Early morning rolled in. Bayleaf was up early; he’d slept on blankets on the workroom floor while Taylor took the upstairs bed. He’d woken hours ago, grumbling with an aching back, hit the can and the shower and was trying to cobble together something resembling a breakfast for two out of the contents of his larder and minifridge. It was more camping food and quicky-instant eat-right-now stuff than a proper meal, but fruit, boxed pastries and some bottled Starbuck’s would have to do for now. Lucky break, he had a package of sausage and another of bacon. He threw both on the griddle and put it on top of one of the forges. If Taylor was anything like him she would be craving protein something fierce.

  Taylor came trooping down the stairs, her hair frowzy and her fur rumpled. He was impressed; he would have expected her to take time to adjust walking up and down stairs with digitigrade legs, but she handled them with grace. Well, as much grace as a 5 AM wakeup would permit. “Bathroom?” she mumbled, looking sheepish.

  And darned cute, standing there, rubbing the back of her leg with one foot and her shoulder peeking out of the collar of her sweatshirt like-- whoa, kemosabe! He quickly turned his attention back to the bacon and sausages. “Through that door,” he said. “Towels in the cabinet if you’re looking to shower.”

  “Tha—Haaahaanks,” she yawned, yawning till her fangs all showed and her tongue curled. She staggered into the bathroom. A few minutes passed and he heard a flush. His head came up. Whoops, he’d forgotten to warn her about--

  A deafening canine shriek told him he was too late. “Ahh WHAT THE HELL YAIIK--”

  “Bidet!” he shouted, smothering a laugh. It was built into the toilet and went off if there was weight on the seat when you flushed.

  “Why the hell do you have--”

  “FUR!” He thought it a succinct explanation.

  “Eugh, fine, but does it have to be FREEZING? ...YEEK!”

  “Would you rather it was WARM?”

  “Eugh. Point.” She didn’t sound happy about it, though.

  Another minute passed. Bayleaf dished up the bacon and sausage on a spare plate and set them on the, well, relatively clean end of the worktable. “What the heck’s up with this shower?” she said in confusion.

  He stopped and got an evil grin on his face when he realized what she was in for. “Just step inside, close the door and push the button,” he said.

  “Push the button..?” He heard the sliding door on the cylindrical shower stall slide shut. Three… Two… One…

  FWOOSH.

  “AYEEEK WHAT THE HELL AGH PFFFLT AGH YOU JACKASS AGGGH!” Taylor yelled and swore as she was hit at every angle with hot soapy water by a dozen high pressure embedded sprayers.

  The water stopped for a minute and she continued to express her opinion of Bayleaf’s morals, stature, and ancestry while the accused stood in his workshop, staggering with silent laughter as he fished out the cutlery. “Better scrub up while you can,” he managed to shout. “The rinse cycle starts in a second!”

  “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS??”

  “I’m a cape, I get all sorts of filthy! Grease and mud and God knows what all else gets in my fur. It takes a lot to get it out! The soap in the water is shampoo, by the way.” She didn’t answer, only muttering foul imprecations for several minutes. He suddenly found himself blushing as he tried not to imagine her lathering up.

  “You didn’t tell me about any of this on purpose, didn’t you you AIEEEK!” She was cut off by the rinse cycle.

  “Be ready for the dryer,” He managed to gasp out.

  While Taylor was busy being attacked by her shower, Bayleaf’s cellphone rang. He popped it out of the recharger and accepted the call. “Adrian, is that you? This is Aisha! Oh man, Adrian, I’m so sorry I screwed up-- I took a skip day yesterday, I didn’t even know what happened--”

  “Aisha?” Bayleaf asked in surprise. “Aisha, slow down, what are you talking about?”

  “Your girl Taylor! I told you I’d watch her back but I wasn’t here yesterday-- and The Three Bees got her. It’s awful, Adrian, it’s bad. I’m so sorry--”

  “Aisha… AISHA! It’s okay. Taylor’s okay, she’s with me.”

  “--But how, everyone saw--”

  Inspiration struck. “Aisha, Taylor’s fine, but she and I need your help.”

  Aisha stopped. “...What kind of help?”

  Bayleaf rolled the dice. “the same type of help your brother could probably use.”

