Our hideout was coming together. Kenzie’s computers were hooked up, monitors and projected screens arranged. Whiteboards and desks were being moved around. Ashley’s whiteboard with ‘Swansong’ across the top in fancy script was now joined by ‘Rain’. The preliminary notes on what they needed and what they’d found were going up on their shared board.

The board we’d freed up listed the other teams, from the Wardens, the Guild, all the way down to the pairing of Fume Hood and Tempera. It stood at the back of the room, furthest from Kenzie’s workstation. People we’d rope in.

Kenzie’s projectors started showing images from her camera feeds. A couple were from Cedar Point. The graffiti had been painted over in places, or had chipped away because some of the yellow paint they’d co-opted and used had been meant to draw temporary lines for outlining buried power cabling or highlighting spots for danger, not to paint something in a way that lasted for weeks or months, across weather changes.

Tristan’s laptop stalled as it loaded the page. I’d stepped away to sort out whiteboard markers while it took its time, and now I approached again. He was wearing only the lower portion of his armor, the upper half just the under-armor part that prevented chafing. Sveta was beside him, hands clasped behind her back as she bent over to a degree that most would find untenable after a minute or so.

The page that had only loaded ninety percent of the way was a map with a list of crimes reported, as compiled and shared out by the police of the Megalopolis. Citizens managed it, apparently, listening in on the police scanners and putting in push-pin style markers on the map.

A slice of the map was gray, refusing to load in, but the overall situation was clear, especially as Tristan moved the slider. Petty crimes were up. People were cluing in that the heroes and the police didn’t have the authority or power to arrest everyone.

In Cedar Point, things were ‘better’. The vacancies were filling, as people relocated here from places nearer to the devastated portals, the villains were scattered with only a few lingering and not really conducting business. Even here, according to the map, there were burglaries, robberies, and concerned citizens reporting that they’d seen drug deals or drug-related activity.

It was a ‘good’ area, with an influx of hopeful people and criminals still spooked from the recent crackdown and collapse of their power structure—there were bad areas too, and there were areas that had been bad, that had been lowered a few notches by the portal fiasco, and by the threat of war.

“We need to figure out how to handle this,” Capricorn said.

“Is that even possible?” Sveta asked. “Handling this?”

“Let me refresh before I try to answer that,” Tristan said.