The screen shifted to footage from a distant camera, showing cracks spreading. Those cracks produced more smoke, but this was only debris from roads collapsing, buildings toppling, as those black-lightning cracks extended for miles. The silhouette of the smoke-Titan was visible at the epicenter. She was walking, head bent.

Eric, like many others, was all tension as he watched. He leaned forward and gripped the table’s edge, having stood from his seat.

“How many people are still in the city?” he asked.

“Thousands. Tens of thousands,” Citrine said, from the end of the table.

Which was a far cry from tens or hundreds of millions.

“Do we have word from the leadership?” he asked.

“Making calls, some incoming,” Pearce reported. “The call center downstairs is handling it.”

The Wardens led from the front lines, because they had to. The people who knew how heroes worked and how villains thought were the same types of people who wanted to be in the thick of things, helping. Most of the time, it worked. The appearance of Gimel and emergence of the city with all of its doorways to other worlds was a dozen diplomatic crises in one. Add in the villains banding together, villains from other worlds who had been stranded here who needed to be broken up, and a massive population of vulnerable, displaced people, and the Wardens had their hands full.

They’d made it this far. Two years.

The screens were switching constantly. Searching as if to find one thing to lock onto that would turn this incident into a clear picture.

The main screens switched to each show half of an overhead view. Satellite camera. The epicenter of the attack, the clouds of smoke from the resulting destruction, and those cracks that spread out, like that from the tap of a hammer on a windowpane, except in three dimensions, not two. A city in black and white, with a shadow of gold due to the prevalence of the solar windows reflecting tinted light down onto snow.

That shadow of gold was swiftly becoming ordinary shadow. The smoke and dust was reaching high enough to cut off some of the light.

Abruptly, the damage began to spread at another point in the city.

“Overlay. Bring up the overlay,” Eric said. Belatedly, uselessly, he added, “Please.”

They brought up overlays. First, the series of icons in bubbles that floated over the city, showing who was where. Part of Larue’s team elsewhere in the facility was tracking capes by geolocation and affiliation.

At the center of that new manifestation of cracks and destruction, a purple bubble with a triangular point extended down. The icon, a stylized woman in a fedora with tie, minimalist face, marked it as Contessa. The purple served to label her as a special case. The Red Queen and her group were other special cases.

“Do they have eyes on her?”

“No,” Larue said. “Sending a flier in with a camera.”