“Let’s end it,” I said, and I said it quiet, where only Littlejohn and Capricorn could hear.

“Troy,” Littlejohn said.

‘Troy’ stopped, going silent, and looking at his partner.

“Head on over to the other end, near the cars. See if you can’t spot anything about the truck the attacker is driving, or the people inside.”

Troy seemed eminently unbothered as he shrugged one shoulder, heading over to the truck. I found myself wishing he’d looked more annoyed or hurt about being sent away.

Sveta would be annoyed and hurt. I knew that much.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Tell me more about this,” he said. “Who are these people?”

He’d indicated Imp. In the last scene we’d pieced together, Imp had an arm that replaced the one that had been torn away. The new arm was a different skin tone and had a bad bullet wound.

I was starting to explain when Lookout showed something on her phone to Ashley, then to others. I trailed off, motioning for her to show me and Littlejohn.

“I got enough detail to map it out. We have license plate and vehicle serial numbers on the frame of the vehicle.”

“Whose?” I asked.

“Faultline,” Lookout said.

“I could check databases,” Senior Trooper Littlejohn told us.

“I think I’ve got it already,” Lookout said.

“But thank you,” I added. “Listen, we were pursuing a lead when we got this far. This is your territory. Do you want to take jurisdiction over this scene? Use of weapons, cape stuff?”

“Fuck no,” Littlejohn said.

“It’s okay if we handle it?”

“Probably not. Except this looks like a steaming pile of mess, and I want no part of it. You want to own this?”

“We can’t pin them for a crime, but we can try to keep this from becoming a string of incidents, and we can keep you in the loop.”

“We’re going to go talk to Palanquin?” Sveta asked, and she wasn’t quite able to hide her excitement.

⊙

Tristan leaned back, a phone pressed to his ear. His helmet was in his lap.

I saw his eyebrows go up as the person on the other end answered.

“We’re not new clients,” he said. “We’re parked a block away from you. We’d like to approach, talk, see if we can’t both help each other.”

The phone dropped from his ear.

“They hang up?” Rain asked.

Tristan shook his head. “They’re checking.”

A voice on the other end cheeped through the phone’s speaker. Tristan raised it to his ear.

“How did we find you?” he asked.

“We followed Tattletale’s path to the bus stop. There was camera footage that had the license plate on it.”

Tristan repeated it, then covered the mouth-part with his hand to repeat, “There were no cameras at the location. They checked. Do we tell them?”

“We have very good cameras,” Swansong said.