The Loop

Flight was one of the most common powers. It was also one of the coolest, as far as Priya was concerned, but not when you needed actual wings to accomplish it.

It was like winning the lottery and going to collect your winnings only to find out you were obligated to keep your money in cash and carry it around with you in a briefcase for the rest of your life. You'd rather have the money than not, obviously, but it still felt like a slap in the face. Especially when all around you, other people were winning the exact same jackpot but without any ridiculous stipulations.

“Priya, dear, please come out of your room. It's really not that big of a deal. Maybe if you just … wear a large coat, or something.” The words were spoken in Hindi, and it took Priya just a hair longer than most native speakers to sort through them. Back home it wouldn't have, but here she only spoke Hindi sparingly at home, and she was slipping. She added getting back in touch with her roots to the ever-growing to-do list in her head.

She snorted as her comprehension caught up with the words her mother had said. A large coat?

“Mom, I have six foot long, feathery wings attached to my back. They haven't yet invented a coat large enough to help with that. And even if I tried to shove them under a coat, all I'd end up accomplishing is looking like a humpback, like a different kind of freak.” She replied in English, or something that was about eighty percent English; she still used Hindi words in places where she knew her mother wouldn't know the English equivalent.

Through the door, she heard her mother sigh and walk away. She knew what her parents thought, that she'd been up in her room, sulking, crying, feeling sorry for herself. They still had this vision of her as a melodramatic teenager—to their credit, she had been exactly that for most of the last six or seven years. But she was an adult now, and something had changed in her. Maybe it was the natural hormonal changes that came with growing up, maybe it was having to take charge of the situation with her grandmother's dementia, the fact that her parents weren't comfortable enough with English to navigate the American nursing home system.

It was a point of contention that her grandmother was in a nursing home at all. Priya’s father believed that her grandmother should remain with them, a member of the household, to be taken care of by her family as long as possible. Her mother held that she was already past the point where they could effectively care for her, that they were doing her a disservice by not letting professionals handle it.

In the end, her mother had won, but it had been up to Priya to actually make it happen.

A lot of things in their lives in America had been handled by Priya alone. She'd applied to colleges without her parents' help, she'd gotten a job, she'd navigated the complex world of dating, where all her knowledge of norms and expectations had been thrown out the window and she'd had no one to teach her the new, local customs.

For her parents, she dealt with paying bills, with banking, shopping. She knew her parents understood English well enough to get by, but it was a problem of confidence.

Confidence that, if I'm being honest, I lack too. The thought crossed her mind as she stood in the center of her room—she'd already made the mistake of unfurling her wings closer to her bed and knocking everything off her nightstand—and brought her wings out to their full and glorious extension.

She looked at herself in the mirror, upper half naked except for a bra, and tried hard to see the beauty in the figure staring back at her. There was a disconnect there, because the wings were beautiful, and she was beautiful. But together, it was just … freakish.

To her mother's credit, she had cried a lot at the start. After she'd touched the orb and nothing at all had happened, she'd cried. What a letdown, she'd thought. And two days later when she'd reached around the back of her shoulder to scratch a persistent itch and felt a knob of bone and flesh, covered by fine downy feathers, she'd cried some more.

But now, two weeks later, she was done with crying. She accepted that she was a freak, she accepted that there was nothing to be done about that. She was grateful that she'd gotten something, at least, that she'd be able to fly.

Not everyone could say that. And maybe the flight alone wouldn't have been enough, wouldn't have been an adequate compensation for having to walk around with giant wings strapped to her back for the rest of her life, if it weren't for the other thing.

She reached out with her mind—not her thoughts, more like a sixth sense that she couldn't have put into words if she'd wanted to—and found dozens of Hypes within range of her power. Reconfigurable metal limbs, pass. Hallucination manipulation, no thanks. Shapeshifting? She wondered briefly at the potential that power offered. Could it allow her to shift into a form without wings?

She probed the power more deeply and came up disappointed. No, it only works for normal human features. Too limited, she thought.

Anyway, all those powers were at least eight blocks away, going by her best estimate of her power’s range. That was close to the limit of her power. The farther away they were when she borrowed them, the weaker they were, and the quicker they faded.

It was strange to see so many powers clustered together, though. If what her power was telling her was right, and she had no reason to doubt it, all of the powers she'd examined so far were congregated in the same general area. And what's more, they were all being actively used.

A fight, she thought. It had to be. Why else would so many Hypes be in the same area using their powers at the same time? Even in a densely inhabited city, it made no sense. There was an implicit desire among Hypes to keep their identities hidden, and that meant not using flashy powers unless you were in costume or you had no other choice.

She itched to get involved. Her wings twitched involuntarily even as she tried to fold them back in. Their movement was intuitive, and learning to use them hadn't been like learning to walk, more like remembering how to ride a bike after a few years of going without.

She understood that this natural understanding of one's powers was common—for many, mastery of all the nuances of the powers took practice and patience, but innate understanding of the basics was built-in.

She knew this because she researched powers a lot. It was almost all she did in her spare time, and since she'd hardly left the house since her wings had become too large to hide beneath ordinary clothing, she had nothing but spare time. The quest for knowledge was reasonable; who wouldn't want to understand as much as they could about their situation when giant wings sprouted from their backs?

And she had learned things about the wings, at least indirectly. She'd been reassured to find that permanent physical mutations—extra body parts; animalistic modifications; enlarged, elongated, or otherwise significantly altered limbs and organs—happened in between one and five percent of Hypes. It was common enough that there were official terms for people like her, such as Digressive Anomalous Hyperhumans—DAHs for short. There were also unofficial terms, like Freaks, Monsters, and Aberrations.

The unofficial terms were far more common in online discourse.

But in her quest for answers, she'd come across plenty of supplemental information about Hypes in general. Everything had to be taken with grains—large blocks, really—of salt, because Hypes were such a new phenomenon and little quality research had been done. But there was enough substance to some of it to convince her.

That was how she knew that she wasn't alone in grasping how to use her powers right away.

