“I’ve been networked in by touch,” Kenzie said, responding very quickly and with a renewed effort, like she’d taken half of a breath and jumped straight to an explanation in her eagerness to play along. “We decided it’s important that if any of us are alone we should be connected to the others. Tinkers get kidnapped, especially valuable ones, and this is like a ‘find your lost phone’ thing, right?”

“Find your lost Lookout,” Tristan commented, smiling.

“Exactly,” Kenzie said, and I had the impression she was ignoring his amusement. “But I just switched on cameras and audio too. Cameras are working well but the audio’s not great. Ugh. Oh! Chicken Little just waved hi. I think he waved because the audio’s bad.”

“Hi Chicken,” Rain said, raising a hand.

“I figured I should let you know, you know, professionally. Like when you want to let the other person in a phone call know they’re on speakerphone.”

“Got it,” Weld said. “We’ll watch what we say and do.”

The headquarters wasn’t up and running, and part of the reason was that it needed facilities. We made our way up the second set of stairs to the second floor. Golem faced down a hallway of white lines and see-through floating two-dimensional squares, reached out, and touched a floating square, turning it ninety degrees.

As we stepped out of the hallway, a bunch of lines extended down the hallway, to targeting reticules that appeared around our heads and faces. I saw a flash of the characters for ‘Antares’, not written out and floating in space, but constructed out of rectangles and slashes that were arranged down the length of the hallway so that they only lined up to form words from my specific perspective.

“Aughh, distractions,” Golem said. He moved a floating panel.

The entire hallway flashed red, and every square and line received an outline of a larger, bolder red.

“Oops,” Vista said. “Don’t panic.”

“Shut up,” Golem said.

“Nothing like a threat of dimensional collapse to wake you up in the morning,” Vista added.

“What? The only dimensional collapse I’m at risk of is from you.”

“There’s a chance of one, I have to admit,” Kenzie said. “But there are so many zeroes after the decimal point that I think we’re safe. The chance of being struck by lightning and bitten by a shark and having a vending machine fall on you all at once is probably higher.”

“This is really distracting,” Golem said.

“I should take notes,” Kenzie muttered. She made a writing motion with her hand, paused, then started writing in the air. “Seeing people use my tech is a good thing to study.”

I noticed that her pupils were red.

“Red eyes?” I asked.

“I commented on that,” Ashley said.

“Yep,” Kenzie said, absently. “Yeah. We were thinking about a costume look, and red lenses and eyes were a part of it.”