“—this is why I’m here!”

I felt a pang at that. A stab of… not guilt, but sympathy.

I’d been going easy on her, letting her coast and stick to known habits, because I’d had something of a guess that this was in the works. That she wanted to be needed.

And the shitty thing was, I agreed with her. That the tech probably made more sense to keep than to discard, given what it enabled her to do. I would have been okay with her keeping it on until she was done, and that wasn’t because I valued this project that highly. It was because she was an eleven-year-old kid who had just lost her most important person for maybe the fifth time in her life, and she needed her security blanket, even if that security blanket was eye-penetrating alien hardware.

I flew over, and the flight aspect of that seemed to give her pause. I put my hand on her forehead.

Warm, but not quite fever-warm.

She kept going, “Listen, I want to do this! I want to do it with all my eyes open. I want to help, I want to make a difference.”

“Count down from a hundred,” I said.

“That’s—” Kenzie started. She stopped. “Not fair.”

I kept my hand where it was.

She counted, under her breath. She was at fifty or so when Candy reached for her hand. This time, she didn’t pull away. Darlene stood behind her, a hand on each of her shoulders.

She reached zero.

“Array one,” Rain said. “Talk me through it.”

“Array one connects to systems and mainframes in the area. Cameras, mostly. Refracts within camera architecture, hijacks signals. Some hosting architecture too, so I can see a feed and think about it some without it taking up all of my attention or keeping me from looking at other stuff.”

“Do you really need that for this project?”

“It lets me keep an eye on Sidepiece in case she tries to hurt any of you, even when my back is turned. I can watch outside, and watch the horizons with the cameras I mounted outside. It means I can work without worrying.”

“Array two, then?”

“That’s mostly a mainframe with a lot of hosting. Alternate vision modes, zoom, analysis, scanning. One hundred percent essential for the work I’m doing. It lets me see inside tech and work on it without taking it apart.”

“Array three?”

“Hookup to my main database, offsite hosting, onsite hosting.”

“With hosting being the thing where you’re using it to think and watch stuff?”

“Yeah. Thanks to scans of Chicken Little.”

“That was what was making you overheat?”

Kenzie nodded.

“Array four?”