The silence wakes me.

  Not a noise - the absence of noise. The low hum of the house that you stop noticing until it's gone. Refrigerator, heating system, the little fan on my desk that I run for white noise. All of it just... stops.

  I'm sitting up before I'm fully conscious, heart hammering, fists clenched. Already, teeth are squeezing out of my knuckles. Just one or two or five, half expecting to see Shrike standing over me. But there's nothing there. Just me in the dark, and I squeeze my knuckles harder until the teeth pop loose like shotgun casings. The red numbers on my alarm clock are dark. Power's out.

  My phone says 1:07 AM. Also says there's a winter weather emergency alert for Northeast Philadelphia. Twelve to eighteen inches expected. Hazardous travel conditions. Stay indoors.

  Twelve to eighteen inches. The forecast said four to six when I went to bed. Before that it was two to three.

  I get out of bed and go to the window. Can't see anything - just white. The snow is coming down so thick and fast that the streetlight on the corner is a vague orange smear. Wind rattling the glass. This isn't a normal January storm. This is a blizzard.

  Maya.

  The thought arrives fully formed. I don't have proof - can't have proof - but I know. Weather manipulation. Mrs. Zenith. She did this. Somehow, for some reason, she made this happen.

  But why?

  I stand at the window trying to work it out. Snow is snow. It's inconvenient, sure. Schools close, roads get bad, people stay inside. But that's not... it's not an attack. It's not targeted. You can't hurt someone with weather unless you're dropping a tornado on their house, and this is just snow. Heavy snow, yeah, but just snow.

  My brain spins through possibilities. Kingdom soldiers moving through the storm while everyone's inside. Break-ins happening while visibility is zero. First responders unable to get anywhere because the roads are impassable. But that's - that's a lot of coordination. That's planning for a storm that wasn't even forecast twelve hours ago.

  How did they know it was coming?

  Because Maya made it. And Maya told them to be ready.

  Or what if it's more targeted than that? Just Maya saying, hey, Sam Small. Fuck yourself. Here's an inconvenience for you. I will riddle your life with small, deniable inconveniences until you want to neck yourself.

  No. Too petty.

  Is it?

  I want to go outside. I want to do something - patrol, investigate, find proof. But I open my bedroom door and the hallway is dark, and when I creep downstairs the front door shows me the same wall of white through the window. I crack it open anyway. Snow immediately blows in, stinging my face. Can't see the sidewalk. Can't see the street. The world ends about three feet past the porch railing.

  Going out in this would be suicide. I can't fight weather. I can't even walk in weather like this. Maya wins this round just by existing.

  I close the door. Stand in the dark living room, shivering, angry at my own helplessness. Maxwell's asleep on the couch - or resting, at least. I can see the outline of him in the dim light from my phone screen.

  "Power's out," I say quietly.

  "I noticed." His voice is alert. Not sleeping, then. "Storm's worse than forecast."

  "Way worse. I think Maya did it."

  A pause. "That's a significant escalation."

  "Yeah."

  "You can't prove it."

  "I know."

  We sit in the dark for a minute. Outside, the wind howls. Snow keeps falling. Somewhere in the neighborhood, Kingdom soldiers are probably doing something terrible, and I can't stop them because I can't even see my own front yard.

  "Go back to sleep," Maxwell says finally. "Nothing we can do tonight. We'll assess in the morning."

  He's right. I hate that he's right.

  I go back upstairs. Lie in bed staring at the ceiling I can't see. The house is too quiet without the electrical hum, too cold without the heating system running. I get some extra blankets and a comforter from the linen closet and drag them out over myself to make a nice little cocoon. I set my alarm on my phone for the normal school time even though I know in my heart that school is cancelled. I shut my eyes and try to let my brain go quiet.

  Eventually, it does.

  I wake up to my alarm - power's back - and the immediate knowledge that something is wrong.

  Not wrong like danger. Wrong like the world shifted overnight and I'm still catching up.

  My phone is full of notifications. School cancelled. Weather alerts. Group chat messages from the Auditors. News alerts about the storm.

  Eight AM. I do my ankle monitor check-in, then stumble downstairs. I should be up earlier than this. Did I sleep through the first alarm? No, my parents wouldn't have let me do that. The vaguest recollection, that sort of thing, of waking up at 6:45 to an alarm going off, and my Mom stepping in and shutting it off. I guess that meant school was cancelled.

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  Maxwell's already awake, laptop open, phone to his ear. He waves me toward the kitchen. Mom's there, still in her bathrobe, making coffee.

  "Power came back around five," she says. "Your father's shoveling the front steps. Or trying to."

  Through the kitchen window I can see Dad in his winter coat, moving snow that's nearly up to his knees. The sidewalk I salted last night is completely buried. The street is worse - cars are just lumps under white blankets. Nothing's been plowed.

  "How much did we get?"

  "Weather says sixteen inches. In about six hours." Mom pours coffee, hands me a mug even though I usually don't drink it. "Northeast Philly got hit hardest. South Philly and West Philly got maybe six inches. Camden barely got anything."

  Of course. Northeast Philly - Maya's district. Mayfair, Tacony, Frankford, Oxford Circle, all the neighborhoods where Kingdom was already establishing presence. They got buried. The rest of the city got a normal winter storm. Dangerous, something that gets snow past your ankles, but... just a winter storm.

  "Sam." Maxwell's off the phone now, gesturing me over to the couch. His laptop screen shows a map with markers - more markers than last night. Way more.

  "What am I looking at?"

  "Reports from overnight. Break-ins, mostly. Businesses hit while the power was out and security systems were on backup or down entirely. I count fourteen so far, and that's just what's been reported."

  Fourteen break-ins. In six hours. During a blizzard that nobody predicted.

