“We’ll continue this conversation shortly. You’ve got a cape with a gun inside the building.”

I backed away. Crystalclear created more explosions close to the other door. The people who had been standing guard at the end of the hallway, probably.

I retreated, ducking behind a counter.

They entered the room simultaneously, doors banging against the wall.

I ducked down, staying behind cover.

“You’re the one who fought Blindside?” the one at the door asked. The police officer.

I remained silent.

“I don’t want to shed any blood that isn’t mine,” he said. He was moving deeper into the room. I heard the door squeak, peeked, and saw the corner of it. It had been opened and was being held open. Another person?

“Alright,” he said.

One of the issues of being a parahuman was that there wasn’t a history to build on or a peerage to draw from. We had powers, yes. Some of those powers were similar to the powers others had, but there were almost always tricks and caveats, strengths one person had that another didn’t. I couldn’t copy Alexandria’s old tactics and style because my invincibility worked differently. Timing was so much more important to me.

I could be shot, if my timing was wrong, or if their timing was especially right.

A person like Jasper could take classes in martial arts and get lessons on the range, and he could use tools and draw on the experience of millions of others who had bodies that worked like his did, a set of capabilities that were virtually identical to his own.

There was only one Victoria Dallon with Victoria Dallon’s powers. I had to lean heavily on my own experience. In exercising my abilities, there was a point beyond which I was the only person that could teach myself—nobody resembled me closely enough to be an instructor in how to fight, how to process, or how to or pass on their experience.

But my own experience was a drawback if I was caught in the moment, where I had to rely on instinct but that instinct pointed me right back to my old ways.

These people were innocent. The officer, the others at the door. Maybe some had been protesters. Kingdom Come had no issue in using them, but I couldn’t hurt his pawns.

He could have moved them as a group, but he didn’t. He moved like a chessmaster played chess. One person taking a new position, pausing, checking the area, then another person moving. The police officer in charge—chief or sheriff, I wasn’t sure—had stopped in the center of the room. Others were moving around the perimeter.