Ike’s chair beeped warnings as he watched Glorybeam suddenly crumple, suppressing panic hormones and leaving him clearheaded. His fingers touched certain buttons on the control panel of their own accord, activating the outer defenses of Star Central. Concealed panels opened up all over the skyscraper, tinker guns and shield projectors whirring to life at the same time he began issuing orders.

  “Bulk, Makebelieve, take that out, collateral authorized. Motion Patrol, crowd control. Rescue Squad, recover Glorybeam and get her inside. Thoughtstealer, do a local deep sweep. Find if there’s anyone nearby.” Generally, the more potent supers had some restrictions on what they were really supposed to do, in order to prevent them from making things worse. Someone like Captain Bulk could topple buildings, and in the busy downtown that was a terrible idea unless there was no other choice. Like now.

  His supers burst into motion, reacting without the panic shown by the press. Most of his people were professionals, but not all of them, and even then if he personally hesitated there would be chaos. Not everyone at the press conference was used to working as a team.

  Bulk immediately ripped a light pole out of the ground, sending fragments of asphalt everywhere, broken electrical conduits arcing and snapping as he took aim. It looked like a javelin in his oversized hand, but instead of a straight throw he sent it in a wide, whipping arc, whirling over the heads of the assembled press — only to be blasted apart by smaller drones as they emerged from stealth. Which didn’t deter Bulk, who held out his hand. Makebelieve’s flat, glassy eyes glowed and the light pole reconstituted itself in the larger super’s hand. The fragments of the original, sadly, ricocheted out to crash through windows and into the brickwork of the buildings across the way.

  The suppressor drone began spooling up again, but was forced to dodge as, this time, half a dozen pieces of steel from the now-disassembled light pole were launched at it in quick succession, overwhelming the ability of the smaller attack drones to destroy them. At the same time, Stop Motion and Sparkle Motion swept over the crowd, removing people in twos and threes at a pace beyond what the unaugmented eye could follow. The twins in the Rescue Squad carried Glorybeam off the stage, rushing her into the watchful protection of Star Central’s defenses.

  He only glanced away for a few moments, but when he looked back the entire stage where everyone had been standing a second before was flying through the air, Captain Bulk launching the chunk of metal and wood at a few hundred miles an hour. Where the streetlight had failed, the massive hulk of the stage succeeded, crashing into the suppressor drone and sending it into the opposite building. Bulk followed, flying after it with a new light pole in hand as a tool to finish the job.

  Mechaniacal’s drones were not, in many respects, all that tough. Nothing like a fully armored tinker-made weapon could be. But it was on file that the suppressor’s effect suffused its construction, rendering many ranged powers useless and even shrugging off some tinker effects. Their outer shell was tough enough to render small-arms fire useless, and just maneuverable enough to make it difficult to engage with anything low powered. Not a problem in the air, but in the dense city they were incredibly difficult to destroy or disable without collateral damage — and the imposter’s drones seemed to be given thicker armor, requiring even more force to deal with even if they weren’t as quick.

  Normally, destroying Mechaniacal’s creations didn’t justify the collateral damage required. But they didn’t usually attack people directly, or at range, and they weren’t the primary threat anyway. It was the smaller attack drones, or the slightly larger scavenger drones that could take things. Or, even worse, the large kidnap drones that could take people. And never before had they taken out Glorybeam.

  “Go to alert level one,” he instructed, depressing the appropriate buttons on his chair. “Glowfly, Stomp, Lunar Bolt — take your squads and sweep the city. Identify and remove any Mechaniacal tech you can find.” The alarms began to wail all over Star City as people were directed to the shelters. It might not be necessary, but so long as Glorybeam was out of action there was the possibility of a follow-up attack that relied on not having a sovereign-class super to defend them. Not to mention the inevitable rioting that was likely to result from such an upset.

  “Vilmonica, pull in all our long-range patrols and set up overtime schedules,” he said, since that was going to be required, even if the immediate threat was dealt with.

  With the suppressor drone out of the way, it didn’t take long for the other assembled supers to remove the attack drones, crushing, melting, freezing, or slicing them apart, depending on which super was doing the destruction. Bulk emerged from the hole he’d made in the far building, carrying the broken pieces of the suppressor drone, as Stop Motion and Sparkle Motion dived into the same building to start sorting out any injured.

  The press pool were, of course, snapping photos and shouting questions from the safe remove where they’d been put, but weren’t stupid enough to come near an active scene with powers still being flung about. Vilmonica was going to be absolutely livid that this was all captured publicly, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that.

