“I’ll tell it,” he said. “Apparently taking on a form with a thousand and five hundred angry foetal grubs crammed inside it gets messy. I changed back to normal, but I guess the foetal grubs didn’t all vacate. I had a slurry of their bits in my guts.”

I could see Natalie visibly pale.

“That’s a good reason to not use that form again,” Capricorn said. “That was horrifying.”

“It’d be fine if I’d evacuated while I was still Brooding Anger,” Chris said, giving me a look. “But I was told not to. By someone who isn’t really official leader.”

I was careful as I articulated myself, “A thousand grubs inside you. They had fangs and claws—”

“Technically they were part human, part grub. I think.”

“You said they were nonlethal,” I said. I frowned. “Chris, I don’t believe you.”

“They would have listened to me, after,” Chris said. “I think? Instinctual listening.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“No sounds good,” Natalie echoed me, her voice soft.

“Let’s not terrorize people too much,” Tristan said. “That thing was horrifying.”

“That thing was me. Anyway, I’m done talking about this.”

He tossed his bag onto the table by his favorite chair, then removed the fanny pack. It joined the bag.

He gave me a hard look when we made eye contact. With everyone going to their workstations, only Sveta and I lingering, I opted not to bug Chris.

I headed over to talk to Kenzie. Natalie followed, because safeguarding Kenzie was her job. It seemed like a conflict of interest, given our prior arrangement, but I imagined the pool of people who could be told Kenzie’s identity as Lookout was narrow, and the system was overloaded.

“Sorry to hear your caretakers left you frazzled,” I said.

“They’re super nice, and I trust them,” Kenzie said. “I think whenever hero stuff comes up, they don’t know what to do, so they give up. It’s like in books when a girl says she has woman troubles and the adult guy gets flustered and gives her whatever she wants, except I don’t think that happens in real life. How do you end up forty and not know basic stuff?”

“Uh huh,” I said. “There was a seventeen-year-old in my Patrol block who didn’t know the ordering of the alphabet after T. You’d be surprised.”

“Well, it seems problematic to not know how hero and villain stuff works,” Kenzie said.

“I don’t think anyone knows,” Natalie said.

“The basics, though,” Kenzie said, as she typed at her keyboard. “Is it okay if I bring Rain and Ash over here?”

“Bring?” Natalie asked.

“Projections,” Kenzie said. “Basically a prettied up video call. It lets them be here, even though they’re really over there looking at their laptops.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

Kenzie nodded enthusiastically. She began working.

Two cameras came to life. They floated to different heights above the ground. Then the dark sides of the big projector box came to life, and the images appeared, frozen in space.