Once they’d secured Small Package with a pair of cuffs, and after a van from the HRF arrived to help secure him, she and the other Heroes were left on a street crawling with police and EMTs.

There weren’t any injured, and there wasn’t any fire, but they still had firefighters looking around. Police cordoned off the street, and none of the Heroes were allowed to leave until they’d been asked a few dozen questions by a bored detective.

Emily was afraid the police officer might discover something, but the questions had been perfunctory and simple. Apparently, there had been plenty of footage of the entire event from a dozen angles, and the detective let slip that it was a pretty clear-cut case. The only person hurt was the criminal, and even that seemed negligible.

And so the young Heroes were then faced with a far scarier prospect than talking to the police: the media.

For every ambulance and police car, there was a news van, and it seemed more reporters were on the scene than government employees.

Emily tugged Teddy after her and tried to find a spot to hide away from the cameras. In the end, her savior came from the phone she’d been given. It buzzed and displayed a message saying that extraction was available if she wanted it.

Extraction, as it turned out, was a free ride in the back of a cramped van with Slaymaker and Cheatah.

“Just the four of us, huh?” Slaymaker said as Emily jumped in and then helped Teddy climb up. Teddy’s legs were too short to make it up into the back without her first sitting on the edge.

“Um, I guess,” Emily said.

The armored man shrugged huge shoulders. “Figures. Hindsight and Glamazon both seem to enjoy the limelight more than I think is healthy.”

“They’re Faces,” Cheatah said.

Emily settled down in a seat opposite Slaymaker and three seats down from the cat-themed Hero. “Faces?” she asked as she helped Teddy buckle in.

“Heroes that work in the public eye a lot. Big, flashy. They sell a lot of merch and spend a lot of time doing image things,” Cheatah said. “The other Heroes, at least the others that are active, they tend to be the ones carrying the brunt of the duty.”

“Oh,” Emily said.

“At least they don’t need to costume up as much,” she said. “And some are famous anyway. Like Melaton.”

“Melaton isn’t a Face?” Emily asked.

“Have you seen any interviews with her? She swears like a sailor half the time and seems like she’s one rude comment away from punching out a reporter.”

That . . . sounded about right.

The rest of the trip was done in relative quiet. Slaymaker pulled out a phone from somewhere in his armor, and Cheatah nestled into her seat and closed her eyes.