But she got along with Chastity. Since they’d reunited, they had been together at every opportunity, breaking apart only because of the serious fighting and the differing modes of transportation.

The hound was tall enough that it could stick its nose into Cassie’s face without rising from its sitting position, licking her with a tongue that looked more like a braid of three tongues than a single one. Armor plating was already sprouting, and skin was splitting to show muscle that would potentially wrap up and around without much rhyme or reason, only maintaining the rough shape of a dog.

“Sveta?” Rain asked.

I pointed skyward. Rain turned on the spot, craning the circuit-board masked face up as he looked to the rooftop. Sveta’s face was just barely visible.

He extended a hand, and the face bobbed in a motion that was too fluid and extended to be called a nod. For me to emulate it, I would have had to use flight or have my head sink into my chest cavity.

I’d tried to fly up to Sveta on exiting, to talk about the route she could take that didn’t risk contact with any rubbernecking college students. She’d asked me to go. Her control was better after Rain’s ministrations, I had some protection, but she hadn’t wanted me near.

Mourning. Grieving her lost body.

Now Rain was using his power again.

“Please tell me that you can figure out something about their location from the broken pieces of the whip,” I told Rain. “Or the glyphs Tattletale drew, or—anything?”

“Love Lost was inspired by the body part severing whip when she designed her whip-claws,” Rain said. “The groundwork’s there, but not the implementation. Not the… energy source, for lack of a better term. The nucleus.”

“But she was going in that direction?”

“Yeah. Seems like.”

“Fuck her then,” I said.

“Yeah,” Rain responded, with some fierceness I didn’t tend to hear in him. Some of the others nodded. Chastity. Rachel. Byron.

“Any luck de-scrambling the signal?”

Rain shook his head. “Lookout’s looking, but I don’t think this is her specialty.”

“She’s busy with the doctors now,” I said, quiet. “I was hoping we’d have more to go on.”

“We have enough,” Rachel said. “They got enough blood on them that my dogs can follow.”

“Good,” I said.

“Almost grown,” she said, indicating her dogs. “We good to go?”

“In a sec,” I said. “We’re missing people.”

It took another minute for our missing people to show.