It was also how she knew that slight changes in personality, favoring impulsiveness and recklessness, were reported in over half of all Hypes.

She'd certainly noticed it in herself. And so far she'd ignored it, quashed it with reason and willpower. But she had to test her powers and satisfy her urges eventually.

Today's the day, she decided, pushing the myriad arguments against brash action to the back of her mind.

She opened her closet and pushed past the clutter of clothing hanging near the front. There, she thought, grabbing a folded bundle that was duct taped to the back wall and ripping it free. She was surprised by its weight every time she picked it up, and it took a fair effort to carry it across the room, even with the baseline boost in strength that nearly all Hypes got.

A quiver pulsed through her muscles and skin as she looked at the package with barely contained excitement. The time spent alone in her room hadn't been dedicated to research alone.

She placed the package down on her bed delicately, almost reverently. To think that her parents had once thought her BFA in Fashion Design from FIT would be useless. How wrong they were. She unwrapped the package and unfolded its contents, allowing herself a moment of pride in her handiwork.

The product of her labor was a black and gold sweater top with built-in armor padding from a dismantled bulletproof vest—you really can order anything online these days, she thought—a large golden falcon's head logo was emblazoned on the front and back, modified with straps and buckles so that it could be worn without interfering with her wings. Next to it she laid out a pair of golden track pants with more armor pads attached at the shins, knees, hips, crotch, thighs, and butt. She'd actually had a lot of fun testing and reconfiguring the arrangement of the armor, ensuring that she'd be able to move her legs freely. It had almost seemed redundant, making sure she could easily walk and run when she had wings attached to her back, but she'd grown up playing soccer and basketball, and the thought of having her legs constrained so that she couldn't easily move them was anxiety-inducing in the extreme. Up the legs of the pants, along the outside, were two stitched rows of black feathers. There was also a pair of black combat boots with golden wings stenciled on the sides, continuing the motif from the pants.

But the pièce de résistance, and the thing her eyes dwelled on the longest, was the helmet. It was a black motorcycle helmet with a tinted visor, with painted gold circles around the eyes and a sharp, golden beak made of steel attached to the front. The beak she'd had commissioned by an independent steel fabricator in the city. It was the one part of the costume she hadn't made herself, that someone else could trace back to her. But she'd used a fake name and an anonymous online payment service to order it, and anyway, she doubted the guy who made it would ever see it in action.

She almost couldn't believe that she was responsible for putting it all together. It was better than the vast majority of Hype costumes she'd seen so far, many of which were tacky morph suits with shoddy painted logos and lights or decorations hot-glued on. Even the nicer ones, like those worn by Brigadier or Mother of Exiles, were still made entirely of off the shelf components, never with the degree of fine detail or modifications hers possessed.

She wanted to make a name for herself, and the costume would go a long way in setting her apart, in establishing her as someone to take seriously.

She'd wanted to make a name for herself her whole life, but she'd only ever managed to come close to greatness, to be in its general vicinity. She’d been the second best student at Jaunpur Academy, always behind Aarya Bir, who also happened to be the prettiest, despite the fact that in any other school Priya’s looks would have made her a prize. She'd been a talented soccer player—she had to remind herself not to call it football in America—but never the star. She'd been good at many things, but never exceptional enough at any one to stand out. She was the girl her former classmates only remembered after much prodding, and even then they'd get her name wrong. ‘Do you remember that girl who made that awesome goal in the last game of our first year playing?’ ‘Hmmm, was she the one with the pigtails?’ ‘No, that was Samira.’ ‘Oh, you must mean Padma?’ ‘Yes, I think that's the one.’

At least, that's how she imagined such conversations must go. Even though she knew she'd never see any of those people again, it still bothered her. Just once, she wanted to be the one the people remembered, and not just because she had wings. But now she had the costume, too, and that was a start.

The irony was that if they remembered her now, it wouldn't be as Priya at all.

Peregrine, she thought. She wasn't sure why she'd picked the name, except that it was the first bird she thought of whose name began with ‘p’. Well, besides ‘Pigeon’, and she didn’t fancy being called ‘Pigeon Girl’. Besides, in NYC, it was only a matter of time before some Pigeon-themed Hype came along. They could have the name as far as she was concerned.

She’d still have the better costume.

But the costume couldn't do all the heavy lifting; she’d still need to actually do something worth noting. At least she wouldn't enter her first confrontation being laughed at from the start, though.

Step one, she thought, going over the plan she’d been brainstorming for the past weeks while methodically putting on her costume. Assess the situation, figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are.

She checked herself in the mirror obsessively with each new item added or adjusted.

Step two, pick a power to borrow. Whatever feels most useful to the situation at hand. This step was of the utmost importance, because after she'd borrowed a power, she'd have to wait for it to fade naturally before she'd be able to take another. She'd be locked into her choice for the duration of the conflict, unless it went on far longer than she wanted it to.

Step three, find an opening and make it count. It wouldn't work every time, but for her emergence into the spotlight, she wanted to have the element of surprise on her side. She wanted to swoop in and save the day in a way that left the bad guys scratching their heads and wondering what hit them, and the good guys slapping her on the back and thanking her for her timely appearance.

She knew it was a childish fantasy. Nevertheless, she couldn't shake it loose.

The last strap buckled, the final zipper zippered, the fit checked and checked again, the movement of the legs tested with kicks and squats, she stood and admired herself in the mirror. She kept the wings folded for now. She didn't want to risk knocking anything over and alerting her parents to the fact that she was in full costume, about to sneak out her bedroom window and fly recklessly into an undoubtedly dangerous situation with no idea how she was going to come out the other side alive.

Her heart raced. Her blood hammered loud and thunderous through her ears, her neck, her arms. She checked her boot laces one final time, reached out with her power to ensure that the people she'd sensed before were all still in the same place, all still using their powers.

She took a deep breath that did nothing to slow her heart or calm her and pushed up the window anyway, not giving herself enough time to deliberate or rethink her actions. She let the warm, fresh evening air warm her nostrils and cool her thoughts.

This is it, she thought. My time to shine.

