“The first one looks really good,” I said. I felt so disheartened that the words felt hollow.

“Ooh, mixed opinions. Those are good.”

“If you let Ashley have too much of a say, then you’re going to end up with an all black costume,” I said.

“Maybe,” Ashley said. “Some white or red details are good.”

“Ashley’s my favorite person, so I don’t mind if that happens,” Kenzie said. “You’re maybe my second or third favorite person, Victoria, so your opinion counts for a lot too. And I want to do good things but I’m working sometimes with villains, we’re being discriminatory with what we do, so something a little darker is okay, I think.”

“Black is striking in bright light, and if you’re out in the light you want to make that statement. At night and in night missions, black will keep you from being seen.”

I rolled my eyes a bit.

“Ooh, I should take notes. I packed up the stuff that would take them for me…”

I couldn’t show her or ask her to take a hand in it, even if she was uniquely qualified to track down where it came from. Because Dragon was also qualified, Dragon was qualified in everything. The apparent Bluestocking of tinkers.

The danger wasn’t that Kenzie’s feelings would be hurt. They would, but that wasn’t the danger as I saw it.

The danger here was that this diary was close enough to home to be seductive. That she was impressionable and some of the worst thinking in the diary would stick if she were to read it.

Was there a good chance of it? I didn’t know. Was it possible to tell her not to read it? Yes. But I worried.

I worried on so many levels.

“Boys, Sveta, tiebreak me! This… or this?”

“I am not the person to ask,” Rain said.

“Please? Gut feeling.”

“I like the first one,” Sveta said.

The one I’d liked. Solidarity.

It all felt so empty, so fragile. The usual fondness wasn’t there. What the hell?

“I like the first one too,” Tristan said.

“Yeah,” Byron said, a moment later. “Yeah. How are you coming up with all of these?”

“I fed my computer a ton of high fashion and costume stuff and put it in a blender, and now I’m extrapolating with human-guided machine learning. It takes its best guesses about what’s working along six different protocols and each time I keep one and discard another it adjusts its guesses and narrows in on something workable.”

“You realize that in another time or climate, you could make a bit of money using that?” Tristan asked.

“Really?” Kenzie asked, eyes wide. She turned to me to confirm.

It meant a lot that she turned to me, except that only rubbed in that horrible, trapped feeling.

“Yeah. Really,” I told her.