From the third story of a crumbling parking garage, filled with rusting cars abandoned long ago, I study the ruins of the college. The swamp has retaken much of the campus, growing over all the buildings and cracking the lecture halls open from below. I dart across the rooftops, searching for any warm bodies among the cold, forgotten buildings. My senses are diminished, but they’re not gone. Crows scatter as I alight on a tall tower that has been split down the middle as if with a gigantic blade. That’s actually what happened, it looks like - a huge, calcium-white sword that only a giant could wield sticks out from the basement. Carnality may have shaped it, when she grew too powerful and her abilities encompassed far more than just blood.

Saw Off whistles, but her attention quickly turns back to me. “When are you gonna let me see your face, Homie?”

“You might be my friend, but you’ll have to wait with everyone else,” I tell her.

“That’s not fair!”

But right after her protest, I pick up the whispers of heat at the edge of my thermal sense. It’s so much weaker now that Gabriel’s locked me out of his share of our engrams. But it’s enough for me to figure out where the masks are meeting. With Saw Off riding piggyback, I chase the heat down to what looks like a former music hall, its roof ripped off like the top of a can, exposing the floor plan of small offices, classrooms, and large performance hall. The heat signatures, over thirty, are coming from the latter.

We sneak over to the roof to see if I can listen in, but then I remember Silent’s power. It would be virtually impossible to listen in without being heard, myself.

“You wanna just jump down there?” I ask.

Saw Off grins. “Hell yeah, bro.”

Their voices come in a rush as we pass the barrier of Silent’s power - bickering and arguing suddenly shut up by my arrival. A group of less than thirty masks, all staring at me and Saw Off as we land in the middle of the stage. Epione and Silent are both there, but aside from them, the only ones I recognize are Portrait, Crane, Power Chord, and Asperity are the only ones that I recognize.

I point my finger guns at them. “Howdy, bitches.”

Epione stares at me, unknowable behind her shield, but everyone else is easy to read. The rest of the masks watch me with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Silent looks like she would run me down right there, if it weren’t for the cast around her arm.

“What happened?” I ask, nodding at her injury.

“Flashfire,” Silent spits. “Fucker got the better of me while we were distracted. Damn dude was strong even without his power, broke my arm and split before anyone could stop him. No thanks to you leaving us.”

“Hey!” Saw Off shouts. “We left him.”

“You don’t get an opinion,” Silent replies.

Epione finally speaks. “Why are you here, Home Run?”

“Because I can give you what you want. I can help you topple the Vanguard, for real.”

“Oh please,” Silent says. “What do you think you can give us?”

“Something they’ve tried to bury. Something even worse than anything we could find about Pandahead or PK.”

“I… truly doubt that,” Epione says. “And we’re not sure we can trust you. Not after it turned out you were feeding information to Bedevil.”

“She tricked me, too.” I raise my voice, still feeling the sting of her betrayal and our tryst. “I thought she was a mask.”

“You suspected she was more than that,” Epione says. “You endangered the Front.”

Now I’m just annoyed we’re going over the same argument again. “As far as I’m concerned, Epione, we’re even. Unless you haven’t told everyone how you abandoned me and Mateo to get caught by capes.” She raises a finger to correct me, and I add, “And don’t give me the ‘I expected you to escape’ line again, please. Just because I beat Krater doesn’t mean you knew I would.”

The rest of the masks, aside from those that have already heard this, turn to Epione for her answer. I realize that she and I are on equal ground now - I haven’t come to her as some guy, I’ve come to her as the mask that singlehandedly put Krater in the hospital.

“What do you think you can give us?” Epione asks, her voice tight.

“We know the masks, the street personas, the names we give ourselves. But at the end of the day, you can’t trust me because you don’t really know who I am. And I can’t trust you, either. We need to know who we are, all of us. Really know.”

