I could have pulled out my phone and made a call, but I didn’t. The sky was dark overhead, the angle of the sun in the late afternoon made it so it didn’t peek through in fleeting slats and beams as it had earlier. The wind was only moderate, if insistent, and the city was eerily quiet for the daylight hours. If there was construction ongoing, the wind consumed the sound.

How many heroes were out there? How many teams were doing what the Major Malfunctions were doing, settling into a territory where jurisdiction wasn’t contested and just subsisting? No interest or willingness to join other teams, no clues about where the villains were, no information with which to equip or empower themselves.

I’d pushed for this network because it made a fundamental sense to me. I knew it was an uphill fight to get it established. I knew there were outright nightmares coming, when groups with views and perspectives as opposed as the Shepherds and Advance Guard ended up butting heads. I knew that. I was wholly aware, both from real life experience and from parahuman studies, that any grouping of capes was going to be a dramafest at best, an implosion most of the time, and an implosion with collateral damage at worst.

But I’d wanted to try.

Fucking damn it.

Five minutes. Five minutes to get my thoughts in order, and center myself. I checked my phone for the time, so I could measure out those minutes.

Three missed calls. The cell coverage was so spotty my phone couldn’t seem to decide if I had a connection to the greater network or not. I didn’t check the missed calls, and instead focused on the signal.

Up. Away from things, to a point where I could see more of the city.

Not that long ago, I’d mused on how I needed to stay connected, because flying could mislead. This was me seeking out the disconnection.

I let the five minutes pass, and I checked my missed calls.

A press of the button dialed the number and initiated the call. I took a minute to fish out the earbud and plug it in.

“Victoria,” my mom said.

“You called?”

“I had a chat with Tristan on the phone. I was worried by how I left things, I gave perfunctory answers, because he clearly wanted to move on and call other people to confirm. Given how tense things have been between us—”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Was it meant to be a question, without the inflection? Asking if things were tense?

“Yeah,” I said.

“I hope you know that Dad and I saying we don’t want to cooperate until this is resolved isn’t because of you.”

“Do you know what this is?”