She stepped out the window, pushing herself off from the sill with a powerful kick and allowing her wings to unfold. She didn't have time to appreciate the sunset-colored sky over the New York City skyline as her brain fought hard to reorient her vision. She hurtled toward the ground as her wings beat as hard as she could manage, and she almost had time to think what a mistake she was making before they provided the necessary lift to keep her from smashing into the pavement below.

Then the adrenaline took over. And the joy.

——————

With a facile, unencumbered grin, she landed on a rooftop across the street from the scene of the battle that she'd felt unfolding as she flew over, as the last light bled from the sky and the streetlights clicked on. Her power didn't give her enough information to form a clear picture of what was going on across the street; it only told her what powers the people inside possessed and when they were active. It couldn't tell her what they were being used for, or who was fighting whom. She'd still need eyes on the situation to determine those things.

There was a momentary lull in the action and she took a running leap, pumping her wings to keep herself aloft just long enough to clear the street and land on the building inside which the fighting had been taking place. She creeped over to a smashed skylight and peered over the edge to the scene below.

She recognized a few of the figures down there from their costumes. Mother of Exiles and Brigadier were there, and a few other New York locals who she'd seen blurry pictures of online but who hadn't announced their pseudonyms publically. There was also a man wearing the outfit of a Catholic priest, and she’d followed the underground Hype news enough to know who he was. She shivered, for the first time considering that she might be getting herself into something she couldn't handle.

“Ingress, you mind helping us out?” she heard someone below her say, one of the non-locals.

Her grin faded as she examined the scene more closely. It looked like she'd taken too long to get here. The battle was over. The bad guys, including the priest, were being cuffed by two of the local Hypes she recognized but whose names she didn't know, while one of the other New York heroes was opening a portal and the out-of-towners she didn't recognize were being sent through. Brigadier was bloody and limping and being tended to by another local Hype, a young looking guy.

I was too slow, she thought. I missed the action. Why did I waste so much time looking at myself in the mirror? She felt an odd dejection, as if having missed the chance to put her life in danger was the most terrible thing she could imagine.

Her power picked up on something strange, an anomaly: one of the bad guys had a bunch of different power signatures, and each of them matched one of the four New York heroes whose names she didn’t know. It was unlike anything she'd seen before. This close, she could more than just sense the powers, she could actually see them like an aura around the Hypes who possessed them. This close, they called to her, like the voice of desire, saying ‘choose me! Choose me!’

And she could see the links between the Hypes. All those who had received powers from the same orb had immaterial lines linking their auras together: the five out-of-towners were connected in this way, as were Brigadier and Mother of Exiles. Curiously, the four other local heroes she recognized were linked not only with each other, but also with the villain who somehow had each of their powers. The line connecting him to them was tenuous and blurry somehow, but it was definitely there. Could he have gotten powers from the same orb as them, but then turned on them? But then why does he have the exact same powers they do? No, she concluded, something even stranger was definitely going on.

As the non-local heroes were making their way over to the portal, she heard the distant sound of sirens approaching. She made a snap decision and grabbed the first power that seemed like it would help her. Help me what? she thought, but she didn’t stop long to consider. She had a half-formed plan and she wasn’t about to stop and change course, not now.

Grasping the nuances of the power as soon as she borrowed it, she folded the light around her body to make herself invisible and hopped down through the skylight, using her wings to ease herself down as the last of the out of town group made their way through the portal. She winced at the whooshing sound her wings made, and again at the dull fwump as her feet met the floor.

“Did you hear something?” asked the young Hype whose power she was using, as he helped Brigadier to his feet and looked around. Two of the others shrugged.

“Wind through the broken skylight?” suggested Mother of Exiles. “The sound of the portal closing, maybe?”

“Maybe,” said the boy, sounding unconvinced.

She wasn’t yet sure what exactly she was doing—she’d planned for a flashy, triumphant fight, not whatever sort of surreptitious thing she’d begun without much thought—but she knew she was curious about the man with the powers of the four heroes. She hadn’t read much about power sharing or stealing or borrowing online, and as far as she knew, she was the only such case so far. Of course, there was no incentive for any Hype to volunteer that sort of information about themselves, so you mostly ended up relying on rumors and hearsay as reported by laypeople who witnessed Hypes doing inexplicable things and tried to guess what their powers were. As such, there was scant information about what powers actually existed.

Still, his was an interesting case, unlike anything she’d ever sensed before with her own power, and since her grand heroic entrance had been taken from her, she wanted to at least follow up on her curiosity. It was a sort of consolation prize.

She waited, tucked away in a corner where she could still see and hear everything that was going on. She was invisible, but that didn’t mean no one could brush up against her or bump into her, so staying away from people seemed prudent. She tried to make as little noise as possible, keeping her breathing shallow and becoming more and more certain that the pounding of her heart would give her away.

“So how did you four come to be a team?” Brigadier asked, making small talk with the other four as they all waited for the authorities to arrive.

“We—that is to say Quintain and myself—already worked together in a … professional capacity. Ingress and I volunteered together. And Flare …” The man who she took to be the leader of the group faltered, clearly not sure how much information to give out. Even amongst those they considered friends and allies, Hypes could be cagey.

Not for the first time, Peregrine felt a degree of shame at her own power. Because she could sense other Hypes’ powers, because she could see the aura around them, disguises and pseudonyms were meaningless to her. She would recognize a Hype on the street for what they were, and if she’d encountered them before in costume, she’d know their identity immediately. It felt like such an invasion of privacy that even thinking about it caused her cheeks to flush. It was like peeping through a window to watch someone undressing.

But she couldn’t turn it off, and she’d have to find a way to live with it. Sometimes, she even allowed herself the fantasy of using her power to catch a villainous Hype in their civilian identity. She wasn’t sure how much glory there’d be in that. Mostly it would just feel hollow, she figured, like cheating.

“They volunteered at the homeless shelter where I spent a lot of my nights,” continued the young Hype, Flare. “What?” he added, shrugging sheepishly at his team leader. “We have to extend some trust sometimes, or the good guys are never going to be able to work together.”

