“Our focus is on the present, not on the past. Do you think she’s still keeping some useful pawns on hand?”

“I think we start by asking if she’s even on the same page as the rest of us. If she even wants to stop this calamity. Then we start asking what she’s using in the way of pawns.”

Sundown 17.10

I walked, both because I was restless, and because I knew I was being watched. Kenzie’s filter made it appear like I wasn’t talking or holding my phone to my ear, and it got weird if I was standing in a dim, damaged hallway for an extended period, staring at a wall and doing nothing else. It would raise concerns.

So, for that matter, would talking to Tattletale.

“How does she think?” I asked.

“Contessa? She’s lava,” Tattletale replied.

“The only volcano references in my recent memory are an analogy to the well of the agent’s power with broken triggers and… someone I hucked into a hillside. Why lava?”

“Because I was going to say molasses but there’s nothing sweet about her, she’s dangerous, and saying she thinks like molasses implies she’s slow. Which she is, but not like I want you to imagine.”

“Okay,” I said. I could get on board with this kind of thinking, at least.

“Lava can spurt, it can reach surprisingly far, when we’re talking about molten rock that breaches the surface. If you get too close to it, you can get burned. It can do a shocking amount of damage, start fires that rage for days, whatever. But mostly if you leave it alone, you get a steady stream that lands close to home and then pools out from there.”

“I’m on board with the line of thinking, but explain that last bit for me.”

“She starts every day with questions. Anticipating, countermeasures, how to secure herself, how to secure her immediate goals. Drop her into a new situation with just her power and no context, and before she’s formed a complete thought, she’ll guarantee she’s safe from the most immediate threats. You can’t touch her.”

“Like you can’t touch lava.”

“Then the lines of thought expand out from there. The pooling out. Finding the cracks and exerting herself along them.”

“How do blind spots factor in?”