This spot wasn’t too bad as mushroom goo went. While near downtown, it was on the edges. Best practices for superhero bases amounted to giving them some distance from nearby civilian buildings to avoid collateral damage when attacked and to make it obvious when someone was approaching.

Justice Fist’s base adhered to that as best a building in the middle of a city could.

With money from Futuremen Capital, they’d bought most of a small city block that used to hold an old warehouse, demolished the warehouse, and put up a squat, circular tower that I’d once heard Vaughn refer to as the “Justice Penis.”

I’d laughed because my sense of humor hadn’t emerged from adolescence either.

The former factories and warehouses around it had been turned into a mix of restaurants and residential apartments. We’d parked in front of a block of brick row houses. To the credit of the base’s designers, they’d fenced off the base with a ten-foot tall, black wrought iron fence. It wouldn’t keep out supervillains or even normal people, but any civilians who chose to trespass wouldn’t be doing it by mistake.

Over the past couple of days, snowplows had pushed sheets of decaying fungus flesh off to the sides of streets. A two-foot-tall pile dripped liquid on the edge of the sidewalk for the entire block.

Much like the rest of downtown, it wasn’t hard to detect an undertone of mold and rot in the air. We were lucky that it was November instead of July. Grand Lake’s temperature in late fall was close to that of a refrigerator or sometimes a freezer.

In summer, the whole city would have reeked.

Over the comm, I heard Haley say, “We’re almost there.”

She must have been using the implant to comm connection because her voice wasn’t quite the same. Anyway, she came around the corner in the Wolfmobile practically as she finished talking, rolling up to the gate and stopping.

The gate slid open and the car moved inside, stopping in front of the building instead of parking in the garage that extended from the left side of the main building.

Haley, Vaughn, and Jaclyn stepped out of the car. Sydney and Camille were already inside. As Sean’s sister and half-sister, they had ID cards that let them come and go as they wanted. In short, the only person in the room Jody might not trust would be Jaclyn.

Rachel and Julie were here too, but they were on top of the former warehouse south of the base.

Over a direct-to-me implant connection, Vaughn said, “Tell me it doesn’t look like a dick. You’ve got the main building and the garage sticking out on the left and whatever’s in the extension on the right. Dayton says it’s not intentional. Daniel should scan the architect. It has to be intentional for somebody.”

He had a point.

Behind me in the van, Daniel laughed, probably because he was overhearing telepathically via our link and his sense of humor also hadn’t left middle school.

Izzy glanced over at him, asking, “Do I want to know?”

Daniel shook his head.

If Izzy had been thinking of asking for more information, the time wasn’t right because the event went live. All of our people were streaming from their armor’s cameras, but around then, Haley said, “We’re here.”

Looking through her suit’s camera, I couldn’t argue. They were at the top of the tower where the design placed the conference room. I couldn’t argue with it at the level of customer experience or defense. Well, at least on the level of visuals. You could make a reasonable argument that from a defense standpoint, the number of windows might be excessive.

The room sat at the top of their tower, giving a view of the surrounding buildings on all four sides along with the yard around their base.

Sean sat at the head of the table with Dayton and Jody to his right and left, Dayton made me think of the star football player he had been—tall and muscular—while Jody was merely short even when sitting. Sean, of course, still looked like his parents’ golden child—tall, blond, and good-looking.

Camille and Sydney sat next to Dayton, their family resemblance obvious even though Sydney like Sean was blond and blue-eyed while Camille’s dark hair and light brown skin made her Filipino ancestry obvious.

Jaclyn sat next to Jody. Vaughn and Haley sat to her left.

“Hey everybody,” Sean said, raising his hands as if to include the whole group, “I’m glad you could make it. It’s nice to have a multi-team meeting where we don’t have to be masked.”

No one was. Everybody knew everybody from Stapledon and their windows had been tinted to the point that they appeared to be mirrors from the outside.

He continued, “We’re all here because we’re going to talk about how we can coordinate with each other better as we all fight the Nine.”

Rolling his eyes, Jody said, “It’s not going to be that hard. We just tell each other what cases we’re working on and if we think they have something to do with the Nine. Easy. We’re done. Meeting over. We can relax.”

Smirking, Jody put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “What are you guys doing this weekend?”

I glanced back at Daniel, “Were you scanning him when Sean started talking about the Nine?”

Daniel stared up at the tower, “I was trying to. Jody’s unreadable and it’s not because they have telepathy blockers on. I can read everyone except Jody. That’s not all though. There’s a touch of the same painful telepathic interference I get out of Lee and sometimes you.”