Images of me, wearing a Glory Girl costume, hurting a man in worker’s clothes, smacking him into a wall, hard.

Images of a young adolescent Rain hurling a molotov at an old house.

An image of me punting a dumpster into a man.

An image of Rain spitting in a scared girl’s face, before adjusting his mask.

A bystander, who looked shocked by the image’s appearance, was depicted in one blurry scene, kicking a dog that didn’t move out of his way fast enough.

The people on the ground looked between us and the images, silent, staring, and judging.

The images kept playing as I floated higher. Images of violence and ugliness. Parts of myself I was sure I didn’t want to face. Images of Rain. The periodic bystander who might have had a corona pollentia.

We had no other choice.

This was going to be one hell of a mess.

Infrared 19.2

I held my gun and trained it, best as I could when I couldn’t line up the sights, on an image of myself below. A scene too distant to make out the particulars of, but ingrained enough in my memories that I intuitively knew what it was. It helped that I knew that this search came down to picking one of the worst memories I had.

The longer I looked, the easier it felt to look past the darkness and the reds of the crystal itself and see through. A dash of gold atop a white figure, a backdrop of gray that was almost blue, with hints of red and orange from distant, cheaply manufactured lights. That gold jerked right, and a slash of crimson was left behind.

I itched to pull the trigger, to obliterate that scene.

Was it a defense mechanism? Conjuring up those images as we hurt the crystal and dug deeper?

No, I decided.

No, just the mechanism. Somewhere along the line, our enemies had decided strife and pain were more likely to stir up the kind of desperate, inspired thinking that they needed from the species they were terrorizing. So they catalogued and studied it, kept tabs on it. The triumphs too, the successes, but also what led up to those triumphs, which was often struggle. I hadn’t been on the battlefield back then, but at one point in the struggle against Scion, one of the Suits had triggered and another cape on the battlefield had helped everyone there keep hold of the glimpses behind the curtain that came with triggering.

The cape, allegedly one of the capes from South Africa, had not wanted to be named. Which was a shame, because they’d saved us. I couldn’t say if it had helped in the final defeat of Scion, but it helped now. Without that knowledge, we would be a people who had been attacked with no warning by our big golden savior, and we’d have no idea what was happening now.