“Why come here? Why talk to me?”

“Because you got shot and that sucks,” he said. “And I see how some of our team members treat each other. Tattletale and Victoria are nemeses, which is really sad because I bet they could help each other. It’s always because of stuff that happened in the past.”

“Yeah,” Kenzie said. “Most of us have hard stuff, don’t we?”

“Some. But I’m not thinking of that stuff. I’m thinking about stuff that doesn’t get looked after, or small grudges that become big ones. In a couple of years we’re going to be the same age Imp was when she joined the Undersiders and they took over Brockton Bay. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do it right this time?”

“You’ve been thinking about this a lot, huh?”

“I was at the meeting where all the other villains were talking about what to do, how to protect themselves, where they needed to draw lines, all that stuff. Tattletale didn’t really want to talk about it, Imp doesn’t—how does she put it?”

“She wants to get out ahead, she doesn’t like being reactive. Reactive gets you killed,” Candy said.

“Yeah. So she’s out trying to get ahead of the problem, when the problem is a bunch of people who could be anywhere who want to kidnap Undersiders or hurt other Undersiders to make the one Undersider do what she wants.”

“I think I followed that. I’m fuzzy with drugs.”

“Sorry, talking about heavy stuff.”

“No. No. It’s… kind of the same here. What were you saying?”

“I couldn’t really talk to anyone. I don’t know Flechette and Parian well enough to ask them stuff.”

“You could have talked to us,” Darlene said.

“You guys were busy helping Nathan after Nicholas got mad and terror-waved him.”

“Oh. You still could have asked.”

“I didn’t think I should,” he told her. He turned back to Kenzie. “I spent a lot of time thinking. Everyone I know that’s not a teenager anymore is stuck on the past.”

“Aunt Rachel?” Candy asked.

“She’s special. But I think she misses the dogs she had before.”

Candy nodded.

“The others are focused on what comes next,” Kenzie said. “The fighting, the violence, the rule breaking, the plots.”

“Let them,” he said. “We should focus on the now. Making sure that things okay when we’re, I dunno, ten years older than we are. Once I started telling myself that, I started feeling a lot better about the feelings that the meeting stirred up.”

“I’ve had messy feelings too,” Kenzie said. “But I think some of that is because I got shot twice.”

Candy tittered.

“Yeah,” Aiden said. “Would it help the feelings if you helped me with my plan?”