“That sounds about right if I have to do any dredging. But the offer stands.”

“Nah,” he said. “No need. You’re looking after the kids, right? Checking on Chris, you checked on Kenz.”

I nodded.

“And that was important to do. You’ll check on the others.”

“Probably.”

“Focus on them.”

“A lot of what you were saying sounded like a cry for help, Tristan. Especially toward the end.”

“It’s not, not exactly. It’s— I can’t talk to Byron, because the two of us can’t be in the same room at the same time. My parents don’t like talking to me. Not since the murder charge. I’m limited in the friends I can talk to, with one being worse off and one in prison. I needed to vent and I needed to say it out loud and make sense of it.”

I frowned at him.

“For the record. This is coming from three places,” he said. “Beard guy I saw on the way over. That’s a bit of it. Sveta was asking me for boy advice, that was the second. So you know, look out, because that’s probably coming.”

I frowned more, but mostly because Sveta had asked Tristan first, and not me. I could set that aside because Tristan was wrangling something.

“And the third part, which actually got me thinking about this in the bigger sense… that whole thing about how powers are hard to get away from?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. That’s our group, but when I was trying to figure out who we might be seeing at the prison, the mentality we were working with or around, what to look out for… isn’t that it? They can’t get away from their powers or what their powers have done to their lives.”

He grabbed the latest spinning top he’d fashioned with his power, caught it between fingertip and thumb, and crushed with an ease that suggested his superpower wasn’t even needed.

⊙

“I can turn into a monster that’s ninety percent mouth. I could do it now.”

“Don’t,” Capricorn said.

“Or a form that’s all slimy tentacles.”

“No,” Capricorn said.

“I just don’t see why it matters what’s in my pockets.”

“I don’t see why you didn’t just leave it at home,” Lookout said.

“Because,” Cryptid said. “I need a bunch of this stuff. There’s a good chance it matters. And because it matters, I don’t need glorified security guards tampering with it.”

“You could put it in the locker,” Sveta suggested. “Two of us can move fast. If there’s an emergency, we could go get it.”