Taylor gazed in horror at the filth spilling out at her feet. Before she could do more than gag, hands seized her from behind and shoved her forward into the locker. Refuse and roaches welled up around her legs as the locker door slammed shut behind her. She gagged, retched, and screamed, kicking and thrashing, trying to kick the door back open-- she heard the lock snap shut. “Enjoy your stay with the rest of the filth, Hebert,” a voice taunted her from outside. Emma? It was Emma?? No, Emma wouldn’t do this, things were bad but Emma would never go this far.. “Emma, please, don’t do this-- please you were my FRIEND--”

  Three voices rang out with mocking laughter at her pleas. “Can you believe this bitch?” she heard Sophia say. “You were my friend, you were my friend--”

  “I was never your friend, you hopeless sop.” Emma’s voice cut through the steel door into Taylor’s ears like a knife. “Nobody’s worthless enough to be a friend with something as worthless as you! Sit in there and rot with the rest of the garbage!”

  A year and a half of torment finally came to a head; that last strut holding the edifice of Taylor Hebert finally broke.

  Everything went dark. Then the void filled with teeming, swirling light. Something vast, enormous, a fractal impossibility swarmed in the dark. Something vast as a continent broke free and floated down. It reached out a tendril glowing with countless promises, reached down--

  “What is this?”

  The Shard hesitated. INTERSECTION/INTERFERENCE/INTERVENTION?

  “Oh, Sister, this is terrible.” Something white, golden, an aurora of pastels.

  Something else; dark indigos, swirling with pinpoints of glittering light. “Strewth, what-- infestation is this?”

  “We should have stopped by decades ago...”

  “We must needs make amends--”

  “It will take some doing. We must be careful.”

  “Yes. Carefully, subtly. But as for THIS wretchedness...”

  The Shard flinched back, too late. Dawn and Midnight swirled and struck; the Shard gave a shrill voiceless cry, then melted away to nothingness like a snowflake.

  Taylor reached out to the vanished tendril that had promised so much, despairing. Hurt. Pain. Betrayal. Loss. Grief. Loneliness.

  “Oh, poor little one.” The voice was as tender as the morning. “Here, dear child. We cannot yet do much directly, but let us do this much for you...”

  A horn of spiraled midnight, a horn of shining white, touched her brow. Everything suddenly changed and Taylor’s world exploded with light.

  Sophia, Madison and Emma cackled outside Taylor’s locker. “Come on, let’s go before someone on staff shows up,” Madison said.

  Sophia snorted. “Don’t worry about the STAFF, Mad,” she said disdainfully. “They haven’t got a testicle or a spine between ‘em. But yeah, let’s go and leave Hebert here to think about her place in life… wait, what..?” Sophia’s arrogant sneer had turned to a scowl of surprise and confusion. Puzzled, her two tag-alongs turned to see what she was staring at. Taylor’s cries had stopped, and now her locker was vibrating with a deep, ominous thrum. Pale lavender light was shining out of the ventilation slots and leaking out around the seams of the door.

  The explosion naturally caught them completely by surprise.

  The call went out over the PRT comlinks. “Attention all Protectorate, this is Dispatch. We have a Trigger Event, I repeat, we have a Trigger Event at the Winslow High School, any Protectorate in the area please respond...”

  Armsmaster and Miss Militia were already on patrol, cruising the streets on their custom motorcycles. Armsmaster was the first to respond; he opened the comlink in his helmet and spoke up over the thrum of his engine. “Dispatch this is Armsmaster and Miss Militia, we are en route, what’s the sitrep?”

  “We copy Armsmaster. According to reports we are receiving from inside the school, we have a code two, possibly a code three Trigger event inside Winslow. One of the students manifested just about fifteen minutes ago and has been rampaging through the school, pursuing one particular group of three female students through the hallways and classrooms, believed to be the ones responsible for the trigger event. The staff are evacuating, and according to phonecalls we are receiving from inside the school Shadow Stalker is already on the scene and responding.”

  “Is that confirmed?”

