The light had slipped through the window/
The morning ripped you away, oh/

You will leave me in the morning/
Leave me in the morning/

Nathan glared at his cell phone like it was responsible for his frustration, wanting to throw it out the window of the car in a burst of childish tantrum; instead, he simply gritted his teeth (he needed to stop that, his dentist was going to stab him to death with a mouth prop when he saw what he was doing to his brand-new caps) and dialed a different number.

"Hi, Mom," he said as soon as she picked up, sounding like the perfect society wife in the inflections of her hello. "I can't get a hold of Heidi, have you seen her?"

The tone of her voice changed immediately, plunging into bad-news disapproval. "Oh," she said carefully. "I don't think you're going to hear from her for awhile, Nathan."

"Why?"

Angela put a hand to her forehead, wishing that Nathan wasn't so very dense sometimes. Not that he wasn't smart—he was sharp as a tack in most areas, but he'd always been decidedly blind when it came to personal relationships. "If you must know, she's considering separating from you," she said, getting it out quickly and briskly, like ripping off a Band-Aid.

"What? Why?"

"Secrets, Nathan," she told him with a sigh, remembering days and weeks of knowing nothing about where her husband was, or what he was doing, and wondering if he would ever trust her. "Too many secrets and too many lies."

"But I told her the truth," he said, sounding shocked. "I told her everything! Doesn't that mean she has to forgive me? Isn't that how it works?"

Angela allowed herself a sad pitying smile only because she knew Nathan couldn't see her. Poor Nathan. It wasn't his fault that he just didn't quite get it—he was so perfect in many other areas that it only made sense for him to have this fatal flaw. "You can fly, Nathan," she said gently. "You can fly, and she found out about it nine months late. How much of this did you expect her to take?"

"I don't know," he said, his voice flatline emotionless. "I just thought…I don't know. Never mind. I have to go."

---

Peter, Katie, and Claire stared up at the White House, silently admiring the clean-lined historical structure in unison with several dozen other sightseers, only with a slightly more pressing intent.

"I'm beginning to see a flaw in our plan," Katie said without taking her eyes off the building.

"What," Claire said, "you mean the one where we don't actually have any idea when this attack is going to happen?"

"Yeah," Katie confirmed calmly. "That one."

"So what are we thinking?" Peter said, running a hand through his hair. "Some kind of long-term stakeout?"

"Could be conspicuous," Katie pointed out.

"Yeah," Peter agreed vaguely.

"Yeah," Claire echoed.

They all seemed to be affected by the same stillness, a sort of calm lassitude brought on by proximity to Historical Buildings. Claire and Katie especially, who hadn't been to Washington DC or anywhere even nearly as full of monuments, didn't seem to be able to shake their awe. They didn't feel much like active, impassioned planning—they felt more like having a nice picnic, or perhaps passing a bill. Downtown, urban DC was as pushy and irate as any big city, but once one reached the Historical Buildings—peace.

"Do you think we'll be able to feel when he shows up?" Peter wondered idly, in the tone of someone discussing stock options and not presidential assassinations.

"I don't think so," Katie replied thoughtfully, watching his skin glint imperceptibly blue. "We'd better hope not, or the shields aren't doing their job."

Peter smiled crookedly. "Oh well. Wouldn't want to blow up the world, would we?"

"No," Katie said composedly. "That's generally considered impolite."

"Peter," Claire said urgently, a break in their society-tea-party atmosphere. "You're doing it again."

Peter looked down at his hand, dismayed to see that it was his own long-fingered, articulated appendage instead of being properly shapeshifted. "Drat," he said with a frown. "This is harder than it looks, you know."

Unused to sustaining more than one ability at a time, Peter and Katie had been letting their cover appearances slip all day, blurring back into their own, eminently conspicuous selves at fairly regular intervals. Claire thought that, all things considered, it was better that they focus on the shields, but it would be decidedly inconvenient if they all got arrested.

With a look of hurried concentration, Peter blurred back into the form of the weedy college student he'd been impersonating, and Katie checked herself over to be sure her disguise was holding—for once, it was. "We need to keep a closer eye on that," she said ruefully. "Someone's going to notice that we're not the same people all of the time."

"Not in DC," Peter joked. "They're all busy looking at the monuments or the traffic or the politicians, or we don't fit into any of those categories."

"They are impressive monuments," Claire said. "Though I admit the politicians aren't as impressive as I thought they would be."

"They all sort of pale next to Nathan, don't they?" Peter agreed, feeling far more forgiving toward his brother now that he was whole states away.

"Exactly," Katie agreed. "I guess I was spoiled by seeing him first—naturally, I expected the rest of them to be just as charming, well-dressed, sexy—"

Peter made a choked noise, expression deeply pained. "Hold on with the personals ad there—you think my brother is sexy?"

Katie looked shifty. "Well, only in the way of being really, really attractive."

"Ack," Peter said.

"Don't ask if you don't want the answer," Claire said gleefully.

Suddenly, their conversation was cut off, broken up by the sound of sirens. Experienced fugitives that they were, they all jumped, instinctively pulling away to see whether they were being hunted down. They were—police cars were pulling in on all sides, boxing them against the White House gates with nowhere else to run. Peter glanced down at his hands, and realized with considerable distress that he looked exactly himself again, articulated hands and all, and a swift look at Katie told him that she'd slipped as well. They were quite seriously busted.

He has just started considering some sort of spectacular getaway (invisibility? telekinesis?), when his scheming was unceremoniously shocked away by the sight of his brother getting out of a police car. The surprise lasted only a moment, quickly replaced by anger and weary should-have-known resignation. Nathan flashed him a brief smile that seemed to be trying to communicate a great deal—brimming full of fury as he was, Peter heard very little of it. Hands were grabbing him and pushing him against a car, guns pressed into his neck and spine by over-wary policeman who had watched too much ten o'clock news. They were pulling his hands behind his back and cuffing them with an agitated delicacy, trying not to touch him more than they absolutely had to, like he was fragile or dangerous. Their eyes told him that he was something terrifying and volatile, less a person and more some kind of natural disaster, volcano, tornado, hurricane.

He saw Katie's eyes meet his, bright bottleglass-green and begging for direction, seconds from meltdown under the pressure that was too much, eight years of too much. He couldn't see Claire, but he could hear her sharp noises of protest, not any kind of weak and furious at being thwarted. Then, over the top of the car, he saw something that made him go still, a horrifying stop-motion, vision-tunneling frame of sight. A man was walking down the sidewalk in front of them, a man with a scruffy beard and an intent forward-leaning walk.

It was Ted Sprague. Ted Sprague was walking into the White House.