The Major Malfunctions, Fume Hood and one other cape in their area were responding to reports of suspicious activity near a power facility as a group. A thinker on my mom and dad’s team was aware of potential riots stirring—or, more specifically, being stirred up, and the active members of that team were responding to that, ready to stave off any problems before they occurred. The Patrol was out and patrolling, no training for serious events, because today was the serious event, just a bunch of painted school buses and young people in scavenged body armor trying to control the damage done.

And those were just the groups and organizations I was personally managing. Tristan had his set, Sveta had hers, and Ashley had a couple of people she was emailing.

It was the first truly cold weather since spring; freezing rain that coated every surface in a thin sheet of ice. Ice left people outright spooked. Spooked people, in turn, did desperate things. They banded together to attack even larger groups and institutions, and they robbed places to try and scrounge up resources that could help them get through the winter. Even with the average Janes and Joes who were leaving work at four in the afternoon, there would be countless accidents, people needing saving.

I would have liked to be out there, helping.

I would have really, really liked it if they had focused on staying warm and stayed indoors. Instead, this weather was a cover for the covert, the break in the city’s rhythm a chance for the criminal, and it was a whole lot of activity needing attention.

The cameras showed Goddess walking up stone stairs. The stairs were built into a hill, not far from the apartments where laborers had been situated. All around the peak of the hill, construction projects stood dark, still unfinished following the strike a month ago, the same event where a broken trigger had leveled a crowd and broken the backs of a laborer’s union.

She had an entourage of two. Three if I counted the creature huddled in Amy’s jacket. Goddess’s jacket was blue, with a white fur ruff, and she had black pants on, with boots worn over. The coverage didn’t seem exceedingly necessary, as she wasn’t touched by the rain. That rain came at an intensity that made it closer to darts being flung sideways than any water coming from above.

She was her own eye of the storm, and the storm wasn’t hers. Sundancer had briefly stayed in my hometown, and her burning orb hadn’t touched anything within a few feet of her, but it had been hers, under her express will. This storm was just nature, and where the rain bent away from her and ran along an invisible slope, I could see the distortions in the air.