I touched the button on the screen to mute my end of the conversation, so we’d only hear, not say anything.

“We tried to get ahold of Rain and we couldn’t. I’m worried,” Sveta said. “I know he’s impossible to get ahold of when he’s with his family, they’re off the grid but I don’t know.”

The phone flicked between a view of Houndstooth and the villains.

“Today’s the third time Chris chose the optimism-indulgence route in five days, I think.”

“What do you mean? He’s not balancing it out?”

“I asked what he was doing to balance it out and he said I should mind my own business.”

I could see the thread of what Sveta was getting at.

“You’re worried about things as a whole.”

“Aren’t you?” she asked.

I nodded.

Except maybe worry was the wrong word. It implied hand-wringing. Sweating, nervousness.

It wasn’t that I was afraid or that it was worse than worry, either. I was becoming far more aware of the problems, for things as a whole.

“What the mother-loving hell?” Moose’s voice came through the earbuds. It sounded weird, captured by cameras at a great distance, sent to Kenzie, sent to us, passed through the earbuds. He’d just received the news. The video on the phone showed him sending people away on errands. Fetching others.

“We have movement,” Tristan said. “They’re getting organized.”

We watched. I carried on with my conversation with Sveta. “Ashley has had a couple of serious episodes that I’ve seen now. Many lesser episodes, too.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a big part of me that was waiting for the other shoes to drop and that part of me feels… not worse, now that those shoes have dropped,” I said.

“I don’t feel not worse.”

“I can see flashes and hints of what you’re trying to bring out in Ashley,” I admitted. “She’s not someone I would have spent time with, in another context. I don’t know how to handle things when she casually mentions her capacity to murder people, as if it’s a way to win an argument.”

“The threats are usually empty,” Sveta said. “That’s a plus.”

“I want to figure this out,” I said. “I want to help. It’s like Kenzie is a distillation of every vulnerable person I’ve ever tried to help, and Ashley is a distillation of every really fascinating branding exercise where you take a random villain and try to paint them as a hero and even bring out the hero inside them. Tristan and Byron are this really fascinating problem with powers and I’m a power geek and I really wonder if there’s a solution.”

“How do you parse Rain?” Sveta asked quiet.