The insects I had could feel one person, moving about the workship with quick, erratic, jerks.
Bakuda?
I massed swarms in the ventilation shafts, trickled them into cracks and corners, under chairs and behind equipment. It was all I could do not to drown the workshop in a tide of chitin. I'd told myself this would be surveillance alone, but if that really was her… I forced myself to unclench my fists — my knuckles were white. Instead, I stood from the bench, and stretched, and forced myself to walk toward a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. Anything to keep from jumping up and down, or grinding my teeth, or otherwise being noticed.
The thug was knocking on the workshop door downstairs; the one inside paused, then moved to a table. Then toward the door.
I took a seat in a booth in the back, and pretended to study the menu. My backpack was beside me, the tylenol already out. I had to know. I reached out to see, to hear…
A different sense of strain, a dizzying perspective, kaleidoscope spinning… settling. No pain.
An asian woman, slight, wearing glasses, straight black hair tucked back in a neat ponytail.
"Yes?"
"The garage was hit, mistress — the E88, again."
Bakuda! It had to be.
"Then we'll get our revenge tomorrow. Don't disturb me for anything but an attack on this building or my next guest, understand?"
The reply wasn't so much a 'Yes' as a grunt, followed by a bow and backing away.
My attention followed her as she reentered her workshop and closed the doors. I looked through the room, looking for a weakness, some information, something. I needed to know if she'd stay here; if she'd move again soon. I sent the waiter away with a perfunctory order for tea and hot noodle soup, my mind searching all the while for a tactic, an opportunity.
Tomorrow night I could bring Purity in again, and with Lung locked up, she could face Bakuda and Oni Lee both and still be favored for victory. But I'd lucked into finding Bakuda this once — if she hadn't requested additional security, drawn on a pool of soldiers I happened to be watching, would I have ever searched this apartment building? Would she stay in the same place tomorrow, or would she move? Would the attack on the garage force her to move? I needed to know more, and I turned my attention from the Tinker tinkering with her devices to sweep the whole workshop.
What I found was a set of tables, with various devices in various stages of assembly — I couldn't begin to tell you what they were, but they looked less like the Hollywood version of a mad scientist's lab and more like a metalworking shop had taken over a chemistry classroom. But on one table in the back, there was a man. Strapped down and gagged, but alive and staring in terror.
Bakuda spent a good ten minutes tweaking some of her devices, and lingering over one that resembled a vest more than anything else. Was she planning on launching a wave of suicide bombers? Eventually, she strolled back to him, caressing his face almost lovingly with her bare hand before donning a pair of surgical gloves.
"Park Chan-ho… awake at last. You're an experiment — well you're all experiments, but you get to be awake for this part of the process! One of the fun things about neurosurgery is that you don't really need painkillers: the brain's what you use to feel pain elsewhere, and it's not really set up to notice when someone's cutting into the brain itself."
She chuckled — a light, musical sound — as her deft hands suited action to word, making a small incision behind his left ear, before peeling back skin and skull to reveal the brain beneath.
The soup arrived just as I'd lost any desire to eat.
"What I want you to understand is that while brain surgery like this is child's play — I am brilliant, after all — my particular specialty is explosives. And that is exactly what I will shortly be inserting into your brain. Usually, I give this speech after the fact, but there's always someone who thinks I couldn't possibly have done… this."
She plucked a small grey capsule from a tray to her right, and began inserting it into the brain, carefully shoving away brain tissue with her fingers, before getting something that looked like an enlarged dentist's pick to poke it in a little further.
"Proving that my word is good is always satisfying, but it can be a trifle… wasteful. I'm hoping that having you awake for the procedure will make you more understanding of the fact that you have in fact just joined the ABB. It's an organization with excellent opportunities for talent to rise, provided you do precisely… as… I… say."
She punctuated each of those words with a twist and a shove.
"There! Now we just have to do a little calibration, and then stitch you back up." Her voice was low and smoky, rich in tone… and wholly inappropriate to the weeping terror of the man on whom she was operating.
"You see, I'm a big believer in management by fear. What you need to know, now that you've joined up, is that if you fail me… you will certainly die. You also need to know that if you don't excel, you might die. It may be fast, or it may be very slow indeed — each of the bombs I implant is just a little different. They might blow you to pieces, or liquefy you, or mutate you, or freeze you outside of time, or simply leave you alive in a wholly unresponsive body for decades! This is part of that wonderful blend of certainty and uncertainty necessary to inspiring proper fear, don't you agree? Lung taught me so much. Oh! Don't think too harshly of your coworkers, who invited you to dinner tonight — they already have their own bombs implanted. And don't think about being a martyr — young Park Jihoo had his operation this afternoon, and the rest of your family will be similarly treated before you are released."
She smiled.
"I wouldn't make you bring your own family in — that would be inhumane. You will, however, invite me to visit one of these days, perhaps tomorrow, and you will provide me space to work. You will even find excuses to invite others by so I can 'recruit' them… or you will die. Your family will die. Your friends will die. And you will find a way to help the ABB rise, and you will do as you are told or… but why repeat myself? I see by the fact you've pissed yourself that you think you understand. It will do for now. For future reference… the next time you do that in my presence will be the last."
Well, that explained the apartment complex of otherwise law-abiding citizens above her. I used my bugs to check for scars — I couldn't get everyone in the building on short notice, but a spot check said she had total coverage of the building. Even the infant I checked had a scar there. And it also implied that she kept on the move, following her recruits to where they lived and using them to bait new victims in… and that meant Bakuda might not be here tomorrow night.
