I elbowed Rain. He looked at Sveta, who was smiling a bit, and forced a smile onto his own face, the projected image translating it.

“Accounting for things like, say, the monster having its claw around the station?”

“Yeah?” Rain asked.

With my eyes, I indicated the pair of officers.

Beside me, Sveta reached for a chip. She took one in her fingers, and in the course of moving her hand toward her mouth, accidentally snapped it in two, the pieces landing in my lap.

I picked up the larger fragments of chip, popping one into my mouth.

“Hey.”

I held up the other half of the broken chip between two fingers, while Rain took over at the laptop, nudging my hand aside so he could do his thing.

“Give,” Sveta said.

I popped the half of chip into her mouth.

“Thank you.”

“Station in its clutches. Right. That’s… a danger. Lots of points to be lost,” Rain said.

“Already lost points, as I see it,” I answered. “Foregone conclusion, before we even started playing today.”

Rain’s knee bobbed up and down. “I might need to take a walk soon, get some air.”

Which translated to him potentially needing to make a run for it. Though if it came to that, I wasn’t sure he really had any good options. Sveta and I were mobile. Tristan, Ashley, and Kenzie were closer to an escape route. Rain, though? We’d have to cover for Rain.

“If you go, we’ll watch your stuff,” I murmured. I leaned back, shifting the chips over so they sat between Sveta and me. “Make sure you’re covered.”

“Thanks,” Rain said.

So much of this was hidden behind veneers and translations. The signals we were using, the language, the false faces.

Nailbiter, roving and investigating as she roved, wandered off to one side, where she joined a group of the tent city thugs. I didn’t really have a better term for them—the people who’d been in the tent cities for long enough that they’d seemed to adapt to the new environments. Almost like homeless people, almost like survivalists, but with a mean edge.

She seemed to know them, and after speaking with them for ten or twenty seconds, they got up and started fanning out, searching.

Love Lost looked very relaxed, her coat removed and folded over the back of the couch, while she talked with anti-parahuman people at the next couch over. It was clear they weren’t very keen on her, but they weren’t cussing at her or acting on their apparent dislike. What they were feeling seemed to stop at frowns and perpetual scowls.

Above, Kenzie, Ashley, and Tristan were talking, while leaning over the railing. They were doing their own surveillance.

“Where did we leave off before the game ran out of battery?” I asked. “Monster due to arrive?”

“Arrived just as,” Rain said.

“Station in its clutches, and… house in clutches.”