  "They knew," I say. "They were ready."

  "They were ready." He scrolls through the reports. "Every location that got hit is in the zone we mapped yesterday. Commercial corridors, just like your dad said. And look at the timing - all of them happened between one and four AM. During the heaviest snowfall. While power was out in patches across the neighborhood."

  "First responders couldn't get through."

  "Couldn't get through, overwhelmed with weather emergencies, stuck dealing with car accidents and downed power lines. By the time anyone could respond to the break-ins, the perpetrators were long gone."

  I stare at the map. All those little markers. Businesses that got robbed while I was lying in bed unable to do anything about it.

  "Maya created the cover," I say. "She made the blizzard, Kingdom moved in during the chaos, and by morning it's over. She has plausible deniability because how do you prove someone made weather happen?"

  "There's more." Maxwell pulls up another window. "I checked Maya's public schedule. Last night she was at a fundraiser in Center City. Photos on social media, multiple witnesses. There's no way she was on a rooftop in Northeast Philly directing a storm."

  "Alice."

  "That's what Miasma was calling her, right? She attends the fundraiser wearing Maya's face, while the real Maya is somewhere she can use her powers without being seen. Some rooftop or something."

  It's elegant. Infuriating and elegant. Maya commits weather-based terrorism, has an airtight alibi because her body double was schmoozing donors downtown, and nobody can prove anything. I'm so mad I could just start screaming. I don't, but I sure want to.

  Mom looks at me and I barely make eye contact out of my periphery. I try to glean whatever sort of psychic message she's sending me, but all I can see is her own fists clenching so hard a vein is bulging on the underside of her forearms. Listening. Overhearing. And I can tell she's not mad at me, or she'd say something about it.

  "I talked to the other Defenders," Maxwell continues. "They're aware of the break-in pattern but stretched thin. Storm hit other neighborhoods too - not as hard, but enough to keep them busy. Tacony Titans have been out since before dawn doing search and rescue. Car accidents, people stuck in homes without power, the usual post-blizzard emergencies."

  "They're overwhelmed."

  "Everyone's overwhelmed. That's the point." He closes the laptop. "This wasn't just a crime spree. This was a demonstration. Maya's showing what she can do when she decides to move. Shut down a whole neighborhood, rob it blind, and walk away clean."

  Dad comes in through the front door, stomping snow off his boots. His face is red from cold and exertion. "Sidewalk's clear. Mostly. Going to need another pass once the plows come through." He pauses, looking at the two of us. "That's not a 'good morning, Dad' expression. What's wrong?"

  I glance at Maxwell. He gives me a slight nod.

  "Fourteen businesses got broken into last night," I say. "During the storm. Kingdom coordinated it - they knew the blizzard was coming before anyone else did."

  Dad absorbs this like he absorbed our talk last night. The weapons cache. My, uh, one woman crime-fighting spree, vaguely chaperoned by a rotting corpse and Crossroads, or as much as I could tell him without making Mr. Caldwell want to kill me (not as much as I'd like). Mom, too. Then, they talked about it alone. I'm not grounded or in trouble yet, but I'm still waiting for the shoe to drop. They just looked... I don't know. I don't even know what emotion it was. It wasn't exhaustion. They looked determined. I think?

  I've never been good at faces. And this is an adult emotion, the kind made of fifteen of my individual teenage primal emotions. It's beyond me.

  Where was I? Right. He absorbs this. And he looks... the same way. Determined mad angry sad upset disappointed tired but not exhausted and a little bit of something else. Pride, almost? I don't know. Faces are hard.

  "And you think Councilwoman Richardson made the storm happen? With her powers?" he asks, trying to tease something out.

  "I can't prove it. But I think if she's... you know. Now they've - the Kingdom's got good leverage. You got robbed overnight? Great way to shill protection services."

  "Jesus." Dad runs a hand through his hair, still damp from snow. "This is - this is organized crime stuff. Federal stuff. Why isn't anyone stopping her?"

  "Because she's good at it," Maxwell says. "And because proving weather manipulation is nearly impossible. Freak storms happen. Maybe Northeast Philly just got unlucky. The, uh..."

  I get scared instantly. Maxwell doesn't use space fillers.

  "The offshore feds are currently dealing with, a, uh, situation in Germany. Something to do with a PMC called 'Red Calf', they did, uh... Let's just say there's some jurisdiction friction. Our people aren't fond of bounty hunting or international incidents," he explains, inhaling through his nose. My spine goes stiff. "And onshore federal superhumans are currently dealing with something in Chicago. Dr. Necrosis went missing two weeks ago. Totally vanished. Nobody likes that."

  "Not the superhumans. Just the feds, Maxwell," my Dad chuckles, trying not to look like he wants to wring his own ears clean off. "The FBI isn't interested in this?"

  "I don't think the FBI cares about opportunistic break-ins during a blizzard," Maxwell replies. I want to say something, but I can't think of anything interesting to add. "I've been trying to get people's attentions all morning. I mean, I've got Philly. Obviously, Councilman Davis is interested, and Councilwoman Richardson is getting in our way, and... you know. Everyone's just passing the buck."

  "Don't I know it," Dad commiserates.

  The doorbell rings. We all freeze for a second. Dad moves toward the door, but I wave him off - I want to see who it is before we open up. Through the window beside the door I can see a figure on the porch. Young woman, maybe early twenties, dark skin, natural hair pulled back. She's dressed for winter but not like she's been trudging through snow for fun. More like she has somewhere to be.

  I recognize her, so I open the door.

  "Sam." Sundial breathes, arms wrapped in front of her body. A small cloud of icy fog forms in front of her with each word. "We need to talk. Mind if I come in?"