  “Mocker, to me,” Ike said, and the warlock appeared next to him in a swirl of shadow as Bulk delivered the pieces of the drone. Mechaniacal had long ago learned some trick to insulate his creations from much of magical clairvoyance, which was why they hadn’t simply swept up all of the ancient caches years ago, but whoever was operating them now likely didn’t have quite the same finesse. Especially as it seemed likely this one had been modified, and so directly touched by whoever was responsible. “See if you can grab anything from this.”

  Ichabod’s clairvoyant muttered a few words, hands moving in arcane gestures as he cast his spells. Bits of mechanisms floated into the air, metal popping and pinging as magical forces warred with tinker skill and slowly dismembered the drone’s remains. Wheels and gears spun into the air alongside cogs and springs, pieces ranging from hand-sized to practically microscopic floating above the casing as Mocker pulled it apart. No particular piece stood out from any other, but the disturbing sense of dread that Mechaniacal’s designs imposed faded as Mocker dismembered it, and soon enough he pulled out something different from the rest.

  A tiny scrap of fabric, which moved to flutter above Mocker’s hand. For some reason it looked familiar, and by the warlock’s expression, he agreed. Arcane glyphs flashed around the thumbnail-sized bit of cloth as he interrogated it, then he sighed and turned to Ike.

  “A piece of Lunar Bolt’s uniform. Modified like the sample down in the lab. Tracing it beyond that just dead-ends; magical nullifiers in place.”

  “Ah.” Ike stared at it, needing to take a moment to dredge up all the relevant details from his memory. There were always enough ongoing crises that switching from one to another was sometimes difficult. “Our mysterious metas connect.”

  “Less mysterious than you might have hoped,” Mocker said. “We picked up Isaac Hartson this morning, and he believes, at least, that he is Dimetria, the meta who fought off Brawn-dude and Blue Blast, and the one responsible for this.” He reached out to snatch the cloth from the air. “And he claims to have no connection with the Mechaniacal technology, but rather, he’s been attacked by it.”

  “Which is still a connection,” Ike noted, glancing past Mocker at the perimeter drawn up by some of his less-mobile supers. Concretor, Steelbody, The Iron Lily; they were still vulnerable to the power suppressor, but anything else was going to have a tough time making it through, even from the air. “Where is this Isaac now?”

  “I put him in Interrogation Two,” Mocker said. “Thoughtstealer was monitoring, but…” Ike nodded and pressed the intercom button on his chair. Ordering Thoughstealer off to do a deep sweep would have taken her away from the observation room, which was unfortunate but had been necessary.

  “Thoughtstealer? What is the disposition of Isaac Hartson?”

  “One moment,” came Thoughtsealer’s precise syllables. Ike was patient; he’d already asked her to scan the crowd so there was no telling where she was. His telepath, unfortunately, required either physical proximity or a specific and very large tinker amplifier, and even then it took time for her to look for hostility or evil thought. “Isaac Hartson is no longer in the interrogation room.”

  “Mocker?” Ike didn’t waste time either bemoaning the situation or trying to find someone to blame. They had made the decisions they needed to at the time, and now that the warlock had actually made contact with the guy, tracking him down shouldn’t be too difficult. Once again Mocker began to chant, pulling a crystal focus from somewhere beneath his robes and waving his fingers at it. Then he sighed and put it away again.

  “Isaac Hartson, whoever he truly is, doesn’t exist at the moment.” Mocker shook his head. “Not dead, in abeyance like we’ve seen before. I am not certain whether it’s some bizarre aspect of his power, or if we still have to worry about a telepath. Yet, if he actually is each of those people…”

  “It would simplify matters immensely,” Ike agreed, and switched channels on his comms. “Vilmonica, find someone who’s free to do a search and grab. We have a subject that recently escaped Star Central custody, only minutes go. He couldn’t have gone far.”

  ***

  Isaac hoped Cayleb wouldn’t be in trouble for the broken door.

  After the alarms went off, Cayleb had – for obvious reasons – needed to skedaddle. Everyone in Star Central had places to be, and Isaac had taken that as his cue to leave. The door lock definitely hadn’t been up to the task of resisting his inertially-overcharged book, and he hadn’t looked out of place running along the hallways that strobed with the flashing red lights of an alarm. Everyone else was in the same headlong rush; the non-meta staff of Star Central taking shelter or going to their posts.

