“What?” I asked.

“More than three. We think it was eight, but it could have been ten. They required specific materials to make. Once the first two showed up, the heroes started getting ahead of the tinkers. Two tinkers weren’t very experienced, one died around then, one got arrested. One made it past heroes to build the third. Five were foiled in their robbery attempts.”

I nodded to myself. Good fucking job on the heroes part. The notion of there being five or seven more spooked me.

“Are they active?” I asked.

“They were active but aimless, in our general Gimel–Europe area. Operating separately. Now they’re together again. As of the last week. Make of that what you will.”

Make of that what I will?

Big ask.

“To me, that sounds like a symptom of overall weird agent behavior.”

“I don’t disagree. Thing is, none of those are really considerations, Vic,” Tattletale told me. “Except the Machine Army. Except the Blasphemies. Where does that get us, except you procrastinating on going back into that room to not blackmail the lacrosse player in the purple shirt who may or may not have a powerful relative who got them into the same university you applied to.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear, halfway hoping I could see a video image of Tattletale’s face.

“You read the dirt?”

“The point is that you’re procrastinating.”

“I’m stopping to think,” I said.

“Emphasis on the stop. Don’t get me wrong, hon. Not faulting you. Sometimes I need to shut off the lights, send the kids away to muck stables or be horrible to each other, and retreat from the world. Just don’t pretend that’s not what you’re doing.”

“Emphasis on the think part,” I stressed. “Collaborating with you. If we think about those guys and how they existed in the first place… there’re questions.”

“You’re doubting her. I heard about the Kid Cassandra’s accusation. Now you’re back to that?”

“It’s hard to ignore, isn’t it? You have to ask a few different questions when you consider that those people and things existed. One, the obvious answer, is that they’re blind spots. Too powerful, too messy, whatever.”

“Certainly applies. They give me headaches, and I’m seeing this stuff in sudoku-vision.”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

“The second answer is… she’s Cauldron. She was. Might still be, in some way.”

“I don’t think you make Cauldron-level decisions for three-quarters of your life and then move on without carrying some of that with you,” Tattletale said.

“How many of those threats were allowed to go on being threats not because they were blind spots, but because they were useful to Cauldron or their goals?” I asked. “They made Case Fifty-Threes, for fuck’s sake, and speaking on behalf of my best friend, it was an evil thing to do to people. To children, sometimes.”