Shelter Five had been designed by civic engineers who, in glossy pamphlets, called it the Brockton Bay’s safest basement.

  It felt like a giant coffin.

  Concrete walls four feet thick pressed closer every time the ground shuddered, and each tremor funneled another layer of stale air through the recirculators, carrying sweat?salted chill beneath the fluorescent panels. The room—really a single massive elongated vault fitted with narrow benches, built?in cots, and shelves strapped tight with emergency rations—held just under four thousand residents, a calculated number by some beauracraut in an office who never expected to be inside one

  Susan Veder sat on a bench bolted to the back wall, her knees together, both hands knitted so tightly that the knuckles whitened like snow. She forced her shoulders back to reclaim the precise vertical posture that had gotten her through fourteen?hour ICU rotations without once tipping the medication tray.

  Another vibrational boom rippled through the floor and people shuddered, almost all at once, with the sound that people made around a natural disaster.

  Voices fell then rose again, because silence inside the shelter was worse than the muffled thunder outside. Several wide-screen televisions bolted above the double doors at the far end hissed static, the cable knocked out ten minutes after they sealed the blast locks. No replacement feed arrived.

  People still stared up at the blank screens as if unwilling to admit the miracle of information had deserted them. Children whimpered in intervals, long enough apart that each fresh bout of crying reset everyone’s startled nerves. An EMT she recognized from the hospital—Randall, chestnut beard, quiet laugh—stood near the center, guiding a pregnant woman onto a folded cot, his baritone dipped to the reassuring register all field medics cultivated.

  Count the breaths. She felt the instruction surface the way dosage conversions did when the crash cart rolled—automatic, professional, safe. In for four, hold, out for four. She completed the cycle twice before noticing she had locked her jaw and slowly eased the teeth apart.

  Across from her, perched on the edge of a shorter bench, Axel “Sparky” Ramon sat hunched over as his eyes searched the vaulted ceiling every time the concrete hummed, then dropped to the steel door as though he could will it open. She could see the twitching in his fingertips, the slight tiredness he wore on his face and almost filed it under adolescent stress response, then realized with a small twist that it doubled as evidence: Axel knew exactly what happened on the streets after curfew, because he followed Greg into those nights.

  Greg. She inhaled through her nose, slow, as though restoring the baseline. Control the breathing, control the voice, the voice calms the room. It calmed nothing now, but she practiced anyway.

  He was sixteen today. Instead the sirens had clawed across the neighborhood loudspeakers, an Endbringer alert bristling hair on every forearm in Brockton Bay. Greg had looked at her, blue eyes too steady, said I’m a cape, and vaulted into the sky without even paying attention to anything she had to say. She watched him bound over rooftops, body moving with impossible coordination until he disappeared beyond Captain’s Hill.

  On her phone, a good two minutes later, she had seen the shaky footage: a white?caped figure streaking over Windthrow Avenue. A wide-eyed man, a cape-chaser, had gasped White Knight en route to PRT HQ. No confirmation, no aliases, no mention that White Knight’s height and blond hair matched the boy who used to play with colorful blocks in her driveway.

  Outside, another distant concussion rumbled and someone gasped near the cots. A toddler screamed and then hiccupped into muffled sobs. Susan’s head lifted as her gaze drifted to Axel again. He stared at his sneakers, thumb rotating on the back of a phone turned screen?down on his knee—no signal, everyone knew that.

  She held silence, until she counted one, two, three heartbeats. “You’ve drunk anything since we got inside?”

  Axel blinked as he looked up, bright golden eyes wide at the sudden question. “Water. I…” he answered as his voice cracked. Shaking his head, the teenager swallowed and tried again I mean, a cup of water.”

  She nodded back at him, trying her best to be the parent she could be for him with his own family sheltered somewhere else. “Stay hydrated. Dehydration compounds stress. Fainting complicates everything.” She smoothed her palms over her jeans, unsure of what to grab onto or hold tight to right now. “Are you warm enough? You can borrow my cardigan.”

  He shook his head, a flicker of a smile on his face that might have been gratitude. Then his gaze slid to the sealed entrance, as if expecting a cape to fling it wide. His knee bounced; the phone bounced with it higher than it should have up into the air.

  Her eyes widened but without even looking, Axel snatched it before it could even go past his shoulders. Susan couldn’t help but stare as that confirmed something else.

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  He kept Greg’s secret. Her mind tightened around the fact, no matter how much she tried to ignore it.