“That’s a good observation, kid,” said Mother of Exiles. “But you’re going to want to be careful how much you say while we’re in earshot of a bunch of detained criminal Hypes.”

“Noted,” said Flare, his head pointed firmly at the ground. Peregrine imagined that his cheeks were probably flushed, but they needn’t have been; the villains were almost certainly out of earshot, and anyway, what could they do with that little tidbit of information, even if they had been able to hear it?

“Ah, give the kid a break,” said the woman she took to be Ingress, the one who’d opened the portal earlier. “He’s right, Cerebro, we all need to start working together, and that means not being so fearful around one another. Brigadier and Mother of Exiles trusted us enough to bring us to their headquarters, there’s no reason we can’t at least explain to them how we all know each other.”

“You can call us ‘The Vindicators’, when you’re talking about both of us,” said Brigadier.

“Oh, God,” moaned Mother of Exiles. “Not this again.”

“What?” he snapped back at her. “It’s a good name.”

Peregrine stifled a laugh. Their public image seemed so proper and dignified and no-nonsense that she never would have imagined them squabbling over a silly team name. She wondered if they had headquarters all over the city, because she lived close enough to this one that she’d been able to sense the fighting from her bedroom, but she’d never picked up on just the two of them here before.

Thinking about how close she’d been to this location made her wonder about how long it was taking the cops to get here. They must have phoned the authorities before she got inside, because she’d been hearing sirens since she’d arrived, and yet there was still no one coming inside. She wanted to move up to the roof again, to see if she could spot the cop cars coming down the street, but she feared detection.

She worried that Flare, whose power she was currently using, would see through her illusory manipulation of light, but curiously he didn’t seem any more aware of the bending of the light than anyone else. She hadn’t had much opportunity so far to actually field test her power-borrowing ability, but she theorized that a caveat might exist that allowed her to use her borrowed powers in such a way that their original users weren’t immune to them. Warrants further investigation, she thought.

She was waiting to see what the heroes were going to do with the villains they’d rounded up, but so far there was little movement on that front. At any given time, a few of the heroes were keeping a watchful eye on the villains, powers at the ready in case they tried anything. The villains—and their unpowered underlings—sat against a wall with their hands cuffed behind their backs. Actually, one of the Hypes was missing his arms and was instead bound around his waist to a radiator. Peregrine noted the blood at the stumps where his arms ended and concluded that he'd lost them in the fight. There wasn't as much blood as there should have been, but with powers, anything was on the table.

She listened absentmindedly, past her own racing thoughts and anxiety, as Mother of Exiles explained to the other heroes that this was their usual procedure, that the police—when they arrived—would come with tools to suppress the villains’ powers while they were transported to a secure location.

Finally, a mix of boredom and curiosity forced her out of her hiding spot. She unfurled her wings, careful to not let them brush up against anything accidentally and give her away. She bent at the knees and launched herself into the air, giving her wings a solitary, powerful flap in tandem with her leap. It was enough to get her up and through the skylight again, but too much to go completely unnoticed. The various Hypes below her were all on their feet now, their features tense as they looked around or else looked at each other for an explanation. None of them looked up, except for the one called ‘Cerebro’, who seemed to look straight at her, even though she was still invisible.

It gave her an eerie feeling that she was still shaking off as she approached the edge of the roof to see what the hell was taking the police so long.

But she felt them before she saw them. Two Hypes, a man and a woman, accompanied a small cadre of armed SWAT officers, regular NYPD patrol officers, and others who looked like they might have been FBI Agents, but their jackets lacked any identifying acronyms. The former held rifles and riot shields. The latter wore black ballistics vests overtop of blue jackets and white dress shirts and ties, and held pistols pointed down at the ground. The two Hypes were with the latter group, indistinguishable from the rest but for the solid black masks they wore that covered their entire heads.

Evidently, they’d shut off their sirens as they got closer, to make their approach more stealthily. Even Peregrine, with her ability to sense Hypes, had been too preoccupied with what was going on inside the building to have noticed their approach.

Or … or else they’re just harder to detect than other Hypes, she thought. Yeah, that felt right. There was something about them that made their auras duller, their powers more muted. In fact, even this close to them, she only had a very vague sense of what their powers were. The man’s power involved affecting other powers somehow. And the woman … she couldn’t even begin to guess what her power was.

Blue, she thought. Blue and sunset and stars and something very, very dark. Images came to her in bursts when she focused on the woman’s power, but there was nothing concrete besides a feeling that she definitely didn’t want to fuck with this woman.

The officers, agents, and Hypes were moving around the building, looking for an entrance where there wasn’t one, at least not in the traditional sense. In her admittedly brief investigation of the building, Peregrine had determined that all the regular exits had been bricked over.

Still, the authorities on the ground seemed to have figured this out, and were congregating around the points where the entrances used to be. Then they waited and watched as a white van pulled up and six more agents emerged. These ones wore what looked like gas masks and night-vision goggles on their heads and heavy gloves on their hands. Each one carried a briefcase. They approached the female Hype, who appeared to give them orders, although Peregrine couldn’t hear what was said from this high up.

Peregrine watched as the SWAT officers placed explosive charges on the walls at the points where the entrances had once been. Peering back down through the skylight, she saw that the heroes finally seemed aware that their building was surrounded.

“Wait!” shouted Brigadier from within. “Don’t blow the goddamn place up!”

Mother of Exiles flew up through the skylight and passed within five feet of Peregrine as she launched herself toward the waiting officers below.

Brigadier, meanwhile, was drawing on his power to create little spheres of blue light in his hands. He threw them at the walls behind which the officers were gathered. The spheres detonated silently, expanding outward into much larger spheres that seemed to erase everything within them.

No, she thought, not erasing. Instead, they turned the walls and any objects caught within their radius translucent, neon blue outlines standing out in sharp contrast to transparent white space.

“You can come through, now,” said Brigadier calmly.

The officers seemed hesitant to pass through the power effect, even though they could clearly see the inside of the building through the ghostly holes the grenades had created.

