So easily formed after a short time away, Tattletale thought.

The scene gave her a glimpse of Weld’s face.

Fondness.

Back to business. All information pulling together…

Mood, tempo, body language individual and collective, differences between cape and civilian; war. Fighting humans; foreign humans, divide marked between them and intervening Warden and paramilitary arms; Warlords.

War involving African warlords, mood, tempo, body language, and everything else; war won, with casualties. Situation unresolved.

Crowd thinning out; Train empty.
Train empty, capes seen; Valkyrie gone

Valkyrie gone, past knowledge that Valkyrie is ignoring Gimel for reasons, past knowledge that Valkyrie’s reasons include high-level threat, stronger, more numerous, past knowledge that Valkyrie feels small against this threat;
Valkyrie alive. Scouting, procrastinating.

The screen showed a message. Her cameraman, wanting to know what he should do. She sent him instructions to follow the crowd outside, getting as much footage of the group as possible. This was intel on capes she didn’t get a chance to interact with much, it was intel on the situation, on the public mood, on the struggling authority that managed the Wardens and subsidiary teams…

She yawned.

The man with the camera had followed the crowd to the area outside the station. He watched the crowd and in the doing he watched Weld and Garotte, Victoria and Laserdream. Vista had approached the group.

The camera went black. It was a good thing the lights had been flicked on, because the room would have been plunged into darkness with the screen off.

Her heart pounded. She was left to wonder if it was one of the breakers, the computer plugged into a different switch than the lights of her temporary accommodations.

Lights on the computer blinked. It wasn’t a power outage.

She was halfway to the mouse when the screen lit up. Pink against a black background. An emoticon, with hearts for eyes and a dash for the mouth.

The face disappeared, turning into a single ‘hi!’. Tattletale’s power kicked in, but it was one of the rare instances where she was faster than the blink-of-an-eye power. She hit the big red button.

This time, the power did go. Everything from monitors to computers went black, the entire system thudding audibly as everything came simultaneously to a halt.

Is there danger? Kid’s behavior, past knowledge of her misdeeds, past knowledge of her conversation style; the first thing she did was say hi.

Fucking tinkers.

Fucking kid.

Tattletale rose from her seat, wincing at the pain in her legs. When she moved, it was with one hand on a nearby table or piece of furniture, to steady herself.

Her phone had died with the press of the big red button.

In the darkness, the stream of everything now cut off, no means of communicating with her squads or contacts, and no means of seeing what was going on out there, she had only her thoughts.