  There was a short, deep silence on the other end of the line. “How do you know about that?” Aisha hissed.

  “The same way I know a lot of things. Cape stuff.”

  “Cape stuff.”

  “I’ll lay it out for you. Your brother and his friends are getting tangled up with some really nasty operators and don’t even know it. You help me out with this, I’ll help you pull your big dumb brother’s butt out of the sausage grinder.”

  “Okay, I help you with YOUR ‘Cape Stuff,’and you’ll help me out with MY ‘Cape Stuff?’”

  “That’s the idea. Deal?”

  Aisha’s voice started sounding amused, the way it did when she thought something was going to be FUN. “Okay, I’m in. What you need me to do?”

  “All right. Go around to all the teachers. Tell them that Taylor’s out with food poisoning today, and I asked you for her to pick up all her assignments.”

  “Got it.”

  “Here’s the important part: if anyone talks about what happened yesterday-- the locker, the Cape, anything, especially if they mention Taylor-- look at them like they’re crazy and tell ‘em you saw her yesterday at lunch. You didn’t speak to her but she was looking kinda queasy. Then I called you today to pick up her homework. Doesn’t matter who asks you or tells you. Deny, deny, deny. And if they ask about me, you saw me floating somewhere around school, you don’t know for sure...”

  “Oh I get it,” her grin was audible. “Gaslight ‘em, right?”

  “Well, well, somebody’s cultured.”

  “Get bent. Don’t worry about it. I’ve been blowing smoke up my teacher’s skirts since I was six. You give me enough time I’ll have half of ‘em swearing they spoke to you and shook your hand themselves yesterday.”

  On with his contributing to the corruption of a minor. “Great. I’ll call you later to tell you where to meet us.” He hung up. Just in time to hear the buzzer and the sound of the drying cycle start up.

  She must have heard his warning this time because there was only a brief whoop, followed by silence. The roar of the dryer went on for some time; she must soak up more water than he did with that long mane of hair.

  The blowers finally stopped. There were a few more seconds of silence, followed by a “YAIK!” of surprise. What now? “You’d better hurry and get dressed; we’re gonna have visitors soon and WAGH!!” He nearly jumped out of his skin when the bathroom door opened and a hairball walked out.

  It was Taylor. She was wrapped from armpit to thigh in one of his big fluffy beach sized towels, and every single hair on her body was sticking straight out. Her fur was poofed out in a fuzzy corona, and her normally loose tumbling locks were frizzed out into a fright wig. She stood there stiff shouldered, glaring at him and looking like the world’s angriest giant Pomeranian.

  Bayleaf lost it. He collapsed on the floor, howling with laughter. He tried to pull himself to his feet; it was no use. Every time he looked at her and saw the expression on her fuzzy-wuzzy face he lost it again. He eventually ended up half-draped over the edge of the worktable, weeping with laughter.

  There was a buzz and the bolts on the back entrance disengaged. Taylor’s father came in, a suitcase in one hand and several bags of takeout in the other. “Taylor, I brought-- Taylor?? What the hell happened to you?” He stopped in his tracks and dropped everything to the floor.

  Danny stood flabbergasted at the sight before him; his daughter-- at least he assumed the giant fuzzball was his daughter-- standing there in a towel looking like she was about to quite literally bite someone, and Bayleaf the hero hanging off the edge of the table, laughing like a hyena.

  He said the first words that popped into his head. They were the wrong ones. “You look like the Sheepdog that ate Seattle,” he blurted out.

  Bayleaf nearly passed out.

  After a great deal of time locked in the bathroom with a set of brushes and combs (brought with the suitcase of clothing) and a great number of sincere apologies, Taylor graciously rejoined the two barbarian, uncouth men in her life at the table and they broke their fast. “So I hit the drive thru at Fugly Bob’s on the way, because I figured after everything yesterday you HAD to be starved,” Danny was saying. “Then I thought it over and went through the drive through again and pretty much tripled my first order.”

