Ashley remained lost in thought. She couldn’t begin to answer the second question, what the change might look like, when the first was so far beyond her.

☽

She had no recruits from among the locals. Matias, Ximena and Ed weren’t the kind to be henchmen.

She was alone as she made her approach to the moot. A bonfire blazed on the beach, with some pieces of furniture as part of the wood stack. Villains ringed it, divided into their individual groups. Everything was painted in reds and oranges, and the effect—she loved the effect.

Fire, smoke, the dark sky. The assembled factions. This was only the groups from the South-End, South Boston, Roxbury and part of the Dorchester area.

She’d asked the three teenagers, offering future payment. They had named some of the players here, declining the payment when payment would have meant interactions at a later date.

The Four. Two men and two women with white clothes trimmed in black. Their clothes had odd cuts, like a shirt that cut from the left hip to the right shoulder, where it became a collar so wide and draping it was almost a cape, folding over one shoulder. Their masks were horizontal white bars at the eyebrow, across their eyeline, and across the cheekbones. One of the men was displaying his power, holding onto a weapon that had the general shape of a rifle, if the pieces were formed of bits from a coral reef. The barrel was flexible and floppy. The entire thing was covered in brightly colored pustules, with the densest concentration hiding his hands. A woman had similar pustules across the side of her face, neck, and ear.

There were three capes with a plant theme. A guy with frizzy brown hair sticking out over the top and sides of a mask that looked like it was made of the softest rubber, all in oval-shaped nodules. More mushroom-like nodules stood out diagonally from his shoulders. A man sat on a rock beside him, foot propped up on a creature that looked like it was made of driftwood, a snake with two forelimbs and no rear legs. A woman stood in the shadows behind them. She had no name for them.

There were the Mullen Brothers. Both wore armor that looked like it had been made from scrap metal. They weren’t tinkers—they were just strong, tough, and tenacious enough that they could make really shitty armor that any ordinary man would have struggled with, razor edges cutting in flesh, ungainly and heavy, and they endured it. Each had a glow that emanated from their chest and heated up the metal closest to their hearts. In the dark, the metal was a faint pink-orange.