The gates of Arcadia stood before me, seeming impossibly tall. Unlike Winslow, there wasn't even a hint of graffiti on the walls or the surrounding buildings, let alone a gang tag, the courtyard was clean, and none of the windows were so much as cracked.
Other students were making their way inside, despite the early hour : I guessed they had club activities or something else which was only available to children in wealthy schools. Dad had driven me to Arcadia, since this was my first day. In the future, I'd have to take the bus, but he'd insisted he accompany me for today, and I hadn't had the heart (nor, truth be told, the will) to refuse.
I took a deep breath of cold January air, and stepped inside Arcadia High School. First, I needed to go to the vice-principal office to get my books, locker key, and class schedule. Then I'd have to introduce myself to my new classmates, who would no doubt be delighted to hear they were getting a transfer from Winslow this late into the school year. I half-wondered how many questions about the knife-fighting, drug-dealing, and other general delinquent activities I was going to get before the day was done.
It said something about me that I'd been less nervous facing off against the E88's team of would-be rescuers. What, exactly, I wasn't sure (or at least didn't want to admit to myself), but it said something.
To Dean Stansfield, also known as the Ward Gallant, reading people was a lot easier than it was for most teenagers. That was because of one aspect of his power that wasn't known to the general public, which allowed him to see 'auras' around people whose color indicated their current emotional state. From what he understood of his talks with his handlers in the PRT, that ability by itself wouldn't have been enough to warrant being hidden from the public : it was the fact that he could affect emotions, a Master power with potentially disturbing and villainous implications, that had led to him being promoted as a Tinker instead, even if it meant he'd to rely on Armsmaster and Kid Win to repair and maintain his suit of power armor.
Still, his power wasn't some kind of master key to interacting with people well : knowing someone's emotions was entirely different from knowing why they felt that way, and he didn't have any Thinker ability to help him figure out what to do in response to the information his power fed him. If he did, he would have been able to help Amy through her ongoing depression.
He couldn't just turn it off, though, so he made do and did his best not to act on what his power told him in his civilian life. And, as he ate lunch with Vicky and a bunch of other students – some of whom were Wards, but not all of them, because that would have been incredibly stupid of them – it was only this long practice that kept him from visibly reacting as a girl he'd never seen before walked into the cafeteria. She was tall, with long black hair and a pair of glasses, and she moved with her tray held close to her chest like she was expecting someone to bump into her at any moment.
Dean's emotion perception wasn't a reliable too to detect parahumans : while people with powers tended to have increased emotions simply as a result of their lifestyle, there were plenty of unpowered people who had the same.
But this was different.
The girl's aura was a massive circle of pure black, surrounded by a bright corona. It reminded Dean of pictures he'd seen of the Sun during eclipses when he was younger, and he'd to force himself to ignore it if he wanted to see the rest of the real world around the girl as she sat down at a table with a couple of other girls.
That was not normal, and the only explanation he could come up with was that the girl was a parahuman of some kind, whose power was interacting weirdly with Dean's. It wouldn't be the first time : Vicky's aura made her almost impossible to read, which was part of why he'd first become interested in her – well, alright, it had been one of the reasons, but it had been important in his eventual decision to ask her out, no matter what Dennis said.
The corona was in colors Dean associated with nervousness, but not outright fear or panic. Still, the last time Dean had seen someone that tense had been when he'd been deployed alongside a squad of PRT troopers after Uber and Leet had launched one of their stupid games on the Boardwalk while he was out there on patrol. For someone to feel like that in a school … well, the only reason he didn't immediately trigger an alarm was that he didn't see any anger or aggression.
An idea struck Dean, and after a few seconds of reflection, he decided that he had to make sure, just in case. As discreetly as he could, he took out his cellphone and snapped a photo of the girl while pretending to check something on it. It was as blurry and unfocused as one might expect, but crucially, it wasn't full of static. If the dark-haired girl was Lasombra – which was a big if : Brockton Bay was a city that constantly caused new Triggers – then the PRT's theory that the Stranger effect that prevented the cape from being recorded by all electronics was something that could be turned off was correct.
