Signal Fire explained, “Coworker of mine was investigated. Looksee left her computer open and kids messed with it, changing her online profiles. They found photos, they took the computer to people in charge.”

“So embarrassing,” Looksee said. I went to stand next to her, and put my hand on her shoulder.

Sveta sat down next to her. Looksee leaned into her.

“Kid in a swimsuit, hanging out with an instructor at a hotel pool, all smiles, the two of them hanging out, pictures of them shopping, eating out of a food truck, being in places he shouldn’t have been near. They looked close. Questions were raised, answered pretty quickly, because of kid’s prior history, but it still had to be investigated. It wasn’t wholly impossible he was skipping patrols and hanging out with the kid instead.”

“Doctored photos,” Mayday said. “Kid was lonely, thought photos of her and the instructor she liked most would be nice to have. BFF close, in the pictures, which looks weird when the guy is fifteen years older than her.”

“I know that now,” Looksee said, quiet.

“Then she goes to the parahuman Asylum, and from the Asylum to Baltimore, with Youth Guard getting involved. Baltimore. We have an inner city, we have gangs, we have some troubled kids in our Wards. Had. I hate to outright say it, Looksee, because I do think you’re a good kid—”

“Everyone says so, but I did bad stuff,” she said.

“Uninformed stuff,” he said, gently. “But bad, yeah. It was more trouble to deal with her than to wrangle all the other Wards combined. I get out of the toilet stall in the men’s room and this kid is sitting on the counter by the sink, waiting, has been for twenty minutes, dead silent for the first time in her life, because she wants to talk to me. There aren’t cameras in the bathrooms. It’s a blind spot. How does that look?”

“Sorry,” Looksee said.

“She works herself to the bone, it looks bad for the department. She intentionally misses the bus or fakes hours so she can spend more time with us, so we have to have people drive her home or pick her up. Which also looks bad, because it’s time spent alone or in proximity to a kid who isn’t just vulnerable, but throws herself headlong at people who prey on the vulnerable. Kidnappers, people who would work a tinker to the bone, people who want to hurt the PRT.”

“Threw, not throws,” Looksee said. “Okay, maybe throws a bit, but only a little.”

“It was a hundred things like that. It was everything that could have made the Youth Guard crawl up our ass to light warning fires. We could have hired two new capes from elsewhere if it wasn’t for the fines and administration costs.”

“Sorry again.”

“She’s doing way better,” Capricorn said.

“Good.”