“What do you mean, it’s going to take a week and a half to get my client back in the DC area!?” I yelled at the speakerphone, quickly losing my temper with the absolute idiocy I was hearing.

  “Well, ma’am, first we need to verify that you are who you say you are, since you’re certainly not Mr. Wassenberg,” the absolutely useless not-a-sailor on the phone said in his dullest, most ‘done with life’ voice. “Then we need to confirm we have an available transport for dangerous Moonshot prisoners—”

  “Mr. McCain has been nothing but cooperative the entire time he’s been in custody,” I snapped back. “And before you go sending him to one of the facilities with video conferencing, I want Mr. McCain sent to a jail, not a prison, because he hasn’t been convicted of a crime, and so should never have even been sent down your way to begin with!”

  “… I don’t think I’m allowed to do that, ma’am?” The sound of fingers running across a keyboard came over the phone line, followed by a delay, then some more typing and a couple clicks. “No, just checked. As NMR Moonshot ‘Pyre’ is too dangerous for civilian contacts—”

  “Son?” I interrupted. “Before you go telling me he’s too dangerous to sit in a room with, please hop over to your little database of Moonshot and look up ‘Foxfire’ for me.”

  “Well,” the Navy grunt murmured in clear annoyance, but had apparently started the search anyway given the sounds of keys clacking, “I don’t see how that has anything to do with… um, ma’am?”

  “Yes, that’s me,” I confirmed. “I am Foxfire. And as you can see, Mr. McCain is less a threat to me than I am to him. Now, are you going to initiate that transfer for me?”

  “Oh, um. R-right away, Foxfire, ma’am.”

  “And could you put a note in there for me?” I asked sweetly, leaning a little closer to the phone so I could lower my voice. “Please make sure it says: ‘per counsel, Pyre is not to be remanded to a prison facility prior to trial, in clear violation of his civil rights, or the Staff Judge Advocate for the District of Columbia will be having words with whoever authorized that transfer’. Can you put that in there for me?”

  “Y-yes, of course ma’am, Foxfire ma’am,” the poor little grunt choked out. “I-I’ll just get that started for you?”

  “Perfect. I’ll be following up with an email to your CO, cc’d to the SJA to make sure no other issues arise, okay?”

  “O-of course. Have a good day, ma’am.”

  “And you have the day you earned.” I picked up the handset, put it back down to end the call, and just groaned. Why. Why, of all the goddamn things they could’ve done, did they send Wayne McCain down to the Navy’s correctional facility at Chesapeake, Virginia!? He wasn’t a prisoner, he was jailed pending trial! He shouldn’t have been anywhere near a military correctional facility, for fuck’s sake! And hell, he used to be Army, even!

  God, this whole thing smelled of people stuck in military desk jobs playing with other people’s lives for their little inter-division dick measuring contests. Couldn’t they just stick to the military academy football games, instead of screwing over somebody who wasn’t even enlisted in the regular military anymore?

  Ugh. Well, this unfortunate delay meant that there was very little I could actively do with Wayne McCain’s case for the moment. While the court had assigned me as his new attorney, he did still have to consent to having me represent him before I could start requesting more than just what Wassenberg already had… okay, no, fine, that wasn’t quite accurate. If I’d wanted to, I could just start sending out interrogatories and discovery requests and scheduling depositions and motions for subpoenas all the livelong day, regardless of whether McCain wanted me as his lawyer or not. But that was… I don’t know. It wasn’t a very me thing to do. Yes, in Cruz’s case, she didn’t exactly have another option — she was downright toxic, didn’t have the money to pay for another lawyer, and had what looked like an unwinnable case.

  McCain, on the other hand? He had money, he had a certain amount of celebrity, and while the usual suspects in the media had had a field day tarring and feathering the poor man, he had enough friends in high places that he didn’t need me, specifically. And because of that, I wanted his consent before acting as his attorney in any official capacity.

  Now, did that mean I couldn’t do anything? Well, no, of course not. It just meant I couldn’t do anything official.

  There was nothing wrong with taking what I already had, and using that to make a few… shall we say, educated guesses.

  First off: location. McCain’s usual pattern of behavior was very simple. He had a script that he liked to follow to a tee: arrive in a new town; talk to his contacts in the law enforcement, military reservist, and veteran communities to help find the largest concentration of white nationalists; set up public outreach events smack dab in the heart of whatever neighborhoods fed the most people into the neo-Nazis; figure out what problem or social issue their recruiters harped on the hardest; and lastly, work with local and state orgs to fix that problem at the root.