Dean wasn't going to tell anyone about what he'd seen, though. Morality aside, outing someone like this was just plain illegal, and being thought of as someone who could identify other parahumans on sight would get him on the shit list of every gang in the city. Besides, Lasombra hadn't done anything that would warrant the Ward going against even the spirit of the law by sharing information that might be used to out him.
Also, in the case that his theory was correct and not just a wild guess based on flimsy evidence, he didn't want the cape who had punched Lung out and taken on a whole team of E88 villains and come out on top to be pissed at him. With all that Vicky had told him about how that fight had gone down, that seemed like a singularly poor life choice.
He was going to keep an eye out for the new girl, though. Just in case. And if someone asked him why, he could always tell them he was sensing her stress and wanted to check she was okay. Looking out for other people was what heroes did, after all.
As I walked out of Arcadia, I reflected that things had gone much better than I'd feared this morning. In fact, the day had gone just about perfectly : the other students had been welcoming without crowding me, and being able to pay attention in class without needing to keep an eye out at all times for someone tossing a spitball at me or stealing my work was even more relaxing than I'd anticipated. It was clear that getting my grades back up to what they'd been would take time : my intense studying at home had barely gotten me to a level where I could keep up with the lessons.
Eating in the cafeteria instead of hiding in the toilet had been a lot more nerve-wracking than I would like, but I'd forced myself to do it, seating with a couple of my classmates. Supposedly, there were Wards in Arcadia, but I didn't want anything to do with them and hadn't gone out looking for them. I was sure they weren't like Sophia, but the idea of being dragged into superpowered teenage drama filled me with a deep sense of dread. I'd also stayed away from Victoria Dallon, not wanting to risk slipping and revealing something only Lasombra knew. How that would've worked given we'd interacted for all of maybe twenty seconds, I didn't know, but I had read enough comic books to avoid tempting fate like that.
I waited at the bus stop, then got on when it arrived. Most Arcadian students lived in nicer areas than me, but there was still a line that would drop me close enough to home that going back and forth on my own would be possible. The journey passed in a blur, and I was nearly home when a black car squealed to a halt right next to me, with a scream of brakes that nearly made me jump out of my skin. As I turned my head to look at it, the front-right window lowered, revealing a man in body armor and wearing a gun which was pointed right at me.
"Miss Hebert," he told me in a voice that was entirely too polite for this situation, "you're coming with us. Don't do anything foolish now."
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck !
The back door of the car opened while I stood there frozen, and another man stepped out, this one dressed in clothing that wouldn't immediately draw attention in a public space. He went to me and said something I didn't register, gently but firmly ushering me into the back of the car. I let it happen, too shocked to even think to struggle, to scream, to call for help.
I couldn't believe I had been this careless. I knew my human body was vulnerable : it was my power's major weakness. But I'd never thought someone could be as reckless as to abduct me in broad daylight. Was this the Empire Eighty-Eight ? Had they figured out my identity somehow, and were seeking revenge for getting Hookwolf arrested and then thwarting their rescue attempt ?
The Nazis were the only ones I could imagine pulling something like this. The ABB might also try to do it as revenge for Lung, but none of the men were Asians, and in any case the gang had completely collapsed in the last few days. Besides, everybody knew that the Empire didn't care about the Unwritten Rules : the tale of what had happened to Fleur of New Wave had painfully etched that fact in the city's collective memory, stopping the hope of a nation-wide movement to bring capes to accountability dead in its tracks.
No matter who these men were working for, there was still a gun pointed at me. I could call Marchosias, and for a brief moment I nearly did it. The sun was still out, but I felt confident she could endure it for long enough to deal with these thugs, and the moment I thought of her, I felt her stir in the Abyss, picking up on my terror and rousing herself from her slumber, waiting only for my call to spring out of my shadow.
The problem was that I had a gun pressed against my back, and I didn't think Marchosias could take out the man holding it quickly enough to guarantee he wouldn't have time to get a shot off. If he did, then unless Panacea was within shouting distance (and, given I'd seen her in her civilian identity back at Arcadia, I somehow doubted that), I would most likely be dead by the time I got to the hospital.
