“Okay, right, can’t see while I’ve got the phone to my ear. Foresight said they were using Final Hour to mask their business dealings. He was their heavy hitter and he might still be. I was thinking he might be using the EMP thing or something like it to keep people from looking in.”

“I hope they don’t use it,” Kenzie said.

“Probably wouldn’t work outdoors,” I said. “Last Minute moves things backward in time. Emphasis on things. Not people. Carries an assortment of tinker boomerangs, bombs, weapons. If Secondhand didn’t have the tinker-ish name, and if there wasn’t a chance they were all lesser tinkers, I’d say Last Minute was a contender for the team’s tinker, with his arsenal.”

“What’s the catch, or what’s the tinker component?” Tristan asked.

“From what little I remember, his gadgets don’t act the same when moving in reverse, or it has added functionality while being reversed.”

“Fuck me,” someone said. I thought I heard someone else groan, too.

“Yeah. Boomerangs fly a different path, or split apart so one version carries forward and one retraces its path,” I said. “That sort of thing.”

I’d slowed while flying, and now I stopped. I didn’t want to enter the territory and draw attention when it wasn’t quite time. I had a sense of what Birdbrain and Braindead did, and there was a risk Secondhand would do a patrol when the meeting concluded, to see what their potential business partners were doing.

I settled on a roof, walking as I landed, then stopping to stand on the corner of the roof. Cedar Point was on the other side of the water, on a peninsula across from me.

“End of Days?” Tristan asked.

“I don’t have a clue,” I said. “Nothing about name or appearance stands out to me.”

“Fuck,” I heard a voice. Rain, I was guessing.

“Why are they B-list?” Tristan asked. Not the first time he’d touched on that.

“Because the tinker stuff is limited. The batteries take time to charge,” I said. “When they were active in Seattle, they had something like twenty days between the jobs they pulled, and they had weaknesses. The batteries ran out if engagements were prolonged and once that happens they lose a lot of their muscle.”

“They might have recruited End of Days to cover that weakness,” Tristan said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not out of the question.”

The Speedrunners took longer to examine Snag’s arm than Snag had taken to examine whatever they’d shown him. I watched through my phone, grieved a bit for my monthly limits, and waited.

On the screen, Love Lost stepped away from the meeting, walking down the length of the parking lot. She stood with her back to the group, hands at her sides, fingers and claws spread.