The rest of the night had been a bust.
No one from the ABB that I could detect had come by to look at the wreckage, though an awful lot of police had. Around about two in the morning I'd given it up and gone back to my cheap little hotel room, had a hot shower, and laid myself out on the bed. I reached out to the spiders I'd been gathering in the crawlspace, and continued work on my costume. I also tried working on that 'speaking' trick: I had vivid memories of Purity putting a bar of white fire through my swarm-clone's chest, and had decided that — even after my armored costume was ready — I was going to be doing as much of business as possible remotely.
Between those two priorities, there was an hour, maybe more, of weaving while the spiders and insects in the crawlspace did their best rendition of the Disney movie songs I'd grown up with. (I'd always loved the Cinderella dress-making scene; it was just my luck that when I finally got to live the dream, it wasn't with cute woodland creatures but spiders. Spiders who couldn't reliably hit the high notes.)
Once I started yawning uncontrollably, I had them switch to lullabies.
Somewhere in the transition between 'Hush little baby' and 'Mr. Sandman' I think I spaced out and then fell asleep — when I got up around noon, I was a little further along on the costume than the last part I remembered working on.
After another breakfast at that diner, I had a few challenges to sort out. On the one hand, my rucksack was now bulging with loose money, and frankly that was more weight and bulk than I wanted to be carrying around. On the other, I'd planned — to the extent I'd planned anything — to spend a week at least mapping out the ABB before starting any fights, and that had just gone out the window.
Impulsivity was one of the symptoms of a concussion, wasn't it? I'd be glad to have this head injury over with, if only so I could stop second-guessing myself.
Regardless, that meant I needed to prepare.
···---···
A shopping expedition yielded a collapsible baton, several bottles of pepper spray, a taser and several boxes of spare cartridges, and (at the shopkeeper's advice) a combat knife that could also function as a crowbar.
It said a lot about how safe parts of Brockton Bay weren't that, when I told him I was worried about the streets lately, the storekeep didn't bat an eye at the size of my purchase. He even threw in a whistle, a book on knife fighting, and a half hour on the range with the taser and dummy ammunition. I found that while my aim was pretty bad, as long as I had a bug on the target, I could point directly to that bug and that was a pretty good substitute for actual aim. The old guy was pretty nice about the whole process, telling me how I reminded him of his grand-daughter, and offering advice on what I should do if I did get in a fight.
Rule 1: run away if possible.
Rule 2: if not possible, go all-out, and then run away.
Good advice, both parts. He also turned out to be a major fan of Dauntless. (Armsmaster was 'a good man, but Dauntless was born in the Bay, and he'll do right by us when it's his turn to lead.') His opinion of Miss Militia couldn't have been higher (his actual comment was that, once I grew up, I couldn't find a 'finer example of womanhood' upon which to base my conduct. I couldn't really tell (and didn't want to ask) if he admired her for her patriotism, her use of all kinds of guns, her work as a hero, or if seeing a woman in camo just worked for him.
Besides, I could let him babble a little. His granddaughter hadn't graduated high school — some turf war between Allfather and the Marquis, back in the day.
Wrong place, wrong time.
He still had the skull of the minion who'd shot up her car mounted on a plaque in the back room: the Marquis was old-fashioned about how he enforced discipline, and had strong views about involving innocents. ('A real gentleman, he was… not like the villains nowadays. A personal apology when he delivered the skeleton, and then my son won the lottery the week after — still not sure how he fixed that. Didn't make up for losing Jessica, it didn't, but he had class, he did. Still wish I'd had the guts to try and shoot him when he was standing on my porch, of course, not that it would have done any good.')
A stop at an outdoor store yielded a fuller supply of camping equipment: a sleeping bag, a tarp, a space blanket, a water filter, some more trail food, some layered clothing... I wasn't planning on going camping, but I was acutely aware that anything I left in my room might not be there when I got back. That my room itself might not be there when I got back. Realistically, I knew the odds were low, but I felt a lot more comfortable knowing that I was carrying everything I needed with me. With that much weight loaded into my pack, I was grateful for the straps and internal frame — the rucksack I'd gotten there two days ago had been a snap purchase, but it was apparently the right tool for the job.