And I didn't want to die. The vehemence of that thought actually surprised me : I'd never been suicidal, if only because taking the easy way out would have felt like admitting defeat to the Trio's endless suggestions that I do precisely that. But right now, with a gun pressed against my side as I mechanically sat down and put on my seatbelt, I realized that I wanted to live.
Also, my death would destroy Dad (which a treacherous part of my mind whispered was the real reason I hadn't taken the Trio's advice, no matter how tempting the release of death had sounded at times).
So I stayed silent as the car drove through the streets. I didn't struggle when the man next to me put a black cloth over my head, keeping me from watching where we were going through the tinted window, reducing my world to the vibrations of the vehicle and the gun pressed against me.
I did nothing, except listen to the breathing of the men in the car with me, and cling to my tie to Marchosias like a child to a security blanket.
Inside his office, Coil watched the security screens as his men brought Taylor Hebert down from the garage and into the prepared interrogation room. He noted that none of the cameras were glitching and all of them showed the girl properly as she was led into their field of view, which, after a few seconds of reflection, he decided to take as a good sign.
"She's secured, sir," said one of his men over the radio once Hebert had been sat on a metal chair in an otherwise empty room, still blindfolded.
"Good," he said. "I'll be handling things from here."
"Sir …" the mercenary hesitated, but continued : "Are you sure about this ? I don't have an issue with it, but it's still an escalation from our previous modus operandi."
"Don't worry," he replied, making sure his smile could be heard in his voice. "I have it handled. I assure you it won't be a problem."
He couldn't exactly tell the man that this timeline would most likely be dropped before midnight – a few experiences early in his supervillain career had shown that people tended to react poorly to that – but the mercenary trusted him enough not to push (or feared him, which was the same thing as far as he was concerned).
The mercenary sounded convinced, which was all he needed, and Coil made his way to the interrogation room, slamming the door behind him loudly enough to make the restrained girl jump slightly. With a nod, one of the two mercenaries still in the room removed the girl's blindfold.
She blinked several times, adjusting to the brightness of the lightbulb which provided the room's sole source of illumination, and froze when she saw Coil standing before her in his costume.
"Hello, Miss Hebert," he said affably. "Or should I say, Lasombra ?"
"I've no idea what you –"
"Ah-ah-ah," he cut her off with a raised finger. "None of that now. I assure you, there is no point in trying to deceive me."
She looked at him, as if trying to figure out whether he was bluffing. But even without his mask, the day Thomas Calvert couldn't bluff a fifteen-years old girl was the day he gave up on his dreams of ruling Brockton Bay and retired to grow coconuts or something else equally asinine.
"I am Coil," he said once she appeared properly convinced. "Do you know who I am ?"
"You're one of the Bay's supervillains," she replied.
"Ah, you've done your research," he nodded. "Good. That will make this quicker."
"Do you really think you'll get away with this ?" she said, with more heat in her voice than Coil had expected. He made a mental note of it for later analysis. "Kidnapping me in the middle of the street, so close to my home ? That's got to be against the Unwritten Rules."
"You'll find, Miss Hebert, that the Unwritten Rules are really more guidelines than anything else."
He chuckled as she glared at him, clearly recognizing the reference to the Earth-Aleph movie and not impressed with his flippancy. Then he realized something : she was looking straight at him. He knew from her file that she needed glasses, but they'd been removed when the bag had been put on her head to keep her from injuring herself with broken glass. And yet, she was looking straight at him, not appearing to be vision-impaired in any way.
He told himself that it meant nothing : he hadn't bothered to check precisely what her prescription was. For all he knew, she could see him because he was close enough to her. But there was something in her eyes that made him uneasy.
Coil checked that his other timeline, the one where he had never told his men to go capture Taylor Hebert, was still safe. In it, he was sitting at home having dinner : a quick check of his security measures showed him that everything was perfectly fine.
Good. He could continue.
