“Well, how do I look?”

Ember is standing in front of a tall mirror in her office, looking at me from out of the hood of a voluminous slate-grey cloak. Patterns have been woven into the fabric, creating an impression of billowing smoke and flecked with occasional bright sparks given life by a metallic red weave. It speaks of the potential for flame; like a tinderbox that could go up at any moment.

It’s long, hanging down to her ankles, and held together beneath her throat by a dull metal clasp that reflects no light, leaving her face completely shrouded in darkness. Whenever she takes a step, the cloak will drift open ever-so-slightly, exposing brief glimpses of her skin-tight costume, the orange flame patterns on the dark grey material flashing like the fire at the heart of a furnace.

I feel so awkward under the spotlight, so out-of-place surrounded by Capes like Jaeger, or the vibrant life of the Red-Light District. I belong in the environment, with its glorious half-light, but the people are still strangers to me. They belong to a world I don’t understand, one I don’t want to understand, but Ember is someone who moves in and out of that world like she was made for it. Outside the District, she blends in with the crowds, no matter what part of the city she’s in.

But when she’s in costume, even among the riot of colour and sensations that fill the streets of our little slice of the city, she stands out. She understands the circles we both move in a lot more than I do, which is why I plan to follow her lead tonight.

“Remember,” she says, flicking her hood back to check the makeup on her lips and chin – the only parts of her face that aren’t covered by her ornate grey and orange mask – “tonight is about being seen, so to speak. People like us thrive on our reputations, and events like this are where those reputations are most important.”

She flicks her hood up, immediately hiding her make-up efforts from all but the closest observers, and starts to fiddle with the fold.

“Everyone knows what we’ve – what you’ve – managed to achieve, but this is about more than that. It’s about showing that you belong.”

Once she’s satisfied with the drape of her hood, she steps away from the mirror and pulls one edge of her cloak aside, revealing the pooled shadows beneath the thick material. I pace forwards, brushing aside the edge of the cloak with my beak and slipping into the darkness. I curl up her back as she lets the cloak drop, creating an almost perfect patch of shadows all around her body, and settle in the deep shadows of the hood.

She turns at the doorway, taking one last look in the mirror. On a whim, I briefly form my eyes above and below her own, my vision tunnelling down as I do and my head pounding a little at the effort of selectively bringing small parts of me out, and catch a brief glimpse of three pairs of yellow orbs staring out of the hood before disappearing as I pull them back into the shadows.

Ember lets out a short, sharp laugh.

“What the hell was I worried about? You’re a natural at this.”

There’s a car waiting for us in the security compound. Not one of the normal ones, with their clear livery and orange flashing lights, but a fairly generic – if expensive – looking silver four door. The driver is one of the security team, wearing a uniform shirt and a clip-on tie but with his holster conspicuously empty.

He moves around the vehicle, holding the door open for Ember as she grabs her cloak and shifts it out of the way as she sits down. She leans back in her seat, her head tilted to look idly out of the car’s tinted windows as the driver brings the car out of the compound and through the press of people in the Red-Light district.

We’re quickly out of the district and pushing our way through the steady stream of traffic that fills the streets in the late evening, as people start to make their way home from work. Ember doesn’t speak, simply lounging back in her seat with one arm idly tossed over her shoulder, resting her hand on the headrest of the seat next to her.

As the drive drags on – the driver speeding up onto the expressway that flies over the city, raised on great concrete pillars above the bustling streets below – I slip out of Ember’s cloak and shuffle along the seat to look out the other window, taking advantage of the tinted glass to see the city without being seen.

At first, I can’t see much of anything, just the yellow haze of the streetlights and the tops of particularly tall buildings or trees. Ahead of us, however, the glow of the city centre is growing larger and larger. Soon it grows large enough to be uncomfortable, towering walls of glowing glass rising up past the left side of the car. As the first patch of harsh yellow light hits my skin, I abandon my perch and slip back into the comforting darkness of Ember’s coat.

The driver pulls us off the expressway, down into the glowing city streets. I don’t see much after that, the ambient light enough to drive me back into the deepest recesses of Ember’s cloak, but I can feel the car shifting a little more as we go from the arrow-straight expressway to the block after block of the city below.

Eventually, Ember lurches noticeably as the car makes a hard left turn and the colour of the ambient light changes from the yellow glow of streetlights to the harsh white light of an underground car park. It’s a little dimmer, enough that I can see clearly through Ember’s hood as the driver pulls up next to a nondescript maintenance door, before getting out of the car and walking around to open up the door for me and his boss.