  Part of her wanted to resent the boy and she felt that same resentment bubble under her chest, hot and unfair. Yet, she couldn’t help but feel most of that curl back towards her. She had noticed the late returns, the rapid muscle and height increases in a matter of weeks, the odd eating habits that popped up out of nowhere.

  But she didn’t push.

  The bench shuddered as an aftershock rattled dust from above.

  Lights flickered once, and regained brightness a full second later.

  Her mind circled round and round, a magnet drawn to what she worried was inevitable. He’s not coming back. The sentence emerged fully formed, brutal and unforgiving.

  No, She corrected reflexively. He’s just going to rescue people.

  She revised that again, well aware of how rescuing capes died too. He will come back but he could be injured. Her pulse ticked faster. He’ll come back, and if he is injured I will treat him. She saw her hands working calmly, methodically, gauze smoothing over skin that once bruised from bicycle spills and her vision blurred, full of tears as she tried to push them back.

  I just want him to come home. She inhaled as heat collected behind her eyes and Susan stared upward, pretending to inspect the rivets securing ceiling plates, even as the tears puddled anyway. She blinked hard, blinked again, until the wet retreated.

  A low boom, closer, vibrated dust off light housings. Somebody shrieked and a domino of voices rose with it, people just speaking to voice their fears like that would help. What was that? Is the door strong enough? Leviathan’s already pushing towards downtown.

  Too much panic, too many voices.

  Axel’s phone lit for half a second but he didn’t pay it any mind. She watched, recognized the flicker of guilt that twitched his lashes downward. She recognized because it mirrored her own each time she lied by omission.

  “A-Axel,” she began, only to pause a second later, doing her best to fix her tone. “Wh-when we get out of here, if you hear anything, anything at all, about Greg, you tell me first, yes?” Susan knew she aimed for gentle but the words tasted far more bitter than she liked.

  The olive-skinned boy held her gaze, throat bobbing, and nodded slowly. Susan sighed, the woman choosing to believe the nod because she needed to.

  Conversation around them continued, keeping the low murmur that had filled the massive vault of a shelter since the huge door had sealed shut. A clergyman near the far exit started a prayer circle; voices merged in a quiet hum that might have been a hymn, as Susan fought the urge to roll her eyes. She wasn’t one to disdain religion, but ever since the loss of her mother to cancer before leaving high school, she couldn’t do much with it in her thoughts.

  Minutes bled into one another, each marked by distant detonations. Susan lost track of time; the shelter’s emergency lighting made time feel indistinct as she shifted, feet prickling from numbness, and forced herself to shift. I wonder if Greg feels like this, she had to think. Said thought only lasted for a second. The hell am I talking about? The boy’s sixteen with super-powers. He’ll never know what joint pain is.

  Shaking her head, Susan looked up, only to find herself blinking as her eyes landed on the sight of a man as he navigated the aisle. He was a tall man, with a bald spot at the crown he didn’t bother brushing over. He wore a Dockworkers jacket half-zipped up over a plaid shirt and the look on his face spoke of the kind of man who’d apologize while carrying you through rubble.

  Hell, he was doing as much right now as he passed elbows and knees. The man walked toward her, clearly unsure of himself but with the sort of backbone that spoke of someone who was used to doing hard things for others.

  “Excuse me.” An accent cushioned the vowels, blue?collar Brockton Bay softened by some level of professional etiquette. He held a neatly folded handkerchief, linen, pale green in his hand as he extended it out for her. “Looks like you could use this. I’m not using it right now.”

  Her fingers brushed his as she accepted it, Veder etiquette and upper-class New England politeness still fresh in her mind after years. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I must look a mess.”

  He smiled. It was a tired thing.

  The smile itself was steady, but the expression beneath it that reached his eyes felt ringed by the same exhaustion she knew deep in her chest. This man didn’t sleep either, clearly too worried about someone else and not able to ever deal with it, “No, of course not. You look… well, you look like everyone looks on a day like this.”

  Susan let out a low hum, unsure of how to answer that without crying again, as she dabbed the dampness at her lashes. With a sigh, she extended the cloth back to him. “I can’t keep this.”

  He shook his head. “No, you keep it. I’ve got more at home.” He scratched the back of his neck, eyes flicking toward Axel, then the crowd, then back. “Stressful day.”

  “Yes,” she managed, smoothing the fabric on her lap. She inhaled through her nose, slowly this time, smiling up at him. “Susan. Susan Veder.”

  He returned the nod, smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Call me Danny.”