  “Good call,” Bayleaf mumbled around a mouthful of double cheeseburger, glancing over at Taylor. Despite being the most petite of the three, she was (no other word for it) wolfing down the food in front of them at a genuinely astonishing rate. She had already destroyed her share of the burger order, was tearing into the bacon and sausage, and was making inroads into both Danny and Bayleaf’s food as well. She looked up, licking her fingers, and flicked her ears down in a lupine blush.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Bayleaf chuckled. “You should’ve seen me my first day. It’s a good thing I can turn into a walrus and snag a few fish in a pinch.”

  Danny nearly choked on his burger. “You-- you’re Wonder Walrus?” he managed to cough out. He started banging on the table with his fist as Taylor started whacking him on the back. Airway cleared he roared with laughter. Taylor was laughing too, staring at him in disbelieving glee.

  “I’m several people apparently,” Bayleaf said with a doggy style grin. “But yeah, Wonder Walrus.”

  “You nearly ended up owing me a pair of pants,” Danny said, pointing in accusation.

  “Why?”

  “Cause I dang near crapped them laughing when you gave Armsmaster that- that walrus smooch!” Danny laughed.

  “He’s a terrible kisser by the way,” Bayleaf quipped, his face deadpan. Danny nearly quit breathing, he was laughing so hard.

  “How many secret identities do you HAVE?” Taylor asked.

  “Let’s see. This form, I’ve been called Skinwalker and Warcrafter. There’s Wonder Walrus,” he chuckled a minute. “and some of the folks at the hospitals call me the Giving Tree. Some folks are talking about the Night Owl, and there are quite a number of drug dealers in jail right now who tell each other horror stories about the Tiger Demon. My human form has my old human name-- Adrian. But… under it all, I think of myself as Bayleaf.” He gave her a smile.

  Her jaw was hanging open. “You’re all of those?” she said. “How many forms do you have?”

  Bayleaf actually had to stop and count on his fingers. “About eleven,” he said. “There’s a couple I haven’t tried yet. Oh, and I forgot that at least one little girl thinks I’m one of Santa’s reindeer.” He smiled at that memory. Then his smile turned a little wicked. “Of course Armsmaster probably thinks I’m either the Devil incarnate or punishment from God...”

  Danny started chortling again. “Why do you pick on him so much?”

  “One, in the original timeline he caused Taylor’s fall into villainy,” Bayleaf said sourly. “She stopped Lung on her first night out as a cape--”

  “LUNG?” Now it was Taylor’s turn to choke. Lung was an asian cape who led the ABB. He transformed into a humanoid dragon when he fought, and the longer he fought the stronger and tougher and more incendiary he got. He’d fought Leviathan to a standstill, in a battle that sank the island of Kyushu. The idea of even seeing Lung in the street and doing anything but run like a madwoman the other way sounded like insanity. “How--?”

  “Bug powers.”

  “Bug powers?”

  “Bug powers. You sent a swarm of black widows down his shorts. He lost his junk when Armsmaster stuck him full of a tinker tranquilizer without asking you what you’d done first. Shut off his regeneration for a while and…. “

  “Nyergh.”

  “Anyway, Armsmaster took the credit for your bust. You were so disillusioned that you wanted nothing to do with him or the PRT or the Wards, so you stayed rogue. You went undercover in the Undersiders and… went native.”

  “That’s a lot to pin on just Armsmaster,” Danny said. “I mean, jackass move, yes, but--”

  “He also nearly got her killed by Leviathan,” Bayleaf interrupted.

  “...What.” Danny was suddenly a lot less sympathetic.

  “The spotlight hog actually tried to arrange a solo fight between him and Leviathan when Leviathan attacked the city,” Bayleaf said. “ He had some new secret weapon and a plan to make himself the number one hero in the country. Taylor got caught in the middle. She saved an Endbringer shelter full of innocent people when Armsmaster’s halfassed plan naturally went off the rails, got half-flattened in the process.

  “Then the sonuvabitch exposed her secret identity in the cape emergency hospital as revenge.” Bayleaf jabbed savagely at his ketchup cup with a french fry.

  “What??” Danny said, rising to his feet as if he intended to go punch the armored tinker in his bearded chin personally. “No, wait… this isn’t the same Armsmaster--”

  “Well, he’s not gotten that bad. But he’s still the same humorless, insecure, spotlight hungry jerk he was in the baseline. He’s peaking out as a Tinker and a Cape, career wise, and he’s getting desperate to grab the brass ring one last time.

