There's a trick to hiding from someone that every little kid knows. As we get older, we forget it and start hiding in shadows or empty rooms, behind or beneath things. With practice and cunning we advance to various forms of hiding in plain sight, using camouflage, misdirection and expectations, or the crush of the crowd to conceal ourselves. I'd tried them all, at one time or another, in dealing with the bullies… made myself quite the expert in hiding.
Never quite good enough.
The fancier forms of hiding in plain sight rely on understanding how your hunter thinks, and luck. The cruder forms of hiding out of the way rely on your hunter being lazy.
And luck.
The way my life had been going, I didn't much feel like relying on luck.
And that meant I needed to go back to the most basic form of hiding there was: get in someone's blind spot and stay there, no matter how they moved. Child's play, literally, but with higher stakes. With Lung, the rule was simple: if he took me by surprise, I died. So, I'd have to be better than I was at hiding from Emma, Sophia, and Madison.
I could do that.
First, of course, I'd have to find him.
The day's search of the city, sitting mind-wide-open on busses that were not yet running to schedule, had turned up some interesting facts: E88 was open for business across most of the city, including large chunks of what had been ABB territory. The Merchants looked like they were trying to move in on some of the rest.
The ABB was just… missing. Which was a problem for me: I could follow underlings up the chain — that's how I'd found Bakuda. I was already taking notes on E88 and the Merchants for later use. But without any ABB presence on the streets, I'd have to find Lung directly… and that might take some doing.
If you can't find where someone is, find where they're going to be. Class schedules had always been the bane of my own hiding attempts. Lung… didn't exactly have a publicly available list of which classrooms he'd be in when.
What would he be up to, right now?
I rubbed my forehead against the water bottle I'd just gotten from a corner store while waiting for the crosstown bus. The headaches weren't as bad as they had been. Maybe that was the concussion fading. Maybe I was getting better at using my insect senses — I had noticed that it was easier if there were more insects in the area I was trying to 'see' or 'hear' in. It might just be something like eyestrain. Did capes get power-strain?
So many things I didn't know.
But for some of them, at least, I had an idea of how to find out.
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A trip back to the gun/outdoors store ("Walker's") yielded a warm welcome and a lot of gossip.
Dauntless and Miss Militia had apparently each stared down an incipient riot Saturday in fine style (he did grudgingly acknowledge that the incident handled by Armsmaster, Aegis, Velocity, Assault, and Battery was significantly larger… "but it's not the same, when you've got backup right there."). The other Wards had been doing some impressive search and rescue work, and Clockblocker and Vista had apparently spent the morning with some architecture Tinker from out of town demolishing the ruins of the freeway interchange — they'd already excavated foundations for its replacement.
Walker himself ("Call me Pete!") remained as concerned for my health as ever. I wasn't able to get out of the store without a water purifier ("What if Bakuda had hit the treatment plant?"), but I did manage to get the police band scanner and emergency radio I'd come for… and a promise to come back again sometime.
Now, I just had to make my way to E88 territory… and wait.
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I picked a spot near the corner of a park.
Quiet, public, relatively comfortable benches — no one looked twice at someone sitting down and watching the baseball game going on as the sun went down and the lights came up. Little League. The stands were three-quarters full of parents and siblings — some sulkier than others. The kids were playing with the sort of total, life-or-death dedication that only made them seem younger, adult-solemn in carefully scrubbed uniforms that were already picking up dirt and stains as they dove for balls. It brought a smile to my face as I watched it, an earbud attached to my scanner and my attention loosely distributed over my range.
An hour passed in a blur of strikeouts, sacrifice flies, and twisting grounders. Occasionally, the swing was sweeter, and the crack of a line-drive sounded out. Once, an outright home run escaped the grounds and nearly concussed a young man playing Ultimate Frisbee on the green. He rolled to his feet with the ball and a smile, launching the ball back to left field with an astonishing ruler-straight throw. The rest of the Ultimate game paused to cheer the home run while the boy in question slowly trotted the bases, solemnly pretending to ignore the way the stands were erupting.
His successor hammered a flat drive that knocked the shortstop off her feet — but she came up with the ball to end the fifth, and so the final inning began with the score four to two. I was actually getting interested in whether the Medhall Monsters would be able to defeat the less felicitously named Tom's Hardware Royals when a patch of static came through my earpiece:
"Shots fired, repeat shots…"
Well.
I stood up, shrugged my pack on, and secured the belt straps.
Time to run.
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The steady rhythm of my foot strikes, the even puffing of my breath, gave me time to think.