"Let's cut to the chase, Miss Hebert : I want you to work for me. You haven't had your powers long, yet you've already achieved more than many capes will during their entire career."
"No," she replied immediately. "I'll never work for you."
Ah, the conviction of youth. It would be admirable if it wasn't so very, very foolish.
"Maybe a clarification of your position here is in order," he said, nodding to his men. They'd known what to expect : he'd selected them for the task, knowing from experience in discarded timelines that they both wouldn't object and had the skills required.
"I'm sure you'll be more open to my offer once the consequences of refusing have been made obvious," he said, dropping all pretence of warmth and letting some of his ruthlessness peer through, causing the girl to turn satisfying pale.
It was time to start figuring out just how to break Taylor Hebert so that she'd never even think of defying him. With her powers, anything else was unacceptable : she wasn't like Tattletale, who needed time and information to be a threat to him, and who could always be neutralized by the simple application of a bullet to the head if she got too cocky. Given Lasombra's Mover capabilities, even a flicker of defiance could end in Coil's death. So he'd need to be extra thorough in studying her limits.
Fortunately, he could try as many times as it took.
The two mercenaries advanced toward the tied-up teenage girl from behind, taking slow, deliberate steps to ratchet up the tension. One of them reached out to touch her shoulder –
Suddenly, an enormous black wolf leapt out of nowhere and fell upon the man, its jaws going straight for his throat. The man screamed in pain and horror, a sound so terrifying it made the other man freeze.
Much as he wanted to, Coil couldn't blame him. The supervillain had read the description of the beast Lasombra had first summoned for his fight with Hookwolf, but seeing it in person was completely different.
"Miss Hebert –" he began as he reached for the pistol at his hip, intent on threatening the Master to get her to call of her beast.
But the young girl was already moving. With what could only be Brute strength, she had broken free of her restraints, tearing through cable rated for industrial purposes as if it were paper. Black tendrils wrapped themselves around her, forming something that was half an armor and half … was that a suit ?
She wasn't a Master, Coil realized immediately, or at least not just a Master. How that made sense with his previous investigation, he didn't know, but didn't care about figuring it out right now.
With a scream, she turned around and punched the mercenary who wasn't being savaged by a giant wolf in the chest, sending him flying. He hit the wall of the cell, and Coil didn't wait to see if he rose again : he ran out, going straight for his office, leaving his men to be devoured by the beast. As he ran, he shouted for reinforcements, and the noise of an alarm soon began to echo into the underground lair, along with the sound of footsteps converging on the interrogation room.
Moments later, Coil burst into his office. The cameras were still working, except for several which displayed only static. That would be the Stranger effect : it seemed it didn't extend solely to Hebert's Lasombra projection. However, the radio was still working, and things didn't seem to be going great for his men, judging by the panicked shouting he was hearing.
Sitting in his chair, Coil tried to make sense of what was going on. The girl had only had her powers for less than a month : Coil was fairly sure she hadn't even known she could do some of the things she was doing right now. Which meant that, once he collapsed this timeline, she wouldn't know how to do it, at least not immediately. In his experience, nearly all parahumans were driven to experiment with their powers, finding out their limits through trial and error. But knowing more about the girl's abilities than she did was something he could use, he was sure of it.
Heart pumping, he considered dropping the timeline immediately, but decided against it. He could still extract valuable data from this one, if only by testing Hebert's resilience. Acting on impulse, he moved to his desk and typed the sequence of twenty-nine alphanumerical characters that started the base's self-destruct sequence.
That done, he turned to the wall that held his escape tunnel. He was going to get out, go to a point where he could observe his base from outside, and see whether the explosion and collapse of the underground complex were enough to kill Hebert. If they were, then he'd have an upper limit for Lasombra's toughness. If they weren't … then he would have to resort to more indirect methods of bringing the girl under his control, which he might need to do anyway. From what his intelligence suggested, she was close to her father, so kidnapping him should –
Suddenly, there was pain, and he was pushed to the ground, breaking his nose as his mask slammed against the concrete floor. Rolling on his back, he saw the black wolf towering over him, blood, his blood, dripping from its maw.
