“So many things I want to add to that,” Imp said. “Paying someone for service counts, apparently… but I’m being good.”

“You’re really not,” Kenzie said. I could hear the distant voices of the other Chicken Tenders, chiming in.

“Victoria,” Tattletale said. “Ignore Imp. The second spot you couldn’t figure out, I can’t put English words to it. You could call it a specific flavor of mixed feelings. Like, ‘I want that and I can’t have it, and ‘I have that and I don’t want it’, at the same time. The light of the connection to Contessa went there when you pinged her?”

“Yeah. We could have kept going, but we were hoping there might be clues or something there, so we visited it. Couldn’t make sense of it.”

“In that case, you’ll want to look for landmarks. Right now, Precipice went a bit forward, can you make out those images?”

I looked down at Rain.

I could see the images flickering around him, depicted by the crystals. Ruins. A treehouse. A forge. A girl’s torso, looking through the sleeve to the side of her chest.

“Ha!” Imp barked out the sound.

Rain didn’t seem to hear or notice.

“Can you stop?” Kenzie asked. “Stop laughing at people when they’re doing nothing wrong.”

“I’m not laughing at. I’m celebrating the weirdness of humanity.”

Rain just stood there, waiting, hands in his pockets, about two-thirds of his attention paid to that last image. As he paced a bit, the image shifted.

I reached over for the camera and turned it away.

“He’s going in the right direction,” Tattletale said.

“I’ll say!”

Rain seemed to hear Imp. He looked up, saw us looking, and looked away, pushing his hood back to run his hand through wet hair that was damp with perspiration.

Tattletale told me, “You want to go from there to… I think you’ll find a cluster of specific images. Trust your instincts, you probably want to climb the mountain. If it starts throwing up grief, sadness, weapons, anything like that, try other directions. Weapons especially, you probably want to right-turn. Think… images, scans, eyes, things like Lookout focuses on. It’ll be kind of like paying attention, looking at things, glaring, hostile attention. Ties into Contessa’s power watching everything. I can’t speak for the mystery segments, parts that can’t be explained neatly in English or categorized by human minds. But you should be able to find your way.”

“Thank you. It’s more of a path than we had.”

“Once you’re there, you’ll see a standalone pillar or island. Smaller than most. That’s her. She’s adjacent to clusters and functions tying into attention and focus. You’re not far. I’m… ninety percent sure that’s where you want to be.”

“Thank you, Tattletale.”