The basement smells like old paper and potting soil.

  I catalog the details automatically - journalism reflex, the part of my brain that never stops taking notes even when I am the story instead of the one writing it. Exposed brick on the north wall, painted over in white that is starting to yellow. Water stain on the ceiling tiles, roughly the shape of Florida. Fluorescent lights, one of them flickering in the arrhythmic way that means the ballast is dying. Three folding tables pushed together in the center, covered in maps and newspapers and a laptop that looks like it survived the Bush administration.

  The space is beneath a used bookstore in Allston, down a set of stairs that are not technically up to code. The owner is sympathetic, or at least sympathetic-adjacent - she lets us use the basement in exchange for help with inventory and the understanding that we will never, under any circumstances, tell her what we are doing down here. Plausible deniability. The foundation of half the leftist organizing in this city. Maybe half the leftist organizing in the world.

  "You're early," Ghostwriter says without looking up from his book. He is sprawled across a thrift-store couch that has seen better decades, his legs dangling over the armrest, a Russian novel held above his face like a shield against the world. His gloves are pristine white. Archival gloves, the kind conservators use when handling rare manuscripts. The kind you wear when you are afraid of destroying the things you touch.

  I know something about that.

  "I'm on time," I say. "You're all early."

  "We live here," Red Scare says from the corner, where he is doing stretches that look more like yoga than combat prep. He is lean and wiry, the kind of body that suggests speed rather than strength, and his movements have a liquid quality that makes me think of water finding its level. "Some of us, anyway. Ghost basically photosynthesizes off the radiator at this point."

  "I pay rent," Ghostwriter says. "Emotionally. Through my labor. And financially, through my day job."

  "You pay rent by being annoying," Lavender Girl says cheerfully. She is at one of the folding tables, doing something with a potted plant I do not recognize - her fingers deep in the soil, coaxing growth I can almost see happening in real-time. The leaves are unfurling in tiny increments, like time-lapse photography slowed down just enough to watch. "Which I appreciate. It's very grounding to have someone around who is always, reliably, a little bit insufferable."

  "Thank you, Lav. That means a lot."

  "You're welcome," she replies, shifting over in her wheeled office chair over to another pot. This one has something in it, something almost like a potato, but with... weird leaves in it, emerging from the roots, the eyes? Wrapped around it like a corn stalk. I think it's half-onion.

  The banter has a rhythm to it, the kind that comes from months or years of proximity. Inside jokes I do not understand yet. References to operations I was not part of. I am the new variable in an equation that has already been balanced, and I can feel myself trying to figure out where I fit.

  The Colonel is the last to acknowledge my arrival. She is sitting at the far end of the table, cleaning something - a handgun, I realize after a moment. Her actual handgun. When her power isn't enough. A Walther PPK she's spraypainted hazard yellow on the trigger and grip.

  She looks up, meets my eyes, nods once. The gesture is economical, like everything about her. No wasted motion, no unnecessary words. I have learned more about the Colonel in a week of silences than I have from hours of Ghostwriter's monologues.

  "Clay," she says. Just my name. Just acknowledgment. But it lands like a hand on my shoulder.

  "Colonel."

  I take my usual spot - the folding chair near the emergency exit, back to the wall, sightlines to both the stairs and the narrow window that leads to the alley. Old habits. Or new habits, I suppose. The habits of someone who has learned to think about blast radii.

  The Boston Red Shocks are not the only powered leftists in the city, but we are the only ones who do what we do.

  There is a mutual aid network that spans most of the Northeast - healers and growers and builders, people whose powers lend themselves to helping. They run food banks and medical clinics and housing assistance programs. They do the slow, unglamorous work of keeping communities alive. During the day, most of us help with that. Lavender Girl grows vegetables that should not be able to survive New England winters. Red Scare teaches self-defense classes at the community center in Jamaica Plain. The Colonel volunteers at a shelter in Dorchester. Even Ghostwriter, for all his affected misanthropy, spends his Wednesday afternoons reading to kids at the library.

  It is good work. Important work. The kind of work that makes a material difference in people's lives without anyone getting arrested or shot.

  But there are things the mutual aid network cannot do. Documents that need liberating. Facilities that need disrupting. Pressure that needs applying to people who have made themselves immune to ordinary pressure. That is where we come in.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "We're not terrorists," Ghostwriter told me during my first week, unprompted, like he was anticipating an objection I had not made. "We're not even really criminals, most of the time. We're just... aggressively investigative journalists with unusual access."

  "And explosives," Red Scare added.

  "And explosives," Ghostwriter agreed. "But like, targeted explosives. Artisanal explosives. Small-batch, locally-sourced explosives."

  "Please stop talking," The Colonel said.

  I understood what they meant, though. The line they were drawing. There are groups that do political violence - real violence, the kind that leaves bodies. We have all heard the rumors about cells in other cities, accelerationists and adventurists who have decided that the only way forward is through. The Red Shocks are not that. We do not kill people. We do not even really hurt people, if we can avoid it. We just... redistribute information. Aggressively. With occasional property damage.

  The distinction matters. I look at my hands and think about the distinction. I flex my fingers, waiting to be given something to do.