Another stop at a pawn shop yielded an old mechanical pocket watch — missing my appointment tonight would probably be hazardous to my health, and I needed a timekeeper I could read while functionally blind. Either that, or I needed to figure out how to reliably see through my bugs without crippling myself, and it was a lot simpler to just get a watch than solve that problem.
I even bought a couple of prepaid cell phones. I had a lot of bad memories about cell phones, but Battery was right: if I'd been able to call the Protectorate, that first night when I found Lung...
···---···
Arranging everything so that I could move and had ready access to anything I might want on short notice — the self-defense tools, water, food, phone — took a good twenty minutes back in my room.
That left the money problem.
With what I'd seized from the ABB stash-warehouse, I now had more money than I could comfortably carry around. Literally: too much loose paper, not enough space in my backpack. I reluctantly decided I could cache some of it here, some of it out in the city, and I'd definitely carry an emergency fund with me. I set my insects to sorting the bills out into piles. I had to glance over from time to time, since the bugs couldn't exactly tell bill denominations apart, but it was a pretty quick process, even with most of my attention on weaving more of my costume. I started bundling the cash into packages of approximately equal value that would fit in ziplock bags.
My bugs found something odd at the bottom of the Alexandria lunchbox: a piece of paper, ripped from a spiral-bound notebook. I reached out a hand to the cockroach-spider team ferrying it over to me, read the note, and then reread it: two telephone numbers, one labeled 'Lunch!' and the other 'Bank.'
I folded it and tucked it away into a pocket of my rucksack. Maybe once I was waking up a little earlier, I'd see about lunch. And what kind of bank could I use anyway? I wasn't technically 'wanted' — that I knew about anyway — but something told me the Protectorate would be trying to get me off the streets at the first opportunity, and opening an account would mean giving the bank my information.
Maybe after I had a good fake ID, I could do something... but then again, what bank wouldn't blink at a teenage girl bringing in a duffel bag of cash to deposit? And they wouldn't be wrong to worry: technically, taking the drug money was still theft. Not the ABB was going to file a police report over the loss, and since they'd already been trying to kill me before I took it, it wouldn't even put me in any extra danger.
With ziplock bags of cash stashed inside the air vents of my room, behind some loose brickwork on a building two streets from the diner (sensing nearby bugs was a surprisingly efficient way to find safe nooks or crannies to stash things in a city), and a couple of other places convenient to the bus routes, I made my way to the garage armory I'd refrained from hitting last night. Well, more precisely, I made my way to a coffee shop two blocks away, where I picked up some hot chocolate and quiet seat in the back while I felt through the garage.
Two hours of waiting later, the lone guard opened the door to two young men. (An exchange of "ABB forever" after the knocking suggested that either the gang had heard of passwords, but not really thought very much about how they worked, or possibly that the exchange was just how they said hello to each other.) I reached out, trying to listen in, and for my pains caught fragments of conversation and some literal pain between my ears.
"... got hit last night, so..."
".... them tonight?'
"Naw — first we gotta..."
"... like I'd argue with her."
"... extra security there anyway..."
The parts I'd missed were where I was getting a headache instead of sound; it felt like I was somehow straining myself. Like I was doing it wrong. Maybe like I was lifting with my back instead of my legs. Or maybe like I was trying to see one of those magic eye pictures, and all I was managing to do was go cross-eyed in the process. Also, the pain might be making my analogies worse.
Regardless, I'd heard enough to know I'd like to follow these two. They were going somewhere important enough to rate extra security. If I was very, very lucky, then the female they didn't want to disobey was Bakuda. I had no illusions about how dangerous she could be in a fight: if I found her, she'd have explosives enough to fight a small war on hand. On the other hand, she hadn't exactly fought me, and turnabout would be not only fair play... but just.
And satisfying.
Absentmindedly, I bugged the two gang members, the car they were using, and the one guarding the armory just for good measure, and started walking toward the nearest bus stop.
···---···
Several hours on the bus later, I'd tracked them down to a midrise apartment complex, maybe twenty years old. Not the kind of place with a doorman that you heard about in New York, but not the kind of outright slum that the ABB tended to favor. The two thugs were sitting in the manager's office, playing cards with the door open so they could watch whoever came or went through the lobby.