The lights in the restaurant flickered, and went out. My attention immediately focused on my own person, and I began gathering swarms closer to me. I slid under the table with my backpack, and felt around for my taser.
No one had come in, and the customers and kitchen staff were acting bewildered. No one was approaching the front. No one at the back. My awareness expanded outward — similar scenes of confusion everywhere I could feel.
The power had simply gone out for these blocks, maybe more.
I settled back into my seat, and returned my attention to Bakuda's workshop, with a fragment keeping track of what was going on in my own surroundings.
She'd moved away from her victim, and was again fiddling with what looked like a grenade taken from a tray of other grenades, apparently wrapping wire around the ovoid, with periodic pauses to adjust whatever lay inside with some combination of a screwdriver and soldering iron.
The mere fact she'd spent more than a minute on it said that, whatever it did, it did a lot more of it than a grenade would.
I thought about launching an assault, but a bomb-focused Tinker in her workshop? I had hordes of bugs. She knew I controlled bugs. If she didn't have a bug bomb that could exterminate insects by the neighbourhood-full, it would only be because she hadn't thought she'd need it since I was already dead. And… she might stay a full day here.
I'd wait. I'd wait, and I'd watch, and I'd come back tomorrow night with Purity and put Bakuda down. If she tried to leave before then, I'd have to choose between trying to follow her — and risk that whatever she normally did to keep from being followed would kill off my insects — and trying to take her by surprise.
Besides, she had to sleep sometime.
I could wait for my chance. It burned, to know she was right there, that she'd killed Dad, and that she thought she'd gotten away with it… but it would burn worse to blow my best chance at her. I would wait.
Minutes ticked by, while I sipped my tea. The restaurant staff had taken the outage in good cheer, bringing out candles and using their gas stove to keep the hot soup and tea coming. They were actually doing pretty good business right now, as a candle-lit beacon of normalcy in the blackout around which people gathered. Someone out front had apparently dug out some kind of three-stringed banjo, and was playing — not brilliantly, but to a lot of cheering.
The part where the ice cream store next door came in and offered all their ice cream half price after the first half hour with no sign of power returning hadn't hurt, either, and the convenience store down the street had also brought their perishables by, and it looked like some individuals were also bringing down whatever they had. At least two people had borrowed time on the gas stove to heat something they'd brought, before taking it out front. Distant sirens told a story of places dealing with the crisis less happily, but here? Here you had a feast, with people eating on credit (with the phone lines so jammed, credit card processing was functionally down) and a kind of community potluck festival was developing.
There were people literally dancing in the street.
Feeling the bugs on the people out there while they danced was almost mesmerizing — I'd been tagging people for as long as I'd been in range, and while I probably didn't have everyone in my range tagged, I certainly had a lot of them. Feeling the way they moved, the way the crowd eddied and flowed, the way the dancers matched the rhythm of the musician, the way a young mother across the street on the third floor opened her window, and swayed and twirled with a two year old on her hip, the way a grandfather who'd dragged a chair up to the storefront tapped his pipe in rhythm… sound and motion blended together wonderfully.
Or… I could call in the Protectorate. People at the other tables were using their cell phones to check on friends and relatives, and if most calls were getting busy signals, a few were getting through. A location on Bakuda ought to bring a massive response as soon as it could be organized. Given what was going on in the city, that might be an hour or two… but still faster than waiting until my next meeting with Purity. I'd been so focused on the fact that the Protectorate wouldn't approve of my trying to get Bakuda, wouldn't permit me to do anything meaningful any time soon, that I hadn't thought much about what they could bring to the table.
For all the gang presence in Brockton Bay, the Protectorate was still the most formidable single force — and it could draw reinforcements from across the country as needed, including several of the most powerful capes alive. E88 had survived decades of Protectorate manhunts by virtue of its deep bench: it regularly boasted a dozen or more capes on its roster, drawing white supremacists from across the nation and even the world to its banner. Every time one quit or was put away, another emerged.
The ABB, by contrast, was only a few years old and had survived almost wholly on Lung's personal reputation: he was quite capable of fighting every other cape in Brockton Bay solo if the fight dragged on long enough, and while he could be beaten… he healed. His foes usually died. To date, no organization had been willing to go all-in against him, and anything less would only temporarily discourage him, at best.
Without Lung, the Protectorate probably could crush the ABB outright — and would be glad of the opportunity. They could focus on Empire Eighty Eight, then, or maybe clean up some of the minor players that had sprung up over the last few years.
Those minor players ranged from the loosely Protectorate-aligned New Wave to Faultline's purely mercenary crew to the Undersiders themselves. There were usually one or two other villain-led gangs, but they never lasted. Coil… who knew what Coil was doing, or even if he were actually a cape. The running theory was that he was some kind of Tinker: his men were known for their professionalism and their laser guns both. The Merchants had only survived this long because literally every other power in the city had better things to do than squashing them — someday, that would change.
I roused from my musings as I noticed that two people were headed down to Bakuda's workshop — I'd felt the car they'd come in press through the crowd on the street, felt them exit the car and enter the apartment building, but hadn't paid them any particular mind until they turned down the stairs.
Two men. I focused my attention more closely, as Bakuda opened the door. A thin asian man in a black bodysuit, bandanna around his neck like he'd watched too many Westerns, wearing a lot of knives. And behind him… Lung.
Well, fuck.