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  “I swear, it was just for personal use,” the person on the other side of the see-through glass, a smalltime drug dealer, told the interrogator. LieSpy noted down the statement as false on the automatic transcription, marking it red.

  Once upon a time, when LieSpy had just joined the Prospectus, she used to pay attention to the interrogations, and afterwards read through the whole of the transcript multiple times while trying to connect the dots herself before handing it off. She’d thought herself a burgeoning detective then, a child investigator learning on the job and soon to graduate to solving murders, secret plots against the government and hidden connections between politicians and their villain sponsors.

  But in the end, all that effort was just a waste of time. LieSpy found she had no patience for the rigor of real investigative work, and the people that had tried to teach her had no patience for her energy. She had – in their thoughts, at least – heard them complain that they weren’t a daycare, or babysitters, nannies or an orphanage – she hated that last guy; what an asshole – that they shouldn’t have to deal with annoying kids and that they should leave the truth finding to the real detectives rather than a glorified lie detector.

  In other words, they just couldn’t handle her vibe, and their own vibes were deader than days-old roadkill.

  The interrogation continued, with LieSpy marking whatever her power told her to. “The only contacts I have are just friends. Just other druggies and dealers, you know? No gangs, and definitely no villains. No way were we gonna try anything on Motorgang’s turf,” the dealer said. LieSpy marked the automatically rolling transcription as a partial lie. The Motorgang part was true, but the gang and villain part were definitely false.

  LieSpy let out a sigh and stretched her arms.

  She really didn’t like this part of the job anymore, even if she understood how useful she was to law enforcement. It barely required any effort on her part to spot lies, and it worked perfectly fine even through cameras, so why did they always require her to be on site during interrogations? And that’s not even going into how mind-numbingly boring it was to sit there and do what amounts to filling in simple yes-no questions for hours on end.

  Even if catching lies was technically the main part of her power and the reason for her masked name, the psychic abilities that came about later were just so much more exciting that she was starting to resent the fact that she’d joined the Prospectus so quickly. If she had waited just a little bit longer, she could’ve gone ahead and joined as a fully-fledged psychic rather than a human lie detector, categorized as a primary caster or even an alter instead of an augur.

  The door behind her opened and three people walked in: a regular, run-of-the-mill police officer, a less run-of-the-mill law enforcement liaison of the Guardians and, lastly, the West Coast Wardens and Prospectus liaison, Angie.

  LieSpy was already holding out the device with the marked transcriptions before any of them could ask.

  “Good work LieSpy,” her colleague – if you squinted – complimented, taking the thing off her hands. Angie immediately handed it over to the Guardian liaison, who read it together with the police officer.

  “Sure, whatever,” she responded tiredly.

  The last few weekends had been- well, not difficult because it took just that little effort, but busy. Busy and boring.

  Damn Crowsong and her new lackey for creating new work for her! Ever since the vigilante got herself a sidekick they’d been going on a spree of busts and captured many local and, as it turned out, sometimes not-so-local drug dealers.

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  But above all, damn the two for having all the fun while she was stuck here dealing with the paperwork!

  Not that all her efforts were useless. For all that Crowsong and Jester made the arrests, it was her work and that of the detectives that built the network it represented. What that network was for exactly was still up to discussion. The Jannacht Syndicate seemed most likely – and the worst – but the Dusk Bandits and even Magistry were still on the table. Piece by piece, they were finally uncovering the sudden rise in Charm’s drug production, smuggling, arms trade and everything else.

  Now they just had to figure out who exactly was doing it, why they were doing it, and where it was all being shipped. 'Cause it sure as hell wasn’t staying in Charm.

  All very useful things to know. Except that wasn’t what she was doing; she was only doing the boring stuff, like making sure that whatever useless answers these idiots gave were true. And that got boring very quickly.

  Like, who cares about telling whether or not some druggie had either regular cereal for breakfast or fruit cereal, when you could mind-blast a henchie into a blubbering mess? Or lift a dozen pepper-balls, blast them at a group and watch them squirm? Or stop a laser – or was it a plasma beam? – of some teched-up henchie or villain midflight and awe them into compliance?

  LieSpy smiled at the last one, reminding her of what she’d accidently done with one of Peakstar’s beams during training. The look on her face was mwah!

