It wasn’t Jeanne who answered. Cinereal gave me my reply. “Thinkers say no. They’re either drawing blanks or they don’t like what they see.”

“Nothing specific? No details?”

“No,” Cinereal said. “But if you look at some of the other major thinker blind spots, you’re going to find yourself running into topics like Eidolon, Sleeper, the Endbringers, Valkyrie, the Island-state, the Pastor incident…”

“Concentrations of power,” I said.

Jeanne shook her head. “Complexity of power, most often. Whatever thinker powers come into play, with these cases, there’s often too many variables to fully consider, thinkers report that their powers are fuzzy, inconsistent, or blacked out.”

“And it’s not just the time-stop bubbles in Brockton Bay that are an issue?” I asked.

Jeanne shook her head. “But Brockton Bay is one of the largest collections. Keep that in mind.”

“And you don’t know why? The thinkers can’t shed any light on this?” I asked.

“Little.”

“You’re saying you checked, you’re saying no, risky for reasons you can’t disclose. The Wardens checked, and they’re saying no, the thinkers think it’s volatile somehow…”

“Yes,” Cinereal said. “Volatile is a good way to put it. It might not explode. It might be devastating.”

“Okay,” I said. “And for the record, I want to stress that Teacher said no. He broke with his mercenaries from Cheit because they wanted to go after this. Are the mercenaries after it because so many people are afraid to touch it, or do they know something we don’t?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Jeanne said.

“Can you send me information on the victims?”

“I will. Bakuda’s victims, the three heroes—”

“Not all heroes,” I said. “Alabaster and Jotun were white supremacists.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Files on those two groups, and the group in the bubble caught the group that snuck into The Scar. I’ll send you what others sent to me.”

Trying to wrap our heads around a problem that apparently even thinker powers couldn’t tackle without running into blind spots.

Daunting.

I turned to the heroes, my eye mainly on Cinereal and Relay. This wasn’t an easy ask. “We can’t get directly involved until we’ve tackled Cradle, Love Lost, or some other peripheral things. If we can make headway in solving any of those issues, we should be able to converge on the mercenary problem from multiple angles. In an ideal world, we’ll catch up with them from the flanks while you’re approaching from the front.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Cinereal said. “But we don’t have many resources.”

More crime and incidents than we had heroes to send to them. The city was still on fire, and we didn’t have the means to put every single fire out.

“When you say resources, you mean heroes,” Foil spoke up.

“Yes,” Cinereal said.

“Do you have money?”