  “The caller is a Madison Clements, who apparently was given Shadow Stalker’s PRT phone by Shadow Stalker and told to report in.”

  “Sir,” a voice broke in over the transmission. “This is Kid Win. I was doing a flyby on my way to the PRT building when the balloon go up. I’m in a holding pattern over the school, do you want me to engage?”

  “No, Kid, do not engage till we arrive,” Miss Militia replied as they accelerated down the street. “Give us oversight till then. Do you see Shadow Stalker or the Trigger?”

  “Yes, I have a visual on them both. The fight has moved to the cafeteria, I can see them through the cafeteria windows.” His voice sounded odd.

  “Can you give us a description of the Trigger?” Armsmaster barked.

  Now Kid Win’s voice sounded really strange. “Yyyes, sir, I can...” there was a pause. “It’s a lavender unicorn.”

  “It’s a whaauuh?” Armsmaster was so startled he veered off the pavement at the next intersection, jolting over the sidewalk at the corner.

  “It’s a little lavender unicorn with a curly black mane and tail,” Kid Win said with determined fatalism. “And it is kicking Shadow Stalker’s ass.”

  By the time Miss Militia and Armsmaster roared into the Winslow parking lot, the school had been evacuated. The student body, for a surprise, was still there, milling about at a distance and craning their necks to see; their morbid curiosity apparently keeping them in attendance. The two heroes kicked open the double doors and moved in, commando style; the ruckus, or the remainder of it, was coming from down the hallway, through the cafeteria doors.

  Another commando-style kick-and-enter and they were inside. What greeted their eyes had them both forgetting every shred of their training, lowering their weapons and standing there gormlessly slackjawed.

  The hallways had shown signs of battle-- bent and half-ripped-off locker doors, books and litter blown about the floor, cracked and shattered lighting--- but this was a whole nother order of magnitude. Cafeteria tables had been sent tumbling, steel trash cans upended, plastic trays had been scattered everywhere, some shot through the shattered windows, others embedded in the drywall ceiling, their loads of food spattered hither and yon, half the lighting in the ceiling ripped loose, along with parts of the ceiling. All in all it looked as if a troop of gorillas had expressed their extreme displeasure at the menu.

  Off to one side was what had to be Shadow Stalker. At least Armsmaster surmised it was her, from what he could see of her. She was clad at least partially in her costume, presumably having to don the cloak and some bits of armor over her civilian clothes in haste. She was jammed headfirst into a partially full trash can. The mouth of the can had been crimped down by some force around her waist, pinning her arms by her sides and leaving her butt and flailing legs sticking in the air. Her crossbow pistols were lying on the floor, crushed like beer cans and tossed aside. Broken bolts-- the kind with steel heads, which she was NOT supposed to have, Armsmaster noted with displeasure-- were scattered across the floor, snapped like pencils.

  At first he was puzzled as to why she was unable to free herself with her intangibility powers-- then he noticed the blinking lights. Some well-meaning soul had apparently made an effort at decorating the cafeteria for the just-past holiday season and had strung electric lights around the ceiling; Shadow Stalker’s assailant had apparently pulled down one end of the strand and used it to tie up the abrasive Ward before stuffing her in the trash. Muffled, sulphurous swearing was coming from inside the can as it rocked back and forth. Oh well, at least she was alive and, to judge by the vociferous nature of the swearing, in good shape.

  On the back wall, between the hot plate lines where the chalkboard with the menu of the day hung, was a redheaded girl of about fifteen years of age. She was bruised, battered, spattered with dust and debris and looked absolutely terrified. She was pinned to the wall, held several feet up off the floor by a lavender aura that wrapped around her and pinned her arms to her sides.

  At the other end of that aura was a tiny lavender unicorn. The glowing tip of its horn was barely higher than his own armored knee. It had childlike proportions, enormous blue eyes, and a mane and tail of tumbling ebon locks that (he judged) would be the envy of any female. There was some sort of marking on each of its hips, but he couldn’t quite make it out as the tiny creature was spattered with… absolutely vile looking filth, all over its hooved legs clear up to its shoulders and haunches. It stood there on all fours, splay legged, its eyes fixed on the girl in its intangible grip and an expression of unspeakable rage and pain on its childlike face.

