The box had been painted to match her outfit, it seemed. Two triangles with one point touching formed an hourglass shape, and that shape repeated across the box, from a predominantly pink hue at one corner to a deeper blue at the opposite corner.

“I like the color matching,” I said.

“My outfit?” she asked, typing at her phone. She smiled. “They were my back to school clothes. I like them.”

I tried my phone, sending a message to the others, to let them know where we were. I saw the tiny red warning icon on each text message I sent. “My messages aren’t going through.”

“That’s what’s going on,” Kenzie said.

One of the thugs who’d tried to rob Kenzie lurched to his feet, then ran, blind, down the street.

“Cell towers might be struggling,” I said, while I kept an eye on the guy.

Kenzie didn’t look up from her phone, but her eyehook turned to track the runner.

The guy didn’t run in a straight line, and as he veered, he ran straight into a pile of trash, tripping heads over heels.

The others who remained looked alarmed at the noise that caused.

“What the hell are you guys doing, mugging a kid?”

“We weren’t mugging her. We were questioning her.”

“And demanding my box,” Kenzie said.

“There’s so much going wrong, you mentioned the cell towers. That’s been breaking as fast as we fix it. The power’s fucked and we’re getting blackouts, and some food that was supposed to be delivered wasn’t. Now some kid turns up with suspicious stuff?”

I looked at Kenzie. She shrugged, saying, “The power outages aren’t that bad. I dunno about the other stuff. Looks like the cell towers are off. I connected online, though. I’m stealing someone’s internet.”

“Their story doesn’t jar with what they said to you?” I asked.

“No, but if they were telling the truth then they were major jerkasses about it.”

“We heard the portal was broken by a group of people. We’re keeping an eye out. Neighborhood watch thing.”

“You ignored a bunch of other people and came after me instead,” Kenzie said. “Is it because I’m a kid?”

“You were carrying a weird colorful thing!”

“Weird thing aside,” I said, “I mean, come on, guys. She’s gotta be the least threatening person you’ll run into in the next while. She’s, what, five feet tall and ninety pounds?”

“Close! Eighty-one and a quarter pounds,” Kenzie whispered. “Four feet ten and a half inches. But thank you for thinking I’m bigger and taller. I’m flattered.”

“You can’t know,” the guy said. “Maybe they got away with it because they were kids. Parahumans are dangerous, they could be anywhere.”

Another of the guys said, “Young ones are more dangerous if anything. They don’t have the impulse control.”