I looked away, and I could see that the others were listening in. No conversation between them. Whatever. It was fine.

“Just, you know, be careful,” I said. “We’re parahumans, the casualties are more numerous and grislier.”

“Yeah,” he said. “No, I get it, believe me. I have some experience with that already.”

I nodded.

My awareness of once having been a ‘casualty’ made me feel uncomfortable. I’d said my piece, and I tried to look casual as I checked the surroundings and flew off in the direction of the store with the woman with the sunglasses.

She stood over a laptop on the desk, gripping the edge of the table as her weight rested on the heels of her hands. Straight black hair in a utilitarian cut with straight-cut bangs and her hair tied back. She wore sunglasses, a black long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and black boots. Her shirt was pulled over a bulge that had to be a gun. The image was fuzzy, but I could see the straps beneath her shirt.

That was her casual wear, as she was in this room… when? Sometime between the passage of construction and the security patrols.

Another her was by the door of the computer store. She stood there, staring down at her phone, looking like she’d settled in to stand there for a while. A different outfit. Nothing suggested she stayed here. Which made this, what? It was her office? A meeting place, with very few meetings?

The refinement process had isolated the papers that had sat untouched on the desk the longest. Because they were the least necessary, they also had the least information. Envelopes had been torn open, left beneath stacks of other things that remained blurry or indistinct, with only company names or logos in the corner to set them apart.

I noted the wires that extended off the table to the wall. There were bags under the table.

“We have our fourth target, I see,” Sveta said.

“Seems like,” I said. “I thought there was one laptop she moved around… but this is three laptops. The store was set up to have internet, power, and other things. There might have been leftover stock. She came here for the hookup.”

The others caught up with us.

“She hooked into this place’s security,” Kenzie said. “The cameras moved to watch the entrances.”

“She made this a base of operations,” I said. “Computers, supplies, internet, power, entrances watched so she could bolt if she needed to.”

“The papers aren’t readable,” Chris said.

I investigated them.

Construction company, agriculture supply, more agriculture, which might have been the same company—I couldn’t be sure. The name Mortari stood out to me.

Kenzie had her laptop tucked under one arm. She put it on the table, then typed a bit.

A pulsing pastel-purple line threaded its way through the room. The woman’s course, or the snake reduced down to a simple line.