He tried to move, to reach for his gun, but the wolf was quicker, and buried its fangs into his chest. Agony exploded through him, blackening his vision, and in that blackness, he saw …
He saw …
Beasts, numberless and horrible, crawling through the darkness. Hungry maws and wicked claws, and eyes that glowed with unearthly malevolence.
Thomas screamed as the horrid visions dissipated, leaving him back on the ground underneath the beast, just like before. He swore the wolf smiled at him for a moment, before turning away and leaping into the shadows at the corner of the office, disappearing as if into a pool of black ink instead of the most solid construction money could buy.
Coil blinked, and realized to his horror that his other timeline, his safe timeline, had collapsed. He was trapped in this one, which he'd meant to discard the moment he'd learned everything he could from Hebert. Trapped in the timeline where his men had abducted a teenager in broad daylight, and he was stuck in his base with a monster and an activated self-destruct sequence. He tried to move, to get up, to escape down his secret tunnel or to get to the keyboard to input the cancellation sequence, but he couldn't move. It didn't feel like his spine had been broken (he knew that feeling well from a discarded timeline he tried very hard not to think about), but his body simply refused to answer the commands of his mind.
He screamed, he cursed, he wept and he begged for someone to rescue him. At this point, he didn't care if it were his men, the Protectorate, the Empire, or even Cauldron itself. But nobody came, and he spent the last moments of his life laying down, trying and failing to move his body as the countdown to his death drew inexorably closer to zero.
Then there was fire, and pain – and then, darkness. But, perhaps more mercifully than Thomas Calvert deserved, the latter was far more tranquil than the dark, haunted pit he'd glimpsed while staring in the eyes of Marchosias.
I ran, wrapped in shadows and possessed of inhuman strength. The doors of the underground maze I found myself into broke at my slightest touch, as did the bones of the men who stood in my way, while their weapons broke uselessly against the darkness around me. Marchosias stalked ahead of me, scouting a way out for me to follow.
I gasped as I reached the surface, bursting out into some sort of construction site. The moment the descending sun touched my skin, I felt the unnatural strength that had filled me since I'd freaked out in the basement desert me, and the shadows I'd wrapped around myself disappear. I cried out in surprise and pain : the shadows being burned away by sunlight hurt, a kind of pain I had never felt before. Thankfully, though I braced myself on instinct for it, the light didn't hurt my actual human body.
I kept running, though, and no sooner had I cleared the construction site than it caved in. I bent in two, hands on my knees, gasping for air to fill my burning lungs. As I did so, I realized that, at some point in my flight, I'd grabbed my school bag. I'd always thought the cliché of guards keeping their prisoner's belonging next to their cell was a narrative contrivance, but it turned out real-life bad guys did it too. I wasn't going to question it : I certainly could use a lucky break after today.
So, I thought to myself as my heart slowly calmed down. It turned out that I wasn't as helpless without my projection as I'd thought. That was … that was something I would have to think about later. Right now, I needed to get back home, preferably before Dad got home from work. I didn't think he would take 'I got kidnapped by a supervillain on my way home' as an excuse. Well, he would if I unmasked myself to him, but that would open a whole other can of worms I wasn't in a mood to deal with now – or ever, if I'd anything to say about it.
I looked around, and though I didn't recognize the street, I did recognize the shape of a few buildings in the distance, enough to orient myself. With one last look at the collapsed ground behind me, I started walking, ducking into an alleyway as the sound of sirens grew closer.
This wasn't the way I'd seen my first day at a new school going, but the worst part of it was that I couldn't even find it in myself to wish I was still at Winslow.
Lisa watched the TV, eyes wide. The screen was displaying one of the local channels, a result of Alec messing around with the remote after getting bored of his latest round of gaming. On it, a man was standing in a street, with a huge hole in the ground behind him, the area of the collapse blocked by police tape and numerous rescue personel working on the rubble – and there was Armsmaster, along with a couple of Wards.
