To tell the truth, Felicity did a lot of the wreasing the wheels with the poliber and Josephine.

  She could temporarily front for Amber to answer some questions that Amber couldn’t, or wouldn’t answer right. And she could doodle one of her eyes when she did that, in a pce where an officer could see it.

  Then she could watch the officer’s behavior and that of the other police, and front and say little things to lower the heat, and sow doubt on the idea that Amber and Josephine were iionally involved in anything.

  It ended up taking a bit of work further behind the ses, though, because there was clearly an institutional iion on the part of the prect to pin it on the most likely suspects, whoever they were. And the suspects they had tact with, despite Josephine’s protests to Amber to keep quiet, were Josephine and Amber.

  So mug that up with chaos and internal rivalries and distrust had been in order.

  And, after a bunch of sudden arguments, disagreements, and ued red tape, it looked like the whole iigation of the Monster of Gresham was going to be tabled.

  That took lohan just a day. It was a lot of work.

  Felicity was not bad at it herself. She didn’t really need any pointers from me. We’d both had the same amount of experieh humans and reading them a bit from the inside.

  I just fucked with their puters, whenever I got the ce.

  We did not tell our little gang how we did any of this, because that was knowledge that could be used against them. We didn’t want them to be aplices, even after the fact.

  Unfortunately, something I started notig was that my human disguises were getting signifitly worse.

  Even when I took the form of someone very nondescript, super average for the area, but detailed enough to be authentic, at least as good as my Synthia persona, some people just couldn’t stop staring at me.

  I could be pretending to be a cis het white man with an REI jacket, a polo shirt, and bck jeans, with halfway det sneakers, and someone would be trag my movements with jaw half sck.

  And they were all human.

  Also, I had started taking pointers from Felicity and increased my monster seo at least match hers. And, I noticed that there were fewer monsters arou any given time than I ever expected.

  I even caught enthalpiphages and other affectivores moving away from me when they noticed me.

  Sometimes they noticed me from a block away.

  And I realized that if that had been going on for a while now, maybe that’s why I didn’t have very many monster friends. Not that I really tried making any.

  When I thought ‘they noticed me’, I wasn’t necessarily meaning sciously.

  I remembered what Felicity had told me when we’d first met. That my disguise was good and she’d had to work hard tnize me for what I was. So, either these monsters who fled or avoided me were pig up on something subsciously, like an ominous feeling. Or my disguises were slipping.

  And with the way that humans were reag to me now, I was starting to think it was the tter. I just wasn’t certain.

  It seemed to have started shortly after taking on Felicity as a symbiote.

  Maybe something about that extra plicated dynamic betweewo of us required some finessing I wasn’t doing right.

  I didn’t fix it, though.

  I was trolling for Croc-face, and I wa to catch a whiff of Felicity within me.

  But I was starting to worry that we’d have to bait it with Felicity in a human host specifically, who was currently being super careful around toilets, sinks, and drains of all types.

  I was either sg it away, or just not iing to it.

  Felicity couldn’t front in me, after all. I didn’t work the same way a human psyche did, even if there were some simir experiences we’d mao simute.

  And I was thinking about this very loudly, whenever my thoughts came around to it, on the off ce Felicity aying attention. But we were both pretty focused on our own things when we weren’t coordinating the derailment of the local police state.

  I also really wao sel Josephine, because she remembered Croc-face pretty clearly, and had been fairly well traumatized by it. And Amber, from Josephine’s perspective, had behaved a little strangely. Especially for having drawn the monster away and then showing up ter not dead.

  Amber’s emory, at least, was believable to Josephine, who told her, “Your mind just shut the whole thing out, didn’t it? I wish mine would do that!”

  But, I didn’t know Josephine, and Amber didn’t invite me into her life, so I just got updates from Felicity on occasion.

  When I expressed my wish that I could help, Felicity had replied, “You just want to taste her emotions.”

  Which wasn’t wroly.

  Felicity still couldn’t remember stalking me, or c me, or w with me on our first disastrous attempt at bating aeratovore. There were no memories there to dig back up. And that just really ged her way of talking to me entirely.

  Especially now that we were stuck together, of course.

  She wasn’t trying to e into some kind of trap or another, whether it was for me or someone else. She was stuck with me now.

  I would have found the switch more bewildering if I hadn’t seen it pyed out millions to billions of times amongst humans and their ever giionships. But seeing it sed hand and feeling the brunt of it are two different things, even for monsters.

  But we had a closer e now, so I wasly fretting about it.

  Time would tell.

  Milk took i in what was happening in Gresham when videos of the people eater chasing a couple of humans were released oer, of course.

  It took a while to get there, even though it wasn’t very far away, since Milk didn’t travel by any teological means, nor would it fly. Its own lootion was fast aless, but that was fast for a living creature or most monsters, not for a vehicle. And while it didn’t have to rest, it had to travel over every surface between its home in Salem and its target.

  And when it oozed into town, it did so via the drainage system, sihat was a good way to hide. Also, it had gathered that the people eater was maybe hiding down there. And Milk wao talk to it.

  What surprised Milk, however, was the discovery that Gresham was host to not just one, but four other Overlords. And the people eater was the smallest of them. Well, sed to smallest now.