Ember acknowledges him with a curt nod as she steps out of the car, though I’m not sure he can actually see it thanks to the hood. As she walks towards the rusted door, I hear the car driving off and parking a little way away, inside the underground car park but not so close to the door that it’s drawing attention.

Ember knocks twice against the door, waiting for a couple of seconds before a pinprick of red light appears just above the frame and a recessed panel pulls back to reveal a small camera. I curl down Ember’s back as she brings her hands up to her hood, pulling it down to show the camera her masked face.

A moment passes, before there’s an audible click and an electronic whirr as the door lock disengages and the door and a significant chunk of the wall around it simply slides down into the floor. Behind the false wall stretches a long corridor with wood-panelled walls, a polished marble floor, and ornate overhead lights offering enough illumination to let everything be seen, without making it uncomfortably bright.

Of the three burly men standing behind the wall, two are dressed in neatly-pressed suits with red ties and blocky assault rifles held in their arms, while the third is obviously a cape, dressed in fur-lined fatigues with a half-mask over his face and accompanied by… well, I’m not really sure what it is.

It’s kind of like a dog, except it’s only a little bit smaller than I am and has patterned grey and brown scales instead of skin and fur. It is sitting like a dog, its head raised and attentive as the slit pupils of its eyes settle on Ember, tall pointed ears twitching on the top of its head.

“Ember,” the dog’s handler says, nodding towards her in greeting. “Love the cloak. Decided to shake things up a little?”

I feel Ember’s lips parting in a friendly smile.

“You could say that. Figured it was time for a change, and another layer of bullet resistant fabric never hurt anyone.”

The handler nods in agreement, before freezing at the same time as his dog rises up, its serpentine lips parted to reveal a row of sharp teeth as it starts to hiss like a snake.

“You bring a tagalong?” he asks Ember as his hand drifts to a pistol on his thigh, and the two men in suits bring their rifles up to their shoulders. I barely notice them, fixing my gaze right at the widening slits of the creature’s pupils. It’s staring right at me.

“You must have heard I have a new hire,” Ember replies, a picture of calm. “Nightcrawler, this is Huntsman. Say hi, why don’t you?”

I reform my eyes beneath Ember’s hood, watching as Huntsman’s own eyes widen in shock, before his mouth spreads wide in a genuine grin. His hound just snarls louder as I reveal myself, until Huntsman idly reaches down to scratch it between the ears, settling the beast immediately.

“I’ve heard about you,” he says to me. “I thought the rumours were exaggerating, but you’ve really got the whole horror movie act down to a tee. It’s nice to meet you. Like Ember said, I’m Huntsman, and this little bundle of joy” – he strokes the head of his hound, which preens at the attention – “is Duke.”

“So,” Ember asks, “how many people got here before me?”

“I’d say maybe three quarters of the ones we’re expecting,” Huntsman replies. “It’s busy down there, but you shouldn’t have to wait long. Enjoy mingling.”

Ember nods as Huntsman steps aside to let us pass, his hound following at his heels. Behind us, I can hear the sound of the door slowly lifting back into place, shortly followed by light chatter as Huntsman strikes up a conversation with the two other guards.

“It would look a little odd to have over a dozen different people show up at the same building at the same time,” Ember explains, “especially when they’re coming from all over the city. So when we need to meet like this, they stagger the invites so that everyone arrives at a different time. It’s fine if you get one of the later slots, but if you show up when there’s nobody else here then you might end up waiting a couple of hours.”

At the end of the corridor, a set of double doors slides open on hidden rails at our approach, revealing a set of stairs with a ramp on one side that drops down into a warren of richly-furnished corridors, with signs pointing off to different rooms and departments. Hospital, Tailors, Administration, Bar, Gym, Overnight Quarters, Cafeteria. It’s practically an underground town, with a vaulted ceiling and walls made from some strangely-patterned stone.

“Impressive, right?” Ember says, guessing my mood even without any visual clues. “It’s more of a vanity project than anything else, but, in the Elite, everything is about prestige. A fully furnished facility like this demonstrates the power of the people that built it, as well as providing us with the closest thing we have to a headquarters in the city.”

I peer through her hood as she walks through the halls, noting the brief glimpses of advanced equipment, comfortable lounges, and utilitarian offices. There are a few people moving around, human staff dressed in business suits or paramedic outfits, but mostly it’s just a series of empty hallways.

“It’s not all for show, of course,” Ember continues. “The services this place offers are a great bit of soft power. Even if a Parahuman doesn’t want to formally join the Elite, they’ll often accept our no-questions-asked medical service, or buy a professional-grade costume from our in-house tailors and engineers.”

