Candy took her hand, and Kenzie looked over, gratitude clear on her face, even though she didn’t smile. But the image changed, to an Asian woman holding a dark-haired girl down, fingers hooked into the child’s ear, twisting. The child wasn’t even of an age to attend kindergarten, but the woman’s face was contorted as she shrieked and wrenched the child’s ear enough it bled.

It was Love Lost who jumped to the rescue, before I could backtrack. Love Lost’s arrival coincided with a shift to images filling the area as if viewed by a dozen different sets of eyes. Every angle, every detail. Mother holding daughter in the midst of a stampede that threatened to tear her child from her arms. The little girl leaned heavily on a bunch of tables that were folded up and resting on their sides, flush to the wall. One slipped from its position, and with it, she went down like she’d been pulled or thrown down. Her face collided with the edge of the next table.

Love Lost faltered, then wrapped her arms around the two girls’ heads, claw-less hands covering their eyes.

Rain helped Darlene, who might have slipped or fallen behind when we’d dodged the reaching hand. The images became a jumble of ramshackle accommodations, a little boy being thrashed. Corporal punishment in ten different forms. A small Darlene fighting a boy she had to be related to, like her life depended on it, scratching, biting. Legs of adults were visible, standing around unmoving, more like the fenceposts of an arena than anything human.

“Your idea fucking sucks, Tattletale!” Tristan bellowed.

“Shut up! It’ll hear you!”

“It can see us!” Sveta called out. “Everything’s lighting up around us while we run!”

I heard Tattletale mutter, “Shit.”

We were closer to Tattletale’s agent now. Precarious, teetering, ever-examining. As we got closer, though, the functionality seemed to change, much as the many-handed ‘Mr. Hugs’ had seemed to multiply the number of hands and the amount of tinkertech it could produce.

Building false crystals that looked like smoke but held a crystal-like shape, propping them up. Moving crystals. All while facing down the other creature, which I could track because it was close enough its spikes seemed to extend out as far as the eye could see to sky, to either horizon, and downward at angles, raking the landscape.

The way it sets up crystals and moves them. That’s how it builds bridges.

“Get to the edge!” I called out. “Don’t get spotted by spike-head!”

The images around me changed. A woman in white, standing dangerously close to the portal. One of Teacher’s flunkies. Two more flunkies were standing nearby. Nobody I recognized.

I let Love Lost and the kids pass me.

“Teacher,” I said.