Rain had complained once that his dreams left him feeling like he hadn’t rested at all. I could simultaneously agree and disagree. Physically, I felt rested. Physically, I felt like my wounds had bound up, muscles tensing, creeping pains having crept all the way in, much as they did any time I slept. The skin on the back of my hand felt tight, but a lot of that was my body reacting and healing. The parts of me that weren’t wounded or wound-adjacent felt better. All like an ordinary night’s sleep.

Mentally, though, that was where I was in full agreement with the guy. Mentally, I felt like I’d been there, for every trigger, for the fight against a monster so big I couldn’t fathom its scale, for the mental gymnastics, sliding around, and facing down of other fantastical hyperdimensional monsters, horrible realities, and Teacher.

When I didn’t focus, my brain felt like a buzz of television static, and that wasn’t a monumental leap to the twilight state where I felt like I could go to sleep.

When I did focus, my mind went straight back to those twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred things that I really wanted to break into and talk to the others about.

Floorboards creaked as Defiant ended his conversation with Tristan.

He paused in the center of the room, head down, looking at nothing in particular, and I was put in mind of Kenzie. Accessing menus and screens, looking things up.

He turned my way, and he approached me.

Probably with my file fresh in his mind, if he wasn’t looking at it at the same time he looked at me.

“Before we get going,” I said. “Can I just say a few things?”

He folded his arms.

“First of all, I’m sorry. I have more to say on that front, but I wanted it to be what I said to you first.”

“Alright,” he said, not flinching or relaxing in the slightest.

“Second of all… the kids. Lookout in particular. To start with, it’s best if you outright tell Syndicate not to connect with the others. Because if she’s connected to Lookout and she’s in arm’s reach of a computer—”

Defiant, filling the doorway, turned.

“Darlene Vasil, are you connected to anybody right now?”

“Tell the truth,” I called out.

Defiant gave me a look over his shoulder.

I didn’t hear Darlene’s response, but I imagined she was pointing.

“Break the connections,” Defiant ordered. “Keep them broken.”

“I don’t know why we’re in trouble,” Candy said, from near the door to the fire escape. “We were here for moral support, we got roped in by accident, that’s all.”