She turns down a corridor, following a sign that just says ‘Court,’ and passes through a security checkpoint, with half a dozen armed guards in suits, another Cape lingering in the background, and hi-tech scanners hidden beneath tasteful wooden panelling. The fancy stone floor has become hidden beneath a richly-pattered red carpet, and the whole décor of the facility has become a lot fancier, with landscape paintings and statues lining the walls.

The people who had been bustling around the halls are entirely gone at this point. Past the checkpoint, it’s like Ember and I are the only people here. She makes another turn, pushing open a set of large double doors that swing open soundlessly, even as the noise of the room beyond them becomes audible past the soundproofing.

The room is part royal court, part corporate boardroom. The lower half of the walls are made of panelled wood, embellished with vine-like patterns of gold leaf and half-pillars of carved stone that stretch all the way up to the vaulted ceiling, two stories high. The upper half, by contrast, is nothing but television screens set in gilded frames like works of art, displaying ticker-tapes of nonsensical numbers, digital maps of the city – of other places and cities I neither recognise nor understand – and the talking heads of twenty-four-seven news channels.

The red carpet cuts off at the door, replaced by a checkerboard of black and white stone that’s been polished almost to a mirror-sheen. Most of the room is taken up by a truly vast table of black stone, unblemished, smooth and without any ornamentation. Its surface provides a mirror that reflects the light of the trio of chandeliers that hang from the ceiling, set to deliberately leave the room in an intimate half-light that only heightens the masked anonymity of the Capes who fill the space.

There are so many Capes. More than I’ve ever seen in one place, more even than the dozen who were present at the Triad’s meeting. Maybe eighteen in all – unless I miscounted – and from the way Ember spoke to Huntsman, it sounds like there are more yet to come.

I tap at Ember’s shoulder, prompting a smile and an explanation from here.

“You see why this place is so big, right? Me and Jaeger, we’re just a small part of a much larger group. There are one hundred and seventy six known Parahumans in the Seattle Metropolitan area, of which seventy eight operate in the city itself. Of that one hundred and seventy six, about forty percent owe fealty to this room right here. Till the Triad fucked off, it was fifty percent.”

If I had the capability right now, my eyes would be dropping in shock. The sheer number of parahumans just seems impossible to me. It feels like even a world as big as Seattle would be bursting at the seams with that many titans filling its streets. It puts my little world of the Red-Light district into perspective, and just confirms that I made the right decision.

I wanted to be safe, and there’s safety in numbers.

“Of course,” Ember continues, “they’re not all here. Most of them pay tribute to us in exchange for being allowed to operate in Seattle. Legal and illegal; there’s about half a dozen Parahumans in the city that don’t fight or work for us directly, but pay us a percentage of their earnings in exchange for access to legal support to get around NEPEA-5.”

“But the people here,” she continues as she walks into the room, “are the core of the Elite. They call it differently depending on which part of the country you’re in, but here we call it the Court. We’re the movers and shakers, who are answerable to the people above us but powerful enough to have assets of our own. Like the Red-Light District.”

Like me, she doesn’t say – probably to spare my feelings, but I don’t mind. I’m not ambitious, and Ember has kept me safe so far. I’m comfortable with where I am, and happy to stay there.

Ember doesn’t mingle with the other Capes, instead picking a corner of the room and silently waiting there. Most of the others in the room are similarly isolated, in twos or threes that probably match up with the people they usually work with. A couple are busy networking, moving from group to group and trying and failing to strike up conversation, but they don’t approach us. Given Ember’s intimidating cloak, I can’t exactly blame them.

More people enter the room over time, Jaeger among them – his uniform-like costume even more spotless than usual. Eventually, after the twenty-third person has entered the room, the mood seems to shift and people take their seats at the long table – according to some hierarchy I can’t make out. Ember’s seat – and by extension mine – is about a third of the way down, which is higher up than I was expecting. Some of the Parahumans don’t sit at the table, instead standing respectfully behind their patrons as a visible show of prestige.

The focus of the assembled Capes seems to shift as a man enters the room, rising out of their seats as he walks down the length of the table. He’s dressed formally, in a deep black jacket with a white bow-tie, a chain of office slung around his shoulders and a formal hat supporting his half-face mask. In his hand, he carries a black staff, tipped at either end with silver.

“Black Rod,” Ember whispers. “The head of the Seattle Elite.”

When he reaches the top of the table, he surprises me by ignoring the ornate chair at the head, instead choosing to sit in a marginally less ornate seat that’s set to its right. As he sits, so does every assembled Cape.

