“My best guess was my only guess. It’s just that I don’t want to go too far, and I don’t know if it curves. It’s easy to get lost down here.”

“Your second best guess, Antares. Come on. Assume you just got confirmation you were wrong—”

“Was I?”

“Fricking hell. No. But pretend you got it wrong, then point at the place you think it might have pointed. I need more info to work with.”

I pointed.

“This landscape added up once upon a time,” she said. “Everything interconnected, it fed more easily. Now it’s… a hundred hard drives crammed into one computer’s housing. Each agent lays some claim to real estate, builds their houses. But when information isn’t flowing freely, and some houses get built on broken or missing ground…”

“Broken triggers,” I said.

“And Titans, when there’s enough support from the system to keep them propped up. Okay. I can fill in the gaps. The first place you didn’t know what it was? You and your parent, Precipice and Mathers?”

“Yeah?”

Imp butted in, “Let’s not forget the Antares–Anelace thing.”

“Let’s,” I said, my temper getting shorter.

“Submission,” Tattletale said.

“Ha haaaaaaaaa!” Imp crowed.

“Not like that,” Tattletale said.

“Haaaaa!” Imp stopped hooting and started cackling. “Oh my god.”

“Cut it out, Imp,” I said. “Tattletale just said it wasn’t like that.”

“It’s just I so didn’t expect that—” she sounded amused, even as she explained herself.

I shook the camera.

The laughing stopped.

“Blugh! Please don’t do that again!”

“Listen to your teammate, listen to me, and don’t mock someone for having a healthy fling,” I growled. “You found a button to press, whatever, fine. But I’ve been dealing with Cryptid and I’m all out of patience. Don’t press this button.”

“I’m not—no. Lemme explain—”

“You were laughing about me and Swansong,” Kenzie said, quiet.

“Oh, kid,” Imp said, and I could hear her sobering up. “No, I really wasn’t. Really.”

“But you are, and I don’t get why it’s funny. I don’t know why that would fit.”

“Tattletale, babe, help me out, use your power, figure out what I’m thinking and why that’s so funny, and bail me out.”

“You dug your own grave. If you tick off Lookout that’s going to bode ill for you while you’re babysitting tonight.”

I folded my arms.

“Kid,” I could hear Tattletale, and it didn’t sound like she was facing the microphone. “Did you ever do a project for her, where she was paying you as a boss?”

“No. Oh. That counts? I said I’d be Swansong’s underling if Breakthrough didn’t work out. That was what kind of got her to start being my friend, and got her interested in the team.”

I hadn’t really known that.