To reassure them, Mother of Exiles passed back and forth through one of the holes.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Peregrine heard the female Hype shout at her men. “Quit being such pussies.”

She and the male Hype passed into the building from opposite ends, moving toward one another in the middle. Brigadier approached them from a perpendicular angle with his hand extended.

“Mr. X,” he said. “Ms. Y. Good to see you both again.”

Peregrine didn’t miss the fact that he hesitated for a fraction of a second before shaking the woman’s hand.

He’s scared of her, she thought. And, for a reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she was too.

The two Hypes with the police coordinated with the heroes on scene to round up the villains, corralling them in a small space outside the door to the bathroom. Here, the men with the briefcases approached.

Peregrine had to shift her position and get closer to the action than she was comfortable with in order to crane her neck and see what was inside the briefcases as the agents opened them. The answer was underwhelming. Inside each briefcase was what looked like a collection of black beanies with chin straps underneath.

The agents fitted the beanies onto the villains while the local heroes chatted with Mother of Exiles and the Hype who was called Mr. X a little ways away. Peregrine moved in closer to hear them.

“—not exactly what I was expecting, is all,” the boy whose power she was borrowing was saying. “I mean … hats?”

“They’re not just hats,” said Mother of Exiles. “They’re actually incredibly sophisticated devices. Prototypes still, as a matter of fact. But we’ve already been on site for several arrests where they were employed and I can confirm, the results have been incredible.”

“We’re hoping to get manufacturing up to speed to deploy them nationwide,” Mr. X supplied.

“And they do what exactly?” asked Ingress.

“Suppress powers,” said Mr. X. “Not completely erased, but down to maybe one percent of full capacity, speaking very roughly. And, if that wasn’t enough, they leave a lingering effect even after they’re removed, so that it might take several hours after they’re taken off before a Hype gets full use of their powers back.”

“And who developed them?” asked Cerebro. “Where did they come from? I don’t suppose they fell to earth from some unknown source, same as the orbs?”

“That’s … classified,” said Mr. X. “But I can tell you one thing: they’re based on my power. I can suppress the power of a single Hype at a time, turning them into a normal human as long as my focus remains on them. The devices were built by a team of people who can reverse engineer powers and create tech that mimics them. As I said, these are only prototypes. The finished product will hopefully be more robust and not look quite so—”

“—Not quite so fucking ridiculous,” finished Ms. Y, approaching the group. Peregrine shuddered as the woman passed by her. Although it wasn’t strictly necessary, she folded her wings in tighter and shrunk into herself, away from any possible contact with Ms. Y.

She watched as the rest of the Hypes reacted. All but Mr. X visibly recoiled at being spoken to by this woman, although Mother of Exiles did the best job of concealing her reaction.

“We’re pretty much done here,” said Ms. Y. To her partner she added, “let’s wrap this up and get back to base.”

The uniformed officers and the gas mask-wearing agents stepped into formation around the villains, who were now shackled both mentally and physically, and started marching them toward the door—or, rather, the disruption in space created by Brigadier’s power. Mr. X and Ms. Y followed at a casual pace.

Peregrine noted that none of the cops or agents taking orders from them seemed to have any abnormal fear reaction to the Hype woman. Maybe it’s part of her power, she mused. Some sort of ability to intimidate Hypes subconsciously?

She wasn’t used to not immediately knowing the details of a Hype’s powers, and she found it immensely frustrating to be so in the dark. She tried hard to concentrate on the two of them—Mr. X and Ms. Y both—to get a better read on their powers, but the harder she tried to grasp them, the further away they seemed to get. And pressing her power up against the woman’s caused such an immediate panic response that she nearly dropped everything to flee the premises, and it took a great effort of willpower to remain where she was.

“Where are you taking them?” Cerebro asked. Brigadier and Mother of Exiles looked at him and shook their heads, as if to say ‘don’t bother’.

“Classified,” responded Ms. Y.

“What are you going to do with them?” asked Ingress.

“Classified,” said Mr. X.

Peregrine watched them moving away and made another snap decision. If she wanted to learn more about the guy whose power seemed to mimic those of Cerebro’s group, she’d have to follow the apprehended villains and their escort.

And there was something else. Her fascination with any powers that interfered with other Hype’s powers was growing, and whatever Mr. X and Ms. Y’s powers were, they seemed to be somewhere in that domain. Learning more about them might help her understand her own power better.

She told herself it was all in the pursuit of becoming a better hero, whenever the opportunity to actually do some heroics finally presented itself. But at this point, she just wanted to get something out of this night, for sneaking out her window to not have been a complete waste of time.

She followed behind them at a safe distance, hesitating only for a fraction of a second before passing through the area affected by Brigadier’s power. As soon as her feet were on the pavement outside, she took to the sky, flying upward and landing on a nearby rooftop to watch the procession as the prisoners were loaded into vans driven by the agents. The regular cops got into their squad cars and left, but Mr. X and Ms. Y made the agents wait in the vans for them while they stood on the corner and lit cigarettes. The streetlight directly above them was burnt out, and from Peregrine’s vantage, they appeared half obscured by shadow, the lit tips of their cigarettes the only thing showing where their heads were. It mirrored the way she was hiding in a way that seemed almost intentional.

She would have wanted to get closer to them to hear what they were saying, but she could tell even at this distance that neither of them was speaking. She kept her distance and before long the two of them crushed their cigarette butts under their heels, rolled the bottoms of their masks back down, and got into the passenger seats of two different vans. Peregrine heard the engines start and took to the sky again, following the taillights of the vans at a reasonable distance as they carried the Hyperhuman criminals and their captors through a maze of streets. Eventually, the vehicles passed into Holland Tunnel, and Peregrine had to fly across the Hudson and hope that she’d see them emerge on the other side; there was no way she could reasonably navigate through the tunnel while flying. To her relief, they did emerge a few minutes later and she continued her pursuit as they made their way into Jersey City.

They traveled Southwest for a long time, and with each minute and every mile, Peregrine became increasingly anxious about how long she’d been using Flare’s power to keep herself concealed. From the few tests she’d conducted, she knew that if she was close to a Hype when she borrowed their power, it could last for a good few hours, which gave her some time yet. Still, the clock was ticking.

