Not an easy to follow line, but it gave us a sense of things.

“A lot of time at the door,” Byron said.

“Do you think we can do that deep scan?” Chris asked.

“Yeah,” Kenzie said.

The scan was localized into an area about four feet by two feet by two feet across. It was localized around the woman, and it took almost as long as the entire mall had. We all did our patrols, studying the images, came back, wandered off again.

From a pure curiosity standpoint, it was interesting to see the woman. People were dark inside, so Kenzie was forced to cast the image in black and white. From there, it was like seeing slices of an MRI scan or X-ray.

I’d been right about the gun, I noted.

As the image filled in from the back forward, flickering violently at points, Chris got up onto the table, bending over. I flew to get a better look.

The front of the brain. The mind’s eye.

“Corona pollentia,” I said. “She has powers.”

“We could have guessed that,” Chris said.

“They take different forms. There aren’t hard and fast rules. But I’ve heard that if you trigger young, it takes more of a hold, with more… it’s called dimpling. Like a hand is actually pressing it down into the brain. That right there looks like dimpling.”

“Creepy,” Kenzie said.

“You get more cloudiness in some kinds of scans where it expands out into the webbing around the brain, but we’re not getting that. It’s been way too long since I studied this,” I said. “The corona starts as a single marker, like a quarter-sized knot in wood, or a ball the size of a golf ball, pushed between the two lobes. Then when we trigger, it surges into life. It’s part of the reason we black out. It expands slightly, veins swell. But most of the time an unactivated corona is hard to tell apart from an activated one, and a surprising number of people have unactivated ones. Sometimes you look at them and the larger veins or structures suggest what the power is linked to.”

“What does this tell us?” Chris asked.

“She triggered young. It’s deeper set. People who had a corona for a long time don’t get dimpling, I’m pretty sure. Looking at the veins, where it seems to have reached out… can you rewind? Slowly go back, show us slices further back?”

“Sure,” Kenzie said.

We went further back.

“Resolution’s too blurry in parts,” I said. “Couldn’t begin to guess. But going further back…”

“Going,” Kenzie said.

There. That didn’t look right.

I searched on my phone, waited for a minute as it loaded, then held up the phone, comparing.

Veins or vein-like solid structures ran through one portion of the brain like the roots of a tree had been seeking nutrients.

“The cerebellum,” Chris said.