“I’ll get my grads on board,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

“We might need seniors too.”

“School-age kids?”

“Seventeen and eighteen-year-olds? Older than some of us,” I said, indicating my group. “The city needs all the help it can get.”

“I’ll talk to parents. I can’t force anything.”

“And other instructors. Any friends or superiors you have.”

I saw him nod. He put a hand on my shoulder as he walked by, going over to talk to the most unhappy and stressed of his Patrol block.

I grabbed a desk that had been tossed across the room and righted it, before sitting on it. Sveta plunked herself down beside me, her giant arm around behind my back and resting on the corner of the desk to my left.

I pulled out my phone, and immediately she pushed it down and away.

“No more,” she said.

I fought her, play-wrestling just a bit, and finally got the phone unlocked. I closed the chat I’d had open, asking for intel on this specific situation so we knew what we were getting into, and brought up the map.

The city, lit up by icons. Each icon had a brief bit of text, describing the situation and the report.

Incidents all over. Nine ongoing situations that didn’t have a team working on them, where the things were was bad enough the police didn’t have them under control, or where capes were involved, or both.

The city was on fire, metaphorically speaking, and we didn’t have what it took to put it out. When Kenzie had put the application together, she hadn’t seemed to expect that things would get this bad, because a lot of the text was unreadable or offscreen. Too much at once.

This time, when Sveta pushed my hand and my phone down, I let her.

“We need a break,” she said. “You need one.”

“I wanted to procrastinate,” I said. “I told myself that we’d wait until Swansong and Lookout are out of the hospital. Then Lookout ended up having to stay the extra day.”

“She’s out tonight.”

“I know. But… I had something to bring up and talk to the group about, and I needed time to digest it.”

“The files from Jeanne Wynn. You went to see Dragon, you got the files, and you found out something.”

“Mostly right,” I said. I gave the phone a shake, bringing it to her attention, the map still glowing with its bright yellow icons on a purple cityscape. “This seemed easier. A relative distraction from that something.”

Blinding 11.2