She was glad for the puffer jacket she’d bought with the bonus from her last payday. In a way, she’d needed to push herself to start thinking about the cold weather and what it meant. Her hands and face were cold, now, but her body was warm, and that helped the rest of her. It meant she could stay outside in the cold and the quiet.

Her breath made her glasses fog up, the lenses catching the small amounts of orange light from the nearby streetlight, illuminating her entire visible world with orange light, which would fade as the condensation receded. She could avoid it by directing her breath to one side, or controlling the output, but as soon as she turned her thoughts to something, she would forget and her glasses would fog up again with that alarming amber glow. Tonight had been important—more important than she’d anticipated.

She’d heard the discussions, the insinuations. She’d been asked once or twice to chime in with her opinion on things. She had been the escort for Kenzie to go to the television studio, and she’d waited in the darkness of the wings as the show started.

Even up to that moment, she hadn’t expected the gravity of it.

If she was anything more than an idle smoker, she would be puffing away right now. If she were a drinker, she would be tipping something back. Maybe, anyway—she still had work to do. The right-now wasn’t so important. It was that if she were anyone else, anything else, she would be able to do more than stand in the dark, her hands in her pockets, fogging up her glasses with her eyes wide.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know what to do with herself, exactly. She knew. If she were asked, she could have spouted off a checklist of things, ordered them by priority, and given the go-ahead, she would do it.

It was the herself, the she. It was the notion that she liked capes. They were neat and she’d always been enchanted by the notion of them. She’d told herself that she had no major illusions when it came to what capes were. They were human but they were humans with a lot of power. That could be a very bad thing and it could be a terrific thing. It depended on the person. She’d told herself they were flawed. Even when Mrs. Dallon took the gloves off and made it look like she was a superhuman lawyer, not just a superhuman in costume, Natalie had kept her perspective in check, or so she liked to think. Mrs. Dallon was a person to look up to, one with a lot of talents, but she was a person.