The Wretch struck the doorframe of the closet. It was loud, considering the otherwise quiet morning.

“Vic!?” Crystal called out.

“It’s fine!” I called back.

Focus, I thought. Focus without focusing, calm.

We pulled the sweater from the hanger, lifted it up…

And I caught it, as I dismissed the forcefield.

Clothes had a way of being armor. Walls erected between skin that was made of stray animals, bugs, and rodents and the outside world where monsters lurked.

I had actual armor now, and it wasn’t what Weld had helped me make for my costume. It wasn’t quite perfect, and it was bound up in a whole lot of negative emotion, but it was armor.

Which let clothes be more like actual clothes. I pulled on the sweater and felt its plush warmth against me, hugging my arms around my body.

Good.

“You ready?” Crystal called over.

“Just about,” I said. I rejoined them. My mom was already ready with three travel mugs of coffee with lids, and with three sandwiches wrapped in paper towels, each with a little marking on the folded corner of the paper towel that stuck out. The Brandish icon, the Laserdream icon, and a star with five prongs sticking out the top.

Which was a hilarious way of marking something ‘no egg’.

“Find something?” Crystal asked, trying to find her shoes in the mess of footwear she hadn’t packed up. She didn’t even walk, half the time.

“I think I found something, yeah,” I decided. I gave her a look. “Ready?”

“No,” Crystal said, unnecessarily. One look told me she wasn’t.

⊙

There were easily a hundred heroes in the Wardens’ headquarters at ass-crack o’clock in the morning, on their way to and from various missions just like the one my team had gone out for yesterday. Controlling villains, getting them to stand down, trying to reduce power uses.

There were people who could enter a room, and everyone would stop talking, or the tone of conversation, at the very least, would shift. Chevalier. Legend. Narwhal. Dragon. There were people who had impacted world-scale events who didn’t quite have that presence or clout. I was pretty sure Tattletale was one such person.

Some of those people had become what they’d become because the PRT had helped make them into icons. Had taken the virtues those capes represented, and sold them, hard. They’d made it subliminal and liminal, marketed it to kids and the elderly, and made things like strength, courage, nobility, caring, honesty, and justice things that just happened to go hand in hand with the heroes appearing. The PRT had boosted social media that sold these principles and the presence of these capes, and had provided deft answers for anything that appeared to hurt these notions.