  The hostage saw the heroes standing there. “Oh god, help me! Kill it, shoot it, the freak’s going to KILL me--!”

  “FREAK?” the little unicorn screamed. The voice was clearly feminine. “You and Madison and that bitch Sophia--” Armsmaster’s face settled into an even grimmer scowl behind his visor at the name. He was getting together a picture of what happened that was uglier by the second.”-- torment me for a year and a half, you beat me up, destroy my things, steal my schoolwork, turn the entire school against me, stuff me in a locker full of rotting tampons--” and it became instantly clear what the mung and scraps of cotton and cloth clinging to her; Armsmaster and Miss Militia both suppressed gags-- “You turned my LIFE INTO HELL for LAUGHS, AND I’M THE FREAK??”

  The girl went white. “Taylor-- please--”

  She floated the girl about a foot away from the wall and slammed her back into it, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. “You were my FRIEND, Emma!” She pulled her out and slammed her into the wall again. “We grew UP together!” Slam. “We did EVERYTHING together!” Slam. “YOU WERE FAMILY!” Slam. “YOU were my SISTER! I LOVED YOU!” Slam.

  “I loved you...” the unicorn’s voice trailed off into a quavering whimper. The telekinetic aura faded away, “Emma” slid down the wall, battered and bruised but otherwise unharmed. The little unicorn’s face screwed itself up into a vision of agony and grief. Enormous tears welled up from the clenched shut eyes; with a gut wrenching sob she turned and ran blindly, staggering, out through the cafeteria doors.

  That snapped Armsmaster and Miss Militia out of their fugue. “We’d better follow her,” Armsmaster said unnecessarily. “Kid Win!”

  The teenage tinker was there, hovering just outside the shattered windows on his hoverboard. “Uh, yessir!”

  “Stay here, administer first aid if it’s needed.” the trash can by the wall cursed some more. “And maybe see about getting Shadow Stalker out of there…. No rush though.” His bearded chin radiated a grim future for the probationary Ward. “I’m going to want her to stick around, if you get my meaning.”

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  “Got it sir.” Kid win snapped off a salute. Armsmaster nodded, and he and Miss Militia left in pursuit of the weeping unicorn. Kid floated in through the window and dismounted. After a cursory examination of the former hostage-- and a warning not to leave the premises until after the authorities had spoken to her. That done, he walked over to where his “teammate” was still imprisoned, and slapped an EMP cuff around her ankle. This elicited a shout of rage from the trash can. The cuffs in question were solid titanium alloy, rated for several categories of brute, were laced with high-voltage circuitry to restrain capes with intangibility powers, and had a built in taser to subdue anything else. They’d become standard issue shortly after Shadow Stalker had made her debut as a rogue, for some peculiar reason. “SO.” Kid Win said loudly, slapping the side of the trash can. It made a deafening bang, eliciting yet another oath from the Ward inside. “Looks like you got your grimdark ass kicked by a Lisa Frank poster.” He played a quick bongo solo on the bottom of the can.

  He held up his cellphone and hit record. The video of her epic swearing echoing out of that trashcan was going to be Youtube gold, he knew it.

  It was fairly easy to track the fleeing unicorn; she was still leaving a trail behind her, bits of paper product and footprints-- hoofprints-- etched out in something tacky and disgusting neither of the Protectorate heroes wanted to think about. She wasn’t exactly evading them, either; the trail led straight to the school gym and beelined for the girl’s locker rooms. They stood outside the door, weapons at the ready.

  “I’ll go in first,” Armsmaster said. He swung around the doorframe and in through the marked door.

  Miss Militia said nothing. She holstered her weapon and stood in front of the door, arms crossed over her chest. “Three… Two… One...”

