“Forty three minutes away,” Kurt said. “With up to one minute added time for maneuvering around traffic.”

So many things were reliant on resources. Money—they handled money and they had money. Kurt had arranged the trading dollar and he’d made it work. A city couldn’t run on barter, and a megalopolis was far more involved than a city.

People were another resource. They had people, but it was scattered. She had seen and worked out the state of Cauldron over the years, after taking over Accord’s position as head of the Ambassadors. She’d known it to be a very large place with very little staff. That much remained true now. When they needed it, as they did now, they could tap their scattered group and make things happen. It was the nature of their group and the people they collected that when they gathered together, they worked together like a perfectly engineered machine.

Knowledge, they were keeping something of a handle on knowledge. Information on friends, on enemies. They still talked to Tattletale now and then because she was a prime source of knowledge, albeit of the uncertain sort.

Things grew more difficult, past that point. Time was a harder resource to obtain.

Nine minutes into their trip, time and people converged as elements. Kurt rolled down the back windows of the sedan. The windows were barely rolled down when lithe forms slipped into the back of the vehicle, as it tore down a forty mile an hour road at seventy-five miles an hour.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Kurt’s younger siblings said. They’d cleaned up, and loosely matched Kurt in presentation, though they’d gone for something more fitting for teenagers. Both wore the thick-framed glasses, however.

Kurt became annoyed with them very quickly, so it had ended up being her responsibility to corral them and give them direction.

If she ever had a doubt that she was Kurt’s type, the fact that his clones were so bad at hiding their fondness for her would have banished the thought. It never failed to put a smile on her face.

“Red vehicle. Wind shear slow, type three, offset by three feet left. Make it a minus five, whenever you please.”

She produced a brief field to encompass the left side of a red truck, causing it to pull to one side. Kurt navigated between two vehicles, her sedan centered on the dotted line as it squeezed between the two. The red truck saw them and braked suddenly, pulling further to the side. She canceled out her power before another vehicle could intercept it or the red truck could be forced off course. Kurt picked up speed once he was clear of the gap.

“Could you give the engine special treatment? I know effects on moving things are hard to maintain, but I can keep the speed constant.”

“Time is of the essence,” she said.