Armstrong flipped the laptop open and swiped his card over the reader to log in. His notes came up automatically, along with mine, in a separate scroll. There were so many highlights it was kind of hard to read; I imagined it was second nature to Armstrong, with highlights for clarity, comments, and verification by thinkers, in yellow, orange, and blue, respectively. I had to work to look past it and find the flow of it.

Back straight, shoulders square, hands held behind my back. Convey the kind of image Legend and Chevalier do.

Armstrong addressed the gathered capes, “Ahem. What we know of the invader’s life cycle is that they attempt to access worlds, disseminate themselves and spread powers as a form of learning and cognition. Each segment of the invader is a consciousness unto itself, and when those segments connect to us, we refer to them as agents. Scion’s role in the process was to guide and shepherd the segments through the process and to coordinate them at the end. That process is ongoing and we are dealing with them as an independent series of individual segments with no coordination. The damage we are dealing with across multiple realities would normally be their final stage, when our civilization was exhausted of everything it had to offer in the way of knowledge and conflict.”

Everyone was watching. My mom. My teams. Teams I’d tried to join. Capes I’d fought.

He went on, “It is to our advantage, if it can be called that, that the Titans are not well coordinated. As of right now they are still finding their feet, coordination, and working out how to exert their full powers. When we view the dark areas where it seems all realities have been stripped away and only their realities are evident, our best cameras are able to see their attentions at intercommunication. This appears like brief flickers of lightning, often faint, and most often frustrated. When they succeed in communicating, they often tend to repeat the attempt and frequency.”

The screen on the laptop showed what was on the screens behind us. An overhead map, Titans spaced out across that map, with two question marks in the Strange Titan’s vicinity, not all that far from Fume Hood—

From Titan Eve.

Lines connected Titans. One between Dauntless and Eve. Then Titan Fortuna with lines of varying strength to the Ophion, Nemean, and Ashen Titans; to Bough, Victor, and Cinereal, respectively. Another line seemed to connect Titan Oberon to the unnamed new Titan, Auger.

“Our worst-case scenario is that they form anything resembling a complete network,” Armstrong said. “At even partial completion, they may extend the damage and cause more Titans, which allows for more of a network, and gives them something you could describe as a firm grip around our planet. From there, they attempt to reproduce and they scatter. They leave little behind. This is how they function.”