A pregnant silence falls across the table, each Cape leaning forward like they’re expecting their leader to speak, but he simply sits there impassively. Ember leans back in her seat, angling her body to get a clearer look at Black Rod and, in so doing, giving me a clear view of him. He seems to be quite content, his face comfortably impassive like he’s simply waiting for something to happen.

A panel in the wall behind him swings open, and everyone starts to their feet as a woman steps gracefully into the room. She’s dressed in an elegant ballgown in red and gold, her entire face covered by a golden mask that’s been sculpted into the features of a stern, matronly face. In place of eyes, black orbs of glass seem to silently judge the assembled Elites as she practically glides to the seat at the head of the table, sitting like it was made for her with her hands folded elegantly in her lap.

Ember whispers nothing to me – her body language as surprised as everyone else there – and, at a gesture from Black Rod, the whole table takes their seats.

“As this is an extraordinary meeting,” Black Rod begins, “we will dispense with the minutes and proceed to the matter at hand. The intelligence picture of the Triad’s operations has improved enormously, but that has revealed an uncomfortable truth. Parahuman traffickers are operating in Seattle.”

A kind of electric tension passes through the room, as everyone stiffens in a mixture of rage and fear. The only ones who aren’t affected are Ember and Jaeger, because they’re the ones who already knew.

“The first order of business is to recognise those who discovered this operation. Jaeger and Nightcrawler – of Ember’s cell – have done us a great service in uncovering this obscenity.”

He pauses, as acknowledgements are directed towards the pair of us. Nobody applauds, limiting themselves to respectful nods, but from the way Ember subtly straightens her shoulders it’s clear there’s much more meaning than the gesture would imply. This entire room is dripping with prestige, and it seems that prestige is what determines a person’s importance.

“This is the reason we were founded.” Black Rod leans forwards, one hand resting on the table and his lips pursed in anger. “This is the reason the Elite exists. To stand up for Parahumans, and prevent them from being ground down by the world. We will find these victims, and we will raise them up. But we must proceed with caution.”

Some of the anger seems to leave him, as he turns his attention to group of five Parahumans in upmarket business suits, two seated and three standing behind them. They wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in the city – if it weren’t for the sculpted, full-face masks completely hiding their features.

“What is your assessment of the situation?”

“The Think Tank,” comes Ember’s whisper. “They predict the future, mostly work as business consultants.”

“It’s muddied,” one of the suits – a woman – answers. “We suspect Counterthinker interference. There’s a rival Think Tank somewhere with an opposing goal to us, and the results of their predictions are interfering with ours.”

“Creating white noise,” the man next to her interjects. “Static.”

“Can it be overcome?” Black Rod asks.

“Not by us,” she answers. “Silver lining is it probably goes both ways unless they have some serious assets. We can’t see them, they can’t see us. If you were prepared to pay for some of the Gentleman’s time, his staff might be able to overcome the interference, but…” she trails off, her brown eyes flicking briefly to the woman in red and gold before returning to Black Rod as he shakes his head.

“The interference raises another issue,” Jaeger speaks from his position a little further up the table than us. “The Triad have no Thinkers, which means they have powerful backers. We know the Parahumans are being shipped overseas, which means these opposing Thinkers are likely beyond the reach of my strike teams.”

“Indeed,” Black Rod acknowledges Jaeger’s contribution with a nod. “It limits our actions. It is imperative we find these captives before launching any significant strike against the Triad, in case they rush them out of the country in a panic. All we know is that they are being transported in shipping containers, and that they will be leaving on a ship. Therefore, we covertly flood the docks with hunters until we have located all ten captives. Then, we liberate our bothers and sisters and launch simultaneous strikes against every Triad target, breaking their backs in a single night.”

The red and gold woman rises from her seat, and the whole room follows her. Where there was shock and surprise at her entrance, now there is just fury and determination. She pauses for a moment, the pitch black glass in her mask’s eyeholes seeming to stare at the entire room at once, before turning and departing through the same secret door she entered through.

The moment she’s gone, every screen in the room changes so that together they make immense maps of the city, covered in light blue markers indicating drug labs, armouries, distribution centres, warehouses, flophouses and all the other assets of the Triad, including the converted bunker that holds their leader. The fruits of my labour, given the most prestigious spot of all; the centre of everyone’s attention, even Black Rod’s.

But not the woman in red and gold. She left before she could see it.

Her exit goes as unspoken as her entrance, as Black Rod begins speaking to each Parahuman in turn, outlining their roles and responsibilities in either the reconnaissance or the strike. I listen as he attaches me to the search team, but my mind is elsewhere.

It’s with the woman in red and gold, and the mystery she represents. The Elite is deeper than I knew, and I feel like I’m only beginning to scratch at the surface.