“Heartbroken,” I said. “And luggage. They’ve left the New Brockton area.”

“Were they driven out?”

I had trouble imagining another reason for them to be gone. New Brockton was their territory. They’d put everything into it for years and now they’d left it? What had happened there, or what was happening here that was pulling them together?

Worrying to imagine, that my old enemies might be cornered or desperate.

Polarize 10.4

I had been trying to build connections for weeks now. It had started at Hollow Point, inviting teams to come in, putting ideas like taking credit second to letting other people have their share of the glory. We had shared and asked for favors, and that we had asked wasn’t that bad a thing, because people tended to like helping, and they felt stronger in knowing they could call in a chit and have some extra powers on their sides.

We’d put our necks on the line for the Fallen fight. Some ups, some downs. We had earned some nods by getting ahead of the portal thing and keeping it from being quite as bad as it would have otherwise been. We’d done the neck-to-line thing again by going on television. Then the prison.

None of it had gone perfectly. Three team members lost along the way, two partially recovered. Raised eyebrows and questions about the television program. Others had questions about the prison thing, but they weren’t going so far as to ask those questions and we weren’t offering details.

Now? Consolidation. Reinforcing our team’s ties to one another was only one part of the consolidation. Reaching out to other teams and doing something more formal with our relationships to them was the other half of it.

I stood in the center of the open floor of our headquarters, surrounded by whiteboards that were littered with notes and personal details. My arms were folded, my still-burned and bandaged hand resting against my bicep, where the bullet had passed through. My costume top was in the laundry, so I only wore a sleeveless black undershirt with my costume bottoms.

My eyes were on a projected screen on the wall. Most projector images didn’t really have black as a thing, which meant they didn’t work so well in areas with lots of windows or light. Kenzie’s cameras projected black, making the text distinct.

Three names, white text on the black background: ‘Mapwright (AG)’, ‘Gong (AG)’, and ‘Bullhorn (IV)’.