Scarcely missing a beat, she answered, “Conserving power. Shutting out the rest of the world to limit information intake. Monitor as good as mine, doesn’t strain anything to look at it in the dark.”

Tattletale smiled. Lily didn’t smile back.

“Do you want me to turn the lights off, then?” Lily asked.

“Leave it. Someone else might notice and flick them on again. Not that I don’t appreciate the little gesture.”

Not a gesture.

“Okay,” Lily said. She didn’t leave.

She wants something.

No shit, Sherlock.

“How are your legs?”

Tattletale raised her feet, closing one eye slightly in a wince. “Ninety percent better. Turns out taking untested, black market drugs have their merits.”

“Bitter Pill?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s mercenary. Doesn’t give anything for free, calls in favors and calls hard.”

“You know her, huh?”

“Reached out to her after Sabah and I ran into a kid in a bad place. Kid’s powers didn’t do anything to fix their body issues, and really complicated conventional methods to fix it. We thought Bitter Pill could do something.”

“Too expensive?”

“Is your power telling you that?”

Common sense. Bitter Pill did temporary work, but that work could be a lot of things. The only ways it would work were to pay for regular doses over the long term, or pay for her to drop everything and research something long-term.

“Yeah,” Tattletale said.

“She’s dangerous. We’re pretty sure she was looking to get the kid in a position where they were taking regular doses.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“And get a kind of control over him. Fucked up, and it says a lot that she was willing. There was so little to be gained. With you?”

“I get it. I know how she is, and there’s no need for warnings. Yeah, sure, she’s demanding and she’s really hungry to gain some ground right now, but I like having legs.”

“Your funeral.”

Dismissive, word associations: death, endings, ceremony; strongly dislikes Tattletale-self.

“No need to apologize or anything,” Tattletale said, leaning back, checking her computer screen. Nothing had happened yet. “Not like I took two bullets because of your whole psychotic rabbit girl thing. Imp lost an arm.”

“We’re hoping we can get it back,” Lily said, before sighing. “We’re all nervous, but you seem fine. I was hoping you knew something we didn’t, and you could reassure us.”

“Huh,” Tattletale said. She turned herself around. There was a quick protocol for it. One keystroke pinged all of her teams. She saw the messages come in. Each of them got a text, if they were on phones or undercover, and buzzed in a certain way on walkie-talkies if they weren’t. One by one, a long column of circles in a table switched over from yellow to green.

Response times; fine.
#1 responding slower than before, has anger issues, sleep issues; post—

Tattletale shook her head.

“Problem?” Lily asked.