“Okay,” Houndstooth said. “Five or ten percent of what I saw? Still pretty fucking bad. I’d like to give you some advice and double check some things. As the person who’s been there and crossed his fingers before.”

“That’s not fair, you’re—” Tristan said.

“Tristan,” I said, cutting him off.

I was focused on Houndstooth. I was pretty sure I’d beaten him by a hair in responding.

“I asked you to have this chat as my side of our mutual agreement,” Houndstooth said. “I’m asking you to let me convey this to you. A lot of it is pretty mild. Give me a chance to say my piece, and you decide what to do with the knowledge.”

I glanced at Tristan.

“I’ll shut up,” he said. “Sorry.”

“I’m here to listen,” Ashley said. “Then I’ll say my piece.”

She had a piece to say? I hadn’t known this when she’d invited herself along as one of the group’s ‘leaders’.

“Please,” I said, to Houndstooth.

“I’ll give you some of the same advice my bosses gave to us and the people who interacted with Kenzie. Minimize the homework she does. That includes work-homework. Cape homework, if you want to call it that.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because she’s so eager to please she’ll hurt herself in the process. She had an art project in fourth grade, it was supposed to be done over the course of a month, following the instructions from regular handouts the teacher gave. Eight or ten handouts, I think it was. She asked kids a grade older than her what they’d done for the same project, and she pulled two consecutive all-nighters to do it. Her foster parents didn’t even realize she was doing it, because it turns out a surveillance-countersurveillance tinker is really good at sneaking out to the garage and being quiet.”

“Surveillance-countersurveillance,” I said.

“She went that far because she wanted to wow her teacher and see the expressions on their face,” Houndstooth said.

“It wasn’t good,” Tristan said. “Their reactions.”

“Shocked, almost horrified,” Houndstooth said. “And Kenzie was devastated to the point of being broken when it didn’t get the reaction she wanted it to. She was so stressed out over it in the days after that that she threw up in class, which—it didn’t win points with her classmates, and it led to her being transferred to another class. Devastating on both fronts, because she had classmates she liked and she loved her teacher.”

“How do you get ahead of that?” I asked. “What do you do to balance it?”

“Treat it like a full-time job?” Houndstooth asked. “Preventative measures, like the ones I’m recommending. She’ll go the extra mile unless you set up a roadblock to disallow that progress. So you have to stay ahead of that. She’s a headache in that.”