“Her assistant is a parahuman,” Crystalclear said. “Something about the way his head is put together. Thinker. They may have been communicating, maybe not.”

“Kiley was communicating with people throughout. Earpiece,” Relay said. “You didn’t see?”

“Heads and surrounding objects get murky,” Crystalclear said, his voice quiet.

“We asked you two here for a reason,” Narwhal said. “You have strong backgrounds, and people see you as trustworthy.”

“Foresight is taking on a role as Wardens adjunct,” Weld said. “A… discreet role.”

“You want us to be your watchdogs,” Crystalclear said.

“They’re keeping too close an eye on the Wardens themselves. We could use observers and more covert operatives.”

“Watching them?” Crystalclear asked, tilting his head toward the window. He tilted his head toward the table. “Or watching them?”

“That you asked proves we were right to ask,” Weld said.

Crystalclear bit his tongue. His instinct was to say Weld was wrong. That he was the wrong person. He missed critical things, by consequence of his power being what it was.

He’d joined the NNH to change things, to be a real piece in something greater, rather than a cog in the machine, and that had fallen to pieces.

But by saying all of that, he would be relegating himself to Big Picture’s small-picture view of the world. Subsisting, looking after refugees, doing small things, instead of what he’d hoped for with the NNH. He would be saying he didn’t have what it took.

“I’m in,” Relay said. “But you already guessed that.”

“Yes,” Narwhal said. “Crystalclear?”

Crystalclear nodded. “I will. One question, though.”

“Ask.”

“If you have us doing this, what do you have Advance Guard and the Attendant doing?”

Glare 3.1

Cities, like people, got their second chances. Few cities had needed one so badly as this. I was left hoping the other cities were doing better with their second opportunities, because nothing I was seeing was very promising, here.

The four teams under the Wardens’ umbrella, now condensed down to three, were divided into those who wanted to return to the way things had been and those who wanted to forge a new way forward, learning from the mistakes of the past. The appeal of returning to a semblance of what we’d had was clear—we missed the foods, the places, the familiar businesses and media, the familiar faces.

We wanted normal and even now every meal, every soap we used, every piece of clothing, it was a reminder of how far from normal we were. It was different and often less because we had less, and we had less of a footing. I wasn’t the only person who felt their stomach sink when we saw the news two weeks after the broken trigger had decimated the reconstruction workers’ protest, saying that the transportation strike was imminent, and that factory workers were contemplating joining in, an across-the-board attempt to demand stability and structure.