Glass was cleaning her apartment. She violently swept the floor, throwing clouds of dust everywhere.

“Stupid partner,” she muttered. “Stupid governmental agencies. Never should have contracted out.”

She set the broom down, frustrated. “She didn’t even ask me! And there is no way I’m helping that villain alien find a perfectly honest and upright citizen of crazydom. Alien or no!”

The broom toppled to the floor, stirring the dust back up.

“You know what?” she said, still aloud. “I’m going to find that crazy alien and warn him. And we are going to hide himself together! There’s no reason that the stupid government should bother an innocent alien-fellow.”

She grabbed her bag and left. Behind her, the dust drifted slowly down to rest on her kitchen floor.

Ninja started the search by hunting through his stuff. There was a lot of alien tech, but no sign of where he might have gone. The house was a mess, such an overload of information that Ninja didn’t know where to begin. It made Ninja realize just how much she relied on her power. Without someone’s mind to read, she had no idea where to start. She wandered around the house amidst smelly socks, random buttons— both technological and clothing buttons— and a truly astounding amount of cheesy-puff wrappers.

What a mess, she thought, but once again, Glass couldn’t hear her. She was too far away. But maybe the neighbors weren’t…

She expanded her consciousness to find Deri’s neighbors. The first was too absorbed in their spoonful of peanut butter to make any sense of, but the next was quite relaxed. This mind unconsciously yielded the alien’s habit of driving up north with camping gear strapped to his station wagon. This neighbor didn’t know anything else, but it was a good start.

Glass logged into her computer at her secret hideout. Every good vigilante needs a secret hideout, and although Glass’ was mostly composed of a large computer and about a million cheesy puffs, she was still proud of it.

She spun around on her spinny chair thoughtfully, stroking her stuffed mascot. It was a red panda, with gleaming brown eyes. She liked to think of it as enormous and staring down her enemies.

The best clues, she decided, would be at the crime scene. But her previous partner now occupied that territory. So, there was only one thing left to do.

She closed her eyes, and pulled her memory of the house into her mind’s eye.

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It was a spacious building, but so filled with gunk that it seemed cramped. There were many computers and computer parts, wires and gadgets, a filthy carpet… She thought for a long time, then reached over for another cheesy puff. That was right! He had a million cheesy puff wrappers. If it was the one thing he couldn’t live without, then…

She pulled up sales of cheesy puffs within a range of three hundred miles from Dave’s house on her computer. She rated them by proportional quantity to individual purchasers. The top three were in Sammamish, Portland, and Canada. Abbotsford, Canada.

The sale in Canada had happened within the last few hours. It had to be Dave.

Ninja was using Google Maps to estimate where Deridilous could have gotten in the time he’d been gone, assuming that he’d gone the speed limit, and that he’d been driving the whole time. She had forty-seven tabs open on his computer, all ending at a different point in the north. The prospects of finding him were not hopeful.

She fingered her phone, tempted, before she remembered that Glass didn’t have a phone. Something about the government spying on her. Ninja thought this suspicion ironic because of Glass’s own internet habits, but she guessed that it was because of her habits of hacking that she feared being hacked.

“Have you found him yet?” Mr Clean asked for the thirty sixth time.

Ninja sighed loudly. “I’m looking for places he could be by now! I have forty seven possible places, and I’m not even halfway done! So no, I haven’t found him yet!”

“Hey,” May said. “Be nice to Mr Clean.”

“Why do you even call him that?”

“It’s an appropriate pseudonym,” Mr Clean said. “Besides, it’s funny.”

Ninja slowed her breath, calming herself. She looked again at the map. If she’d been fleeing from an old alien friend, where would she go? Would she take the backroads, or follow the freeway as far as possible? Rosebud could easily go as fast as any car on the freeway, so Ninja decided that she’d personally follow the freeway a ways, then retreat to the backroads. But what would this alien do? She knew next to nothing about him. She’d never even got the chance to meet him, much less read his mind. The only one who’d met him, besides Glass— who was infuriating— was Mr Clean.

“That’s it!” she said. “Mr Clean, what kind of place would he want to go? What kind of places did he enjoy?”

“Well, he always did like trees. And snow. He doesn’t like Sword Art Online, which is a shame. We could have watched it together. He likes crunchy carbs,”

“ Like cheesy puffs?” Ninja inserted sardonically.

“Exactly. And he really likes maple syrup.”

It was right on the tip of her brain, but Ninja just couldn’t place it. She searched around the walls, hoping to find a clue she’d missed before.

There— right between two monitors— was a photo of Deridilous. It was a badly taken selfie, and a moose was chewing on his afro. Behind the moose was the red shape of a maple leaf—

“Oh, Canada!” Ninja cried.