Moving slowly, Aisha crossed the room, touching Chicken Little’s shoulder. She pointed him to the corridor near where Juliette was. He retreated to the doorway.

She did the same with Darlene.

Lookout didn’t even seem to notice.

“Are you there?” Lookout asked, and her voice was plaintive. “Hellooo?”

The room they were in was a conference room for what was supposed to be a block of offices for one branch of a larger organization. The central table had been carted out, desks moved in. The small voice was very empty in the wide space.

“I don’t know what to do. I’m not sure I can fix this.” The kid typed constantly. Lines of code spread across the screen without rhyme or reason, like cracks crawling their way across a broken windshield.

“Look—”

“No,” Lookout interrupted. “One more minute… please.”

“One more minute,” Aisha said.

They waited.

One more minute. Lookout periodically typed, her expression shifting between eye-watering stares and frustration.

“It’s not your responsibility,” Brian said.

“If it’s not mine then whose?” Lookout asked. Her eyes were already large in her head, but they seemed impossibly large now. Moisture clung to them without becoming tears. “I just lost my best friend a week ago. The coolest person I knew. She’s out of reach forever now, except—”

She stopped there. Shaking her head as she turned back to the computer screen. She wiped at one eye with the heel of her hand.

“It’s been a minute. Do you think maybe you could keep your end of the deal?” Aisha asked. “Take fifteen minutes, lie down in the bed in the back. Just—”

She reached for Lookout’s shoulder. The reaction was so sudden that it made her jump, as Lookout sprang to her feet, the computer chair, wheeled with a wide base, tipping over. It crashed to the floor. The kid was all tension.

“I’ve got stuff to do,” Lookout said. Her voice was entirely out of sync with her rigid posture, like she was a dog ready to bite. “Sorry.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” Aisha said.

“What do you know what I can do?” Lookout asked.

“Your team needs you alert and you’re all over the place like this. I don’t want to play the puppy card, but the puppy? Less than twelve hours ago?” Aisha asked.

The tension increased, the already small Lookout shrinking down.

“You don’t want to make another mistake like that because you’re not thinking straight, and you’re not thinking straight as long as you’re tired,” Aisha said.

“My team needs me. I’m indispensable. T—Tristan needs me. I’ve got to find the right data, find a way to bring him back…”

“What if you can’t?”