  “‘Swhy I torment him so much. I’m trying to break him of that. I figure if he wants to be in the spotlight so much, I’d make sure he was there as much as possible-- as the stone-faced butt of every joke I could think of.” He smirked around a mouthful of fries. “Plus, it’s fun.”

  Taylor was looking at her hand, shifting it back and forth between worgen and human. “Will I be able to change into as many forms as you?” she asked.

  “Um, no,” Bayleaf said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and got up. “We don’t have the same powers.”

  Danny and Taylor looked at each other, then back to Bayleaf. “I think we both thought that your, ah, friends gave Taylor a copy of your powers,” he said.

  “Oh no,” Bayleaf said, shaking his head. “We both got our powers-- and our forms--- from the same setting, but we’ve got two diffent powersets. I’m a Druid…” he picked up an apple and juggled it in one hand. “But she’s a Rogue.”

  “Aren’t you both technically rogues right now?” Danny said.

  “No, not like the PRT means it.” Bayleaf snorted. “And isn’t that a cute little semantic headgame trick. Rogue. Make it sound like even a person with powers who just sits at home doing nothing is a dangerous outlaw. Watch out, we got a runaway off the plantation!”

  “Anyway. Rogue, in Azeroth terms means someone with training and powers in stealth, infiltration, and melee fighting with quick, vicious takedowns. Um, basically a sort of super-ninja.” he picked at the apple in his hand. “Oh, uh, Taylor, would you get that knife off the rack there?”

  Taylor got up and pulled down the knife he’d pointed at. It was actually more of a dagger, nearly a foot long and wicked-looking. “Got it,” she said, turning around.

  “Think fast!” The apple came whipping through the air at her head like a fastball.

  Swipp Swipp! “Hey, what did you do that fffff…..” Bayleaf pointed down. Taylor looked. The apple was lying on the floor at her feet, neatly sliced into four sections.

  “Ho. Lee. Snap.” Danny said reverently.

  “How did I YAIK!” Her yelp of terror was only to be expected. One does that when a roaring werewolf leaps at them from across the room. Just before Bayleaf’s claws reached her, there was a bang and a puff of blue-black smoke and she disappeared… only to instantly reappear in another puff of smoke directly behind him and deliver a perfect roundhouse kick to his kidneys. He went down with a crash, sprawling on the floor and groaning in pain. He rolled to his feet, clutching his back.

  “Owgh. Sorry, Taylor honey, it was the only way I could think of to...” he blinked. Taylor was looking at him with wide eyed terror, the knife held pointed at him in her shaking hand. “Oh, whoa, honey, I’m so sorry I scared you that bad, I swear I wasn’t going to hurt you… whoa.” As he had been speaking she had stepped backward and slowly faded from sight. “Taylor?”

  “I-I’m sorry,” the empty space said. “But holy shit you have no idea how scary that is...”

  “Taylor,” Bayleaf said with a doggy grin. “Look down at yourself.”

  “Honestly, men,” the empty space said. “It’s always boob jokes with… omigosh I’m invisible!”

  “And you just teleported, too,” Bayleaf said. “And if I remember right, Subtlety Rogues-- which is what you are-- can disappear instantly, render people unconscious with a single strike, throw blades with pinpoint accuracy, generate clouds of smoke that blot out a sizeable area, and are natural masters of knife combat… oh, and can disappear into a “shadow state” for short periods that heals their wounds and makes injuries they cause more damaging. Cast mystical “poisons” on their weapons that make people sluggish, or heal more slowly…. And a few other things too.” He shrugged. “Super Ninja.”

  Taylor slowly faded back into visibility. “Aww,” she said. “I tried to make it last longer, but...”

  “Too many people focusing on where you were, I guess. It also sorta poops out a few seconds into combat, so there’s that.”

  “That was… amazing,” Danny said, his eyes dancing with excitement. “I can’t believe it, my daughter is Nightcrawler!”

  “Who?” Taylor said. “And eww. What kind of a cape is named after a worm?” You could almost see a little bit of Mr. Hebert’s childhood die in his eyes. Bayleaf turned away and bit his lip to keep from laughing.