Wherever they were headed, she hoped they’d get there soon.

A little after midnight, the vans approached a small, private ferry terminal on the Westside of Bayonne. She watched from a distance as the vans boarded a massive ferry, but only half her attention was on the convoy she’d followed there. The thing that kept snatching her focus away was the insistent draw on her power that was produced by only one thing in the world: Hyperhumans. More than she could count. More than she’d ever encountered in all of New York City.

And they were all right here. If her power was telling the truth—and she had no reason to suspect otherwise—they were all aboard the ferry that the vans had just driven onto.

No, she thought. Not on the ferry. Under it.

And yes, she realized, that was exactly right. The ferry was a decoy, a red-herring. It probably wasn’t even operational. But underneath it, in what must have been some sort of subterranean, subaquatic facility hidden beneath Newark Bay, were housed hundreds of Hyperhumans. All of their powers were subdued so that she could hardly sense them, and if there hadn’t been so many of them packed so tightly together, they might have gone unnoticed even to her. At this distance, the powers were so diminished that she couldn’t distinguish between them or determine what they did. All she knew for certain was that they were there.

She stood precariously on an overhead floodlight that looked over the ferry terminal—at least, it would have been precarious for anyone else; a side-effect of her physical power was enhanced balance, a necessity for winged flight—and from this vantage point she could see what those on the ground would have trouble discerning: routine guard patrols, people who were standing around looking a little too casual but who were actually keeping a sharp eye on the world around them, weapons concealed but never out of reach. There were shipping containers and fences arranged in a way that appeared almost careless at first, but upon closer inspection was clearly deliberate, intended to confuse and slow down any would-be assault.

It was the hardened, heavily guarded entrance to a top-secret military facility, and it was hidden in plain sight.

She couldn’t afford to stay up high forever. She’d need to get closer to find a way into the ferry and whatever lay beneath it. She managed to work up the courage to move in, and had just landed on the pavement in front of the ramp that the vans had used to board the ferry, intending to follow the route she’d seen them take as far as she could, when a woman’s voice called to her from her right.

“Hey, you there!”

She looked down at her body, reassuring herself that Flare’s power was still with her, that she remained invisible. Probably talking to someone else, she thought, her heart pounding as she took another step forward.

“You should probably stop,” said a man’s voice from her left.

She looked both ways, aware suddenly of what her power had been screaming at her since she’d landed. The two Hypes she’d followed, Mr. X and Ms. Y, were leaning casually against fences on either side of her, and somehow they’d evaded her notice until now. And what’s more, somehow they were noticing her.

“It’s okay,” said Ms. Y. “The invisibility is neat, but you’re not fooling us any more than invisibility alone would fool your power.”

“We’ve known you were following us since before we left that headquarters in New York,” said Mr. X. “We were kind of hoping you’d reveal yourself before we had to do this, but … well, here we are.”

She hadn’t spoken yet, some part of her still clinging onto the fantasy that they weren’t talking to her. She gave up the fantasy quickly when they both took a step toward her, perfectly in sync.

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“Like I said, kid, it’s fine,” said Ms. Y. “We can’t let you go any farther, obviously.”

“At least not without having a little chat first,” said Mr. X.

When he spoke, Peregrine was nervous, like a child caught doing something naughty by an adult. But when the woman, Ms. Y, spoke, she was petrified, caught in a sort of fight or flight response that she couldn’t credit, and too scared to do either.

“I’ll just … I can just go,” she managed to stammer. “Pretend I didn’t see … because I didn’t really see, you know … all this.”

To her surprise, the man and the woman both laughed lightly.

“Turn it down a little, Marissa,” Mr. X said, his voice suddenly seeming a little warmer and kinder. “Can’t you see you’re scaring the poor girl half to death?”

“No,” said Marissa. “I can’t see her at all, Jimmy, and neither can you.”

They both laughed again, and to Peregrine’s immense relief, the terror she felt at the woman’s voice and presence faded drastically until it was something more like a slight wariness, an easy to ignore concern in the back of her mind.

“Sorry, kid,” Marissa said. “I forget to turn off that part of my power sometimes. The people here have been exposed to it so long that they’ve developed a tolerance, and Jimmy here is an orbmate of mine, so he’s immune.”

Finally, feeling safe enough to let her guard down, Peregrine turned off Flare’s power. It had been growing weak anyway, requiring constant focus to keep the light bent around her. It probably would have failed before she made it far into the ferry, even if she hadn’t been waylaid by this strange pair.

“Who are you? What is this place?” she asked, looking between the two of them. She felt more at ease just knowing they had names, and such ordinary names, too. Jimmy? Marissa? When she looked at them now, she saw two ordinary people wearing suits and silly masks. There was nothing too intimidating about any of it.

“We’re government agents,” said Jimmy.

“We’re Hyperhumans, obviously,” said Marissa.

“And we’re unique. Unique enough that we were recruited pretty early on to spearhead the U.S. government’s Criminal Hyperhuman Taskforce.”

“And here’s the thing, kid—and the reason we stopped you to talk instead of just arresting you on suspicion of espionage—you’re unique, too.” Marissa’s face twisted under her mask in what Peregrine knew was a smile.

“Can you guess how?” asked Jimmy.

“I can sense powers … Hyperhumans, I mean.”

“Bingo,” said the other two in unison.

“And I’m guessing you guys do too?”

“That’s correct,” said Marissa. “Anyone with the ability to manipulate other Hyperhumans’ powers has to have some innate power to sense them.”

“At least, that’s the rule for everyone we’ve encountered so far,” Jimmy said, stressing the last two words. “We can never know anything with absolute certainty when it comes to Hypes.”

“Okay, but you don’t have to be so pedantic all the time, Jimmy. Obviously the girl—what’s your name by the way?—anyway, obviously she knows what I meant.”

“I’m Peregrine,” she said, breathless and reeling from the fast paced exchange happening between the other two, not sure which one of them to look at.

