“I usually get tripped up on the fixing part.”

“Maintain. Hold onto the moment where things are okay. Keep yourself in working order like you do with your tinkertech—” Riley ran a finger over the raised reminder on the skin of her arm. “Keep your hands busy if your hands are a problem. Go to places where you know you can be stable. Even if it means leaving a workshop that’s the size of a deserted Earth to seat yourself at the end of a prison hallway.”

“Then what?”

“Then you either keep maintaining, or you relapse. When the relapse happens, you watch your world implode, and then you pick up the pieces and start from the beginning. Contemplate, prepare, take necessary actions…”

“And maintain.”

“If I can do it, you can do it.”

Lookout nodded. She pressed her lips together, before making a smacking sound with her lips. “Then I guess the implosion is coming.”

“What did you do?”

Lookout turned her head, and pressed her finger to her lips.

The girl began to disappear.

“Kept a secret,” Lookout said, and in that moment where the hologram hadn’t completely hidden her and she seemed to think she wasn’t visible, the smile fell away, and there was a weight and a weariness.

Riley reached out, because she felt that same weight and weariness. She connected to it enough that she felt compelled to make some kind of physical contact.

The woman cape from earlier stepped into the doorway and gave Riley a curious look.

“We’ve got an escort prepared. We can take you to your new apartment.”

“Apartment?” Riley asked. She gathered up her coat, standing.

“Monitored, but yes. We can take you now.”

Riley didn’t step forward. She reached over to the door, and lifted the plate. “Cryptid?”

“Please don’t disturb the other prisoners,” the woman said.

“It’s a lonely way forward, especially for people like us. I know you liked me,” Riley said. “I won’t hold your actions that night against you. I think I understand more than anyone. It was nice talking, as the end of the world approached, working on a project. If you wanted company… a fellow tinker… but I can’t if you want to chase monstrousness.”

“Riley Davis,” the cape told her, stern. She motioned for people to come.

“It’s your choice,” Riley said.

Chris’s voice came from the cell, young, “I’m tired of little girls chattering at me. One’s gloating, the other’s lonely.”

Riley let the plate fall to cover the slot.

Lookout didn’t seem like she was gloating. But the fact you see it that way…

And if I can have a conversation with Lookout, I think I can find others. Human connections. There were others, like Amy, like Jessica, all still out there.

She’d stay the course.

“Sorry,” she told the capes who had gathered at the entrance. “I’m ready to go home.”