By the time I had to leave to make my appointment with Purity, the puzzle had only grown, and I let my thoughts dwell on it while I caught the crosstown bus. The tenants who came and went were mostly — but not entirely — Asian, sure. But they all looked like they worked for a living.
The ABB members I'd seen at the warehouse, or the armory, or on the streets... even if they weren't wearing their colors, they fell into recognizable types: young men or women, walking down the street with more bravado than sense, looking for a fight or a customer; older men or women, in their twenties or thirties, herding the younger ones with sharp words and occasional blows to the back of the head; a handful of people so calm they looked tranquilized, with thousand-yard stares and at least three concealed weapons. The way they grouped together, the way they oriented on whomever was the big cheese in the group, the way they walked together — all distinctive, all recognizable, if you were looking.
And, for the tenants, all wrong.
They nodded to the thugs when they went out or returned, and they had the characteristic fear of the low rankers for those higher in the ABB... but otherwise, they looked like working citizens. I followed a few of them out of curiousity, and they'd led me to... businesses. A grocery clerk, a waitress, a manicurist, a gas station attendant... it didn't fit. Sweeping their apartments hadn't yielded anything either. I hadn't been able to get through all of them yet, but every one I'd found had been... relatively neat. Lived in. People with their families. No guns or weapons or drugs, just... people. A third of whom weren't Asian by any stretch of imagination! And the ABB didn't recruit non-Asians. Just didn't.
Lung had a thing about that.
Of course, Lung was in jail right now. Maybe Bakuda was branching out?
I stepped off the bus, found a quiet bench, and checked my watch. Three minutes to go. I formed a swarm on the roof of the building, shaping it into a column, and then into something like a crude imitation of a person. The legs weren't really separate, and the arms kept collapsing back into the mass when I tried to gesture, but it looked something like a modern artist's interpretation of a human sculpture. Made of living insects.
I cautiously reached into it, for hearing and then for sight, and was surprised. The strain was there; the pain... wasn't. What was different?
The question would have to wait, because that's when Purity made her entrance.
"The armory, tonight?"
I guessed whatever reservations she had about doing business with a stranger apparently made of insects had been assuaged by giving her the stash warehouse yesterday — anyone who hurt the ABB was alright in her book. I didn't really have room to criticize that, considering. I shook off the distraction, and replied.
"Yes. It's inside the closed Perfect Autobody, on seventeenth just before it crosses Clipper street. It had one guard when last I checked, but I've seen as many as five there at a time if they're cycling guards for the warehouse through."
"You're not coming?"
I'd thought about it going along, but shook my head. She had more than enough firepower for the both of us. I'd stick to surveillance.
"Maybe a lead on Bakuda. Not sure yet. Want to keep up the stakeout, see if they react. Can you give me forty minutes before you kick the doors in?"
Purity nodded.
"I'll look for you here tomorrow at nine. Good hunting."
She rapidly dwindled to a moving star among the others in the sky. Flight looked really fun.
And fast.
And convenient.
I sat down to wait for the next bus.
Fifty minutes later, I was occupying myself by sweeping through the rest of the apartments in the building. Still nothing: just people and their families. If it weren't for the two ABB thugs sitting in the manager's office, I'd have written this off entirely. Everything here felt legitimate. (And the one time I'd tried to actually 'look', I'd reintroduced my brain to irregular stabbing pains.) But whatever was here, the ABB wanted extra security here after they lost their warehouse.
Extra security? I hadn't even found any security aside from those two bozos!
The wail of sirens rose in the distance; the direction told me that Purity had just hit the armory. One of the thugs started, and then took a cell phone call (it was amazing what you could tell about what someone was doing with a fly on or around a few of their major joints — something like a wireframe animation of a person), and then headed down to the basement.
By the building directory, that was just where the mechanicals and the maintenance office were… of course. Where else would you hide a workshop in a residential building? As quickly as I'd shifted my attention downward, I felt it — a wide space, crammed with various tools and components. Bakuda's workshop — one of them anyway.
And it was occupied.