  It was literally just the usual “Hearts & Minds” approach that the US military had been using abroad since the end of the Cold War, geared towards the home front instead of foreign shores. Simple, familiar, effective, and proven to work against civil unrest far better than running in guns blazing ever did.

  And yet… apparently McCain threw away decades of training and ran in guns blazing. Metaphorically, at least. It didn’t make much sense to me. His outreach methods were working — the files I’d gotten from the court included text message logs between McCain and a few burner phones, clearly asking for more information, and then asking for help.

  So where and how did that go from his usual PR play to him helping a bunch of neo-Nazis escape the feds?

  I was missing information. To be fair, it was almost a guarantee that everybody was, and the only person other than McCain who might have known what was going on, Wassenberg, was dead. And with a week and a half until I could actually get that information from the horse’s mouth, my only options were to sit and wait with a thumb up my butt, or use what I had to try and intuit something that I could use as a jumping-off point for—

  My ears perked up at the sound of knocking on my office door — my own usual ‘shave-and-a-haircut’ pattern. I minimized the files I’d been looking at and turned towards the door, slipping on the flats that I’d kicked off when first sitting down.

  “Come in!”

  The door opened, and Casey came in, a somewhat odd expression on his face. It seemed like he was trying his level best to keep his expression blank, but there was just a little bit of apprehension leaking out, going by the slight tension in his jaw.

  “Hey Naomi? Do you have a minute?”

  “Of course!” I waved him in, but of course, he chose to sit on the arm of the chair instead of in the chair itself. Odd little quirk of his, that. I wasn’t sure whether it was him trying to keep himself out from underfoot and beneath notice, or if it was so he could be the first to stand ready when an opportunity made itself known. Now that I was thinking about it, though? Probably context-dependent.

  “So, um,” he hesitated. “Commencement is on Monday, and my family’s driving down from Jersey, so um. They’re probably gonna stick around a few days?”

  “Well, obviously you have as much time off as you need; you only graduate from law school once,” I told him, pulling up his timesheet and billables in the system as I spoke. “Since you’re not barred yet, your time is being billed as a law clerk, and you’re helping me on some mandatory pro bono work, so don’t worry about hitting your requirements. Just let me… there.” I clicked save. “You’re set through the day after Memorial Day, so no worries on that front.”

  “Oh. Um… that wasn’t…” Casey worried at his lip, then reached into that omnipresent jacket of his and pulled an envelope from the inside pocket. “Are… are you able to come? T-to commencement, I mean!”

  … oh. Ooooooh!

  “Casey. Honey.” His shoulders started to slump when I began talking, so I stood from my chair, set myself down on the desk, and smiled to let him know it wasn’t anything bad. “Georgetown is my alma mater too, and I’m a somewhat notorious alumna. Sure, I’m not gonna sit in the seats, doing that got my tail stepped on almost a dozen times during my own graduation, but I will definitely be there.”

  Casey was off the arm of his chair and had me in a hug almost before I could blink. I hugged him back (obviously; hugs were great!), though I couldn’t help the quiver of embarrassment when my tail started wagging hard enough to send my computer mouse flying off the desk.

  “Thanks,” he murmured, giving one last squeeze before pulling out of the hug, looking a little bashful over the sudden display. “Just — glad that I’ll have someone there who won’t try to make it about themselves.”

  “Your parents?” I asked, reaching behind me to both nudge my tail off the edge of the desk and pull the mouse back up. I thought I was being furtive about it, but from the way Casey’s eyes flicked over to my hand, I definitely needed a bit more practice on that front.

  “Just my dad,” he sighed. “My mom tries, but… I dunno. It’s always my dad’s way or the highway. Did I tell you he made me take out student loans for law school because I didn’t apply to his alma mater for grad school?”

  “… seriously?” I whispered my question, a bit dumbfounded. Of all the fucking… wow, just. Wow.

  “Yeah. My mom talked to him, but, well. He wouldn’t budge. And now he’s gonna be here.” Casey waved out the window behind me, towards another few buildings here in downtown DC. “Hard enough to get a word in edgewise on a normal day. Just… parents. You know?”

