I stepped off the roof, realized that someone was standing on the sidewalk on the far side of the street, staring at me, and saw the alarm on their faces. I gave them my best heroic salute as I started flying instead of falling from the roof of the two-story building.

“Ashley and Rain are kind of quiet,” I said, to the phone.

“I don’t like phones, where I can’t see faces or reactions,” Ashley said. “I’m fine. This is good.”

“I’m not so fine,” Rain said.

Understandable.

Right. I’d maybe talk to him after, or encourage him to reach out to Yamada. Even better, he could get around to making that call to the hero teams.

But for now, going into enemy territory, I needed to look after myself and the mission. I now needed to make prompt decisions for things that I’d hoped I’d have a few days or weeks to think about.

“Radio silence unless it’s an emergency, or you need to tell me to stop deploying the camera, Kenzie,” I said.

I heard a faint ‘boop’.

No assistance, now. Just me and my intel. I put the white mask on.

Primary concerns: Braindead and Birdbrain. Clairvoyants both.

Braindead was a tactical thinker, who could designate a set area in three dimensions, setting out a rectangular prism where he sensed everything in the area. He could cover a small town with his power and have a general awareness of everything that happened in that town, but if he designated a smaller area, he got more clarity, more attention of simultaneous things at once, and he was aware of stats. Non-numerical values for abstract things like physical wellness, martial combat capacity, and run speed, for everyone in the area. Smaller area, more and more accurate stats.

The drawback was that he was a twenty-something guy that spent an awful lot of time sitting in a chair with a diaper on, drooling, mumbling, and feeling acutely uncomfortable. When his power was active, and for a time after, he was unable to act on his knowledge himself, or even to effectively defend himself. He had been on the side of the good guys, once, which was why his power information was such common knowledge. Something had changed or snapped.

I flew just over the rooftops. It wasn’t me flying at a height where I could pull my phone out, because there was a very real chance I could fly into something like a power line or chimney.