Epione considers what I’m asking. She nods her head back and forth, like a very slow metronome. The other masks all wait on her thoughts, but I start to get impatient. When she doesn’t speak for a full ten seconds, I open my mouth, but she cuts me off: “We don’t do that for a reason.”

“Yeah, Oracle. I know. Mind reading and all. When we wear masks, we can’t betray each other or mess anything up. But because of them, when we get hurt, when we die, we’re alone. No one is there to catch us when we fall. We sigh and move on.”

“It’s not only Oracle,” Epione replies. “Masking protects us from the capes, and it protects us from ourselves. If we take off the masks, if we start to rely on our faces, we’ll start to tie up our identities in this, our egos, our hubris. It will create new cults of personality, something we’ve striven to avoid.”

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“But where’s that gotten us? What’s the last material thing you or any mask did to work against the Vanguard that lasted longer than a few months? Has anything a mask ever accomplished really changed anything?” I look for anyone to answer me. They’re all watching me, even Silent, their faces pensive.

I think of Megajoule, fighting alone, unable to overcome all of my brothers. Even he couldn’t do it all alone.

“Look at us, look at all of you!” I shout, raising my hands to gesture to all of them. “Are you happy? We’re barely hanging on in a war we didn’t ask for.”

Epione puts a hand on her head. I sense the barest wisp of Affect from her - rage at me. Frustration. She wants to stride over here and silence me herself. But also, reluctant begrudging acceptance. She knows what I’m saying is right.

The rest of the masks murmur, still not sure where they land. I feel their trepidation. I keep going, even though I can feel Epione and Silent are furious with me. “But we can win this war, decisively! One blow to cleave the Vanguard to its core. You think it’s strong all the way down? The Vanguard is a shiny steel coat over rotting nothing! And what I can give you will strip away that coat and show the world what the Vanguard really is.”

I’ve enraptured them. They want to know. They need to know.

I reach up and pull my hood back.

The room goes silent as my mask comes off. I’m hit with an absolute storm of Affect - a huge spectrum of emotions, but the general pattern seems to be shock, disbelief, and awe. No one can form a coherent sentence, not even Epione herself, so I just stand there and let reality sink in. Those whose eyes can be seen beneath their masks stare at me with intensity I don’t think anyone else has ever been the subject of. A holy terror.

Saw Off’s face lights up like a kid on their birthday. She can’t help but grin. “No. No way. No fucking way.”

“You can’t be.” Silent looks exasperated, as if this were the final straw of her mental health. “He’s dead. You’re dead.”

“He is dead! I’m not him!” I shout at the masks. “I’m not Megajoule, but I have his face and a fraction of his power. Hiding behind this mask, nobody knew! All they see is a mask killing a cape. A mask becoming a cloak. They don’t know who I am underneath. You didn’t until just now, and you were afraid of me. But we only fear the unknown. I want to rip everyone’s masks off. Ours, and theirs.”

Epione has kept quiet this entire time. But now, the other members of the Front look to her to speak.

She stares at me with her pink eyes for a long time before she even moves a muscle, and when she does, she approaches me with no lack of caution. “You really are just a miracle, aren’t you?”

I don’t know what to say to that.

Epione reaches up and pulls her mask from her face, eliciting a gasp from the others. With the mask comes her pink hair, evidently a wig, which should have been plainly obvious all this time. She has almost jet black hair, and big, dark eyes, and a soft-featured face that does not align well with her flat expression. She is at least partially Korean, if I’m not mistaken, and looks oddly familiar - not a cape, obviously, but someone I might have seen on a screen or in a magazine sometime. Suddenly, her flat face lights up with a demure smile. And I finally understand what I’m hearing when she speaks: she is an enormously calculated person. The lift of her brows, the pleasant little smile she’s giving me, the crinkle around her eyes. The fact that zero emotion comes with this smile from her Affect.

“My name is Abigail Park,” Epione says. “And I’m the daughter of Park Dae-seong, guild master of PK Resonance.”