  The door to the parking garage had even been unlocked, though he couldn’t fault that, and he just followed the exit signs for the stairs going up. People had to leave somehow, especially during a crisis. He assumed that getting in would be harder — but either way, he was able to make it to the parking lot and across the way to duck into a nearby alley. One where there were no people or cameras in sight.

  What he really needed was another disguise, but he didn’t have anything on him, and not nearly enough time to even go buy new clothes. Though the artisan in him cringed at the idea, he took off his shirt and turned it into a durag, wrapping it around his head, then braced himself against the unpleasant noise and tore off the legs of his jeans, using the line between partial inertial imbuement where the fabric was just too weak to support the force of its own movement. It was definitely too chilly to be dressed that way, like some tweaking loser, but it probably made him nigh-unrecognizable.

  “Yakov Bolz,” Isaac said, naming the persona and leaning into the little bit of power flux that came with it, trying not to imagine a muscle lifting but rather just a force going in that direction. He wasn’t entirely certain how well it worked, but he tried to lean into what he was doing in general. It wasn’t clear to him if he could apply his power to something as nebulous as escaping from Star Central, but he’d take any help he could get.

  The city sirens came on, wailing in the distinctive way that urged people to take shelter. Isaac peered out of the alley, looking at the press pool and assorted bystanders who were still milling about, and strolled over to join them. As much as he wanted to run as far and as fast as he could, that would just make him an obvious target. Someone would come looking for him as soon as the current crisis was over, if not before.

  He had no idea what the telepath could do, so he did his best to keep his mind empty and just focus on what was going on around him as the gaggle of press people with their cameras herded themselves down to the nearest shelter. Star Central itself was, in fact, not one of those shelters as it was likely to be a target when something happened.

  Most people around him were talking about the incident, gesticulating excitedly as if they needed to rehash what they all had just seen with their eyes. Several of the reporters had dictaphones out, muttering into the recording tubes as they spun out a full account for the papers and news stations later on. On the other side of the spectrum, there were a few civilians, probably just super-fans, who looked shell-shocked. As well they might, seeing Glorybeam brought down.

  It was even colder in the reinforced concrete of the shelter than it was outside, and he had to keep himself from shivering by sheer willpower. Instead he held the springy, loose-jointed gait of the soft-drug types he’d seen, where somehow they seemed energetic despite all the nonsense they consumed, keeping his eyelids lowered as he let the crowd jostle him into the middle.

  “Star City’s own sovereign-class super was dealt a major blow today—”

  “Did you see them take out that drone! Like, bam, boom, right through the wall!”

  “For the eighth time, I already saw, I don’t need you to—”

  “Yeah, this is James, I’m in a shelter. Yeah? Yeah, good. Look, tell mom that she should pull the trigger on that move. Might be safer getting somewhere with another sovereign.”

  He wondered if the last person knew something, or was just panicking. So far as he knew, the knowledge that the suppressors were permanent was not common. He assumed Crash had told Blacktime, but there was no telling how far it had spread from there. And perhaps Crash hadn’t said anything – or hadn’t known – about the ranged capabilities.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Isaac did his best to blend in, eventually sitting down on one of the molded stone benches that came with the shelters and watching a reporter interview a fan about the incident. It would make for good television later, especially with one of the other reporters maneuvering a handheld diffuser to provide picture-perfect lighting despite the shelter’s overhead and the still-strobing alarm lights by the door. In the meantime, he leafed through the book he’d taken – The Motives and Methods of Sovereign Powers by J.D. Whittaker, required reading in high school – and carefully removed all the inertia from the pages.

  There was a small commotion at the front of the shelter, and Isaac glanced over to see a trio of supers in blue uniforms appear through the doorway, one of them hovering a head above anyone else and peering around. It was probably just paranoia, but he had the immediate thought they were there for him. A suspicion that was actually confirmed a moment later.

  “Isaac Hartson!” One of them called, the three supers studying the room. Isaac only barely kept himself from reacting, leaning into his vague-minded, hippie persona and joining the others in glancing around. It seemed that his acting passed muster, for after a moment the three left, one flying and the others moving at superhuman speeds.

  It was almost another hour before the alarms finally cut out. Some people left before then, but Isaac wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. So he shuffled out with everyone else, making the same complaints about the length of the emergency, and headed off into the city with an unhurried gait. The walk to the gym where he’d left his stuff seemed to take forever, especially since the streets were overrun with supers patrol, flying through the air or driving on branded cars or motorcycles. None of them gave him much of a look, following the sound of local sirens or emergency vehicles.

