It took three tries before it worked—a three-dimensional map, incomplete, with some rooms and areas simply in blocked-out estimations of building dimensions, other areas hyperdetailed. The route we’d traveled was as clear as day.

“There.”

Everything about the three-dimensional replication was cast aside as the image zoomed in on the pharmacist’s destination point. The image was supplemented by more rectangles that had video feeds.

“This is pretty awful work,” Lookout said.

“It looks good,” I replied, but I was lost in my observations. The pharmacist was in the room I had to assume was the pharmacy. The black trash bag was emptied, pill bottles put on a shelf with other bottles. I pointed at her.

“Can we get video of the area when she would have been leaving the scene?” Capricorn asked.

“Maybe. I use the cell networks, and they’re hinky right now. Some of this is old or out of sync.”

“Is that accident or intention?” Capricorn asked. “The towers being down?”

“I don’t know,” Lookout replied, even though I suspected he hadn’t really been asking for her verdict.

What is the pharmacist doing, and how does it factor into Teacher’s agenda?

“Can you get eyes on security, while you’re at it?” I asked. “I’m curious who was watching the monitors when a woman with punk hair and a purple metal shirt waltzed through a door made of lightning.”

“On it.”

Natalie shifted her weight from foot to foot.

Capricorn checked his phone, which was gripped in one gloved hand. “Feeling the time limit.”

Another call from the guys?

“Working as fast as I can,” Lookout said.

There. It hitched and glitched here and there, but the image split into two rectangular screens. In one, the electrical door appeared. The pharmacist came through with the latter portion of a leap. In the other, we had a view of one of the security guards reach out and change the image on the screen away from the violently flickering image.

“We want to know who he is,” Capricorn said.

“Already on it.”

I got to watch the pharmacist get settled, torch the portal from her end of it, and then set to work, pulling things from the bag and organizing them in a painstaking way… then getting the baggie of orange—I presumed orange because the image wasn’t great enough quality to contrast the warm colors and it was close-powder.

That was the main attraction in our little theater here, enacted in a neutral location that put us closer to the portal. On the sidelines, Lookout’s system was pulling out schedules and images. We had one pharmacist and one security guard confirmed as thralls—or whatever it was when they weren’t outright brainwashed.