“I like him too,” Rain said. He leaned back in his chair, hands at his hair, pushing it away from his face as he stretched. “I don’t like talking about you like you’re not here, Byron. We’ll hang out later, okay? Unwind.”

“It’s been a long and rocky road,” Tristan said, to me. “He’s not interested in the hero thing either. He’s on Mrs. Yamada’s side here. On yours, kind of, Victoria.”

On my side? I was trying to frame my argument, but it was an uphill battle for logic to win against the heart, and it did seem like their hearts were in this, to varying degrees.

I decided to say as much.

“I might not be winning any points with Mrs. Yamada in this,” I said. “And I don’t know enough about your individual situations, but you have personal, thought out reasons for wanting to do this. At this stage, I’m not telling you guys you shouldn’t do this. I’m definitely, definitely not saying you should. I think there are a few things to work out. I’m honestly really concerned about Ashley.”

“As anyone should be,” Ashley said.

“That would be why I’m concerned. I don’t know if you guys want to sit down as a group at a cafe or something, hammer out some basic plans. You’d probably want something like an outline or playbook that you can take with you when you’re talking to the Wardens or whoever’s managing the territory closest to you. I think the hero teams are covering different sections of the city, and you wouldn’t want to step on jurisdictional toes. If you want to do this.”

“That could be great,” Sveta said.

Kenzie nodded, very enthusiastically, as in most things.

“Chris and Kenzie,” Mrs. Yamada said. “You’ve been quiet.”

“I’ve talked about wanting to pick Victoria’s brain and she listed some topics,” Kenzie said. “I like this whole conversation as a recap, seeing where everyone’s at, instead of trying to think back to previous sessions and think about what people’s reasons are. I’m glad we’re talking like this and I want to have that meeting and figure things out.”

“Chris?” Mrs. Yamada prodded.

“Can I just say I don’t want to share with the guest here?”

“You can,” Mrs. Yamada said. “Is it the truth?”

Chris looked annoyed as he looked at her. “I don’t like talking about stuff. Digging into my thoughts for answers stresses me out and throws me more out of whack than it helps.”

“You can’t exist purely on the surface level,” Mrs. Yamada said.

“I can. It might or might not be good for me, but something that could be good or could be bad is a lot better than no-win after no-win.”

“No win?” I asked.

“I could say it’s none of your business,” Chris said.