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sake, don’t get yourself caught. Try to be inconspicuous.”
    “That’s me. Inconspicuous,” I said with a grin.
    Portia exchanged a glance with Max.
    “We’re fucked,” he said, and she nodded before giving me another stern look and walking away. “I swear to god, I will kick your blond ass if you get yourself caught,” Max said to me as we started walking toward David’s lab. “I mean. I’ll try to, anyway.” I laughed, and he shook his head. “I’m gonna have a fucking ulcer dealing with this shit.”
    “Poor baby,” I murmured, and he flipped me the bird.
    “Seriously. Keep your ass in the mini jet and behave.”
    “Don’t I always?”
    He muttered a few choice curse words at my back as we walked into David’s lab, where I got to hear the whole lecture plus some from David and Jenson, and then they obsessively checked the cameras and tracking devices on my uniform after I put it on.
    “Okay. We have to go,” I said. “I need to get the hell out of here and hit something.”
    “No goddamn hitting things,” Jenson shouted after us as we left the lab. On the flight deck, I was greeted with fist bumps and way too many “are you sure about this?” queries from the flight crew. Luckily, within a couple of minutes, we were off, soaring into the sky over Detroit. It felt good, just to leave the building, to be in my uniform, working, the way I was supposed to be.
    I never in a million years would have thought anything like that in my former life. The idea of suiting up and going out to sacrifice and fight for people who hated me? I would have laughed myself silly at the notion during my burglary days. I still wondered, a lot of the time, why I did it.
    I glanced down as we circled around Command. Just as there had been every day since news broke about Render’s death, swarms of protesters filled the courtyard and the area near the front entrance of our building. Many of them were protesting powered people in general, saying we were too dangerous to live among normal people, that we were monsters, abominations. But a good number of them were there because they wanted my head, because of all of the “heroes,” I’d been the one to cross the line. I’d killed someone, and it made it very hard for non-powered people to sleep at night. I understood. Those who protect them are supposed to be above that. We’re supposed to be benevolent. Safe. And I’m not. I understand their point of view. I just think it’s stupid.
    I mean, really. They think their lives would be better if all of the super teams just packed up and went home? What did they think would happen if we weren’t there, standing between them and assholes like Killjoy, and Render, and Raider, and the other super villains around the world? The villains outnumbered us badly, and in the time since the first Confluence, there had been far too many lives lost, thanks to the actions of super villain types.
    I kept my eyes on the ground below as Max flew the jet. We patrolled in silence for quite a while, the silence only broken by Max doing his periodic check-ins with Command, and, once, Ryan telling me over my comm to watch my ass. I could hear in his voice that he was stressing out, but it was one of the things I adored about him: he never asked me to be anything other than what I was. He knew it drove me nuts to sit and try to play it safe. He’d probably been expecting me to do this for weeks now. He handled it much better than I would have, if our situations were reversed.
    If it was him in the plane, and he was wanted by a bunch of powerful assholes, I would have dragged him back to Command and chained him up myself.
    That thought immediately took my mind in an entirely different direction, and I sat in my seat in the plane and just went with it for a while. We hadn’t taken that step yet, not because we didn’t want to, but because he was giving me time. I’d asked for time, and he gave it to me. I’d believed that I couldn’t be