  “Yeah…” I demurred, ears folding flat atop my head in sudden discomfort. I didn’t know, not really. I hadn’t exactly spoken to my parents since I was a teenager, but, well, Casey didn’t need to hear that right now. “Anywho… they’re not in town yet, are they?”

  “No, not until tomorrow,” he said, blinking in surprise. “Why?”

  “Free to help me with something today?” I asked, letting a conspiratorial grin pull at my cheeks.

  “Please,” he practically begged.

  “Perfect!” I smiled, my ears perking up and tail wagging slightly to match my mood. “Okay, I know I sent you the files on US v. Wayne McCain AKA Pyre last week, so hop on back to your office and review the photos and videos we got from the District Court. While you look over everything, I want you to be thinking about what caused any damage: to the area, to the client, etcetera. Sound good?”

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  “Mhmm,” Casey affirmed.

  “Oh, and one last thing before you start in on that!” I cut back in, making sure he didn’t get up to leave quite yet.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, given the time of day…” I opened up my middle desk drawer, grabbed the swathe of carry-out menus I kept in there, and laid them out in front of Casey. “What do you want for lunch?”

  Casey has good taste. I say this because he picked pho; I hadn’t had pho in way too long and it was absolutely delicious. Plus, the pho place dabbled in some other Asian cuisines to attract the kind of tourists that would go anywhere with a California roll (ew), so I was also able to get some inarizushi, which was extra yum.

  But now that we’d eaten and Casey had reviewed the photos and videos we’d received, we were back in my office. Only briefly, though. Just long enough for me to print off the photos and some specific frames of video that could be used as a reference.

  “Casey! Quick bit of trivia for you!” I began, pitching my voice loud enough to be heard over the printer. “What!... is the most common superpower?”

  “Uh… super strength?”

  “Well, no, but not for the reason you’re thinking,” I replied. “And this is a brief tangent, I admit, but fun fact: did you know there’s no such thing as ‘super strength’ as a superpower?”

  “What?” Casey blinked, looking a little dumbfounded. “But, but there’s so many Moonshot out there with super strength!”

  “Yes, there are plenty of Moonshot who have super strength, but no Moonshot just outright has it as their power,” I clarified. “Super strength is only ever an effect of superpowers, as opposed to a power unto itself.”

  “That — huh. Could you give some examples?” he asked.

  “Tactile fields that alter weight, enhanced musculature, redirection of force through the body, short-range gravity manipulation…” I waved a hand. “The list goes on. But each of those powers, despite conveying some measure of superhuman strength through their effects, are not themselves super strength. Anyway, back to the initial question — most common superpower. Any other guesses?”

  “Uh. Flight?”

  “Nope. The actual answer?” I held my hand out to Casey, palm up, and conjured a roiling orb of violet foxfire.

  “Wait. Fire?” he asked, to which I nodded. “Really?”

  “Really,” I confirmed, leaning back in my chair and bouncing the ball of foxfire in the air a few times. “And let me tell you, there are a lot of theories as to why that is.”

  “What, like the old myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity?”

  “... yes, actually,” I said, my ears lowering in surprise, my orb of foxfire disappearing as my concentration faltered. “Well, sort of. It’s more that the ability to create and control fire is seen as the first real ‘pinnacle’ of tool use, given how fire was the prerequisite for a lot of technological advancement throughout history, but still, yeah. Fire is the most common superpower. But do you know what is shockingly rare by comparison?”

  “Being fireproof.” There wasn’t even a hint of hesitation in Casey’s response. That wasn’t a guess, that was raw certainty.

  “You got it already? Damn,” I mock-cursed as Casey’s grin widened. “But yes, most of us with fire-based powers are only immune to our own fire, and even then only while it’s still under our control. For example?” I pulled out a tissue, conjured the tiniest wisp of foxfire, and touched it to the tissue. Violet flame swiftly engulfed the flimsy paper product, and though it merrily licked at my fingers as the tissue burned away, the foxfire felt like nothing more than a warm, comfortable breeze.

  And once the tissue was entirely gone, all that remained was a little wisp of foxfire, cradled in the palm of my hand, which disappeared with a flick of my fingers.

  “If the fire is still your purple, it won’t hurt you.”

  “And I can still put it out with just a thought,” I added. “But if I lose concentration while my fire is eating away at something, and it’s something that’s ordinarily flammable, then the purple will fade and it’ll just be normal fire, which can then burn me. Most Moonshot with fire or heat powers are the same way, so a lot of injuries happen that way, and many of those injuries result in lawsuits.”

