Who We Are
Chris wasted little time slipping away. Alec was the only one who'd noticed but a quick wave was enough to assuage him. He wasn't the type to raise a fuss anyway, certainly not when someone broke the 'rules.'
The arrival zone was chaos, but ordered chaos.
He'd grown accustomed to it quickly, even if the scale surpassed even that of Boston.
He supposed when they'd gone to fight Leviathan, there had been more than a half-hour of warning. Things could be thrown together with far more precision than a blind rush to Wisconsin. Here everything was haphazardly thrown about and stacked. Soldiers and police in uniform directed those arriving by mover or aircraft.
The sound of artillery and gunfire echoed in the distance.
He'd heard something about the Marine divisions stationed near Madison being deployed almost as soon as the city quarantine was breached.
It all had a different tenor than Boston.
Yet, as bad as the situation was, he still tasted bile in his mouth.
This was wrong. Deeply wrong. And something had to be done about it.
His search didn't take him long. In the absence of Dragon, a much more rudimentary communications system was being set up by the Kansas City Protectorate. Veda offered to employ Dragon's system, but someone had complained that the Simurgh could compromise it from half the world away.
All the better for Chris.
He'd already cracked the OS and could see who was where and with whom.
Lucky for him, he spotted exactly who he needed to find quickly. Not that he knew exactly who he was looking for. Tecton, Jouster, and X-Caliber together would do though.
Chris made a beeline for them, navigating crowds and a line of vehicles. Tents were already going up with the Red Cross creating triage teams.
The three Ward team leaders were huddled off to the side, whispering.
"—do you mean?" Tecton asked. Chris missed the first half of the question.
Jouster shrugged. "I told you I don't know. One second we were starting to get a handle on things and the next there was this light and all these voices."
"Master power?" X-Caliber asked.
"No," Jouster said firmly. "I mean, I don't think so… That's something someone mastered would say, isn't it?"
Chris quickly caught up. "You're talking about New York."
His fellow Wards turned and acknowledged him.
"Kid—Uh, Win." Tecton nodded. "Yeah."
"Everyone is talking about it," X-Caliber noted. "There's talk of quarantining everyone affected, but it would be too many capes."
"And we're fine," Jouster insisted. He turned to Chris. "You were there. Is that something Newtype's done before?"
Chris shook his head no. "Your description is right though. It felt like… Like being open to everything. It wasn't like a master power."
X-Caliber seemed skeptical still but Jouster nodded. "Yeah… I th—No. I know it wasn't. I just can't describe how I know. It was like everything was everything for a bit there. It's all a little blurry."
"Where is Newtype?" Tecton asked. "Last we saw her was in Chicago."
Right.
Big moment.
"She's going to Sanc," Chris revealed. "She's going after the Simurgh."
The other boy's heads turned.
"That's insane," Jouster protested.
"Miss Militia let her do that?" Tecton inquired.
More like Hannah knew no one could talk her out of it.
And that wasn't mentioning whatever was going on with Taylor's eyes and that golden girl she'd pulled out of wherever. Maybe everyone was right to be paranoid. Taylor had kept secrets for a long time, but it was getting a bit ridiculous now.
Though, in the back of his mind, Chris didn't doubt her intentions.
Taylor wasn't some secret schemer out for herself.
Those were the people who infuriated her the most.
And Chris had to agree.
"What do you think of all this?" he asked, looking over toward the tents and masses of capes and troopers moving in the direction of the gunfire. "A whole lot of response for one quarantine breach."
"It's supposed to be pretty bad," Jouster defended.
"It's overkill," X-Caliber retorted.
"We're here to look like we're doing something useful," Tecton agreed, arms crossing over his chest. "Not because it is useful."
The Protectorate and Wards might have been facing waves of resignations, but that was ignoring how big they were. A few hundred departures didn't cut either group into a small team. They were still the largest organized group of capes on Earth.
Maybe the people in charge were right.
Maybe they couldn't fight every battle in the middle of all this.
"Maybe we're being wasted here," Chris mumbled. He looked at the other three. "Makes me wonder if this is who we are."
All three of them caught on quickly. They tensed and glanced about, at each other and their surroundings.
"Win," Tecton warned. "We—"
"No," Chris warned back. He thought back to what Taylor had said just before she left, and he was sure. "This is the time to ask ourselves what matters, and why we put on these masks… And if we should be wearing them if we're really okay leaving people to die like that."