“I can’t remember how I worded it, but that was not what I meant. I’m sorry, if it came across that way. I’ve hurt people badly enough to risk killing them, like Valefor, but I don’t set out to kill. I—I definitely don’t set out to do worse than kill people. That’s not me.”

He continued to stare, until Kenzie elbowed him.

“Don’t do that,” he told her.

“Say something to her.”

“I’m not cool with you showing up.”

“Chrisss,” Kenzie said.

He glared at me. She elbowed him again.

“Stop, Kenz. And I believe you,” he told me. “I buy it. That in no way is me being okay with you showing up. I’m still ticked.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“You and I can talk about it after,” Tristan said. “You’ve had a few times where you were incommunicado. We had to do something.”

“I could do a phone thing,” Kenzie said.

“You’re doing too many things,” I told Kenzie.

“It’s important that we can stay in touch, though,” she said.

“There’s got to be a simpler answer or policy than you going the extra mile every time,” Tristan said. “Chris, your phone isn’t working at all? Was it an outage?”

Chris shrugged. “It wasn’t charged. I was stressed, so I went out last night, went to the middle of nowhere, changed to Quiet Awe. I put on some music and lounged, tried to shut out the world. I spent too long like that, changed back by accident, went straight back to that form. Came back at one in the morning, probably, power was off, I couldn’t charge it.”

I met Sveta’s eyes. Quiet Awe didn’t sound like a derivation of anger.

“We’ll figure something out,” Tristan said.

“Alright. Are we changing here?” Chris asked.

“We’ll go down into the town, find a spot, and then change out,” Tristan said. “We’ll stand out less, and there won’t be as many cameras as there are here at the station.”

I turned my head to look. Kenzie pointed at two.

“Don’t point at them,” Chris admonished her.

“They’re so shoddy it’s barely worth calling them cameras. I’m scrambling our faces so they can’t track our secret identities.”

“We’ve got two team members without secret identities,” Chris said, looking at Sveta and I. “And Tristan looks so much like a hero out of costume that it doesn’t fool anyone.”

“No I don’t,” Tristan said.

“You look like Legend probably did when he was a teen, except light brown with a modern haircut.”

“I don’t—” Tristan started. He stopped as the last few passengers of the train and the people who were picking them up emerged. As the crowd fanned out, they approached the point they might be in earshot.

“You know it’s true,” Chris said.