“Your name is Peregrine?” said Jimmy. “Like a Peregrine Falcon? Your parents actually named you that?”

“Do I sense a slight Indian accent?” asked Marissa. “It’s a very pretty name, at any rate.”

“It’s not … I mean that’s just my Hype name. My real name is Priya.”

She wasn’t sure how wise it was to let her guard down to this degree, but she hadn’t shown them her face yet at least, and Priya was a common enough name among Indian immigrants in America.

“What are your powers, by the way?” she asked. “I had a lot of trouble getting a read on them.”

“That’ll happen with anyone else like us. We can sense powers, probably not in the exact same way that you can, but we can’t sense each other’s powers with any degree of clarity.” Jimmy’s voice was precise, his diction perfect. He sounded almost excited, like he’d take any chance to nerd out about powers.

“Well, you were there when Jimmy gave a brief explanation of his power to ‘The Vindicators’ and those other New York guys, and don’t act like you weren’t.” Marissa snickered when she said the name of Brigadier and Mother of Exile’s team, like it was too ridiculous to take seriously. Peregrine smirked at it too.

“Basically, I see the current strength output of someone’s power, and I can push it downward to basically nothing,” Jimmy said. “When I’m using my power actively like that, it takes all my focus, and my ability to sense other power’s disappears. That said, I can turn it off and switch targets on the fly.”

“And, as you got an unpleasant taste of, I have a passive power that makes me seem highly terrifying to other Hyperhumans, which I have to concentrate to turn off,” said Marissa. “And I have an active power that makes me variably immune to Hyperhuman attacks.”

As the conversation carried on, they had made their way aboard the ferry, and Peregrine followed without even really noticing that her feet were moving; she was so engrossed in what they were saying that they could have led her into a gas chamber and she wouldn’t have skipped a beat.

“Variably immune?” she asked.

“As in, the closer a Hype is to me, the stronger the immunity is. If I focus very hard, I can make myself completely immune to a given Hype’s powers, but only at the cost of making myself vulnerable to others’. It’s a fine balance.”

“Cool wings, by the way,” said Jimmy. “We’ve found that a significantly higher percentage of Digressive Anomalous Hyperhumans among Hypes with power-manipulating powers, or PMPs, which highlights an interesting—”

“Jimmy, Jesus, the kid doesn’t give a fuck about this nerdy shit.”

“She might, if you’d bother to ask. Not everyone is as unimaginative as you, Mar.”

“Where are we going?” Peregrine asked. They passed rows of cars parked in the guts of the giant ferry, every one of them looking as if it hadn’t been moved in weeks except for a few white or black panel vans parked near the entrance. They turned away, into what Peregrine expected to be a stairwell leading up to the upper deck for passengers. Instead, it was a doorway that led to a stairwell that spiraled down and down so far that she couldn’t see the bottom of it from the top.

“We’re going to talk to our boss. His name’s Trojan, and he’s the guy you need to talk to if you want the job.” Jimmy spoke matter-of-factly, as if this was all part of an ongoing discussion they’d already had.

“Sorry,” said Peregrine, struggling to keep up with the other two on the narrow stairs even as she tried to keep up with what they were saying. Her wings, even while tucked in, kept bumping into the walls and railing. “What job are we talking about?”

“Well, you’re obviously a hero, or at least hero-aligned, or you would definitely have tried to bust out the villains or hurt the heroes while you thought you were concealed,” said Jimmy.

“And since you followed us here at all, it’s clear that you have a curious and inquisitive mind, and are interested in not just learning more about powers, but actually doing something with them,” said Marissa.

“And since Hypes with PWPs are relatively rare, and we have a vested interest in getting as many of them on our side as we can …” Jimmy continued. Peregrine noticed that the two of them had an uncanny tendency to finish each other’s thoughts. Telepathy? she thought. But no, they’d been pretty upfront about their powers, and she didn’t think they’d been lying. They’re siblings, she realized with a start. Although she’d grown up an only child, she’d noticed in many of her friends a strange sort of closeness of mind between siblings, as if the combined forces of nature and nurture consistently created people who were so close to one another that their thoughts were nearly interchangeable. It was something she’d always been envious of.

“Trojan will definitely want to offer you a job. And if you have a brain, you’ll accept.”

“What happens if I don’t?” Peregrine asked, suddenly wary of this woman again, aware that she’d let her guard down and allowed herself to be led into a confined space with two intimidating Hypes and who knew how many unpowered guards just outside, and all because they spoke quickly and with a certain undeniable charm. She had half a mind to try to fly back up the stairs and escape, but she knew the space was too cramped to effectively use her wings, and there weren’t any other useful powers nearby that she was able to borrow, so escape wasn’t really an option.

“If you don’t?” said Marissa. “Then you don’t. Then you go back to Manhattan or wherever you’re from and go on with your life.”

Relief flooded through her so quickly that it felt like whiplash. These two had her simultaneously at ease and on edge and she wasn’t sure what to make of that. Likely it was just strange power interactions causing conflicting feelings, she decided.

“You said I’d accept the job if I had a brain, I thought you meant—”

“She meant that this job is fucking awesome, and only an idiot wouldn’t want it. You’re allowed to be an idiot, though. We won’t hold it against you.” Jimmy’s voice was warm and almost playful now, a laugh hiding just beneath the surface. His demeanor put her more fully at ease.

“And here we are,” said Marissa, stopping abruptly in front of a solid wall. Peregrine barely managed to keep herself from running into the back of the other two.

“Don’t be nervous, kid, but we have to pass by the inmates to get to Trojan’s office.”

“Stupid design decision. They can’t hurt you, though,” Marissa was quick to add. “Their cells are lined with tech based on Jimmy’s power. They’re basically normal humans as long as they’re here.”

Without further warning, the two of them stepped forward, walking straight through the solid steel wall, which flickered and stuttered slightly, and Peregrine saw it for what it was, an immaterial forcefield. She stepped through after them, and couldn’t help gasping at the view on the other side.

