http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHvf20Y6eoM
The members of Team Tomorrow Americas mourn apart. A week passes, but it is a long week. For those who do not, perhaps cannot, sleep, and who process information at speeds far in excess of the normal population, the Team experiences at least triple the time experienced by the rest of humanity.
Comstock spends time locally with his family, hoping to rebuild connections and to heal the pain that his existence and work brought upon his family, but all the while knowing that nothing would ever be the same. His spare time is spent helping the community where he can with construction and renovation, but he constantly sees the parts he can't heal, the intangible but far more important ideals that hold society together by tenuous threads. By night he watches the city, his city, and despairs as it reflects his own failures. But in the darkness he can act, he can be something else that he has never dared to be and enforce the ideals that he holds so dearly...
Solitaire reconnects with her family after long absence, if only briefly. The contact is poignant, and it is difficult for her to continue the charade, hiding who she is. But it's safer for them... and as the mourning continues, she wonders in the dark places of her mind, would they blame her? Would they be able to accept her? While away from work, Solitaire has time to attend to her other projects, building hope in the hopeless, offering a hand up to those willing to grasp it. She finds a spark of light in a world that has become so much darker despite her best efforts.
Impetus' life is a masquerade. He wears the smiles he must. He is strong for his family. He reassures the media that the team is ok, that they are just on vacation. He makes speeches at schools and prisons, wearing a calm and confident demeanor, and makes the world a better place one audience at a time. He suffers the obsession of the public, whether love or hatred, with equanimity. But inside, he is dying one little piece at a time, and every day he thinks about the lover that is gone while he needs her most, whose safety is now in question. And he thinks of the future, what it might be like for them together, as a family. Of the child he already has. And of revenge for the horrible crimes that will in all likelihood go unpunished.
Suzukaze lives a strange dual life. Half of her time with family, a dutiful, caring attendant to their needs, the other half wading through a cesspool of underworld contacts and government agents. She seeks out information on her ex-teammates, revealing that they were hired by an outside source, with funds coming from Columbia; the team was all too happy to accept the offer. After cutting down a North Korean minister and two respected Japanese businessmen to get the location of her former teammates, she finally succeeds. A grim smile of satisfaction plays across her face; there will be a reckoning.
Gravitas is reminded that he was once Quinton. The Nova that can move between worlds is forced to confront the man he once was, and the weaknesses that define the human condition. And his family is forced to confront Gravitas, the nova who was once a man, their brother, their son. No one is comfortable, and after a few days of awkward interaction, Quinton retreats to the lab permanently, his lab, for solitude. In it he bends his will to the mystery of his brother's murder, starting with the tissue samples taken near his brother's time of death. Gravitas finds that the Mite was indeed odd, cut with something else, a chemical that can only be extracted from a living nova's M-R node, killing the nova in the process. Another chemical is present as well, a hormone found only in newly erupted novas; either his brother was injected with hormones from a newly erupted nova, or was one himself. Finally, he finds that the tissue sample shows too little decay... His brother was alive at the time of extraction, but showing no life signs. Looking up from his research, Quinton and Gravitas share a moment of profound realization... Their brother may still be alive, and if so, he is perhaps the only family that will ever be able to connect with them.
Zero watches. It always watches. It watches its teammates with their families, in shared sorrow. It remembers loss, but it has little left to lose now... except its friends, and the future it has so desperately been trying to build. But Zero won't let that happen. It searches files, it beats answers out of baselines, and out of novas that thought they were untouchable. It will know the truth. It faces ambushes from thugs and novas and nova thugs, most timed with uncanny accuracy, but escapes them all through stealth and its teleportation. It finds the truth in Columbia, after working its way through obstacles that few other novas could uncover without full scale invasion. The cartels have every nova in the country working for them, and they're... making more. They've allied themselves with the eastern Triads. And together they have very, very powerful friends.
Flare mourns with what's left of her family, and walks through her father's life in hopes of finding something, anything, to help her make sense of what happened. She interviews his friends, his co-workers, and his acquaintances. She re-creates a picture of his life before his untimely death, and the picture is one of a good man that she never really knew. Seeing him as he was to others, more than just a father to a young daughter, makes his loss all the more tragic for her. His final days were spent helping at the department, and preparing for his retirement party. His killer was a young kid, 16, that shot him at a coffee shop on his way home, on the day before he was going to retire. The kid said something about being hired, how it wasn't his idea, he was just told to "go in at 7 and start shooting." But the kid killed himself out of guilt that night, and no one on the force really looked into it. The detectives on the case, who should have investigated further, are curiously in possession of new cars, and one has a hospital record from the night of the shooting; he was beaten pretty bad, a "bar fight gone wrong" supposedly, though he never pressed charges.
Gale has no one to mourn, something for which she is very grateful. She watches as the team moves through the base, ghosts to the world around them, and she helps them as best she can. Frostburn makes use of her, sending her on errands and to meet key personnel, in a process likely designed to make Gale a part of the the team and of the base's functioning. Gale tries to help with the various tasks at hand, in the lab, with research, with anything that can help to better understand the problems that have beset the team. But she finds it difficult to make herself a part of what the others are doing, either due to lack of expertise, or because of the distance that the recent deaths have caused. But in the process of watching the team, and getting a grasp of the disparate information they are working with, it occurs to Gale that perhaps this wasn't merely an poorly thought out stab at T2M:A. Perhaps it was a move to discredit them entirely, to weaken Utopia, or perhaps even to provoke an attack that would break international law... The media, which none of the others really had the time for, was already talking about the deaths and the cessation of T2M:A activity. Now everyone knew just how to get to Utopia members, and what buttons to push. It wouldn't just stay cartels, it would be anyone with a bone to pick... What exactly had she gotten herself into?
Phantasm did nothing most of their time off. She stared at a plain white wall in her room. She stared at the sky. She stared at the computer screen as it flashed data faster than baseline eyes could process. The only thing she really did much of, was to think about things. She thought about her family, her new life, about revenge, and about the world that was emerging. She thought about what had happened, about loss, about happiness. She thought about her time with her new friends, her trip with Imp, her nights with Dillon. She thought about the problems with the world, and the problems facing the team. She puzzled out how to deal with someone who could predict the future, and someone who could see the present. She thought about how to apply all the information she was absorbing, and she though about whether she would ever have a life. When she was done thinking, she asked Quinton to take her to her family one more time. She trailed them all day; they were recovering, and they were fine without her. She thought about that, and what it meant, when she returned home that night.
Utopia sees its perfect plan collapsing in on itself, and works to shore up its the holes that are forming. A famous soccer player erupts in the middle of a game, and is recruited to Team Tomorrow to distract the media from more important affairs. A group of Nova terrorists calling themselves Teragen has stumbled upon a form of super-charging nova evolution, and with the help of their informant, Proteus makes plans to steal away the woman that is even now undergoing a metamorphosis.
Further removed from the workings of the world, Shadow Walker sees realities diverging yet again, as he dances on the sea of probabilities, fascinated by watching an old man walk between them as he tries to set right events before they end in a great wall of quantum possibility. Divis Mal looks up from his contemplations, as though sensing a familiar friend, but he sees only shadows; what will he choose to make the future he wonders... How much should he intervene? And on a distant star, ghosts tremble as creation vibrates beneath them, through them, signaling a danger too great to be ignored.
