She straightened, and then gave me a serious look. “You know what you sound like right now, right? But it wasn’t a dream! It was a place! And this guy was there, and her, and him, they were all there! But they couldn’t have been, Auntie Em!”

Crystal put her hands to her cheeks as she finished it.

“I wish it was a dream,” I said. “It was a mess. I’ll fill you in on it later.”

“Great.”

“Or not. You could find out by browsing the web—”

“Blegh, internet.”

“—finding a video of our TV appearance—”

She perked up. “Oh hey! That’s good! Neat!”

“Not good,” Sveta commented. “Necessary, but not pretty.”

“Oh no,” Crystal said. She’d gone from excited to crestfallen in a second. Even borderline horrified. “Because ‘necessary’ always means good things. We just finished a stint of necessary.”

“They were pulling a media hit job on one of our team members,” I said.

“Who is they? What group, or what show?”

“No idea and Hard Boil. On Lookout.”

Crystal made a face. “Even if it was them, why wasn’t it pretty? You’re supposed to be good at this stuff, cuz! And you have Capricorn! He’s done media appearances before, and he’s good at it!”

Someone looked him up, I thought.

“Sorry to butt in,” Sveta said. “Didn’t mean to get you in trouble, Victoria.”

“No,” Crystal said. “No, you’re fine. You can butt in all you like. You’re as good as family.”

Sveta blinked.

Weld put one arm around her. “I heard about the TV show. The prison.”

“It’s nice to know they keep you in the loop,” Crystal said, sticking out her tongue at him.

“Leave that group of yours and join the Wardens. We’ll take care of you,” Weld said.

“Tempting,” she said. “Prison?”

“It was one thing among… a lot of things,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re not too badly hurt,” Weld said.

“Somewhat traumatized, but we’re mostly fine,” Sveta said, hugging him back. “We lost a teammate. Cryptid. Not—not dead. But he left.”

She’d stumbled over her words in her haste to clarify that ‘lost’ wasn’t dead.

It put me in mind of the Leviathan attack. ‘Losses’. The word had haunted me for a while, until other moments and things had taken over. Such a horribly ambiguous word.

“Half of you didn’t have names when I left,” Crystal reminded us.

“One of the younger two. Not the camera tinker. Our changer.”

“I vaguely recall. I might be sharper if it wasn’t nearly midnight.”

“It’s past midnight,” Sveta said.

“Fucking time zones. So you were on television and you fucked it up—”

I elbowed her again. “It wasn’t great from a PR standpoint, but we did what we needed to. Got heroes on our side, saved Lookout from being the focus.”