It was an impossibly high-ceilinged room, with cells like cubicles arranged in neat rows stretching as far as she could see in every direction. Only a small handful of cells actually had someone in them, but clearly they had prepared for the possibility of housing thousands of inmates.

As if reading her mind, Jimmy said, “no one really knows how many orbs there are or what percentage of the population is or will become Hypes, so the people who built this place went a little overboard.”

As they passed through rows of jeering, angry-faced prisoners in gray jumpsuits, a million questions rushed through Peregrine's mind, too quickly to latch onto long enough to actually ask most of them.

“Are these people being held … indefinitely?” she asked after they'd gone a little ways. “Are they even given trials?”

“No and yes,” said Marissa without hesitation. “They're given the same due process as everyone else, only quicker.”

“Because of the potential harm they pose, they're held here or in similar locations around the country while they await trial, but the whole process is expedited. They see trial and conviction and sentencing much more quickly than an ordinary criminal. And if they're sentenced to jail time, they come back here to serve their sentences.”

“The ones you watched us pick up are currently being processed into a higher level for short term holding. We brought them all in for convenience’s sake, although some of them aren't Hypes and will quickly be sent on to other facilities.”

“All this has been set up pretty quickly,” said Peregrine. In truth, she was somewhat suspicious of the whole thing. It felt like there couldn't possibly have been enough time to set something like this in motion; it had only been a few months since the orbs had fallen to earth and Hypes had started showing up. This facility alone seemed like it would have taken years of planning and construction. “And who's in charge of all this? How much does the average citizen know?”

“A lot of questions,” said Jimmy, laughing. “You'll have to take our word on it that Trojan can and will answer any of them. And the people in charge are the same elected or appointed officials in charge of the rest of the justice system.”

“The trials are public,” continued Marissa, “but as for where Hype criminals are actually being held, that's kept secret, for obvious reasons.”

Peregrine tried her best not to stare at the inmates as she walked by, but every once in a while she saw or heard something that she couldn't ignore. A man with skin as white as alabaster, eyes that were blood red from edge to edge, and a body at least twice the size of an ordinary human in every dimension, with large, curling horns on top of his head caught her eye. When he saw her staring, he winked and said, “nice wings, sweetheart. Why don't you come over here and let me ruffle your feathers?”

She shuddered, blushed, looked away.

“Don't mind him,” said Marissa. “Don't mind any of them.”

“If powers are suppressed by the tech in the cells …” she began, unsure how to ask what she wanted to know.

“The tech doesn't and can't suppress physical mutations. That guy is still very large, extremely strong, and has deadly horns on his head. But the walls can stand up to anything he can throw at them.”

“Just be thankful that his primary power is suppressed,” said Marissa.

“What's his primary power?”

“Seduction,” said Jimmy. “If he wants something from you, he makes you want that thing, too.”

Peregrine didn't ask any more about the man, but a million possible scenarios that could have gotten him landed here ran through her head, and not one of them was pleasant.

“Just a little farther,” said Jimmy.

They rounded a final corner and Peregrine stopped dead in her tracks as she came face to face with a prisoner staring her in the eyes. The intensity of his gaze almost took her breath away, until she saw that his eyes were vacant, glazed over, like he had no idea what he was staring at.

“Perfidious,” the man said. “Pendulum. Plantation. Precious little ponies.” There was a Southern lilt to his voice. Peregrine wasn’t familiar enough with American regional accents to narrow it down any more than that.

“What the …?” she said, gathering her wits and hurrying to catch up with the other two.

“Oh, him,” said Marissa.

“He’s actually a pretty interesting case,” said Jimmy.

“Plaster. Portly. Peregrine.”

She wheeled around and stared at the man, but his head hadn’t turned to track her, and his eyes continued to stare straight ahead, their glazed look no less vacant than before.

“A coincidence,” said Marissa, but her voice wasn’t as certain as Peregrine would have liked.

“As I was saying,” said Jimmy as they approached an unremarkable steel door at the end of the row of cells they were passing through. “He was picked up in Texas, and if it weren’t for evidence collected by the police there in connection with some abductions and murders, we’d have no reason to believe he was a Hype.”

“Why not?”

“No powers,” Marissa explained. “Something happened to him. Some sort of brain damage.”

“He was being held in our facility in Arizona, but Trojan took a special interest in his case, brought him here to keep him close.”

“No use, though,” said Jimmy, stopping in front of the door and knocking lightly. “Whatever fried his brain and disconnected his powers messed him up in other ways. Can’t get a word out of him.”

“Unless it starts with the letter ‘p’,” said Marissa as the door opened a crack and a voice from within said, “Come in, bring the kid.”

Last chance to turn back, thought Peregrine, but she knew she wouldn’t. She stepped into the room behind the other two. It was a huge room, the end they had entered was a well-appointed office, with beautiful wooden and leather furniture, expensive looking bookcases, and faux-windows that somehow provided extremely realistic scenery and natural-seeming light. This office was divided from the rest of the space by a short, waist-high wall on four sides. Beyond it, the area was divided into what looked like a mix between a massive warehouse space, workshop space, and impeccably clean laboratories, cordoned off from the rest of the space by floor-to-ceiling clear plastic walls, and full of equipment whose uses Peregrine couldn’t begin to guess at.

She only registered any of that peripherally, though, for most of her attention was on the man standing behind the desk. Dark-skinned, well-built, with features so handsome and striking that they were intimidating in their own right. He stood at least six and a half feet tall, and he greeted the three of them with the warmest, most genuine smile she’d seen on a human face in a long time. But there was no mistaking this man for a mere human.

He was adorned in armor that Peregrine would have pegged as ancient Greek if she’d been pressed. It comprised a skirt of leather strips with bronze accents, a bronze breastplate and shoulder guards, and a truly beautiful iron helmet with two curved horns sticking out the top. In the corner, propped up against a bookshelf, were a massive spear and an impractically large, oblong shield.

“I’m Trojan,” the man said, never letting the smile slip or breaking eye contact. “But my real name is Troy. I’m very pleased to meet you, Priya. How would you like to help me save the world?”