“Buy all the stupid stuff you want,” she told him.

“I think this is it?”

She handed over the cash.

He took it and diplomatically decided to trust her. “You said you wanted your reminder as we arrived. Your uh… maintenance.”

“Thank you.”

She let herself out, and paused to scratch out a word on her arm. The scratches became raised skin. The constant juggling act of keeping herself in working order. Every tinkering needed attention, and her body was loaded to bear with tinkertech.

She looked around at the building. It looked like a large bank, refurbished, the signs taken down and nothing put back to replace it.

It might have been a good thing that she had been distracted, because eye contact as she emerged might have sent people running. The way it had happened, people were already making themselves scarce. There were staff outside smoking. One of them was staring at her, stiff.

Fight, flight, or freeze.

She kept her hands out of her pockets, so people would have less reason to panic, and made her way up the stairs to the door.

Inside, staff were milling around. Her entry had a ripple effect. Heads turned. People noticed other people noticing. Off to her right, someone stepped out of a doorway with a washroom sign above it, saw her, and turned around, disappearing back inside.

I’m back.

Still keeping her hands in clear view, she approached the reception desk.

The receptionist was a young guy, and he typed something in a rush as she made her approach, before looking at her, almost stunned, definitely guilty.

“I’ve been away for a time,” she told him. “You just told your superiors I’m here?”

He swallowed. “No, but…”

His voice stopped making words a half-second before his lips stopped moving.

“It’s fine. I’m here to see them,” she told him.

The man continued to be silent, typing, looking more anxious by the second.

More anxious by the second, and it took him over a minute, working in silence. She watched as he started making more use of the backspace key. Typo, type, type, type, typo.

Her patience gone, she stood on her tiptoes, reached over the desk, and grabbed one side of the monitor, turning it around.

The Wardens and other major heroes were either deployed or at functions. The man at the desk—Tod with one ‘d’ on his nametag—had reached out to less important Wardens.

“I’m going to go to the back. You can send someone with me if you want, but I’m just going to do what I did when I was under the Wardens’ custody, before. I’ll take a room, I’ll get settled, I won’t do any tinkering until I get permission.”

She waited for a verdict, then when he didn’t give her any indication either way, she turned away from the desk, striding toward the back.