"… heroes are still on the scene of the collapsed street, but several bodies have already been pulled out of the rubble," the reporter was saying, but Lisa didn't pay attention.
Holy shit. That had to be Coil's not-so-secret underground base. She'd been trying to locate it for some time, and was confident she'd have managed it with a few more weeks of taking every opportunity to glean more information than her 'boss' was willing to give her.
How had that happened, though ? The bastard was as paranoid as … well, as someone who was forcing a Thinker to work for him under threat of death and was plotting to take over the Bay.
She looked at her phone. After a few moments of hesitation, she picked it up and called Coil's number, something she had almost never done : far more often, it was him calling her.
"The number you're calling is currently unavailable …"
She hung up, and considered her next move. She needed answers, that much was clear. She fired up her power, letting it absorb the crumbs of data from the news report and put them together with everything else she knew.
Coil always knew more about the PRT's activities than he should even with agents in the organization. Coil's power let him obtain information from Lisa she didn't volunteer. Coil knew about the possible link between Lasombra and Taylor Hebert. Coil tried to kidnap Taylor Hebert to check the hypothesis and gain control of Lasombra. Hypothesis was right, but Coil failed to control Taylor Hebert.
Coil didn't intend to capture Taylor Hebert – Coil did capture Taylor Hebert – Taylor Hebert is Lasombra – Taylor Hebert isn't Lasombra – Lasombra killed Coil – Lasombra didn't kill Coil – Killing Coil was an accident – Escalation from previous encounters with capes – Lasombra is a projection – Lasombra isn't a projection –
She forced her power to stop as it started rambling again after running into whatever anti-Thinker effect was part of Lasombra's absurd grab-bag of powers. After some experimentation, she'd found that her power could work at the metaphorical edges of the subject, but the moment it focused on Lasombra, it started giving out contradictory, nonsense information. Or at least she hoped it was nonsense, because the alternative – that all these things were somehow true at the same time – was far more disturbing than she liked.
Then something else occurred to her, without her power's prompting, and she jumped to her computer. She didn't have long : even with the damage of the collapse, the Protectorate had access to enough Tinkers that they were likely going to get something from Coil's computers.
"Tats ?" asked Grue, who she just now realized had been staring at her warily for the past few minutes. "What's going on ?"
"Our boss just got killed," she replied, already typing. "And now I'm going to everything I can to get as much of his money into our pockets as possible."
"Our boss just what now ?" said Regent, suddenly sounding a lot more alert than usual as he straightened on the couch.
"We were working for Coil," she absent-mindedly answered even as her power fed her logins and passwords. "He was bankrolling our operations in order to use us as deniable operatives. Grue got recruited with a promise of getting custody of his sister, I got recruited with a gun to my head, Bitch got recruited with promises of cash for taking care of her dogs, you got recruited with … well, you know."
She didn't need her power's help to know that casually revealing what Coil had promised Regent in return for him joining the Undersiders wouldn't go over well.
"Wait, we were working for Coil ?" said Brian, disbelieving. "And you didn't think to tell us ?!"
"What part of 'recruited with a gun to my head' didn't you get ? I was informed in no uncertain terms that if he wanted you to know who he was, he would tell you himself. Now it looks like Coil fucked around with Lasombra and found out," she continued. "That's his secret base on the news, and they aren't mentioning any survivors or that Coil got arrested. Plus I can't contact him, so I'm assuming he's dead. Also, remember that he knew all of our civilian identities. It's not certain that the PRT will be able to extract them from the ruins of his base, but it isn't impossible either."
"What are the odds of that happening ?" asked Grue, suddenly a lot more tense.
Is worried about his sister – no shit, power.
"I …" She hesitated. "I don't know. I never went into his base, so I don't know what precautions he's taken. But he was definitely enough of an asshole to setup some kind of deadman switch to fuck as many people as possible if he ever got killed. I'll try to find and disable it, but we should plan for the worst-case scenario anyway."
"So we should skip town as soon as you've gotten the money, is what I hear," said Alec. "If they don't get the info, then we can always come back later."
