“Yeah. For right now, I’ll get her stuff,” he said, quiet. “I’ve got a sheet of instructions.”

“I’ll help,” Chris said.

“Be nice,” I told him.

“I’m a tinker,” Chris said. “I might be able to warn him about stuff he could mess up.”

“I can’t believe you hid that from us,” Rain said.

Chris only shrugged, loping over to the box with an apelike body and mostly ordinary head.

“Can we do this?” Rain asked. “Because I’m hearing all of this and my head is spinning.”

“Oh good,” Chicken Little said. “It’s not just me.”

Rain put out his hand, and Chicken Little gave him a high five, before crouching down by the box and straightening out the folded piece of paper he’d been given.

“The mountain of a crisis we’re trying to overcome here is deserving of head spinning,” I said. “It’s scary, it’s big. I don’t disagree with you two.”

“I’d rather go with my plans,” Chris muttered.

“Which are?” Sveta asked.

“Not doable, anymore. So let’s do this instead.”

“Let’s say we can get to this window of opportunity you’re talking about,” Sveta said. “What do we do then? You wanted them to stumble?”

“That’s the basic idea. And for that, we need… something big.”

“Big in what sense?”

“Big in the messy sense. In the… blood, guts, altering our machinery sense.”

Sveta stared at me. Behind her, Rain and Byron exchanged a look.

Sveta’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t mean Chris.”

I shook my head.

“What happened out there, between the time you left and the time you caught up with us again.”

“I found Chicken, and I saw some things in the crystals that helped clarify things. The pieces to a puzzle I didn’t know I was trying to solve. I feel… I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I feel like you seemed to feel after you got your body.”

“We went to a spot where I saw… someone who was important to me once,” Chicken Little said. “Someone who looked like her mom, and some older guy, and a teenager.”

“My first instinct is to ask if master–stranger protocols are in order,” she said, and her voice was quieter than it had been. “You were worried about keywords or implanted phrases… and we never technically rescinded that, did we?”

“Nothing to do with my sister. My mom, my Uncle Neil, and Dean.”

“But you want to go to her, and collaborate?”

“She’s the scariest damn person in the world—”

“Still?” Sveta asked.

“Still,” I said, my expression like stone. “If it comes down to pointing her at the monsters we’re trying to stop, then that’s what we do.”