Natalie was wearing a shirt with a folded collar under a work-suitable navy-blue sweater, with black slacks. I’d seen Kenzie wear a similar outfit a few days earlier, though Kenzie had had a skirt, and Kenzie had worn it better.

The group’s ‘lawyer’. She was just a student, but Mom’s verdict was that she knew her stuff well enough to serve, and she had a good sense of what was happening in the future.

I explained, “The area we were surveilling had a team of heroes come through, at our urging. They had a brief interaction with the embedded villain population, suggested they might be sticking around, and then left.”

“And they were followed? By the entire group of villains?”

“By two, Hookline and Kitchen Sink,” I said. “They were angry following the discussion, were previously established as exceedingly violent, and they have criminal acts that are awaiting process.”

“They’re not in the nine percent?”

“Is it nine, now? I was hoping the number would go up, not down.”

“Nine now,” Natalie said.

“They aren’t. I think most of the villains in Cedar Point are trying to stay clear of that line,” I said. I took a bite of my sandwich, then wiped the cream cheese from the corner of my mouth with a flick of my thumb. Thoroughly disappointing.

Nine percent. I’d known it as the ten percent, which had been a neater, rounder number. With the courts badly behind, only a certain number of crimes and criminals were being rushed through court, and it wasn’t based on the time of the deed. There was something which might have resembled a balance right now, but it was slipping fast. People wanted to focus on getting themselves sorted out, there was plenty of work with reasonable pay, and the people who thought they could game the system ended up falling into the ten percent. For those who did, the hammer came down hard and decisively.

There was, however, a population of people who’d realized they could get away with things if they avoided being among the nine or ten percent worst offenders. It seemed to me that the gap was widening as people got more settled in and dissatisfied. I knew some areas were using a lottery system to deter the lesser criminals, choosing the crimes they’d act on and prosecute by drawing them at random.

“Do you and did you know the crimes these two have awaiting process?”

“Hookline dangled someone out of a fourth story window. Witnesses saw. He was presumed to be acting as collections for a money lender. The neighbors heard shouting about debt, not when Hookline was there, but in general, with the victim and his partner.”

“And you know this how, if it wasn’t pursued?”