“I think it makes sense. I think you’re going to be sparking a lot of individual conflicts and fights when you’re saying people can legally take one another’s stuff—”

“Yeah.”

“—but that might be intentional. Diverting those of a mercenary mindset and setting them against the troublemakers.”

“That was part of the intent,” Natalie said.

“Won’t be easy or clean,” I warned her.

“No. I never thought it would be.”

“Follow the law, then do what’s right, reach out if you’re not sure,” Kenzie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Minimize regrets.”

“It might not even matter,” Natalie said. “We’re going to try to spread the word, but we’re worried nobody’s going to listen because the anti-parahumans are louder and they just got a quote-unquote ‘win’ by attacking the mayor and killing her boyfriend.”

“And there’s the city itself,” I said.

“Either we evacuated for nothing and people will be so mad they won’t listen to reason, or we evacuated for a reason and nothing’s going to matter for a while,” Natalie said. She sighed.

I heard that sigh, and it sounded like a perfect distillation of the feeling that had seized me earlier. A dead dog sigh.

I hadn’t felt any profound degree of kinship with Natalie until that sigh.

“Let us know what we can do,” I said.

“I will,” she said.

The conversation turned, and we recapped our encounter with Deathchester, with Kenzie chiming in, in a very Kenzie way. Not quite the happy Kenzie I wanted to hear chiming in, but happy was expecting a lot.

She’d still lost her favorite person.

I’d noted my ability to sense the turbulence of the world where the reality had been wounded and scarred over too many times, in too fragile a place. In this car that wasn’t meant to drive through snowy dirt roads, I was aware of different sorts of turbulence. Natalie and her underlying feelings on things. Kenzie, and the rising nervousness and intensity.

Emotions crowding out emotional intelligence, maybe. Compensated for with more verve, hype, excitement.

I could hear howling well in advance of anything being visible. As we got closer, I could hear the barking.

Massive cabins, and there were buildings I might have tentatively called stables. As we drove up, a dog larger than Natalie’s car ran up alongside us, separated from us by a fence it could have easily jumped. No rider. Some bones that should have been on the inside were on the outside, connected by webworks of mystery bone, ligament, muscles that didn’t correspond to normal body type and shape, and were studded inconsistently with spikes and longer, thinner bits of bone that might as well have been spines. The tail that flicked out behind it was like two human spines joined together and then joined to the butt by a haphazard tangle of meat.