  “But why a Rogue?” Taylor went on. “I’m sure there were other powersets that were… better for our mission.”

  “It’s not what you got, but what you do with it,” Bayleaf said. “And as to that, well. Do you remember any of the questions the Judges in your dream asked you?”

  “Yyyes,” Taylor said, putting a clawtip to her chin as she thought. “They asked me what I thought of my world. I told them I wished I could make it better. They asked about Dad...I said I wanted to make him proud and… and happy again.” she shot a look to her father, who just smiled at her. “And they asked me about Sophia, of all people.”

  “I told them the truth. That she was my enemy. They asked what I wanted to do about her.

  “I said I wanted to beat her. I wanted to win. I didn’t want to let her break me or make me a monster. That I wanted to be BETTER than her.”

  “That’s probably it right there,” Bayleaf said. “She’s you’re rival. You want to out do her-- be better than her. So they gave you the powerset that most closely matches Sophia, or rather Shadow Stalker. Just so you could beat her at everything, even her own game.”

  Taylor felt a wicked smirk growing on her lips. “I think I LIKE that,” she said.

  “How about ‘Rogue?’” Danny said hopefully. “As a name, I mean. No, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it.” He looked crestfallen.

  Bayleaf chuckled. He walked over and patted Danny on the shoulder. “Marvel Comics has gone to its well-deserved rest, Mr. Hebert,” he said. “Just let them rest in peace.”

  “I’m going with the name I told the Judges,” Taylor said firmly. “If nobody else likes it, tough.”

  “What name was that?” Bayleaf asked.

  She looked at him with determination in her eyes. “Hemlokk.” She paused. “With two K’s,” she added, feeling a bit silly.

  A corner of Bayleaf’s mouth quirked up. “Works for me,” he said. He pulled out his phone and started dialing. “Now it’s time to call in some help, if we’re going to save both our secret identities.” He put his phone up to his ear. “Hello, Amy?”

  It wasn’t half an hour later that Bayleaf was standing on the loading dock of the abandoned warehouse, freezing his currently furless butt off and waiting for his guests to arrive. To his surprise, the first one there was Parian. A taxi pulled up to the end of the street and a young woman dressed in a skirt, heavy winter coat and with her head muffled in a scarf got out. She trotted down the alley to where Bayleaf waited and smiled at him with dark eyes. “Hello again, Adrian,” she said. “Or should I say Skinwalker? Or perhaps Warcrafter?”

  He sighed. “Thank you for coming, especially on short notice,” he said. “I know how you hate leaving your shop.” He gestured towards the open shutter. “Come on inside, get comfortable--”

  Anything further was interrupted when two girls dropped out of the sky. The flying one was a platinum blonde, and in fashionably scuffed jeans, crop-topped festive sweater and ugg boots, was definitely underdressed for the weather. The girl in her arms on the other hand was bundled up like an eskimo in a thick plush coat that reached clear to her toes. “Did you have to fly so fast, Vicky? I like to froze my face off,” she was complaining.

  “It’s bracing! Good for you!” Vicky said.

  Bayleaf growled in exasperation. He should have expected this. “She insisted on coming, did she,” he asked Amy, nodding at Glory Girl.

  “Sorry,” Amy said. “She found out I was going to see-- a friend-- and she squeezed the rest of me. Then I couldn’t get her to butt out.” She seemed a little miffed, though Bayleaf suddenly found himself wondering if it was at her sister or at him.

  “I suppose it’s only fair you brought some protection along,” he said grudgingly, facepalming. “I haven’t given you much reason to trust me yet--”

  “You got THAT right, Mister Shapeshift Rogue,” Vicky said, interposing herself between Amy and Bayleaf and jabbing him in the chest with rather painfully her finger. “You tried to pull a fast one on my sister--” jab “and I don’t care for that.” Jab “I don’t know what you’re up to, inviting her out here all alone--” jab jab “ But I’m watching you, buster, and I erk!”

