I hugged her. She smiled as she broke the hug. “Hi Missy.”

“You can call me whatever. This is, uh, Theo and Ava. I just realized I didn’t ask first about identities.”

I put out my hand to shake theirs. Theo accepted first.

“Glory Girl, hi,” Theo said. “I was a fan when I was a kid. Laserdream, wow.”

“I think I win,” Crystal whispered. She threw up a forcefield, expecting a jab that I didn’t bother to deliver.

“I’m Golem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know the name.”

“I know the name,” I said.

“I know too,” Sveta said. “But if I said how, you’d think I was weird.”

“Weird why?” Theo asked.

“If I said J.Y., would that mean anything to you? Staff?”

“Yyyes?”

“She was one of a very small number of people who looked after me. So when she said she went to a town, I looked up the teams there.”

“Ahh,” Theo said. He wrinkled his nose. “Not too weird.”

“I’ll settle for that,” Sveta said.

“Cuff,” Ava introduced herself to me and Sveta. At Sveta’s handshake, she extended a look down. “That’s quite a hand… shake.”

“You’re the Chicago Wards,” Sveta said, matching Ava’s tone of intrigued surprise.

“When a lot of people make that connection, they’ll add something to it,” Ava said. “Chicago Wards, Weaver’s team. Or Chicago Wards, the people from the New Delhi video.”

I shook my head. “Chicago Wards, did what few teams besides New York were doing and organized a roster with a strategy.”

“That was in the New Delhi video,” Ava said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“If it was, it was something you guys were doing before the video, before Weaver, and I was paying attention back then.”

“Well, on behalf of Tecton, I’m touched,” Ava said.

“It’s tough. Damned by association, like Brockton Bay and the Undersiders,” Missy said. “Theo’s from Brockton Bay originally.”

“When did you get out?” I asked.

“Around the time the Slaughterhouse Nine arrived.”

“Good move,” Crystal said.

“I like getting together with all of the old Brockton Bay people,” Vista said. She huffed breath into her hands, then adjusted her scarf. When it didn’t adjust the way she wanted it to, she warped its dimensions. “Feels like I’m putting a puzzle back together. Everyone always has questions they never got to get answers to, you know? Except Rachel Lindt’s one of the people I keep meeting up with, and she’s not a question and answer kind of person.”

“Tattletale’s the one I keep running into,” I muttered. “She is a question and answer kind of person, and it sucks.”