“Kenzie, you’re cute and all,” Vista said, and her voice had a burr of tiredness in it. She trudged over to the cot Byron had been sitting on and plunked herself down. “But you are going to get shanked if you keep that up.”

Kenzie tittered. “Don’t make me laugh, you’ll make me mess up the sequence.”

“Does it have to be done tonight?” Vista asked.

“No. I can finish programming tomorrow,” Kenzie said. She turned onto her side, eyes pointed the way of Ashley’s knee, then twisted around almost to face the opposite direction to look up at Ashley, “You okay? Your leg isn’t falling asleep?”

“You’re fine,” Ashley said.

“Darlene’s throwing me off with the sequences anyway. She’s staying up tonight to keep an eye out in case I need emergency help or hands elsewhere. She’s giggling because both Candy and Chicken are snoring. It’s like dueling banjos, but snorty. She’s trying so hard to not laugh so much she wakes them up.”

“You stay connected while you’re asleep?” I asked.

“Sometimes! The first time we did it, Darlene fell asleep by accident, so there was nobody to cancel it, unless we wanted to wake her up on purpose. Then that was the same night someone, I’m not gonna say who, they had a nightmare. Really spooky when it happened, because you’re paralyzed while you’re asleep, but you’ll jerk and twitch and your heart rate goes up and stuff. So I thwacked my hand against my bedside table to wake everyone up. A little too hard. It still hurts a bit.”

“Might be a little too much, if you’re always connected,” I said.

“Maybe. But it’s kind of nice having company when falling asleep, you know? It’s only been good dreams ever since. I can feel them breathing and it makes it easier for me to breathe when it’s dark and I start thinking about spooky stuff.”

“Do you have trouble breathing?” I asked. “Panic attacks?”

“Not actual trouble. But everything feels heavier, you know?”

I digested that. The pressure of the twilight hours. “I know. Is it the cape stuff that’s getting to you?”

“No, nah. Cape stuff is fun. Spooky stuff is when I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling, and I start thinking about what if I never figure it out, you know? What if I’m never better and I spend the rest of my life pushing people away, and every morning and every night I wake up without a family, and every Christmas it’s just me buying myself a present. Always just me, you know, smiling smiling smiling, trying to keep busy making Christmas treats for the needy for church events and still doing tinker stuff too because that’s going to be in my life forever…”