The Inquirer article drops while I'm in homeroom, which means I find out about it the same way everyone else does: thirty phones buzzing at once, Mrs. Patterson trying to get us to put them away, giving up after about ten seconds. Someone's got it up on their laptop. Someone else is reading the headline out loud.

  Organized Crime Ring Operated Protection Racket in Northeast Philadelphia for Weeks, Documents Show.

  I don't need to read it. I've seen the photos. I helped sort them.

  But I watch the room react, which is more interesting. Darnell's got his eyebrows up, scrolling fast. Jessica's whispering to the girl next to her, something about her aunt's store. A couple kids from Mayfair are clustering, comparing notes, and I catch fragments - "my mom said," "that's three blocks from," "no wonder the cops didn't--"

  Outside, the sky is the color of a bruise that's gone yellow at the edges. Not the yellow part - the purple-grey. It's been raining since before dawn, but not regular rain. The kind that hits the ground and sits there, slicking everything over, and then the temperature drops another degree and suddenly you've got black ice on every surface. My weather app says it's thirty-one degrees. Thirty-one is worse than twenty-five. Twenty-five, you get snow. Thirty-one, you get this.

  Mrs. Patterson gives up on wrestling control of homeroom back sometime between 7 AM and 8 AM. I think we're all sort of preparing for the announcement to come, and not paying attention to the other stuff that doesn't get done in homeroom anyway. School's closed. Go home before the streets are unusable. Half the class is still reading the article, the other half is texting parents, and I'm doing the thing where I look at my phone but I'm not actually seeing it. I'm thinking about Maya's statement.

  The devastating blizzard that enabled these crimes is exactly the kind of disaster that weather-controlling metahumans could prevent, if federal regulations permitted their involvement in emergency response.

  She made the blizzard. She made the blizzard, and now she's using the blizzard to argue for repealing the laws that would let her make more blizzards legally. It's--

  I don't know what it is. It's something. There's probably a word for it.

  The announcement comes at 10:30. Early dismissal, buses running at 11:00, roads deteriorating, please proceed to your lockers in an orderly fashion. Sometime in precalc. Ms. Patel dutifully writes down homework assignments she expects everyone to have done tomorrow, including you, Sam, she doesn't say out loud. "Remember, the test is still on Friday, weather permitting. I'll be sending everyone a link to a VidShare lecture on inverse trigonometric functions over the student portal, and that will compromise the second half of today's class. Make it home safe, everyone," is what she does, also, say.

  The hallway's chaos, but the good kind. Snow day energy, even though it's not snow yet, just the promise of snow on top of ice on top of misery. I grab my stuff, look for someone familiar, find nothing, and push through the crowd toward the exit. The security guards look just as miserable as the weather does. They probably have to stay even longer.

  Outside is worse than I expected. The rain's turned to something between sleet and freezing drizzle, the kind that gets into your collar and down your neck and makes you hunch your shoulders up around your ears. The sidewalk's already glazing over. Someone's mom is trying to pull out of the pickup lane and her tires are spinning, not catching, and there's a teacher directing traffic who looks like he's about three minutes from giving up entirely.

  I start walking. It's not far. It's never far, in this neighborhood - everything's too close together, which is usually annoying but today is a blessing. The cold gets into my bones faster than it should. I'm not dressed for this. Nobody's dressed for this, because yesterday was thirty-eight and raining, which is different, and doesn't require a second layer of thermal pants.

  Maya's been building this for two weeks. Pressure system from the west, cold air from the north, moisture from somewhere. Natural enough to pass muster. The first blizzard was an anomaly that everyone noticed, but two anomalies in one month with a weather controller on city council would draw attention. Especially in that weather controller's neighborhood. No, this is natural. Au naturale winter storm.

  By the time I get home, my fingers are numb and my hair is doing that thing where it's not quite frozen but it crinkles when I move. The house is warm and smells like coffee, which means someone was here recently, but both cars are gone. Mom's at work. Dad's at work. I check my phone - text from Mom, stuck at library, roads bad, stay inside, and one from Dad, at the office, might be late, there's leftover soup.

  I tell them both I love them and pointedly do not tell them what I am about to be doing. I look at my wrist, and there's a tracking bracelet still on it. Oh yeah. I almost forgot about that, it seems... quaint now, compared to the ankle bracelet. One's for the state, one's for my parents, who are kind of like a mini-state who's nice to me. At some point in the past while the light went off, which I guess means the battery's been dead and my parents were just content to let it sit like that on my wrist.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Maybe when I was a fugitive - did they turn it off remotely so they couldn't be compelled to give anything incriminating? Or did... the battery just die? I don't trust it enough to not take it off, so on it stays.

  Maxwell's on the couch, laptop open, police scanner crackling on the coffee table. He's got a headset on - one ear covered, one ear free - and he's talking to someone in a low voice. "--no, the one on Harbison, not the one on - yeah, exactly. If they can get a unit there in the next twenty minutes--" He sees me come in, holds up one finger, keeps talking. "Copy. I'll route it through. Out."

  He pulls the headset off. "You're early."

  "Everyone's early. They closed the schools."

  "Saw that." He gestures at the scanner. "It's already starting. Two fender-benders on Roosevelt, one slip-and-fall on Torresdale, and that's just the first hour. Dispatch is going to be slammed by noon."