  Milk saw their shadows orands as clear as its own silhouette there.

  It would have to tread very carefully.

  I was belligerently sitting on a toilet in a city hall restroom when Cassy texted me.

  “I don’t know how to my head around this,” she’d written.

  Without her present within the same room, I couldn’t tell what she was feeling, and so I didn’t know the subtext of that message or how to interpret it. I had to guess.

  My answer was the same for whatever it was she was talking about, though, “You don’t have to.”

  “But I want to,” she replied.

  So I sent back, “That’s OK, too.”

  “I know, but you help me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” was my immediate ahen I sent, “Do you wao?”

  “Please.”

  I wasn’t actually doing anything ooilet, of course, besides trying to bait Croc-face. And now I was texting on my phone, which was really a pieyself. It’s very likely that only one person knew I was in there, and that that person was a security guard, who I might have also been baiting, in a way, for a different reason.

  I spent a couple moments sidering all the different ways I could help Cassy e to terms with the existenonsters, assuming that’s what she was talking about. It retty good guess. There really wasn’t much else she’d been messaging me about. And the possibilities for providing her with more proof were nearly endless, ranging from easily dismissible and easy to do to utterly mind shattering and also all too easy to do.

  I couldn’t do much over the phone, of course, besides send her an Eye of Felicity and have my partner give her a visit.

  But meeting her somewhere after her shift seemed like a nice ge of pae, and I did miss her presence.

  “Do you wao expin more, or demonstrate?” I ended up sending back to her.

  “Both?”

  “OK, I’ll meet you after work and walk you to wherever you want to go that’s safe and private,” I wrote. “We should avoid storm drains and such.”

  “Eek. Yeah. OK,” she responded. “Thank you! <3 <3 <3”

  I felt a little surprised that this subject warranted hearts. But I let it go. I’d get a better read on her demeanor and iions whe.

  “See you at 3:30?” I sent.

  “3:30 it is!”

  I had some time, so after that I simply waited for Felicity to let me know she was in the clear, so the security guard was no longer a . And it was obvious that Croc-face wasn’t going to ambush me here. It would have do a long time ago, probably.

  And, then, I got up a for a bit of a walk around the neighborhood before heading over to Hayward Grocery.

  Even carefully watg all three of the Source, the Strands, and the Antumbra, Milk couldn’t determihe retionships of the other four Overlords.

  It had assumed the people eater, the smallest of the set, had been chasing another Overlord. Typically, very public dispys like that didn’t happen uhere was a flict between Overlords. But with the way they were all behaving now, there was no indication that that flict remained. Either the people eater had ed a much smaller Overlord, or it had been put in its pce.

  But four Overlords was a lot for a pce like Gresham. And now there were five, with Milk there.

  This made it nervous, and it sidered leaving again.

  It certainly no longer felt it had business with the people eater.

  But then the biggest of the local Overlords started moving about in what seemed like a frantic way. Cirg and weaving about, followed by a retively straight line route toward the East.

  Not typical behavior for an Overlord. It seemed fused.

  Maybe it would be safe to approach that oerall. If nothing else, by getting a closer look, Milk could get a better idea of what the local power structure entailed. And that would salve its curiosity at least.

  In the Winter afternoon sun, which was already so he horizon, Cassy blinked in the gre of it off of someone’s windshield, “Hey, Synthia!” Her bck, curly hair cast stark rings of shadows across the left half of her face, which were then occluded by the shade of her hand. “You’re looking well!”

  I had made sure to look like Synthia before showing up. I waved and walked over to her.

  More quietly, when I got closer, she added, “Though, I suppose you look however you want. Right?”

  “Correct,” I said. “It does take effort, however. We should keep moving. Where would you like to go?”

  “ I see your pce?” she asked.

  I was surprised, “Do you feel safe enough to do that?”

  No, she definitely did not feel very safe, and siderably less so after I asked that question.

  “I think so,” she lied.

  “We’re friends,” I told her. “But we’ve only known each other for a couple of years now. I’d love to show you my domain, and how it works. But maybe we should go somewhere that’s yours.”

  “My pces aren’t very private, and you said you’d rivacy. Privacy isn’t very safe,” she expined.

  Of course, she was right.

  I nodded, “Text Greg and Ayden to let them know that you’re with me. That way, if something does happen to you, I risk my retionship with them. A little insurance, even if it isn’t much.”

  “Already done,” she said. Of course, based on that emotion, she’d talked to them during their shift.

  “They don’t want to tag along?” I asked.

  Another shift and flood of plexity, tinged with faint and uain smugness, and she said, “No.”

  They’d talked about it and didn’t want to risk all three of them.

  “OK. I guess that makes a lot of sense,” I said, theured. “My home is this way.”

  And we began walking.

  “We’re being followed,” Felicity whispered in my mind almost immediately.

  “You’re done?” I thought back, surprised she wasn't focused oter with Amber and Josephine.

  “No, I’m just that good.”

  “Thank you. You’re wonderful.”

  I had the senses she had now, but she was in a stronger habit of using them. And I was slipping.

  Her alert to me was a remihat I shouldn’t slip.

  theInmara