Me:
Can you make your way to us if we need backup?

Rain:
No.
No—I have no transpo and time is wrong. 13 minutes until my power knocks me out automatically. Then I sleep like dead.

I looked at the clock.

Rain:
What is trouble?

Me:
Ashley was grabbed, thrown from bed. She broke a window. No idea where the attacker is.

Rain:
Weirdness here too. K’s projector box is sweating.

“Rain says your projector box is sweating?”

“What?”

“Is that dangerous?”

“No. No, it just doesn’t make any sense.”

“Talk to our guy,” I told her, putting my phone on the coffee table and sliding it to her. “I’m going to check the building.”

Ashley stayed with Kenzie, while Damsel came with me.

Front hall clear. The door was locked.

The kitchen was fine.

Bathroom, first bedroom that included my office with the papers strewn everywhere, the second bedroom that belonged to Ashley, the storage room that still had Ashley’s furniture in it, from where I’d moved it in to make room for my things… all clear.

“Um,” Kenzie said, as Damsel and I returned from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. “So it’s not just that my projector box and computer are sitting in a giant puddle.”

“Spit it out,” Damsel said.

“The door was left ajar, so it almost froze. Rain was hogging space heaters, so it took him a while to notice.”

“Didn’t you waterproof it?” I asked, “because you knew Capricorn would be using his power around it?”

Kenzie nodded.

“And proofed it against cold weather?”

“Best as I could, but that has nothing to do with anything, except it means they probably survived the flooding.”

“Why? How? Did it malfunction?”

“It wouldn’t ever malfunction like that. That’s like saying your barbecue is broken, it keeps making salad.”

“Kenzie, please. Simple answers.”

“It’s the simplest answer! It’s wet because someone put the water there,” Kenzie said. “Then, according to Rain, this theoretical person left the door partially open on the way out.”

Why put water on a computer? Attempted sabotage? How did one put water on a computer without alerting the guy who was working late on his tinkering?

And if they were active there, and we had strangeness here…

“Shit,” I said. “My computer.”

I took flight, cutting a path through the hallways.

The door to my room and office was closed when I got there—and it had been open when I’d left it a minute ago. I pushed the door open, and a blast of cold air mingled with choking, blinding fumes to dash my senses. I couldn’t see, couldn’t smell, and couldn’t taste, and the only noise was the wind from the open window.