Natalie looked downright desperate to figure out what was going on, suppressed alarm clear on her face. She couldn’t ask, though, not without signifying that something was wrong.

“We’re going forward with Chris’s disconnected cells idea,” Sveta said.

I approached her, reaching out. She put her hand in mine, and I gave it a waggle.

Tension across her face seemed to ease slightly with that. The smaller signs of anxiety like free tendrils finding their perch or the rustle of movement inside her shell of a body were muted in a similar way.

“Disconnected cells,” I echoed, confirming I’d heard.

“She has two other groups. We’ll move in coordination once we know for sure what we’re doing.”

Natalie touched her phone, which was in her jacket pocket. The layers she wore seemed overly warm for even this shitty weather, but I could see that she’d gone easy on the top beneath the sweatshirt and jacket. No doubt choosing clothes that didn’t press on her cut.

She didn’t draw out the phone, though, or tamper with it in a way that made me think she’d opened a call to emergency services, holding a button too long or tapping one area of the screen while the phone was still in a pocket.

I let myself relax.

“What’s the verdict?” I asked.

“Still studying it, but…” Lookout pulled out her phone, held it out, and clicked a button. A little square robot face with hearts for eyes pirouetted across the screen, providing the object of focus for a side-wipe screen transition. What was left in its wake was gibberish data. “Portal to another world, obviously. You mentioned that already, over the phone.”

I nodded. I was hyperaware of everyone’s state at this point. Natalie’s anxiety was creeping up. Capricorn was quiet, lost in thought. Lookout was lost in her work, naturally. And Sveta…

She didn’t look like she was wholly in control of herself. More tendrils snaked out here and there, finding gaps and crevices, or old damage. They weren’t the long tendrils—those were managed. It was only the shortest, narrowest ones.

It sucked that she could accept the hand-waggle, but she gave me a look with doubt in her eyes when she didn’t think I was paying attention.

Lookout was humming. “Hmm. Okay. Can you get my laptop? Oh, and the projector disc. I’ll image it.”

I got the computer. Kenzie tinkered, plugging projector disc and phone into the laptop, while holding the phone out near the door in a box.

“I can’t get the teleporter working, I don’t think,” Lookout said. The bun-encasement at the back of her head opened up, making eye contact with me, while she hunched over her work. “But I know space and coordinates, and these things were made with coordinates built in.”