  Armsmaster promptly came back out as quickly as he’d gone in. He pointed a thumb at the “women’s” logo on the door. “...You go in. I’ll go…

  “... Backtrack, examine the, ah, scene of the crime. Or something.” Miss Militia said. “Right.”

  “...Right.” The tinker hero of Brockton Bay beat a hasty retreat. Miss Militia rolled her eyes, smirking behind her bandana, and walked inside.

  It didn’t take much guessing to figure out where the distraught, mutated girl had run. Miss Militia could hear the showers going full blast… and the sound of the girl’s sobbing. She sighed, put her phone and wallet on a nearby bench for safekeeping and walked into the shower room.

  Like everything else in Winslow, the shower room was bare, utilitarian and ugly. It was a single large room with bare concrete floors and walls, lined with drains and shower fixtures every few feet. Every shower head was going full blast, filling the room with spray and steam. The unicorn-girl was sitting on the floor under the last showerhead, hunched and miserable, water gushing over her and flattening her mane and tail. A few travel-size bottles of shampoo were scattered around her hooves. She was making a feeble attempt to scrub her own flanks with a hoof, trying to get the muck from the locker off her, and sobbing fit to break a heart of stone. She was the picture of abject misery. “Taylor?” Miss Militia said.

  The unicorn looked up at her. If the sobbing hadn’t already done it, that face would have melted her heart like butter in a blast furnace. “Muh...Miss Militia…?” she quavered. “Oh… oh no...” she broke into a new round of tears.

  Miss Militia took a long, invigorating breath and let it out in a sigh. She firmed herself to ignore the drenching her costume was about to get-- she’d waded chest-deep through leech infested swamps, she could tolerate having soggy britches from a high school shower stall-- and walked inside. She crouched down next to the girl… next to Taylor… and carefully, gently rested a hand on her withers. “Hey,” she said gently. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

  Taylor closed her eyes and shook her head, wet mane flapping around her neck. “I-- I Triggered,” she whimpered. “I went ‘Carrie’ on the whole school...”

  “It’s not that bad, Taylor.”

  “I’m gonna go to the Birdcage...” she sniffled.

  Miss Militia couldn’t help but laugh a little. “No, I promise you are not going to the Birdcage,” she said. “Noone was seriously hurt… and the damage isn’t even too bad...” she picked up one of the bottles at their feet and opened it. “Tell you what, before anything else, let’s get this mess cleaned off. Then it’ll be that much easier to tackle whatever’s next. Here, let me give you a hand… you’re not going to get very far with hooves...” that said she emptied the bottle on Taylor’s head and back and began scrubbing in a no-nonsense fashion. The gunge sloughed off mercifully quick, swirling to the floor and down the drain.

  Taylor held up one of her hooves and looked at it. “Why...?” she said.

  “You Triggered,” Miss Militia said, going for the obvious answer. “Your transformation is… pretty extreme, but with help you will be able to adjust--”

  “Why did they do that?” Taylor went on. “Why did they do any of it?” She looked up at Miss Militia. “Months and months and months of hurting me, mocking me, hating me-- why would they do that. Why would a hero do that to an unpowered person? Why would anyone do that to anyone else? Why would someone do-- that-- to-- their-- best-- friend--” she broke down again, leaning her head against Miss Militia’s shoulder. “Why, why, why, why??”

  Miss Militia patted her back and tried to think of something comforting. Then she realized the girl’s horn was glowing again. Trapped in indecision, unwilling to stay or leap away as the glow grew brighter-- then without warning exploded in an enormous wave of lavender light--

  Armsmaster looked at what was left of the row of lockers. It was obvious which one had been Taylor Hebert’s. If the filth and gunge spilling out of the bottom hadn’t been an obvious clue, there was the fact that it was no longer so much a rectangular steel and aluminum box as it was a work of modern art. It had been ruptured open from within like someone had stuffed an M-80 into a beer can and lit the fuse. It was a miracle noone had been injured…

  Though perhaps not, he reflected on a second look. From the look the… detonation, for lack of a better word… had been deliberate, blasting almost entirely upwards and sideways, mashing several lockers on either side and peeling itself open and laying it out like the petals of a flower. An extremely jagged, incredibly VIOLENT flower, but still.

