“Long coat, long hair, just got through the door, has a gun,” Crystalclear said, thumb on the button of his walkie-talkie.

The reply from the officers was almost impossible to make out.

The status quo in quiet periods was for there to be two thinkers on duty at all times. They were meant to be in communication and watching each other’s backs, and they were meant to be cooperating with the officers stationed at the portal.

During the quieter times, it would have been less than perfect for his partner to be in the midst of the crowd, where it took effort for Crystalclear to keep track of him and watch the man’s back.

Relay, one of his new teammates.

It wasn’t a quiet period, as one of the day’s bigger trains had just arrived. There were supposed to be four people on duty, one shift nearly over, another just beginning, for twice the number of eyes and powers on the scene.

Yes, it could have been an accident that the other two had yet to arrive. But accidents and coincidences could just as easily be contrivances at the hands of masterminds. The radios acting up didn’t help matters.

“—ot the gun, good ca—” the voice on the other side of the walkie talkie reported, the static cutting off the very beginning and the ending.

Sure enough, the officers had the woman in the coat. One of the officers had the gun, now.

Red jacket, jeans, pointed boots, group of three, Relay communicated. Words and ideas conveyed without being spoken. Not telepathy, not sound, but impressions.

Crystalclear’s vision didn’t give him color that wasn’t the blurring around the white outlines that defined everything. Red jacket meant nothing to him. But he could see the crowd, seeing everyone at once, and he could check the shoes. It took some focus to narrow things down, to look for the pointed shoes, to observe for another few moments to see who was grouped up.

Three people, all about the same age, all men. Their heads radiated with distortions. Their focus—not on anything in particular. He saw what they were dwelling on as a series of fractures, distorted angles, and breaks that surrounded them. These things suggested things about what was going on in their heads that were more limited to the moment, covering stresses in every sense of the word.

Stress as in emotional upset, stressing the importance of something, stress as in tension and wear.