I'd covered a half mile by now, and the chance grew with every second that I'd find the scene empty when I got there. I reached out to the bugs ahead of me as I moved forward, abandoning the ones behind me as I passed them. I'd work with what I found on site — no point slowing down to collect more now. Besides, half the weight in my backpack was insects. Insects that were venomous, flying, or both — I'd learned from the last fight with Bakuda. I might never want to use that option, but I'd make sure that I always had it.
As my sphere of awareness moved forward, I could feel people moving, feel traffic coming, and shifted pace and direction almost instinctively, threading through the knots of people outside a bar as if they weren't there. Once, across a street against traffic. It was showier than I wanted to be, but right now I needed to be fast. There was nothing guaranteeing that it was Lung, anyway — Coil could be on the move, or even the Merchants, or…
A roar sounded in the distance before me, an immense and bestial cry of triumph that lasted most of a minute, and echoed endlessly after.
Good news: probably Lung.
Bad news: exactly the same.
Another block of running brought the address from the radio in range, and I reached out. I couldn't feel any fighting going on — just buildings and apartments with people going about their business… and a big area of heat, much larger than Lung himself.
Looking through my swarms, I saw a building on fire, which would explain the heat. Judging from the name, still visible above the door, ("The Eagle's Nest"), and the black and silver color scheme, it was probably an E88 bar. That… made sense. Lung might have issues finding E88 stash houses without his minions, but a bar wouldn't be moving around weekly… and it sent a stronger message, in some ways, to torch a local bar.
I slowed my pace to a jog, considering.
A cop car drove up to the bar, slowed, and then swerved wildly as a man on fire flew out one of the bar's windows, over the car, and across the street before skipping off the roof of another building, and into an alley. Maybe Lung had bad aim, or maybe he hadn't noticed the cop car and had just been going for distance — either way, it was a hell of a welcome for Brockton Bay's finest.
I didn't blame them for hitting the gas and clearing the scene.
More chatter over the radio. The PRT and Protectorate were being notified. Lung might be perfectly willing to wait for them to show up, and that might solve my issues with him… or he might just beat them all and walk away.
He'd done it before.
The erratic noise of gunfire from the bar stopped. The smashing, crunching and screaming continued for a short time that felt long indeed, before it too stopped.
A portion of the wall glowed and exploded, showering the street with burning debris, before Lung walked out and glanced around the street. There was a perfectly good door not ten feet away… but given the size of the fire behind him, the building was probably a total write-off anyway.
He was still man-sized, though taller than last I saw him. The corona of fire about him died out, and I closed my eyes as a bullet simply… oozed out of his neck as he regenerated, as if he were popping the world's biggest pimple.
Closing my eyes did exactly nothing to keep me from seeing this. Fortunately, it also did exactly nothing to my running.
Sirens were already sounding in the distance, and Lung was just walking… toward a yellow taxi with the engine running. He might be more calculating than I'd thought, if he was deliberately hiding himself in the traffic that way. Then again, maybe he'd just gotten into a cab and said 'Take me to a neo-Nazi bar.'
I pulled up before I'd reach their line of sight, coaxing a single insect from the horde I was carrying clear: a female moth. It fluttered up, caught the wind, and rode it toward Lung, catching up with him as he opened the taxi door. I had it crawl beneath his jacket, in the small of his back, and reached out to it, flipping the switch that told it that it was time to mate… and then told it to stay right there.
Might work, might not.
Plan A was to follow him from a distance, but if he was in a car that would be tricky at best. I was already running toward the nearest bus station, guessing routes and where he might go to ground…
I really needed a car. Or a motorcycle. Or something. I'd bring it up with Quinn next time we talked.
The taxi pulled out of range a long time before the bus got there.
I felt a PRT truck arriving on scene, Armsmaster preceding it on his cycle. After they'd given the all-clear, the fire trucks showed up.
The bus took me out of range before I saw the fire doused.
Sieving one of the male moths in my backpack out of the swarm was effortless. Trying to smell through it left me with the beginnings of a headache, and no progress whatsoever.
Telling it that mating time had come, and then feeling the direction it wanted to go… that worked. And at this time of year, there shouldn't be any other female moths emitting pheromones right now.
Tracking it down still took two hours and three bus transfers — the moth could tell me which way to go, but not how far, and the bus routes didn't ever go exactly the direction I wanted.
Still, at the end of it…. Lung.
Reclining on a La-z-boy almost too big for him.
He was alone in the apartment, apparently content to simply stare straight at the ceiling. I couldn't tell if he was meditating, trying to get some sleep, or just imagining dismembering his various enemies. The moth was actually still with him, still in the small of his back.
I'd found him.
The next bit was going to be tricky.