. Where’s the action when we need it? Di, eat your eggs.”

Spooning in rice, I said, “Spunk says he’s doubled the watch.”

Across the room, a posse of the lads stuffing their faces before reporting for sentry duty raised a cheer as the once-dead member of their crew slinked through the doors. Beet-faced, he edged in among them and tried to disappear.

Eyeing them, Gracie said a bit too loudly, “And you’d trust that lot to keep us safe, with nothing but their bare hands and a couple of paddles?”

“They’re what we’ve got.” I patted Rivera’s back, cleared my dishes, and left, before I walked into trouble defending Rousseau to two people I counted as friends.

Maybe by this time, Rousseau would have a moment free.

His office was a long, narrow room around the corner from the media loft, windowless but for a wall of glass overlooking Main. When there wasn’t a line out in the hallway, you’d knock on the half-open door, wait for his signal like at the gate of a sanctuary. He’d found enough deep-red paint to cover the walls, so walking in was like the room swallowing you whole. He’d be hunched over his screen in the thin light leaking in from Main’s skylight, or at night, in the warm pool from his desk lamp, the room in shadow but for the gleam of the locked glass case on the wall behind him, protecting the den’s small weapons cache. That is, the ones we knew about.

Today, a noisy crowd milled around outside, not the usual orderly line, and the door was closed. As I neared, Jake stuck his head through the door and barked at everyone to keep it down.

“What’s the word?” I asked an older guy with sawdust in his hair, one of the handies who built stuff for the den.

“One dead, rest out of danger.”

“Heard that. Anything else? Like, who did it?”

He scratched his jaw. “Might never know that for sure.”