Isn't planning on returning. Now that Coil isn't there to keep him hidden from his Father, is considering going back on the run. Can be convinced otherwise, doesn't want to go back to living on the run, but will if he doesn't feel safe.
Lisa wanted to call him paranoid, but given that his Father was Heartbreaker, there was no such thing. She would have to handle this with care : despite the circumstances in which they'd become a team, Lisa actually liked her teammates, most of the time. She'd rather keep the Undersiders together, if for no other reason that her forced recruitment by Coil had taught her the importance of having someone to back you up.
"That's one option," she admitted, "but not the only one. We can leave town, stay but change our identities – I think I'll get enough cash for it to be doable, and I know people we can go to for help in that regard. Or …"
"Or ?" asked Grue.
"Well, let's just say that depending on how this hacking of mine goes, we might have other options available to us," she said with deliberate vagueness.
"Wait a sec," said Alec. "You said it was Lasombra who took down Coil, but the news are saying the collapse happened during the day. I thought he could only come out at night ?"
"Just because he didn't come out during the day before doesn't mean he can't," Brian pointed out. "Most crime takes place at night, after all."
"True," said Lisa. "Also, if what I suspect is correct, then he has other reasons not to show up during daytime."
"If what you suspect … Tats," said Brian with growing horror, "did you give our boss Lasombra's civilian identity ?"
"What ? No !" she protested. "Of course not. Do I look like I'm crazy ?"
"Well …" began Alec, and Lisa didn't need to look at him to know he was grinning.
"Shut up, Regent," she snapped. "No, Grue, I didn't tell Coil anything about Lasombra's identity. He'd me run some analysis for him on Lasombra's powers, but I didn't give him everything I found. I didn't want the cape who took down Lung to be pissed off at me."
She didn't say that, according to her power, Coil had somehow known her deductions anyway, and that depending on what he'd told Lasombra before getting his comeuppance, the unaffiliated cape might already know that Lisa was involved in getting her kidnapped and dragged into an underground base.
"Okay, so," Grue sighed. "Bitch is at her shelter right now. Do I need to go pick her up, or should I at least call her and tell her to be on the lookout for the PRT ?"
"I …" Lisa hesitated. "No. No, she already knows she needs to keep her head down with the gang situation right now. That should be enough until I get more information."
"Alright. Then, once you've shared the money you got from his accounts, we can decide what we're going to do now that our boss is dead. As a team," said Grue, stressing the last word.
Well, at least he wasn't jumping to disbanding the Undersiders yet. Lisa could work with that.
"Results of Thinker analysis by Appraiser.
Keywords : 'Marchosias', 'Lasombra', 'Brockton Bay', 'Fallen'.
Recording starts at 18:15 EDT :
[Yellow … yellow … What ?! The eyes ! The eyes, they see me ! They – Black ! Black ! Black black black black black black black ! Endless, depthless, all-consuming black !]
Recording ends.
Addendum : Appraiser had to be carried to medical after the analysis, having suffered from what the medics determined to be a sudden and violent panic attack. It took him several hours to calm down, and when questioned about what had happened the next day, he claimed not to remember anything but a vague sense of dread when trying to think back to the analysis. Medical advised against making another attempt. Our checks revealed that the standard precautions against the known anti-Thinker measures of the Fallen were in place, and the effect is completely different from what happened during previous attempts at using Thinker powers on that group.
File marked for sending up the chain of command."
Watchdog internal report, logged on January 18th, 2011.
AN : Thank you to Kylia Quilor for helping me figure out what the Undersiders knew of their employer at this point in time. That was far too complicated for a minor bit of the chapter.
The most important thing is that Coil is dead, and somewhere in Brockton Bay, a little girl is going to be very surprised when she wakes up and ask herself whether she is in danger of being kidnapped.
Regarding the fate of the Undersiders in this fic : as of right now, I haven't yet decided. I'm inclined to let the characters decide (that is to say, give the Muse the wheel and see what I end up writing). So if you have suggestions, now is the time to shout them as loud as you can in the hope that She will listen.
As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments.
Zahariel out.