  When he made it back to the locker, ready to change back into warmer, non-ripped clothing, the radio armband he’d been issued was blinking red. Hurriedly he swapped back to the upscale David Jeffries clothes, left the gym, and found a sheltered stoop before pulling out his voice changer. He fumbled with the transmission stud, clicking it once and seeing the red light turn amber.

  “Ravdia here.”

  “Oh good,” Lia’s harried voice came only a moment later. “Calling you in early. Get back to headquarters, Brute Squad’s waiting on you. Star Central’s called out everyone. Seeing Glorybeam go down like that, and the fact that she’s not back yet, is making all kinds of people go crazy.”

  “Ravdia will be there momentarily!” Isaac said. With everything that had been going on, he’d forgotten that he had been scheduled for a patrol later in the day. He looked around for a place to change, finally hopping a gate into someone’s rear garden. Ducking into a corner next to a climbing trellis and behind a rhododendron, he donned Ravdia’s armor and was off again, skating along with his flails ready and his mind and body girded for trouble. If things were that bad, he might well get accosted on the way.

  Nobody actually stopped him as he headed toward the upscale areas, probably because they were upscale. But he still heard thuds and booms from the distance that indicated some sort of conflict going on. It would have been easier not to get involved, to stay out of the super-fights that he was so woefully equipped to participate in, but he felt some odd sense of responsibility. If he hadn’t retrieved that data, Greg wouldn’t have gone so hard after Glorybeam’s reputation and that press conference never would have occurred. A loose connection, but a connection nonetheless.

  Captain Multiples was waiting outside Justice for Hire, three versions of himself briefing different teams. Isaac recognized some of the people being addressed, including Victor Hardbody lingering at the edge of one of the teams. Each of the clones was dressed in a distinctive magenta-and-cyan bodysuit, the multiplier far more concerned about visibility than fashion. As Isaac skated up, the closest version lifted a hand and pointed at Savage, Bubs, and Stratum. The Brute Squad was considerably more suited up than he’d seen before; the cybernetic raptor clad completely in armor, Bubs with his dart bandoliers arranged around runed rods sticking out of his amorphous mass, and Stratum with glowing, sparking pink crystals embedded in its floating stone.

  “Train robbers!” Savage said with no small about of glee. “Come on!” He took off at a sprint, metal talons clicking on the asphalt, and Isaac spun about to follow. It was a shocking swerve from his morning, but even now he could hear the sounds of distant fighting, even gunfire. Perhaps Star Central had been too hasty in releasing the shelters — though, they were more meant for a single incident and not the current widespread unrest.

  Stratum simply sank into the asphalt without a ripple, and Bubs ignored mass and distance and flickered along like he really was a shadow. If anything, Isaac was the slowest among them, though if he were to go much faster he’d be out of control, operating as he did with merely human reflexes. How they were going to catch up with a presumably moving train, he didn’t know, so he simply focused on keeping up with Savage.

  It was with a strange sense of disconnection that he bounded up a fire escape, lowering his inertia to make it just a slight bit easier, and followed Savage out on a leap to the skywalk that crossed over the suspended rail. The train itself was visible in the distance, where the rail curved into view from elsewhere in the city, a heavy locomotive towing a score or so of freight cars. A part of him wondered exactly how good the dispatchers were to send a group that was close enough to actually intercept the thing.

  “You’ll be good to jump?” Bubs asked. Stratum wasn’t in evidence, but he was actually a scout rather than a heavy despite his looks. When the rock person got onto the train, it’d phase through the metal — or so Isaac thought. As he’d been warned, Stratum rarely communicated in any way outside of codes on the comms bracelets.

  “Yeah,” Isaac said. In fact, he’d probably be better off than any of the others, since with no inertia he wouldn’t suffer the effects of sudden acceleration when he jumped onto the train. The comms wrist clicked, a rapid staccato, and Bubs translated.

  “Fourth car back. Five of them.”

  “Right,” Isaac said, still feeling a bit out of it as he pulled inertia out of himself and then followed the other two in leaping off the skywalk and onto the train below, putting out his hand to grab onto the lip of the cargo wagon’s top hatch. His vision jerked as he went from still to moving at twenty-plus miles per hour in an instant, then he was re-establishing his inertia again as he followed the other two from car to car. The train cars vibrated underfoot, boxcars rattling and clanking while wind whipped by. If he hadn’t readjusted his inertia, that air resistance would have carried him off and away, and wouldn’t that have been embarrassing.

