“One second,” Kenzie said. “You’re outside of my setup.”

Then the video started.

Trial, Error, a crowd of hirelings with guns—there was no shortage of people looking for easier money, given the situation across the city. I saw other capes I could dimly recognize, too. Cleat. Etna. Crested.

“Can you tell the others? Three more capes, twenty hirelings? I’m going around the right side.”

“Got it.”

I landed on a rooftop, striding forward at a slower speed than I’d been flying. The intent was to buy myself a moment when—

There. A glimpse of Foxtrot.

“Additional capes, guns,” I said to the glimpse. Her head snapped around to look at me. “Proper B-listers.”

Her focus might have changed to me, because she recurred in my vicinity, as I continued forward on foot.

“This is supposed to be the drop-off,” I spoke my realization aloud. “Spright and Shortcut are down there, making things difficult. I think Flapper is airborne here too.”

I reached the rooftop’s edge, looking across to where I could see the trucks—the people around those trucks were so small that I couldn’t make out whether they were male or female. The coveralls didn’t help. Foxtrot appeared next to me, standing almost shoulder to shoulder with me, nose pointed out in the direction of those trucks and specks.

Kite landed beside me a second later.

“What are you gunning for, with this strategy, pulling everyone in together?” Foxtrot asked.

“That? Is it really the priority?”

“No,” Foxtrot said. She made an amused sound, “But that isn’t, down there. Not until we have friends at our back or our side starts bleeding. What’s this group thing?”

“It’s saying to hell with jurisdictions,” I said. “To hell with getting credit for one win or another. Coordinating to make sure we’re all going after the ones who count. Sharing information.”

“Some like credit and having their own jurisdictions,” Kite’s voice was quiet, almost guilty. “Not me, but I know people and I don’t think it will be that easy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, in an ideal world, I’d like to do something here that would get us attention, enough that any abstainers would feel like they’d need to join in if they wanted a share of the limelight. But that’s all secondary. For now, we live and let live, and we fix what’s broken.”

“Others are reaching you now,” Kenzie reported through my phone. I missed Kite’s response.

Sveta’s group.

“Tell them to hold back a second. How far behind is Cap?”

“A few minutes.”

Okay.

Shortcut and Spright were mostly evading at this point. They weren’t pushing in to attack, because Error didn’t let them do so without risk. They’d draw in close, then pull away, leap onto something, wait until someone tried to come after them, and then move again.