I could be honest, say something, and they almost certainly wouldn’t let us do this. I could have mentioned my background when applying to teams, and I would have had even worse luck joining them.

Or I could stay silent.

“No,” Sveta said. Her voice was soft in what someone else might have mistaken for timidity. I knew she was nervous, but I didn’t think it was timidity. She was thinking the same thing I was.

“No sir,” Tristan said, with confidence.

“No,” I said, adding my lie to theirs.

Shadow 5.7

It was an overcast day. Our nights were dark with the city power rationed and most apartments and businesses left unlit, and emerging from that to a day where the sun couldn’t shine through had an effect on the mood of the Megalopolis.

I was fully in costume, and I was surrounded by people who weren’t. New Haven wasn’t the closest settlement to the Fallen camp, but it was close enough that people were bound to pass through. It was the time of afternoon where everyone who had work was working, too late for lunch, too early to end the work day.

There were still people at the coffee shop, favoring very relaxed clothing. Some were students, part of one block or another, with no work for them for the moment. Most were keeping an eye on me.

Image was so important. I had my hood down, because it was large and heavy enough to be warm, and I didn’t want sweat in my eyes later, when it mattered. Having the hood down and the metal mask at my belt meant that I could present a fairly friendly face.

The coffee shop was somewhat industrial in feel, with a floor of poured concrete that had been altered after pouring to give it a look very similar to wooden floorboards. The bottom half of the employee’s counter and the counters that jutted out from the walls with stools lined up beneath them were more concrete. Everything else was wood.

I waited in line like everyone else, encouraging the woman in front of me to stay in line when she offered to let me cut ahead. It could have been fear, respect, or help. Free coffee for the cop or feeling the pressure of a parahuman standing behind her.

There were looks from people who were clearly bothered by my being around. There wasn’t much I could do about that.

On the other side of the coin, one of the teenagers who weren’t in school was trying to surreptitiously take a picture of me with his phone, which I noticed because the girl sitting next to him kept jostling him and trying to get him to put it down. Interest of the positive but borderline troubling sort.