“I’m thinking about the prison,” Tristan said. He stabbed a marker at the series of squares and lines that depicted the prison. “To get there, you have to travel to one portal, which is about twenty-five minutes away from the city, and then you have to travel for another twenty minutes to get to the next portal. That one’s where the guards and security are. That’s without the time it takes to reach the first portal. It’s deliberately set out of reach. What are our options?”

I folded my arms. “The obvious option is that we enable Kenzie because she’s exactly what we need in this situation, we exacerbate her issues and ignore problematic behavior, and we regret it down the road.”

“Obvious but not ideal,” Sveta said.

“We have reason to believe they’re watching—which would be hard, or they infiltrated the prison with the aim of going after Goddess—we assumed staff.”

“They have more ability to communicate with the outside world than prisoners do,” Sveta said. “Though they did let Rain and Ash have laptops and phone access.”

“Limited,” Tristan added. “And monitored.”

“Code?” Sveta asked.

“Could be,” I said. “But staff seems more likely. Staff can drug, make promises, open doors, manipulate.”

Sveta nodded, her eyes widening. “It’s scary to think about. Remember how vulnerable people were at the hospital? If someone had caught me at the wrong time with a few kind words, I could have believed anything. I think some of the Irregulars fell into that trap.”

“Okay,” Tristan said. “We keep an eye on the staff?”

I shook my head.

“No?”

“The question isn’t whether we do. I think it makes sense. The question is if we can do it while keeping Kenzie out of trouble. We need to do this surveillance without handing a ridiculous amount of work to an eleven-year-old that’s already prone to overworking herself.”

“Agreed,” Sveta said. “Did we make any contacts that might be able to help with thinker powers?”

“I can’t think of any big ones from the people who replied already, but we’re getting a lot of responses and it’s only, what, nine?” I got a nod of confirmation and carried on, “The prison being isolated is a double-edged sword. The staff need to sleep, they have families, homes to go back to, and they have commutes.”

“If they’re out of reach at the prison, we get them when they’re elsewhere,” Tristan said. “See if they arrange any meetings.”

I smiled a little. “Yeah.”

“It’s a lot of people,” Sveta said. “And you want to do it without Kenzie?”

“If we’re going to make her happy or find a safe way for her to hero, for both workload and this frontline role she really wants, I don’t think it’ll involve her maintaining a thousand surveillance operations.”