“Candice Vasil, I have heard stories about you and your siblings from my colleagues who worked in Brockton Bay. I’m trying to be fair here, and to put all prejudices aside. Help me do that. Follow my orders, sit and rest while I talk to each of you in turn.”

“’Kay,” I heard Candy. She sounded more anxious than she normally did.

“Lookout too,” I said, before Defiant had walked all the way back to me. “Something you should address, while we’re making sure this goes as smoothly as possible.”

“What about her?”

“If she was that insistent on saying something, it was probably for a reason. Ask her.”

“Lookout,” Defiant called out, without taking his eyes off of me. “The potential exceptions you talked about.”

“Oh!” I could hear Kenzie. “Um, first of all, can I move my eyes?”

“Yes,” Defiant said.

I started to move my hand to indicate he should follow up, when he added, “Why would that be a concern?”

“Um, because I’ve got cameras embedded in my eyes, and there are tracking points that let me operate some of my systems remotely.”

“Have you been remotely operating your computer after I told you to do nothing?”

“Um. Yes? Just sending some messages and updating some things, and taking notes, and—”

“Stop,” he said. “Don’t touch your menus. Don’t operate any tinker technology you or anyone else owns. Don’t operate any non-tinker technology. What else?”

“Um. What about technology that operates itself? It’s just running in the background but I haven’t been nudging it back onto course and it’s gathering and using some data, and running some defensive routines, and a few offensive ones. And stuff.”

Defiant didn’t move, except to break eye contact, and to dip his head a bit.

The lights in the building flickered. I could see some lights of monitors and projected screens at the far end of the room momentarily flicker, glow, or change to a different interface.

With Defiant occupying most of the doorway with his partially-armored bulk, there was only one projected screen near the door that I could sort of see. I watched as it went black, then flashed, showing Defiant’s dragon-spear logo against a shimmering gold background.

That logo changed to a woman’s face. Dragon’s.

Dragon the A.I., I had to remind myself.

“I found exception number three,” Dragon said, her voice sounding like it came from Defiant’s right, with a bit of an echo to it. “Handled.”

“Thank you,” Defiant said, not sounding quite so angry. He turned his attention back to me. When he spoke, he sounded upset again. “Antares. Victoria. Anything else?”

“Not on that front. I just thought I’d warn you so you didn’t have cause to be upset after.”

“We’ll see.”