  He poked through the rubbish spilling out of it with a handy pencil. (There were quite a few handy… there was quite a bit of stationary lying about where students had hastily abandoned it.) He wrinkled his nose at the mess: it looked to be at least several waste cans worth, and had been in there for a considerable amount of time, long enough for some of it to start to rot. Probably over the entire holiday break. Roaches scuttled over everything, eliciting a grunt of disgust from him.

  And they’d taken another human being and stuffed them into a locker full of this, he thought. Just for their own amusement. What kind of a teenage sociopath did this sort of thing?

  His memory flashed back to a certain crossbow-wielding, highly antagonistic teenage vigilante of his own acquaintance and winced. Exactly, that sort of teenage sociopath…

  “Hello?” one of the lockers said.

  Armsmaster stared, then walked down the hall to where the locker in question stood. “Who is this?”

  “I’m Madison?” the locker said, tremulous.

  “The girl who called in the alert,” Armsmaster said, remembering.

  “Uh huh.” There was a pause. “Is the scary pony gone yet?” she said, her voice high and fearful.

  “She has been dealt with. How did you get possession of Shadow Stalker’s phone?” Armsmaster asked, his ‘interrogation’ voice on full.

  “We stuffed the Taylor bitch in the locker, and then there was this explosion-- this EXPLOSION and purple light everywhere and screaming and the angry pony was coming after us--” the voice halted, then started again. “And then Sophia was pulling on a mask and armor and getting this crossbow out of the janitor’s closet, and she shoves this phone in my hands and yells at me to call the PRT and what to tell them… so I hid in here and called...”

  “That phone is PRT property, I need it back,” Armsmaster said. The locker door cracked open just wide enough for the phone to slide out. He took it; the door shut again. “….Aren’t you coming out of there?”

  “I think I’ll stay in here a while,” the locker whimpered.

  “….Very well.” He returned to the ruined locker at the other end of the hall and poked about in the rubbish with the toe of his boot. Well, there wasn’t much here that any forensics officer couldn’t figure out. He grimaced…

  Then the walls began to vibrate. The lockers rattled against each other. Armsmaster braced himself, but before he could do more than that a wave of lavender light swept down the hallway, passed through him, and then passed on down the hall-- eliciting a scream from Madison the Locker Girl-- before disappearing.

  Armsmaster staggered and blinked. Then blinked again. The hallway was suddenly full of butterflies, blues and yellows and greens, a riot of color flitting back and forth. Where had they all come from?

  He looked down. The mess of filthy bandages and tampons and dried blood had vanished, replaced with-- “red and wide rose petals?” he muttered. An enormous yellow and blue butterfly alighted on his helmet, unnoticed. He rewound his helmet cam and re-watched the last ten seconds of footage.

  He blinked. He blinked again. Had he seen…?

  Yes, there it was. As the wave of purplish light had washed over the cockroaches, they had transformed, one by one, into brilliantly colored butterflies.

  It was a scene. The entire student body was still milling about, E88 punks heedlessly rubbing shoulders with ABB, Merchant junkies with E88, preps with jocks, all crowding in among the vehicles surrounding the building. Police squad cars, the fire department, the EMT, a PRT van and at least one TV News van were there; the PRT and BBPD were working to keep the crowd back while the school principal was busy shmoozing with the news crew, preening for the camera and spin doctoring as hard as she could.

  As the mobbing students watched, the school doors opened and Armsmaster came striding out, his boots clanking loudly on the cracked sidewalk and his lips set in a thin line. Immediately behind him came Miss Militia, inexplicably soaked, and carrying a large bundle of towels from which peeped a mass of tousled curly black hair and pair of wide, worried eyes. The weaponsmaster cape made a beeline for the PRT vehicle; the crowd of students parting like the Red Sea before Moses the instant they caught a good look at what was in her arms.