  At the fourth car, Savage beckoned for Isaac to go first. As the resident bruiser, he was sort of the frontline, though none of them were susceptible to ordinary bullets. He yanked up the top hatch – it wasn’t locked – and dropped down, his extra inertia making him land hard enough to make a thundering boom. Inside were five rough-looking probably-metas, trying to pry the lids off one of the stacked containers. Two were mutants, one with a carapace-like sheen over bulging muscles and the other with some kind of whip-tentacles growing out of his back, while the other three looked normal but were dressed oddly enough to imply low-level supervillain.

  Ravdia charged forward, a flail in each hand, as the non-mutants turned guns in his direction. While he wasn’t fully inertially invested – he hadn’t had time – when he did hit them it was like he was a small car, and the small man in all green with a tommy-gun went flying as Isaac shoulder-checked him. The little bit of training he’d gotten with Justice for Hire had shown that a shoulder or hip check wasn’t going to do more than crack bones for even non-metas. Not pleasant, but without much speed behind it the amount of force he could bring to bear wasn’t terribly dangerous. Unless he had something small and pointy, anyway.

  An electric crackle came behind him as Savage shot stun pellets from his guns with cybernetic accuracy. Isaac turned around to see one of the other toughs raise his hand, a whirl of crackling blue flames gathering in his palm. Hefting one of his flails, Isaac brought it around in an underhand swing, hitting the guy right on his rear.

  There were subtle differences between Isaac’s extra inertia and normal super strength, but the unsubtle one was that Isaac had a lot less control over how much force he hit people with. His power gave him an idea of how much inertia was in an object, at least once he’d invested it, but there wasn’t any special knowledge of how hard that truly hit. Part of his training from Lieutenant Big-Max had included what to target so he wouldn’t do too much damage, given how little control he truly had. Hitting someone’s back was actually a really bad idea, limbs were better, but the hip area was a good compromise for when he had little choice.

  The lightning-fire super yelped as he was launched forward a few feet, where Bubs poked him with one of the playing-dart weapons and let him drop. That turned out to be the last of the hijackers standing, and Isaac was struck both by how he hadn’t done much of anything – save soak up bullets – and by how fast the entire fight was. Admittedly, these were clearly common-class or lesser types, but they’d not stood a chance.

  A compartment in Savage’s armor opened and ejected a bag of tinkered zip ties into the air. Bubs snatched them and pulled out a handful for Isaac, the two of them taking the time to secure the would-be train robbers. Isaac wasn’t sure how well the zip ties would actually hold anyone with enhanced strength or fire-electricity powers, but it ultimately wasn’t his problem. Especially since he didn’t know how to secure supers with extra appendages.

  “Ravdia wonders what they were trying to steal,” Isaac said, peering at the crates.

  “Chloro-Gro,” Savage answered in his synthetic voice. “Like liquid gold in some places.” Isaac nodded understanding; he remembered vaguely from school that it had been Star City’s main export ever since Ike had recruited Greengrocer and Sunspot, but that was about all he knew. Not that it mattered, since their comm bracelets buzzed as Stratum was carrying the unconscious crooks out of the still-moving train to give them their next assignment.

  The next few days were a constant blur of activity, perhaps half fighting and half goodwill patrols, none of which Isaac enjoyed. He didn’t get a rush from dealing with bullets, magical bolts, or super-strength criminals — though thankfully the Brute Squad was never sent after anyone genuinely threatening. Most of it was just normal crime. He wasn’t sure if that was because the team wasn’t qualified for anything heavier, or if there was just so much ordinary chaos that the super-crime seemed diluted.

  The news was a constant flow of coverage about all kinds of small-time heists, robberies, and more significant attempts foiled by the top-tier supers that Star Central employed. It wasn’t that Glorybeam had, herself, been countering all these criminals, but rather there was a perception of weakness that had brought out many wannabe villains. Then the unrest, itself, fueled the courage of lesser men and women to commit their own crimes. That was the argument put forth by the news, anyway, and Isaac found it persuasive because he’d very rarely seen Glorybeam.

  His own small part in the chaos wore at him, though he wasn’t about to admit it to anyone. Star Central probably already knew he was involved in leaking the information, though, as he expected Cayleb would have reported everything once it was found out Isaac had fled the building. It was also the main reason he didn’t just quit despite how much he hated the fighting and wasn’t much interested in the policing in general, though at least he had the time and incentive to keep practicing shoving inertia into metaphysics. The extra crisis-pay didn’t hurt, either.

