“Not this,” Candy said.

Lookout smiled, tears in her eyes. “Do you know what the longest stretch of good days I had was?”

“Your foster dads.”

Lookout shook her head. “Guess again. The longest stretch of time where I wasn’t anxious, where I was happy about every day, my heart was light and I was hopeful about tomorrow.”

“I don’t know, Kenzie,” Candy said.

“It was when I was blackmailing my parents, after Gold Morning. It was when I could at least pretend. So… do I have to pretend here?”

“You’d be ruining everything if you did,” Candy said.

“I don’t—” Lookout shook her head. “I don’t know! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!”

“You need to rest. You need to stop.”

“I… can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t!”

Darkness flooded into the room, smoke as black as ink.

The darkness dissipated almost as soon as it had appeared. Juliette stood opposite Lookout.

The two of them promptly froze in place.

“Shit,” Tattletale said. She pressed the heel of one hand to her forehead. She held out the other hand for Aisha.

Aisha took what was offered. Two pills.

“Sleeping pills,” Tattletale said, taking a water bottle from Brian. “Fast acting, for thinker headaches.”

Aisha placed the pills on Lookout’s tongue, then took the water bottle.

Juliette released the kid, and Aisha squeezed the water bottle, forcing pills and water into the back of Lookout’s mouth.

The kid coughed, staggered, looked in the direction of her tech, and saw only darkness.

There was anger on her manic face, her fists clenched, as she remained there on her hands and knees. She was frozen again like that, her expression still. The little mad scientist was mad.

Aisha fished in her mouth, checking the pills were gone.

“Things will be better when you wake up,” Tattletale said. “All of this is fixable.”

Gradually, frozen as she was, the tension was released. The girl’s eyes rolled up in the back of her head.

Juliette released her, and Lookout collapsed, unconscious.

“Or else the world will have ended. Either way,” Tattletale said, with a deep fatigue to her voice.

Infrared 19.10

“…so they had to tranquilize her,” Chicken Little finished. “I think that’s what it was. Syndicate cut Lookout out of our network after that.”

I nodded. I looked over, and I noted the lack of any message or appearance from Imp or Tattletale.

Question was: did I trust them? Their judgment call? All we had was Chicken Little’s report that Kenzie had gone for a lie-down, got to talking with Candy, and then got into an agitated conversation with Candy before being frozen, being forced to take pills and then passing out.

Could we afford to get distracted?

“How many pills?” Number Five asked.

“I barely remember. I could feel them on her tongue. More than one, but there was a hard edge. One and a half?”