  The Guardian liaison had apparently read enough of the document. “Thank you again for all your help, LieSpy,” he said, then turned to the WCW liaison. “And thank you once more for your cooperation. As always, if the Wardens ever need our help, we’re just one call away.”

  LieSpy held in a snort at the comment. Yeah right, and pigs can fly- wait, that had actually happened in Australia. Well, whatever. The saying might actually work better that way.

  Angie wrapped up with the others and they finally left for base at Rennie’s Island. LieSpy hoped she could relax there, or maybe find someone to train with to let out some steam. She was really, really getting tired of all this fake detective work.

  Then, just as the car started driving, LieSpy recalled something, a sort-of promise she’d made some time ago.

  “Can I make a call?” LieSpy asked her chaperone.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Angie replied without taking her eyes off the road.

  LieSpy quickly called the number one contact on her work phone: Peakstar. It didn’t take long for the Warden managing their junior division to pick up.

  “Heya LieSpy, what’s up?” the woman greeted.

  LieSpy smiled at the voice. Peakstar was her – and all members of Prospectus’ – favorite person amongst the WCW. “Hiya Miss P., we just wrapped up with the pigs.”

  “Don’t call them that,” Angie admonished.

  “Always good to be out of the freezer,” Peakstar said loud and clear in commiseration, getting it like Angie couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

  LieSpy stuck out her tongue at Angie, who just rolled her eyes in response.

  “Yurp. But anyway, I got a request,” she said.

  “Okay,” Peakstar replied, intrigued. “Request away.”

  “See, the whole thing was boring. Like, really boring. Like, really, really, really boring and also the how-many-eth time I had to do this?” LieSpy emphasized. “So I was thinking, maybe I could get next weekend off?”

  “Next weekend, huh,” Peakstar replied, curiosity clear. “That’s very short notice. What brought this on?”

  “Yeah, well, incidentally, I talked with some friends-,” hint, hint, “-about getting to hang out a whole weekend sometime soon, and I kinda sorta hoped that maybe that could be next weekend?”

  Peakstar remained silent for a second. “A friend, hm?” Peakstar sounded amused. “Well, alright. You’ve got plenty of hours built up and I don’t see anything that couldn’t wait a week or two. So, why not?”

  “Thank you Miss P.,” LieSpy said happily, her mood already improving by leaps and bounds. “Love you!”

  “Yeah, yeah, just inform me when you’ve set a date,” Peakstar said.

  “Will do bye bye!” Millie said and immediately hung up. She heard Angie snort in front of her, but generously elected to ignore it.

  When Peakstar asked Millie – not LieSpy, but Millie directly – to become friends with her daughter, she’d been super annoyed at first, especially when she told Millie she’d made sure the two would be classmates. She didn’t know if that was an abuse of power, but Millie had sure wanted to file a complaint!

  Like, she got it, her daughter had just basically come back from the dead and all, so to want someone to look out for them was perfectly understandable, but come on! She wasn’t a child, neither of them were; they were fifteen! You can’t just send a fifteen-year-old on a playdate and expect them to be instant friends. They weren’t babies!

  But, well, Peakstar was kind of the ‘team mom’ of the Prospectus, both emotionally and functionally. So, Millie did as asked and tried to be friends with Sam, even though she was fully prepared for it to not work out.

  Then, Samantha went ahead and introduced herself like that? Looking all confused about how old she was before just throwing out four different ages? Hilarious! Especially with how confused everyone looked, and especially especially with how absolutely done Miss Sims had looked – though to be fair she always kinda looked like that. And she, and only she, had the inside scoop of the whole thing. How great is that?

  The conversation afterward had also stuck with her, considering what Sam had said about ‘just telling the truth’ back then. After all, Millie didn’t like liars – she got enough of that on her job, and there was a reason her powers started out as they were. Maybe. Who knows, really.

  Anyway, friends that spoke truth even when it handicapped them were rare, and she’d already lucked out with Saga and Jolie. To get another friend basically for free? One that also got along so easily with her other friends, despite Jolie’s black-and-white principles and Saga’s overall roughness? And it came with a lever big enough to move Peakstar?

  Well, Millie was just glad she hadn’t said no.