My eyes moved away from March to the people on the ground, then to the nearby buildings. I couldn’t lose sight of the major goal here. Was Mama Mathers there? I could look at the civilians on the ground without a problem, which meant she wasn’t there, or her power was more subtle than that. I’d caught a glimpse earlier, though, so she couldn’t be too far. There were a dozen buildings in our immediate vicinity. Was she watching through the window?

The trouble was, if I saw her, I risked being affected like the people on the ground were. If I didn’t see her, she had the advantage and she could catch us by surprise at a time of her choosing.

The idea of losing my mind like that terrified me, to the point I felt like my gut and my brain were bound in knots. I tried to focus that terror into a cold, rational look at what I needed to do. Mama Mathers was the biggest danger. Valefor was the second. They were masters and strangers, the PRT classification for those who controlled others or minions, and the classification for those who infiltrated or deceived. Mama Mathers and Valefor were squarely in the overlap between the two.

I found myself missing my old team. New Wave had had its problems, but I’d known the team and how it worked. I wasn’t a strategist, but I could do fine if I could identify the big problems and solve them. My tendency back in the day had been to hit hard as my method of solving, and to rely on my instincts and the team.

These guys were hard to rely on. New Wave had been all about straight lines of attack and barrier defenses. Lasers and punching, shields and forcefields between danger and the vulnerable. The most indirect we’d been was when my dad made his grenades bounce off walls or when my cousin had created forcefields in unconventional but otherwise simple shapes.

Here? Sveta had disappeared while all attention was on others. Capricorn was… it looked like he was changing forms rapidfire to switch identities, so no one self heard a single whole utterance referring directly to them.

Chris was off doing something, hopefully far away from this. Rain was—he’d contacted people I barely recognized. I’d seen March’s mask before, but it had been in passing. An article about one of the big cities. There’d been a weird dynamic there, but I couldn’t afford to dwell on it. My mind went to a bizarre combination of upper-class and low-class crimes, like corporate espionage and petty vandalism, but I knew almost right away that I was thinking of the wrong person.