“I do too,” Sveta said. She held out her arm while Weld checked the fit of a different arm encasement. His finger drawn to a point, he raked it along the metal to mark a part that needed fixing.

“We’ll figure this out,” Tristan said.

“How did the talk go?” I asked, looking between Tristan and Natalie.

“Natalie and I covered the events of the day,” Tristan said. “Byron is loaning me time so I can do more. He’ll help some tomorrow too. He’s not up for the hero thing, but this is serious enough that he’s on board. We’re a little more divided on tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Byron,” I said. “As for tomorrow, Natalie, maybe you could take a look at the proposal for the Wardens?”

I turned my laptop around for her. She took a seat on the ground to read it, no longer standing and hovering around like she didn’t know what to do with herself.

On the screen of Sveta’s laptop, Kenzie was elbow-deep in electronics, unable to type. No recent messages from Chris.

Just about everyone had their costumes ready. Kenzie was going to equip Chris with some projectors.

“Two major groups of capes,” I said. “The Fallen aren’t to be messed with. They were a minor nuisance for years, with some bad stuff going on in the background, with kidnappings, murders, mutilations of minorities, Case Fifty-Threes included, and a lot of low-level terrorist or attention-grabbing stunts. The group we’re focusing on now, I believe, are the Mathers. Each of the major branches took an Endbringer as a theme, and the Mathers took the Simurgh.”

“The kidnappings were their thing,” Weld said. “Back in Bet, they would go after isolated capes, ages sixteen to twenty-five. These capes would be married into the family. Thirteen incidents over seven years. Three of the kidnapping victims stayed. Three died. The rest escaped, were released, or were freed by PRT intervention. The PRT tried to go after them, but they moved frequently and they had anti-thinker measures in place.”

“It stands to reason they still have them,” I said. Because Rain had been hiding among them.

“Stands to reason,” Tristan said. “Looksee, that means you keep cameras off of the Fallen, unless we give the all clear. We don’t know if it goes through cameras, and your cameras are weird enough it might be more dangerous.”

Kenzie took her hands off of her work to type. Protests, it seemed.

“We’ll present our situation to the Wardens and we’ll do what we can to get them on board. Whether we get them or not, we’ll have some priorities, small scale and big, and they’ll be what we default to if we’re caught in the moment.”