It hit me like a blow to the head. An image in my mind’s eye, a feeling, a sense of something greater. Forgotten in the same instant it occurred. I dropped out of the air, and I caught myself a moment later. Crystal did much the same.

“Get back!” someone hollered.

A megaphone blared, “Get away from the center!”

The eight people were sixteen now, including the two that had run toward the center and some of the people that hadn’t retreated to the clearing’s edge. Eyes glowed, powers wreathed a few hands. A spike of power-generated material was stabbing skyward in front of a woman. A man had fallen to his knees, arms spread, and the ground was rippling around them.

People didn’t get away from the center. Realizing what was happening, or thinking they knew what was happening, others dashed toward the group, joining it.

“Get back,” Crystal said. “If we get knocked out—”

I retreated, looking for where the defending capes were. Lit by flashing, noiseless sirens, the capes were clustered not far from the building. They were getting organized.

“It’s a broken trigger,” I said.

“Is it?” Crystal asked.

I flew straight for the heroes on scene. I didn’t get the chance to hear two words out of the leader’s mouth before we were hit again. Every one of us winced and reacted as it hit us. Too brief to be a trigger vision, incomplete, fractured, it still made itself felt.

The sixteen had become thirty-two.

Flare 2.4

“Evacuate!”

One word from the parahuman in charge was all we needed. The clock was too short for anything more.

Capes fanned out, most of them on foot. I could leave the parts of the crowd closest to us to them. I flew, avoiding the sky directly over the group of affected people, circling around the periphery instead. The wind was cold against my face and legs.

The massed crowd of citizen workers was to my right, the people with powers to my left. Half of the light sources in and around the clearing had broken, and the only other illumination came from the effects of powers. A common thread ran through all of it. Energy spilled out and created matter where it splattered on the road, materials sprouted from nothing, streaked with thin streams of liquid that glowed like fire, and more abstract growths formed suspended in air, their images sticking to the backs of my eyes like the persistent afterimages of sparklers waved in the dark.

People were shouting. Some were screaming. I couldn’t make much of it out.