  Miss Militia smirked to herself as she climbed aboard. She was going to derive a lot of enjoyment in the future recalling hard-faced asian gangsters and tattooed neonazi punks retreating in wide-eyed fear from a little lavender unicorn.

  Armsmaster cast about, looking for the principal: a highly unpleasant, scrawny blonde woman with a bowl-cut hairdo. She had struck him, even in his brief encounters, as completely unqualified to maintain discipline or structure over an educational institution such as this one, much less over a Ward like Shadow Stalker. Well, if what he had pieced together over this fiasco was any indicator, his original assessment had been laughably generous. He spotted her over by the news van, giving an obviously prolonged interview to the press, as the saying went, before the bodies had even cooled-- another damning black mark against her. He strode over, the butt of his halberd striking the pavement with every step so hard it should have struck sparks.

  “Yes, the Protectorate responded immediately,” Principal Blackwell was saying. “The girl has been a problem for the school in the past, but we of course never suspected--”

  A steel-gauntleted hand clapped down over the microphone. “Any and all information on this matter is under PRT jurisdiction,” he said. “Further inquiries will be addressed in a prepared press release.” The cameraman and the hair-sprayed talking head both yelped in complaint. He ignored them and pulled Principal Blackwell away by her skinny arm.

  “What is the meaning of this--” she yipped.

  “I would like to know, Principal Blackwell, why you have not complied with PRT or Protectorate procedures like you agreed to.” Armsmaster’s voice was low and dangerous.

  “Now what do you--”

  “You were supposed to keep a tight rein on Sophia Hess while she was under your supervision,” he said, his voice clipped. “You were supposed to immediately report any disciplinary problems-- any of them!-- to Director Piggot or myself. Yet I have just uncovered evidence of what had to be the culmination of a year long campaign of sadistic bullying by her and her two underlings against another of your students-- one severe and traumatic enough to induce a TRIGGER EVENT.” His temper was growing so hot that the biofeedback readings were making the servo motors in his suit whine.

  “And to cap it all off I find you out here, talking with the press, disclosing information about a metahuman incident involving those same students without our clearance. Principal Blackwell, you are in a great deal of legal trouble of so many kinds and variations it will take a week just to write out the list.”

  Blackwell’s mouth flopped open and closed like that of a particularly unattractive fish. “Our legal department will be in touch both with you and with the Hebert family. We will be requesting many things, Principal Blackwell. Including all school records and files concerning all the parties involved, one GLOWING recommendation for transfer to Arcadia for one Miss Taylor Hebert, and your signature on a Non-Disclosure Agreement that will require you to fill out forms in triplicate before you pass so much as a FART, much less any information about what occurred today.

  And for your own wellbeing, Principal Blackwell, I recommend you develop a sudden, fantastic case of amnesia concerning Taylor Hebert or anything to do with her. The only words that should cross your lips about her from here on out should be ‘Taylor Who?’

  “Am I PERFECTLY CLEAR?”

  Blackwell fishmouthed for a few more seconds. “...Yes?” she squeaked.

  “Very good.” He started to stalk away, when yet another microphone and camera lens appeared in his path. Another blow-dried talking monkey, this one possibly male, beamed in his face. “Armsmaster, we just wanted to congratulate you and your fellow Protectorate members for swiftly bringing an end to this terroristic attack against one of our educational institutions,” he said, his teeth gleaming. “Can you tell us anything about the events that led to this terrible rampage against innocent children?”

  Armsmaster looked over his head at the teeming crowd of students. He spotted Merchants, Neonazis, Azian Bad Boys, and other gang colors scattered among them…. But that wasn’t so much to the point as the expressions he saw on all their faces. Whether they were jocks, preps, punks or gangers, it was the same; apathetic boredom, morbid anticipation, ghoulish eagerness-- all of them waiting for a little blood or mayhem, all of them waiting to catch a little bit of the spectacle of someone’s life coming apart at the seams.

