My hand had found a natural resting place over the keyboard well before this point. Pressing the keys down as softly as I could wasn’t difficult.

Yes

I didn’t hit enter, because it would have taken another movement of my hand.

It didn’t matter.

ON IT

Immediately, she began sending messages to the others. New patch, anti-Mathers measure. Don’t freak out. The text appeared in their field of view, with the eye cameras they wore. They barely seemed to notice, their attention on the capes. I typed as quietly and unobtrusively as I could, got frustrated, and opened a notepad document. I began taking notes. Rune, other stuff, and in the midst of it typed:

This Amy stuff is taking up too much focus
This might not be the biggest danger

And deleted it.

Kenzie’s reply appeared a few seconds later.

TATTLETALE THINKS SO TOO

I watched the screen, tense, trying to think. I paged through to Kenzie’s video footage, overshot, and ended up on Chicken Little’s. Good enough.

“Tattletale?” Kenzie asked. I wondered if she’d waited for me to get to the right footage, so I could follow along.

“Your voice isn’t exactly dulcet, Lookout. Thinker headache, remember? Before you make it worse, consider that Tattletale-with-headache is going to be crabby. Tattletale-with-no-headache buys you treats.”

“Can I give you an eye camera when we’re at the workshop?”

“I think jamming something that looks like a bunch of forks welded together into my eye is the sort of thing that makes headaches worse.”

“It’s painless,” Kenzie said. “And it’s important.”

There was a pause.

I could imagine that great titanic agent working with crystals, drawing connections, pulling up data.

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

It’d be a direct, private line between me and Tattletale, then.

Good start.

Sundown 17.8

This is going to be a juggling act.

At Shin Station, Capricorn, Sveta, and Rain were part of a greater assembly of heroes, forming the group at the station entrance and the loose perimeter around the Mother Giant.

The Shepherds who’d been stationed at the entrance had backed off, as a crowd of capes emerged. Half-and-half. Half had clothing in the Shin style, with masks and draping cloth. Capes, like more old fashioned capes had worn on Bet, but with more emphasis. Layered with one cape atop another with a slightly different cut, so the edge of the one beneath framed the one above. Stylized drapings of cloth made to evoke images, or made so overwhelming that the cape was ninety percent of the costume. There were patterns recurring across the costumes that looked like Shin’s equivalent of tartan, argyle, or houndstooth, but more complex.

The other half were ours. Our most problematic. Coalbelcher, Gambol, Crock o’ Shit, La Llorona. More.