“I asked,” Tristan said. “They don’t want us. That’s our big issue. It’s a hit piece, probably aimed at Kenzie by her parents, and it’s going to be organized so they can leverage the fear or whatever that they play up. Kenzie’s parents get to discredit the primary witness against them, and there’s no competing viewpoint to screw with that or muddy the waters.”

“Spooky,” Kenzie said.

Sveta rubbed Kenzie’s shoulder with a prosthetic hand.

“Stupid that preys on fears gets a lot of traction,” Rain said. “If you want airtime, you need to offer something stupider or more nonthreatening than what they’ve got in line.”

“No,” I said “I refuse to believe that. That’s not what this ecosystem is about.”

“Post Gold Morning?” Rain asked. “I might have been interacting with a biased pool of people, but I feel like it weighs pretty heavy on us. It breaks people a bit. People are so overwhelmed by the end of the world and an entirely new universe that they can’t even think straight. Someone tells them how to think? They jump on it.”

I frowned.

“I’ve seen that fear and anger,” Sveta said. “Against Case Fifty-Threes. By them.”

Fear and anger. I spoke, “I want to go on the show with our most stylish, best PR people on the team. If we offer the right thing, maybe we can swing it… like if we take the next two hours to ask the other teams if it’s okay, and then we put ourselves forward as the sacrificial goats.”

“The goats?” Tristan asked.

“We can’t reach everyone,” Sveta said.

“No,” I agreed. “But at this stage, if someone comes to us and they’re angry about us talking about things they wanted to leave alone… let them be angry. If they don’t matter, we deal. If they do matter, we tell them the truth. That there’s too much at stake these days, and they need to step up or get out of the way. A small convenience isn’t worth everyone being in the dark.”

“You’re putting out a fire by dropping a bonfire on it,” Rain said.

I glanced at the blank spot on the wall.

Yeah, I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want this team to be an idea that existed for a fleeting moment, then existed as a haunting echo thereafter. Good moments? Sure. Some celebrity, some success, money, whatever. But the momentum had been lost.

I wanted to keep the momentum. There was a need among people, and capes were aching for unity and collaboration. They wanted security. That could be granted. If we were going to go up against giants, we had to swing big and swing high.