“Ha ha,” Lookout retorted, working her shoulders so one stuck forward with one ha, switching orientation for the next. “You got it wrong again, Cryptid. Heart shaped pupils, not starry ones. Like my online handle.”

“That doesn’t mean what you want it to mean,” he said. “But I’m not going to try to explain it if Capricorn’s scared of eavesdroppers.”

“I’m not scared,” Capricorn said.

“You’re concerned,” I said. “Let’s change the topic.”

Lookout jumped in, “What we were talking about before—Those seventy percent kids were mostly the problem cases who the higher-ups thought needed boot camp to straighten them out. Most became problem cases who could kick ass, instead.”

“Ah yeah,” I said. “I’ve met one or two of them.”

“When you were a temporary Ward? Oh, wait, I can take notes, look up that team and work out who.”

“Boundaries,” I said.

“Boundaries, right. No prob.”

I wished I could see her face. The helmet she wore covered it. I had a sense of how she comported and conveyed herself now, and… she gave away very little like this.

There was an energy to her, a combativeness that I wasn’t sure was there all the time. Trick was, I wasn’t sure if she was more inclined to drop retorts or seize the initiative in conversation because she was unhappy, because she wanted more control, or if she was freer to do it because she wasn’t spending so much energy on defending herself against her parents on a day-to-day basis.

I glanced back at Natalie and her colleague.

Ashley was the only person besides Jessica and maybe me that ‘got’ Kenzie. She’d signed off on my proposed course of action. We’d turned the Martins in, leveraging Natalie, my mom through Natalie, my old Patrol contacts and the nebulous phrasing of ‘the complicating factor of a parahuman in the mix’ to get people to not sweep things under the rug.

The Martins had their initial tribunal meeting. It helped that they were on a different track and a different field of focus than the groups that were working their way through a backlog of Fallen arrests.

Kenzie was still at home, her parents were locked up, and people from the system were staying with her at her house. I was being kept out of the loop on purpose, until they could make sure that everything was square.

“By the way, just so you know, because boundaries, I’m recording stuff for our missing team members.”

“Might have to edit that recording,” Capricorn said.

“Keeping secrets?” Lookout asked.

“Just… depending on what you pick up,” Capricorn said. “We don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side because you recorded them and word of it got to the wrong people.”

“Oh, sure. Recaps, maybe?”

“Maybe. Let me glance over it before you send.”

“Okay.”