  “But how do you prove that in court?” Casey asked. “I mean, you’d have to prove that the injuries weren’t the result of something normal instead, and you can’t prove a negative.”

  “How indeed?” The printer had finished up partway through our little discussion, so I grabbed the printed photos, handed them to Casey, pulled the lanyard with my key fob to the building out of my purse, and headed over to the door. “Ready for a little field trip?”

  “Sure, I guess?”

  Thankfully, Casey didn’t need any more prompting than for me to open the door. He followed dutifully, and once I’d escorted him out of the office and into the building’s stairwell, I kept talking, partly so there was some noise other than the echoing of our footfalls to fill the air.

  “I got my first Moonshot client within three months of passing the Bar,” I said as I took the stairs at a relatively sedate pace — less noise that way. “Even though I hadn’t been an NMR super for most of a decade by that point, I was and still am a matter of some talk within the American Moonshot community, largely because, well, I don’t exactly get to have a civilian identity.” I wiggled my ears for emphasis. Casey, who had gone ahead of me and waited at the bottom of that flight of stairs before it doubled back, just nodded as I reached him, then turned to go down the next flight. “Needless to say, I wasn’t very surprised to almost instantly get clients wanting to sue the NMR. But that first one? That very first one? It was an NMR super whose ex-husband had publicly accused her of using her powers to attack him, and he gave the news some photos as proof.”

  “Wait, I think I heard of this one!” Casey exclaimed, then winced at how loud everything echoed within the stairwell. “Emberwitch, right? Up in Massachusetts?” I nodded. “Then… why file in DC? I know the DC District Court can claim jurisdiction over any case involving Moonshot, but still!”

  “Well, for one, even though both the District and US Attorneys up in Boston declined to press charges against Emberwitch, she was still unlikely to get an unbiased jury up there,” I explained. “And two, well… who better to prove her case than someone with relatively similar powers? But!” I paused before turning the corner of another flight of stairs, drawing Casey’s attention with the exclamation. “I ran into a bit of a problem when trying to use my powers to replicate the damage in his photos.”

  “Lemme guess, they were clearly fake?”

  “Well, I realized that eventually, but that wasn’t the problem. Oh, we’re going down into the garage,” I told Casey when he stopped at the door back out into the lobby. “P4, bottom floor.”

  “Huh, alright then. And uh, what was the problem?” he asked as he turned the corner on the stairwell.

  “I didn’t have a safe space to experiment. The office was too flammable, the street was too crowded, and I don’t exactly have a backyard. I mentioned this issue to Alice, and she told me to grab some caution tape, section off whichever of our spots on P4 were closest to the vents, and use that as my experimenting space. It’s not like those spaces ever got used, what with always having some amount of people working remotely, so it didn’t even inconvenience anyone. And I did just that… but then some of the other attorneys asked to use the space too.”

  “What for?” he asked. “Some tests of their own?”

  “Testing demonstratives for court,” I explained. “Like using RC cars to recreate a car crash, or wailing on a storage bin with a baseball bat, or even using a kitchen knife to stab a dummy dressed in close approximations of what a victim might’ve worn. And enough people started sending in expense reimbursement forms for those materials that Alice called me to her office, said it was my idea in the first place, and ordered me to figure out something safer and more permanent.”

  Right on time, we arrived at the bottom floor of the parking garage. Casey opened the door and held it for me, which was sweet of him, after which I led him across the parking lot to the far corner of the parking garage, close to the roar of the fans. A chain-link fence backed with an opaque tarp sectioned off this part of the garage, with a magnetically-locked door serving as the only point of entry. I waved my key fob over the reader, and once the light flashed green, turned the handle and pulled. Behind the fence rested what looked to be a windowless plywood box, painted matte black to blend in with the fence in front of it. It, too, had a door set in it, with the same key fob lock.

  I let Casey through the door in the fence before making sure it closed behind him, then brought him over to the door in the plywood ‘box’.

  “Welcome,” I said, unlocking this second door, pushing it open, and holding it for Casey. “To the Prop Room.”

  I flicked a switch. The lights came up.

  And Casey’s eyes went wide.