  "So," Lavender Girl says, wiping soil from her hands onto her jeans, "are we doing this tonight or what?"

  "Waiting on confirmation," The Colonel says. "Contact said she'd have the guard rotation by six."

  "It's five-forty-five."

  "Then we're waiting fifteen minutes."

  I pull out my phone, more for something to do with my hands than because I need to check anything. The screen is cracked - dropped it during training three days ago, right before I blew a fist-sized hole in a concrete wall. The explosion was clean, exactly the yield I intended, but I flinched at the sound and my phone paid the price.

  Progress. Sort of.

  Ghostwriter sits up, closing his book with a soft thump. The novel is Bulgakov, I can see now - The Master and Margarita. I read it in high school, back when I was a person who read Russian literature for fun instead of a person who spent her evenings learning how much of her own body she could safely detonate.

  "You good, Clay?" he asks. His tone is different from the banter earlier. Genuine.

  "I'm fine."

  "You're calculating again. I can see it."

  He is right. The math runs in the back of my head constantly now, like a song I cannot stop humming. This basement is roughly eight meters by twelve. The ceiling is two and a half meters high. If I detonated a full hand's worth of fingernails at the center of the room - about a thousand joules, give or take - the pressure wave would...

  No. Stop.

  "Occupational hazard," I say. "Still getting used to it."

  "It gets easier," Red Scare says. He has finished his stretches and is now leaning against the wall, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I cannot quite read. "Knowing what you can do. Eventually it stops feeling like a threat assessment and starts feeling like... I don't know. Awareness. Like knowing where the exits are."

  "Does it ever turn off?"

  "No," he admits. "But it gets quieter."

  I think about the Commons. The crowd. The flash and the pressure wave and the screaming. The smell of burning hair - my hair, I learned later, vaporized by my own activation event. The feeling of my body doing something I did not choose, something I could not stop, something that hurt almost a hundred people who were on my side.

  It has been four months. The math has not gotten quieter yet.

  The Colonel's phone buzzes. She checks it, nods once, and stands.

  "Guard rotation confirmed. Two on-site, shift change at midnight. We go at eleven-thirty."

  The room shifts. The banter drains away, replaced by something more focused. Ghostwriter sets aside his Bulgakov. Red Scare uncrosses his arms. Lavender Girl produces a small bag from under the table - her kit, I have learned, full of compounds and tinctures and a few things that probably violate the Geneva Convention if you squint hard enough.

  "Target is Alcott Properties," The Colonel continues. "Developer. They've been buying up buildings in East Boston, jacking rents, forcing out families who've been there for generations. Standard gentrification playbook, except they've also been cutting deals with the city to expedite evictions. There are documents in their office that prove coordination with officials who should have been neutral."

  "And we're liberating these documents," Ghostwriter says.

  "We're copying them," The Colonel corrects. "Then we're distributing them to journalists who will ask uncomfortable questions."

  "Aggressively investigative journalism," I say. It earns me a small smile from Ghostwriter.

  "Clay, you're on breach. Front entrance, service door, and the file room if it's locked. Red, you're overwatch - roof of the parking garage across the street, eyes on approaches. Ghost, you're on documents. You know the drill: copies first, originals only if we have time."

  Ghostwriter nods. His gloves are already on, and I watch him flex his fingers, feeling the weight of the books in his backpack. His library. His soldiers.

  "Lav, you're technical support. Alarms, security systems, anything electronic. And me..." The Colonel pauses. "You know."

  I find myself hoping it does not come to that.

  "Questions?" The Colonel asks.

  Silence. We have done this before - or they have done this before, and I have trained for it. The plan is clean. The target is justified. The risk is manageable.

  "Then we prep," she says. "Wheels up at eleven."

  I spend the next few hours eating.

  This is not a euphemism or a joke. Caloric debt is real. Tomorrow I will wake up ravenous regardless, my body demanding payment for the tissue I am about to expend, but front-loading helps. Lavender Girl made a batch of protein bars that taste like cardboard and desperation, but they are dense with calories and nutrients, and I force down four of them while reviewing the building schematics.

  Thankfully I do not need to burn, like, an equal amount of calories. Whatever weird shit happens that lets me explode, it also cheats the energy requirements. Thanks for small mercies?

  Alcott Properties occupies the third floor of a converted warehouse in the Seaport. The building is old but renovated, brick and exposed beams, the kind of aesthetic that screams "we displaced the people who used to work here and turned it into office space for startups." The front entrance has a keycard lock, rated for maybe two hundred joules of focused force. The service door in the alley is heavier - three hundred, maybe three-fifty. The file room is the unknown. Could be a simple knob lock. Could be reinforced.

  I do the math. Front entrance: two fingernails, impact-detonated. Service door: three or four. File room: I will bring extra, just in case. Maybe a pinky's worth, if I want to be safe.

  The numbers are comforting in their precision. This is the part of my power I am learning to trust - not the raw destructive potential, but the granularity. The ability to scale force to purpose. A hundred and fifty joules for a padlock. A thousand for a reinforced door. More if I need more, less if I do not.

  Control. That is what I am learning.