The leader of the Moderators was tanklike as he powered down a hall in the West Virginia Museum of Living History. Broad shoulders. Fat-soled athletic shoes crunching debris beneath them. Everywhere Lock’s flashlight beam illuminated looked war-torn. Hanging ceiling tiles. Peeling paint. Faded, knocked-over furniture.

The ruined museum was unsettling, but Lock wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about the mannequins.

Someone had filled the hall with a troupe of mannequins from the museum exhibits. Recently. Everything here was covered with great, soft layers of dust, but the mannequins had handprints all over their arms and chests. Fresh. A few days old at most. Farooq-Lane shone her flashlight on each as she passed. Sailor. Baker. Homemaker. Policeman. A Zed could stand among them and the Moderators wouldn’t know until they were on top of them.

“Oh, come on,” said one of the other Moderators, delivering a sudden kick at the homemaker. The mannequin heaved to the side, heavier than expected, and fell into the arms of a surprisingly sturdy train conductor with mismatched eyes. “There’s no Zed here. We’d already be completely screwed if there was.”

The Moderator wasn’t wrong. Every recent encounter with the Zeds had ended the same as the encounter with the Zed in the Airstream, with the Moderators defeated and confused, and generally feeling like absolute idiots. These new Zeds were boggling their minds. Literally. Farooq-Lane understood that even this ruse of mannequins was mostly to play with their heads. It wouldn’t stop the Moderators for long—it was just to unsettle them. It was Nathan’s scissors.

Lock shone a flashlight into a mannequin’s face. It was a chef. He—Lock, not the chef—said, “The Visionary saw us confronting the Zeds in her vision. That means we’re supposed to be successful in the future, only it gets changed. We will find a way through this.”

“Where is the Visionary anyway?” one of the other Moderators asked, a little nervously. The other Moderators were all very afraid Liliana was going to blow them up. A reasonable fear. She’d accidentally blown up a family of ducks during her last vision.

“She’s waiting in the car,” Farooq-Lane said. “But she’s very stable at this age.”

“Very stable at this age.” One of the other Moderators mimicked Farooq-Lane’s crisp way of speaking, which, to Farooq-Lane’s surprise, sounded a lot like Nathan. “She’d be more stable if she’d turn that stuff inside. Like every. Other. Visionary. Until Miss Carmen here.”

Just a few weeks before, Farooq-Lane would have spent time wondering what she could possibly do to prove her loyalty to the Moderators. But not anymore. No longer did she find them the all-knowing righteous arm of the law. The failures of the past few weeks had changed all of them. The Moderators had all separated neatly into Team Discouraged or Team Cagey or Team Angry.

Carmen Farooq-Lane was Team Restore Order.