“No wonder you knew so much about them,” I say.

Epione smiles, just a little. “It was being his daughter that made me see what the capes were doing. Everyone here has a story about a cape hurting them, or leaving them to die, or being terrible. But me? I saw behind the curtain, saw how it worked from top to bottom.”

Portrait is the next to pull her mask off, emboldened by Epione. She’s strikingly beautiful, with delicately shaped eyebrows and bright brown eyes. Her expression is… annoyed, which is understandable, but she tosses it to the side with her mask and smiles at me. “Sage Hunt, although I’d still prefer Portrait.”

Saw Off pulls a make up wipe from one of her pockets. I already knew what she looked like since she wasn’t wearing the camo makeup when I showed up at her place. She grins at me, a few green and brown splotches still on her nose and around her lips. “I’m Kaylee Thompson.”

The rest of the masks join us. They’re from all walks of life, all ethnicities, all genders, all ages. From one, who reveals himself to be a Black man around my age with an infectious smile, to a middle-aged Latina woman who must be a suburban mom in her real life, they’re a microcosm of Houston. Asperity is a young Caucasian kid, scarcely older than Mateo, and Power Chord is a beanpole of a Filipino man. He grins at me as his mask comes off.

The last person still wearing a mask is Silent. She groans, throws her head up toward the sky, and plants her saber into a patch of rotting wood on the stage. She says, “No. I’m not taking it off. I am Silent, and that is who I’ll remain.”

I suppose that’s fair.

I don’t know if this will be better than keeping the masks on, but I can’t help but feel like it’ll help.

Epione looks out at the crowd of former masks, now just Affected, save Silent. She heaves a sigh as if a great weight has fallen off her shoulders, and a genuine, if tight, smile creeps onto her lips. She looks at me and becomes solemn again. “I think there’s one person who, if their mask came off, would help us understand a lot about what’s going on in Houston and how it relates to the Vanguard.” She bows her head to me knowingly, and I finish the sentence for her:

“Pandahead.”

“Indeed,” she says. “I’ve known of his connections to PK and Danger Close for some time. Since before we went into the Null Domain, in fact. But I had no proof. Not until after we found his hideout.”

I can’t believe she managed to get some work done in all the chaos. “You found something?”

“There were maps, documents in his hideout,” Epione says. “Pointing us to one central location, to a meeting meant to happen tomorrow night. To PK Resonance’s main headquarters in Houston.”

This proclamation shocks everyone, including me. A meeting, dead in the heart of PK Resonance. The smoking gun of all smoking guns. We just need to expose them, to record some of it somehow. I slam my fist into my hand. “So we know where he’ll be.”

“And if the Megajoule comes to get him… Well, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot of interesting things. And the people get to see you and what the Vanguard did to you.”

I can’t help the grin that almost splits my face. “And if we get public support, we can get into the Shrine, get Mateo out. Maybe the Houston capes will even join our side.”

“I hope reality meets your optimism,” Epione says.

Bedevil pops into my mind. Despite what she did to me - I wince at the memory - I know she saw what I saw. I know she thinks the system is broken now. If there are other capes like her, then maybe the Affect can shift against Oracle, against the people that enabled Lilac. Against PK Resonance and all the rest of the evil scum growing within the Vanguard. “If the people stop giving their engrams… well, then they have no power, right?”

“That would follow, yes.” Epione falls deep into thought as she maps this out in her head. “They’d still have some power, partially because of built up engrams and partially because negative emotions still generate some power. But if it came to battle or needing to use their powers for an extended time, they’d burn through their savings, so to speak. This would, of course, require the public to decisively stop giving their Affect over to these people. That’s… unlikely, Gabe. But I admit, with this, with what you’re suggesting, it’s possible.”

“Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go save the world!”

But as I look out at the masks, I see him, skulking in the dark. Gabriel’s eyes burn and burn, a green fire that will not rest.