There were a lot of newspaper articles. She’d drawn a lot of attention once. Everyone was supposed to be getting a second chance, and it seemed that people’s memories were long enough that she wasn’t necessarily getting hers.

I gathered everything together, and I headed downstairs.

Jasper was in front of an assembly of roughly a hundred kids. Boys and girls. Not all were ninth graders, new to high school. Some would be refugees, their educations interrupted by the rather massive inconvenience of the world ending.

“…mostly long treks into the middle of nowhere to deliver supplies or check on things. If we’re lucky, we get a car. It’s not glamorous. Seriously. Run away,” he was saying. He spotted me coming down the stairs, and a smile crossed his face. “Once you’ve been with us for two years, you get one of these embarrassments and you have to be seen in public with them—”

He held up a gun with slide back and magazine removed, a bright red bike lock threaded through the bottom of the gun and out the top.

Jasper went on, “And you’ll be expected to clean it as well as the gun you use on the range. You’ll have to treat it like a real, loaded gun. That means you pretend it’s loaded, you don’t aim it at anything or anyone you wouldn’t want to destroy, you never leave it unattended, and so on. We’ll drill it into your skull and frankly, we’re really hoping you make a mistake so we can kick you to the curb.”

The other senior students were dressed in their uniforms now. Black clothes with some body armor worn over them, and the body armor was recognizable. In places, flakes of the letters and symbols that had once been stenciled onto the armor panels in white were still visible, having survived the steel wool and turpentine scrub. PRT issue, salvaged.

When they’d been trying to figure out what to do with the high school kids when there weren’t enough schools and seats for all of them, some idiot in the administration had come up with this. Some teenagers could go help on farms, some could get trained in construction, some would work, the ones who could keep their grades up enough could take afternoon classes too, and so on. There were sports teams and clubs. Finally, there was the Patrol group. Us.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame it on an idiot in charge. Maybe it was inevitable. Some wanted to feel like they had power, when the capes had dropped the ball. Some wanted answers. We talked and ran errands pertaining to power stuff. Some of the kids might go on to police, investigate, or study the power stuff, as more informed police officers. Possibly.