Love Lost had settled here in Lyme. We had some surveillance, but positioning ourselves was a task. Ninety percent of everything that wasn’t part of the old tent city was under construction. The other ten percent was like this—crowded, patrolled, and potentially monitored by moles and agents in league to Love Lost.

We’d tried to set up and operate out of the van, where our supplies were in easy reach and our team was together. We’d struggled to find a parking spot in the happy medium between being close enough to Love Lost to act, and far enough away to avoid attention. Within two minutes, we’d had police knocking on the door of the van. Every spot was pre-claimed or, as we’d been told, subject to the whims of the construction teams that were moving large amounts of material through.

Our attempt to get out of the van and set up somewhere as a team had been similarly stymied. With that, and after seeing just how closely monitored and claustrophobic the emerging community was here in Lyme, I was prepared to give Love Lost some credit.

She’d either been insanely lucky to stumble onto a location like this, or she’d had the sense to find it. I was betting on the latter.

Our only options had seemed to be setting up in the next area over, with a twenty minute travel time to get here if we needed to do something, or setting up close and dealing with constant hassle, with civilians peering over our shoulder and potentially reporting back to Love Lost.

Except Kenzie had had an idea. Old programs. One to superimpose images, and another that let her tech put the game together based on a description. We’d watched for ten minutes before the game popped up in a mostly working fashion.

“What do we know about her?” I asked. I reached forward and hit the arrow keys, since there wasn’t a lot happening on-screen. I stopped when we had an image on the woman with the canary feather boa on screen.

“Heavy question,” Rain said. “She’s angry, but I think most people picked up on that.”

“Silent,” Sveta said.

“Nearly silent,” Rain agreed, nodding. “She was law enforcement. Detective, I’m pretty sure. I saw a flashback where she won an award, her daughter was in the audience. So I think she was a pretty good one. I remember, uh, another flashback, she had a child, but her child died. Was killed. Senselessly.”

The sentences were more fragmented as he went. I saw him clench his fist, white-knuckled, before wrapping his other hand around it and cracking the knuckles manually, his eyes on the screen.

“And she turned into a… pirate?” I asked, mindful that people might overhear. “Using all of that expert knowledge from her past life?”