  What had once been seven parking spaces (which are bigger than you’d expect — parking spaces in DC are 18 feet by 9 feet!) was now sectioned off into two rooms, one big, one small. The smaller room, filling one and a half former parking spaces, was a sealed-off test chamber, separated from the rest by a thick acrylic window and a heavy fire door. It had ventilation, a fume hood, plus a pressure washer and a shop vac for cleaning — but that wasn’t the main attraction.

  No, what really had Casey staring around in awe was the rest of the Prop Room, which was dedicated to the absolutely enormous cross between an amateur armory (no guns) and a department store clothing section.

  “Say your client’s suing somebody for assault, and the defendant alleges self-defense.” I walked down the aisle and pulled a button-up peasant blouse out from a row of hangers (price tag still on, of course, to keep the expense sheets accurate). Then I went a bit closer to the test chamber, picked up a knife rack, and showed it to Casey. “Now, you want to try and copy your client’s wounds, which the defendant says he caused when trying to protect himself. So you grab our buddy over here,” I walked over to a couple of mannequins we had, selected a female one, and rolled its stand over to the test room door. “You put the blouse on the mannequin, set it up like it was the aggressor, lash out like you’re trying to fight back from an attacker, and compare the kind of damage you did to the blouse with your photos from evidence.”

  “Ooh…” Casey only briefly glanced at the mannequin before looking through the acrylic window to the test chamber. “What about, say, if I wanted to record it?”

  I directed Casey’s attention to the desk set in front of the test chamber window, with a closed laptop sitting atop it, and pulled open its bottom drawer. Inside were a small tripod, a camcorder, and a little case full of memory cards.

  “But we aren’t here to record anything right now. Today, we’re going to ask a question.” I rolled the female mannequin back over to the side, and grabbed a large, bulkier male one. Then I swapped the peasant blouse out for a thick, lumberjack-style shirt and a leather jacket — the clothes that Wayne McCain had been wearing when he was arrested. “Our client’s clothing showed some serious damage when he was arrested, and the reports we were given are delightfully vague as to how they got that way. So you’re gonna have a police nightstick, a stun gun, and a taser, I’ll grab this neat little thing one of the others came up with to simulate rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, and we’re gonna try and get the results we saw in those photos you’re holding. Sound good?”

  If the grin on Casey’s face was anything to go by, it one hundred percent was.

  Over the next half hour, we went to town on that poor dummy. We thwacked it, zapped it, threw everything we’d allowed ourselves to use at it, and when even that didn’t work, I went and grabbed a pair of the sort of knives I’d expect some feds to carry as a backup option. But try as we might, we just could not get the same type of damage we saw in the photos, let alone the same level.

  “Well… that’s worrying.” I held a photo out at arm’s length, so Casey and I could more easily compare what we saw in the image to what lay in front of us. “If we’re not getting the same kind of damage with what the feds had, then that means it wasn’t the feds who caused it.”

  “So Pyre had already been in a fight, then,” Casey continued, picking up where I’d left off. “But with who? And why?”

  “That’s something I have to hope he actually tells me,” I said with a sigh, my ears folding flat against my head in worry. “Regardless of the who and why, it was clearly important enough for him to throw away his public image, let alone his freedom. But alas, that’s a question for another day.”

  I pulled the clothing off of our little target dummy, brought them back outside the room, and booted up the laptop. Casey didn’t need any prompting to join me, thankfully, and watched over my shoulder as I double-clicked on our inventory program.

  “Now, pay attention.” I directed Casey’s attention to the screen, typed in my firm email address, then hit tab to go to the next text field. “I’m not supposed to share this with you, but the Prop Room is my baby, so I’m making an exception.”

  I raised one finger in front of Casey’s face, and once I was sure he was watching, went hunting and pecking for a few digits — 022984. My date of birth, and also my PIN for signing anything out of the Prop Room.

  “I know all too well how stressful dealing with family can be,” I told Casey as I finished the process of logging everything we’d used. “So, if they’re driving you spare? Feel free to come on down here and smack a dummy around, or whatever else this room might provide for stress relief. Okay?”

  And just like that, the firm’s newest lawyer-in-training was reduced to a kid in a candy store, eyes practically shining with the realization that he’d been given more or less free rein over everything in here. Was this a good idea? Well, some might argue that no, it absolutely wasn’t. And they were allowed to disagree. But the Prop Room was my pet project. My baby, my rules.

  And if Casey did get up to some trouble with what we kept in here? Well… I’d cross that bridge if I got there.

  But I had a feeling things would be just fine on that front.