I glanced at Ashley. She’d been quiet since sitting down. The last time I’d reached out hadn’t ended well. Was I supposed to ignore her now, leave her alone while she wound herself down?

“How about we talk about your idea, Tristan?” I asked.

“It’s getting later in the afternoon,” Sveta said. “And Kenzie has dinner with her parents. It would be good to get it out of the way.”

“I can skip it if I have to,” Kenzie said.

“You shouldn’t,” I said.

Tristan shifted position, metal sliding against smooth stone. “The plan. We’ve only got the broad strokes worked out, so if you want to help hammer it out, Victoria, it would really help.”

“Okay.”

“Protecting Rain in the coming weeks is essential. My starting point for thinking about this plan was thinking how we might cover all the bases we want to cover. We need to keep the older members of the group free enough to help Rain with whatever he needs help with. Kenzie wants to do something integral to the group, and while she can help keep an eye out, it’s easy for her to take too much of a backseat role.”

“Am I taking a frontseat role then?”

“I’m—not exactly. There’s a lot about this that’s counterintuitive. My first instinct is to think, hey, I want to make money, I want to be out there doing things. But that leaves us open to interference and distraction. So… what if we go covert?”

“Covert?” I asked.

“Nobody knows Ashley is on the side of the good guys for the time being. She’s really good at the villainous persona and atmosphere.”

“Thank you,” Ashley said.

“And then there’s Chris, who can be monstrous, appear, disappear, then show up again as someone or something else.”

I glanced at Chris. Chris had two sets of pliers in his mouth. He was readjusting his braces.

“The masterminds and the organizations are masterminding and getting organized. Hollow Point is one example of that, and Tattletale’s degree of involvement, that’s another example. I didn’t get the impression Tattletale was really aware that we were a team, so I think this works.”

“Take all things mastermind with a grain of salt,” I said.

“Of course,” Tristan said, quickly enough that I wondered if he’d bothered with that grain of salt. “Okay, so what if we do like—actually, it’s like Victoria was saying a few minutes ago, about creating and capitalizing on weak points—”

“She was telling us more about Tattletale,” Kenzie told Ashley.

“Yeah,” Tristan said. “Look, no rush, we do this slow and careful. We put you guys out there, Ashley and Chris can plant cameras, Kenzie handles backend, we gather all the data we can, and we find out what the masterminds are doing and where the organizations are most vulnerable.”

“Then we hit them,” Ashley said.