The words froze Jeanne at the door, as she was making her exit. Not a single person replied to me.

I reached for a laptop someone had left open and logged in, pulling it over to me. The motion saw Eric back away a step.

I brought up the screen. The list of objectives.

A possible concern that would fly under Dinah’s radar.

Something useful to Contessa? I wasn’t following that thread anymore. I could dismiss it. I trusted Citrine in that, at least.

But was something Contessa had made use of. Citrine had lost her husband when they’d rigged a bomb to her car.

The list showed them. Anti-parahuman groups and cells. All toward the bottom. The ones that were active threats and the ones that had already been suppressed. There were two dozen listed, but only fourteen remained ongoing problems.

Fourteen with fourteen minor teams or groupings of independent capes assigned to them. The most minor capes, sent to deal with the ordinary humans upset at losing their city, or the shit-stirrers from foreign worlds, or both.

I could discount the ones obviously outside of blind spots. Narrow it down.

Contessa had gone to Cheit to get Teacher. She’d had to bring a team with her because she couldn’t see clearly around his tech. The portal tech, anything close to that.

Cheit, who had sent the people who had blown up the portals.

The name of the team ‘Major Malfunctions’ caught my eye. They were on the list. Part of a group of eight keeping the peace at the Bet–Gimel border. I checked, and sure enough, they were close to an area that was likely rigged with some of Teacher’s countermeasures.

Interlude 17.x (Sundown)

Withdrawal, Now

It was a problem with his team, that they all moved at different speeds.

People were pressing in, getting aggressive. And it was getting worse, not better. There were ten people holding the line, only a couple of them capes, and they really needed twenty or thirty.

He set his foot down, and the boot-prong stabbed through snow, found ice, and got some traction there. The frame ran up his spine, down his limbs, and extended out past his hands and feet, each extension something between a disabled runner’s prosthetic foot and a pogo stick. He sank down as the full weight of his body and combined gear came down, metal straining, mechanism sinking into mechanism.