It made the kids happy, as they all sat around Aiden’s desk, enjoying what looked to be the best aspects of being kid capes with their own hideout. With how nervous I was, the joy wasn’t contagious, but it did make the day less bad.

Tattletale had promised me five minutes and she gave me twenty before she finally closed the laptop, setting it aside, resting atop her own.

I waited another minute to give her room to think before my patience ran out.

“Do I need to explain why I’m concerned?” I asked.

“You wrote a diary before?”

“Very little, while I was in the hospital.”

“But that’s not yours.”

I shook my head.

I did my best not to show just how relieved I was to hear those words, after doubting my own sanity.

“Who did they send it to?”

“Dragon found it, when I was sending her case files. She passed it on to someone important to our group.”

“Weird.”

“More than weird,” I told her, quiet.

“No need for money, no need for favors. I wanted cred for the Undersiders, and this will do.”

“This?”

“It runs deeper, Victoria. I know you think very highly of yourself, but this isn’t about you. Not exactly. Either they chose people they thought would make good targets, they chose randomly, or, they had a methodology like targeting the newest person to join each team.”

“‘They’, you say.”

“They. This isn’t just you, and it took a team. If we’re tackling this, we should start at the fringes. Small groups and groups with very new or tenuous memberships. I don’t know if Dragon found it by an accident that’s lucky for you, or if she found it by design, but… it’s interesting and concerning either way. I’m halfway to wondering if one of the other Undersider contingents has something like this planted on their systems.”

“Yeah. I was wondering about the rest of my team, but I don’t know what that would look like, or how I would look.”

“Come on,” she said. She got to her feet and stretched. “We. Us. Investigate.”

Black 13.5

“Warm up the car,” Tattletale said, over the phone. “Plug in the booster seat and cage.”

“Booster seat?” I asked. “Who?”

“You want to ride with?” she asked, more like she was replying with light annoyance or incredulity than she was offering.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Half-size cage, slot it into the middle. Thanks,” she said over the phone. She hung up, and rather than answer my initial question, she walked across the junior team’s headquarters and knocked on the frame to the office.