“We should be shortly,” the leader said, glancing at a Foresight cape who stood nearby.

“Yes sir,” the cape said. A girl with a hood and blindfold.

“How many?” Rocketround asked.

“Ninety-two, if you include the ones in houses,” she said.

Rocketround paused, staring down the length of the road toward the center of the vastly extended clearing. He spat. When he spoke, he managed a tone that pretty perfectly encapsulated what I and probably most of us were feeling, “Fuck me.”

Ninety-two. Ninety-two, many like Anne. Many wanting help. I wanted to fly in, to do something.

“I want everyone clear of the area. We wait, we see what happens,” he said. “We see if it expands in reach with further pulses, but I don’t want to give it anything. Not even any bounceback from reaching out and finding some of us. Let me know when the next pulse happens.”

“Yes sir,” the blindfolded girl said.

Something in the distance crashed to ground. Another fixture like the fractal tree?

Laserdream approached me, and she put an arm around me. I did the same for her.

There was small talk, people remarking on what they’d seen. Horrible things. People buried alive by their own powers. A few cases like what I’d observed.

“Is Vista around?” I asked. “That was her, right?”

I hadn’t expected Rocketround to be the one to answer, but he was the one who spoke up, saying, “She is. Upstairs, top floor. She said she needed a view and no interruptions.”

No interruptions. I was disappointed.

“Who’s she with?” I asked.

“Wardens,” he said.

“Good for her,” I said.

“Who are you and who are you with?” he asked.

“Victoria Dallon. Nobody, yet. I’ve been interviewing for teams.”

“She did pretty good work,” blindfold girl said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“When you three got the homeless out of the house, Vista said something under her breath. I think it was ‘thank you’. They were getting in her way somehow.”

I nodded. “I’m from her town. I was briefly her teammate.”

It was so mundane it was chilling and disconcerting, after the chaos we’d just weathered. A few moments of horrible, of stupidity and damage and madness, and now we waited to see what happened next, waiting to see what the aftermath would be. We talked about dumb things.

“What do you think?” Rocketround asked. “Not just asking you, Victoria. Anyone.”

It was in that question that I saw the first real hint that he was shaken. He was doubting his own capacity in this.

“This is going to hurt,” another cape said. “People were already feeling pretty beaten down, and… ninety people? We lost ninety?”

“We don’t know if all of them are in trouble,” Laserdream said.

“I think they might be,” blindfold girl said.

Laserdream didn’t have a response for that. She only hugged me tighter with the one arm.

“I think—” I started. “Just speculation.”