“Scans show some yellow-tier stresses,” Kenzie reported. “I’ll let Dragon know as soon as the phones connect.”

“Translate?” I asked her.

“It’s… safe but it could be better. If the wrong parts on the underside took battle damage, it might not be safe to hold. Some of it can be tweaked, but I’ll let Dragon figure that out.”

“Perfect,” I told her.

A short, sharp whistle turned my head. Gilpatrick.

Jester and Camisola went for their weapons.

“Hold up!” I called out.

At the edge of the clearing, looking a little more hostile than friendly, a snarling dog-mask flipped down to cover her face, Rachel stood with one wolf and one dog at high alert to either side of her. Yips hung further back.

“Rachel,” I called out.

She indicated Kenzie. “My business is with her.”

“What happened?”

“She knows what she did,” Rachel growled.

“Um!” Kenzie started. “Uh, sorry? I—”

“Hand him over.”

“Um…” Kenzie looked very on the spot, even with her face covered. “I won’t make any sudden moves, so maybe don’t send the dogs after me?”

“Can you make them stand down?” I called out.

Rachel didn’t budge an inch.

Right. Stubborn.

“I’m going to move verrry slowly,” Kenzie said. She reached up to the side of her helmet and tapped it twice.

From my position above the truck bed, carrying fourteen tons of tinkertech, I couldn’t really see. I noted that Jester did, though.

He put his gun away, moving with care, and then reached down to retrieve ‘him’.

Kenzie had had a puppy zipped up into her jacket, camouflaged with her projector tech.

Explaining the lack of bounce or exuberance.

Jester carried the pup over. The wolf growled as he got closer, and he stopped.

“Sorry,” Kenzie called out. “I was absolutely going to bring him back. But he was sleeping and—”

Rachel walked the distance over to Jester, and took the pup.

“—he was warm and safe, and I was super, super careful, so—”

Rachel looked at each and every one of us, as if we’d perpetrated the crime in question, and didn’t so much as look at or respond to Kenzie.

“—so I didn’t even realize it was a problem, I’m sorry, I am, I was distracted—”

Rachel stormed away, snapping her fingers for her dogs to follow.

“…Oh,” Kenzie finished.

“Lookout,” I said, not even sure what to say.

“I was going to take him back! It took me forever before I could even bring myself to touch him, and then I couldn’t just put him down because it would have woken him up. I don’t know how to feed him anyway, so it’s not like I’d ever keep him, right? I wouldn’t risk hurting him that way.”

“I think it’s going to take more than that to convince her,” I said.