Rain stepped out onto the fire escape. The door slammed behind him, more because it was a heavy door than because he’d actively slammed it.

“He needs help,” Erin said, quiet.

“It’s a bad situation,” I said.

She nodded.

“That wasn’t about you, you know,” I could hear Tristan telling Kenzie. “He’s stressed.”

“I know. But it isn’t cool. There’s a big part of me that feels like it is about me.”

“It isn’t. Cool or about you.”

I looked around the room. Chris was at his station at the point in the apartment furthest from the screens that wasn’t inside the bathroom. He was bent over a video game.

The cameras were capturing video from high overhead. One came down at an angle, and the other was a bird’s eye view, depicting only the tops of heads. Ashley had yet to arrive. The cameras tracked automatically, based on the people they recognized and their apparent importance. One was following Nailbiter and Colt.

But there was another measure of tracking: it seemed to judge by number. The other camera was shifting to look northward. The labels popped up as people were recognized, so distant they were barely more than stick figures. The labels congealed together into a single large label above the small crowd. Twelve unrecognized individuals.

“We didn’t have a patrol coming through, did we?” I asked.

“Not for an hour,” Tristan said. He turned to look. “Oh what? Fuck me.”

Kenzie ran past Erin, Sveta and me to get to her desk, seizing control of the cameras. She focused in on the crowd.

“What’s going on?” Tristan asked.

The costumes were distinct enough for me to recognize them before any icon came into view. Bold contrasts of light and dark, angles, armor panels, and bright colors. Masks tended to be full-face. All of it looked like they had one very tired designer working on their costumes. Cohesion to the max.

The camera caught the icon, and it popped up in a window, blur-corrected. A figure running to the side, drawn out as a collection of triangles and irregular shapes. Their arm was out and holding an arrow-shaped shield. Others had slight variants on the same icon, to play into costume textures and other minor details.

“Advance Guard,” I said.

“We haven’t talked to Advance Guard,” Tristan said. “We actively avoided bringing Advance Guard into this.”

I looked at Erin and touched her shoulder. “Do you want to go get Rain?”

She nodded.

A second screen was projected onto the wall to our left. The camera began gathering blurry portraits together, lining them up in three rows and four columns, each showing one mask. As the camera got better resolution shots, they were overlaid over other shots of the same person, the images clarifying in stages as each image was uploaded. Some details remained blurry, while others became bold and precise.