“For my metaphor? Bodies of water? I don’t know. I’m ass-pulling, as Imp would put it. But the idea applies. The lava pools up and around, it builds… walls, peaks, accumulations. She sets up stuff in the periphery or vicinity that impact or constrain the blind spot in question. For Scion, it was Case Fifty-Threes, it was specific teams of specific power levels in various Earths, stuff hidden out of sight and stuff in plain sight. The PRT. It was distractions, it was delays and it was encouragement for him. To get him where they needed him and when.”

I kept silent, digesting that, trying to imagine it in this context. There were people walking toward me in the hallway, and so I was forced to play nice and not say anything that would turn heads or get talked about in earshot of the others.

“Why do you ask?” Tattletale asked.

The coast was clear. “Sorry, there were people, had to wait before I replied.”

“I knew that, it’s why I waited to reply.”

Ah. Her power.

“I can see you on camera,” she clarified.

Oh. “My line of thinking is… if she is a problem, knowing the angle helps. If she isn’t, knowing the angle helps. If there’s a threat that slipped her notice, it’s possibly something that escapes her blind spots and it’s helpful to know how she sets things up and how something could slip by. If she set something up—”

“It helps to know how she sets things up. Right.”

“Right,” I said.

I didn’t know the exact way to where I was going, but I had some ideas. I’d come this way once before. This place was massive, and a lot of the time navigating it was like traveling across a city and marking the transition from suburb to commercial to high-end residences and then to industry. Once one knew the general feel of an area, it was a question of knowing whether to head north, south, east, west, up, or down.

Up. Out toward the exterior wall.

“What do we look for?” I asked. “Groups?”

“She pools out, remember? Finds the channels and cracks. Teacher catching her reset everything, put months of distance between her and her… pawns, for lack of a better way of putting it. So she deployed—”

“—And she started with herself, then reached out for tools closest to her. Worked out from there.”

“If it helps, I can’t imagine it was personal.”

I reached the top of the staircase, walked past some people who looked like refugees that were getting the low-down on the work being done, and through a gate. The area was an interior roadway primarily meant for moving cargo and materials.

Off to the right, there was a long corridor that led to the outside, with an extension that combined balcony, road, and helicopter landing pad, all running along the outside of the building.