“If you need to look around more, then do that, just don’t take too long doing it. If these loons are the next ass-clowns in line to cause trouble, it’s better we get them before they’ve figured out which way is up.”

It’s a little more complicated than that. They’ve figured out a lot more than which way is up.

“Sounds good,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”

“Explain some of this to me as you go. I should know more than I do.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Geez, where to start?”

“Why does this all look wrong to me? Doesn’t look like it meshes together.”

“It doesn’t,” I said, as we walked back toward the rest of the group. “It’s the puzzle we were trying to put together: what goes where. We can ask Lookout—she’s running the simulation. We froze a few key scenes that we worked out.”

“Show me? These are people from my city, apparently.”

“They were. We were in the middle of trying to figure out if they’re leaving because someone worse scared them away, or if they left to go protect some people elsewhere. Lookout! Scene one!?”

The scene around us shifted. The moment where Tattletale was mid-meeting with Faultline, Chicken Little and the Heartbroken sitting on the front of the parked cars, where headlights illuminated the light snow. Trails marked where snow clumps had been rolled against the ground to form snowballs. They had been stacked into miniature snowmen. Chicken Little had two birds in the snow on either side of what looked like a failed snow-bird, the outstretched wings having crumbled under their own weight.

I pointed at that, then spun around to point at the other end. The headlights of March’s vehicle were sweeping into the lot as it pulled in, but March wasn’t waiting that long. She sat in the open window of the car, leaning over the hood with a rifle in her hands. The frozen scene had captured the muzzle flash. Even from a distance, there was something in March’s eye—she wore her mask so it covered half of her face, her left eye peering through the right eyehole of the mask. The adjustment of the mask freed her to look down the rifle’s scope.

“Page us through slowly?” I asked Lookout. No need to raise my voice now that we were closer.

A matter of ten feet from us, the image of Tattletale had shifted, and was mid-reaction, the bullet having connected. A bullet to the back of the thigh. The other thigh had a fresh wound on it. The reason there hadn’t been more blood on the snow was that most of the gore had hit the side and interior of the car. The only thing that kept Tattletale from going straight to the ground was Snuff’s grip on her arm.

“Eliminating the competition?”