I smiled. “He doubts himself a lot, you know? He’s had a rough go of it.”

“All of us have,” Chicken Little said. He leaned back, resting one arm on the top of the cage with the eerily still and quiet hawks in it. “But some of us, like the younger Heartbroken and Lookout and I, we had stuff happen so long ago that we don’t remember it, you know?”

“Is that what Lookout said?”

“I kinda just figured.”

I nodded. I wouldn’t out her or correct him, especially with a strange mercenary and manipulative thinker in the driver’s and passenger’s seat, respectively.

“We don’t remember it all but a lot of the time it messes us up. Feelings get mixed up, swapped around, or we have something quirky. For me, it’s dreams. For some of the Heartbroken, it’s like wires get crossed.”

“Good way of putting it,” I said. “And there’s the scope of the agent–parahuman relationship, right?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The way it was explained to me in courses I took, the earlier you get your power, the less defenses you have. You don’t know how to work with it or make it do exactly what it wants, so… the power has more room to make you change or adapt instead.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” Chicken Little said. “And it’s like if a chicken grows up in a coop that’s too small, it ends up deformed. Or if a tree grows into a fence and it gets warped and there’s metal in the wood. We have something big occupying this space—”

He tapped his forehead.

“—and grow around that thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I like those analogies. Perfect.”

“Did Precipice have powers for a long time?”

“No,” I said. “Last year.”

“I have more experience than him,” Chicken Little said. “That’s funny.”

I smiled.

“He made knives for fun he said,” Chicken Little said. “And even hand-made bear traps from scrap, once. Like Biter and Bite-size have for their masks, but weaponized. That was before he was a tinker.”

“I think he spent a long while without TV or internet. Not even that many books to read. So he kept his hands busy.”

“Given the situation, he could have done worse,” Tattletale added, in what probably passed for a compliment, coming from her.

“Situation?” Chicken Little asked.

“That’s for him to share if he wants,” I said. “You might already know parts of it—”

“He does,” Tattletale said.

“—but maybe I’ll send him with Lookout for one of the drop-offs, and you guys can catch up.”

Chicken Little nodded, enthusiastic.

The chatter continued as Snuff pulled onto the highway, picking up speed.

Foresight.

⊙