  "You think it's retaliation yet? Or just a freakishly well timed storm?"

  Maxwell looks at me with an eyebrow raised, which is weird, because he's got sincerity up the wazoo and zero sense of humor. "Come on, Sam. What do you think I think?"

  I start stretching in the middle of the hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen, just to get the cold out. I pointedly do not answer him. "Gossamer's on her way," I say instead. "She's bringing the stuff."

  "I know. She texted." He leans back, winces, adjusts his shoulder. "Sam."

  "Yeah?"

  "Be careful."

  "I'm always careful."

  "Don't play with me, Sam. You're always extremely good at improvising and you have a good tactical head. That does not mean you're careful. Be careful," he repeats, like a mom. "If you want to lecture your kids about this stuff you have to practice what you preach."

  "Ouch, but fair," I sort of half-flinch half-mumble half-jokingly. "I promise I will be careful, Dad. Scout's honor. Look, I'm not even crossing my fingers."

  "Were you ever even a Girl Scout?" Maxwell asks.

  "No. Not enough running full-force into other children for me. It was like, junior tumbling, then every extracurricular sport I was allowed to do in every season, and then soccer, soccer, soccer," I answer. "Girl Scouts probably would've made me well rounded, which I was trying to avoid at all costs."

  Maxwell chuckles, "Makes sense," and then puts his headset back on. Back to coordinating with him, back to waiting for me. I head upstairs so I can change into dryer and maybe billowier clothes like a pair of boxers.

  Amelia shows up twenty minutes later, which is fast, considering the roads. She's got a duffel bag over one shoulder and she's shivering, her coat soaked through, her hair plastered to her face. I let her in and she makes a noise that's half greeting, half complaint about the weather.

  "I brought everything," she says, dropping the bag on the kitchen table. "Both kits, plus extras. Also I think I saw three cars in ditches on the way over. It's bad out there."

  "It's going to get worse."

  "I know." She unzips the bag, starts pulling things out. Two bundles of fabric, both wrapped in plastic. A utility belt with four coiled shapes attached. A pair of boots with soles that look like tire treads. "You want to do this here, or...?" she asks, looking around for sight of Mr. and Mrs. Small.

  "Upstairs. My room. Just in case there's a baby monitor somewhere I forgot about," I reply.

  We go up. I close the door, and Amelia hands me my bundle without ceremony.

  The Remora suit is dark, almost black but not quite - more like the color of deep water at night. The stripes are there, black and white, breaking up the silhouette in a way that makes it hard to track where one limb ends and another begins. Pink accents running through, mostly around my head and shoulders.

  I strip down and pull it on. It fits like Amelia's work always fits, which is to say perfectly, including the mask. Domino for the eyes, very classique, something rough and guarded for my jaw and throat, with another voice modulator built in. It makes me sound like Darth Vader when I breathe. It is probably dense enough to stop my jaw from getting broken. And it comes with earmuffs.

  "How's the grip?" Amelia asks. She's already halfway into her own suit, the Stingray kit. Countershaded white and blue-grey, black fur lining, the utility belt with its four coiled whips sitting on my bed waiting to be buckled on.

  I press my palm against the wall and drag my hand down. Even on drywall, the friction is almost unbearable - it makes my arm rattle in a way that is profoundly uncomfortable to every single one of my senses, and makes me want to rip my inner ears out and clench my teeth so hard they break. I drag my hand across my blanket and it makes a weird sound as it gets yanked off the bed without me needing to actually close my fingers. "Seems right to me."

  "It should work on ice. I tested it. There's lining in the fingers, on the, uh ventral side, it's stiff when your hand is curled, like hard plastic, but it relaxes when you stretch your fingers out. So when you grip something, the glove does some of the work for you. Holds the shape. Keeps a lot of pressure off your fingers and puts it back towards your palms." She's pulling on her boots, strapping padding and guards over top. "You could scale any building if there were enough pipes. Theoretically."

  "Theoretically."

  "Don't test it today. The fingerpads are just like, rubber. Hard to get better than that for high friction without a lab I don't have access to."

  I don't plan to. I've got enough to worry about without adding "falling off a building" to the list.

  Amelia finishes suiting up. The Stingray mask covers her whole face, smooth and slightly pointed, with eye lenses that reflect the light. The whips are coiled at her belt now, four of them, each one different. Her secret projects that she's been working on with all the time she hasn't been spending working on Young Defenders stuff. Various... kinds of whips. I'm sure my Mom would find that hilarious for reasons that I wouldn't understand in the slightest. But more importantly...

  She looks like a villain. That's the point.

  I look like her sidekick. Also the point.

  "Comms?" she asks.

  "Dark. I've got my burner so that Miasma can snitch for us where we're headed, and that's about it. Cell service won't be stable enough for an earpiece anyway," I explain.

  "So if something goes wrong--"

  "We handle it ourselves."

  She nods. She doesn't argue either. I'm getting a lot of that today. The masks fit, so we throw our hoods up and lower them back down as much as we can, extra winter coats on top to hide our silhouettes. My burner phone buzzes. Frankford & Rowland. From here? Longshore & Revere or so? That's nothing.

  And so we walk.