  Considering that he wasn’t up against much more than dregs and normal weaponry, it was hard to tell how much adding to Ravdia’s ontological inertia helped with things like bullet protection or, more esoterically, the inertia of a robbery-in-progress. Now and again he got a faint hint of some feedback from his power, and he seemed to be getting a better handle on his self-directed version, but it was still too ephemeral to make any firm conclusions.

  After the initial burst of activity was over, things calmed down slightly, enough that he actually had some time off. There was still a lot of gang and crime activity, but it wasn’t to the point where people were afraid to leave their houses, like it had been for the first day or so after what some wit at the Star City Times had nicknamed Gloryfall. No information had been released about her, but neither had she made any public appearances, so Isaac could only guess that Star Central didn’t know how to reverse the depowering.

  A week after the Glorybeam incident, he had his first full day off. Venturing out into the city, he switched not into his walking-around persona of David Jeffries, but into Lou. After everything that had been going on, he needed to ground himself, and thanks to all the activity he hadn’t been able to make time for his usual volunteer work. Something so ordinary and unambiguously constructive was exactly what he needed, and he was a little concerned that there’d be issues at the foster center with all the crime. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly the best, nor did it have anything important enough to incentivize much hero activity when things were strained. Like now.

  Indeed, as he pedaled up on his retrieved miricycle, he could see graffiti painted on the stone exterior. Just tags, nothing truly objectionable, but it still shouldn’t have happened. He sighed and wished for a moment that he had cleaning powers – though if he did no doubt SuperClean Solutions would have snatched him up just like they had all the other cleaning metas – before he headed inside.

  “Lou! Thank goodness!” Dolores waved at him the moment he crossed the threshold, looking a little harried. Not that he blamed her. While he was pretty sure she was some brand of meta, it certainly wasn’t something that would lend itself to fighting off hoodlums and super-criminals. “I’ve been keeping the inside mostly clean, but outside…”

  “I saw, Dolores,” he said, taking a moment and actually carrying his miricycle inside the vestibule. Just in case. Dolores unlocked the inner door for him, offering him the key to the janitor’s closet, and he headed down the hall, dodging children. They seemed a bit stir-crazy, probably because they hadn’t been able to get outside too much, but he remembered just being generally restless at that age.

  He pulled the janitor’s cart out of the closet, swapping some of the usual supplies for heavier-duty, outdoor cleaners and pushed it out to the front. The cart’s tiny castors rattled on the coarse concrete in a way that reminded Isaac of Ravdia’s shoes. Rolling to a halt in front of the graffiti, he pulled out a couple of spray bottles and a stiff brush to begin scrubbing off the brickwork. It was calm, meditative work, and he could feel himself relaxing a little bit as he sunk into Lou’s tasks. Simple and straightforward was exactly what he needed.

  “Hey, Mister Lou.” Isaac glanced over to see that Dolores had let at least one of the kids out, presumably because she trusted Lou to keep an eye on anyone who might want to hang out in front.

  “Hey, Davey,” he said. “Feeling better?” It’d been a couple weeks since Dolores had mentioned the flu, and David didn’t look under the weather, but sometimes these things lingered.

  “Yeah, I guess,” David said, prodding at the mop sticking out of the janitor’s cart. “Is everyone fighting out there?”

  Isaac glanced around. There were a few people on the sidewalks, but not many, and they hurried their steps rather than strolling at a normal pace. In the distance, sirens were a constant noise as emergency services and warning tones indicated attacks or incidents. In all the chaos, it wasn’t just criminal activity — there was the occasional awakening, too, someone gaining powers under stress, or a mystical artifact finding its wielder just in the nick of time.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” he said, a half-truth given how much time he’d spent fighting in the last week. But a lot of normal people were happy enough to surrender when confronted by supers, or to listen to someone who could help them take control of some wild ability they’d never had before. “I wouldn’t do too much walking around, though.” He would have liked to think that kids would be relatively safe, but he knew that wasn’t true, even in Star City.

  “Yeah, okay,” David said, bouncing the mop back and forth against the sides of the cart, a rhythmic thumping from a clearly bored little kid. Isaac just shook his head and went back to scrubbing, seeing no real harm in letting David hang out so long as he wasn’t going to take off somewhere or damage anything. At least until David piped up again.

  “Hey, look!” Something in David’s tone prompted Isaac to turn around, following the kid’s pointing hand, and he saw in the sky a set of metallic spheres, emerging from nowhere.

  Mechaniacal’s drones.

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