  He felt a vein twitch in his eyelid. Wordlessly, he activated the Crowd Addressing System in his armor, amplifying is voice enough to be heard by the entire mob. “Yes. I have found evidence that this incident was caused by a months-long campaign of sadistic and cowardly bullying against a student, one of such breathtaking cruelty and viciousness that it caused the innocent victim to go into a power-triggering emotional breakdown, committed by three of the most popular students in this student body for no better reason than their own petty amusement.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw a seriously bedraggled and garbage-spattered Shadow Stalker being hustled into another PRT vehicle and felt a moment of satisfaction.

  “It is also clear from what we have already learned that this campaign of bullying was made astronomically worse by the cooperation, both passive and active, covert and overt, implicit and explicit, of the COWARDLY and GUTLESS student body and school staff, who witnessed this CRIMINAL AND INHUMAN ABUSE and did NOTHING AT ALL to intervene, many of whom even contributed or participated...” several of the teachers and students gaped in outrage, more than one cringed in guilt. “So I would have to say that it is my professional opinion that this entire school is full of nothing but WORTHLESS LITTLE SHITS.”

  “Thank you and good day.” He roughly shouldered the flabbergasted reporter aside.

  It was probably only his imagination that he heard several students on the fringes of the crowd applauding as he climbed inside the PRT transport.

  He sat down across from Miss Militia, who was still cradling a towel swaddled Taylor in her lap. The patriot-themed hero’s eyebrows had nearly climbed past her hairline. “May I ask where that all came from?” she asked in a mild tone.

  Armsmaster stared off at nothing in particular. “You are aware of some of the things they speculate about me on ParaHumans Online?” he said. “Autistic? Asperger’s Syndrome? That sort of thing?”

  “Er, yes?”

  His face, what one could see of it, was impassive. “How well do you think the public school system, or the children in it, treated autistic-spectrum children twenty to thirty years ago?”

  The back of the transport was silent for a moment. “So what now?” Taylor said.

  “We contact your parents or guardian...” Miss Militia said.

  “Father,” Taylor said. “My mother, she-- it’s just me and my Father,” she corrected herself.

  “We contact your Father, and have him come out to the PRT building where we discuss your membership in the Wards.”

  Taylor’s ears pricked up (Miss Militia barely restrained herself from squeeing at the adorable. It would have been terrible for her image.) “Really? You want me in the Wards? Even after all this?”

  Miss Militia’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “Like I said, we’ve seen a lot worse than this.” Taylor’s muzzle wrinkled as she considered the track record of a certain other Ward in the next vehicle; Miss Militia wasn’t kidding.

  “It’s sort of inevitable isn’t it,” Taylor said.

  “It is most likely the best place for you,” Armsmaster said matter-of-factly. “With your unique circumstances and abilities, you are going to have some equally unique necessities. The PRT and the Protectorate are the best equipped to provide those.”

  Taylor nodded glumly. “Something tells me a secret identity’s not exactly in the offing, is it?”

  Miss Militia smothered a snicker. “Probably not. I think you’ll still need a cape name though. Taylor’s a nice name, but I don’t think ‘Taylor the Unicorn’ has quite the right pizzazz.”

  Taylor made a noncommital noise, but it was clear she agreed.

  Armsmaster glanced down. “Hmm.. interesting.”

  Taylor saw where he was looking. “Do you mind not staring at my butt, sir?” she said.

  “What? Oh, hm, sorry,” he said, hastily averting his eyes and sitting stiffly. “I was just noting your odd markings… did you have tattoos before your transformation?”

  “What? No!” Taylor protested. She craned her neck to peer at her own uncovered haunch. “What, what is that?”

  Miss Militia poked at the mark. “It’s a ladybird,” she said with a smile in her voice.

  “Hey!” Taylor protested. “… No, that’s a ladybug...”

  “That’s what some people call ladybug,” Miss Militia said. “A Ladybird.”

  Taylor seemed to consider. “Ladybird, huh?… A good a name as any.” She rolled the name around in her mouth for the feel. “Yeah.”

  “Ladybird."