  Bayleaf had reached up and grabbed her hand in his fist. His suddenly clawed, shovel sized fist. He’d gone full worgen between one breath and the next. He took a moment to enjoy the expression of growing alarm on Vicky Dallon’s face as she found herself struggling harder and harder to pull her hand out of his grasp. She pulled free finally, but it took an unsettling amount of effort. His smile was an inch from her nose and ALL teeth. “A one-ton deadlift is kiddy stuff on my scale, little girl,” he said. “I flip pickup trucks one-handed for fun. So don’t try throwing your weight around with me.”

  “You’re Warcrafter?”She yelped at the top of her voice.

  “Say it a little louder, sister, I don’t think they heard it on Captain’s Hill,” Bayleaf snarled in exasperation under his breath. “Get this through your pom-pom brain, prom queen, this is about somebody’s secret identity. UNWRITTEN RULES stuff. I’ve got three people here, counting myself, who are trying to keep every villain in Brockton bay from finding out their names, addresses and favorite ice cream flavor before the end of the week, so I’d greatly appreciate it if you kept your mouth shut!”

  Wide eyed, Vicky nodded till her ponytail bobbled. He hadn’t collapsed her forcefield but he’d come close. That was enough to get the message across. He released her and quickly shifted back to his human form. “Lets get inside before someone stumbles along and sees this little circus,” he grumbled.

  He looked apologetically at Parian. “This could risk your ID. I can understand if--”

  She held up a gloved hand. “I’ve come this far, I want to see all this out,” she said. “Besides, I owe you greatly for those miracle materials you gave me. They’ve meant a sea change in how I do business.” The end of her scarf suddenly slithered around through the air around her. “Not to mention how safe I feel out in public.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement.

  “You’re PAR—UMPH!” The scarf suddenly elongated and shot across the loading dock to wrap around Vicky’s face, silencing her. Vicky tried to rip off the cloth, to her alarm it didn’t even stretch.

  “Sorry,” Amy said as she ran her hand down her face. “She’s a fan...”

  “In, in, in, before your sister invents a whole new kind of Collateral Damage,” Bayleaf said, ushering them through the open shutter and slamming it down behind them.

  “Pfuh, the heck is that scarf made of?” Vicky said when it finally peeled off. Parian ignored the question. Bayleaf stopped in the middle of the warehouse and took a calming breath. “Amy, Parian, I appreciate this. The people inside and I… we’re going to be trusting you with a lot. Our names are just the start of it. A lot of it will be dangerous to know. If you want to back out, now’s the time to say it.”

  None of them said anything. In fact all three young women crossed their arms impatiently. “Okay, I just had to say it.” He led them to the back of the dusty building and slid the plywood panel aside, revealing the hidden entrance. He bowed and opened the door. “Entre’ vu.”

  Amy started to enter, but Vicky stopped her with one hand. “I’ll go first,” she said. “Just in case wolf-boy here has any surprises planned,” she gave him a defiant look. She ducked in. “Oh how nice, a hole in the wall,” she snarked as she disappeared from sight.

  A moment later a reverent “oh wowww” echoed out. “...Holy crap there’s two of you?”

  Amy cocked an eyebrow at him. Bayleaf just smirked. She and Parian stepped through and inside; Bayleaf followed, dragging the plywood back in place behind himself.

  “I have to say,” Parian said in admiration. “I find myself having workshop envy.” She was seated in one of the comfy chairs, her scarf and heavy coat set aside for a light silk headwrap and domino mask. Bayleaf was kind of relieved she’d opted to leave the doll mask behind. That thing was creepy.

  “Thanks.” Bayleaf said. He looked abashed. “Amy, Vicky, I’d like to apologize for that scene outside--”

  “Don’t bother,” said Amy over her shoulder. “Frankly it was worth the price of admission to see someone make Vicky shut up for a second.”

  “Get bent, sister dear,” Vicky said sweetly.

  The Dallon sisters were still well into the “Gawk and poke” stage of their visit. Amy was over intensely examining the arcane plants, while Vicky was more or less playing with the bots and toys wandering the floor. “Oh look Amy, it’s so cute!” Vicky gushed, holding up one of the workerbots. The agitated little bot was squeaking and kicking its feet.

  “Please don’t bother those, they’re busy running errands,” Bayleaf said with a sigh.

  “Errands like what?” Vicky asked.

  “Like collecting scrap to make more workerbots,” he said. “I’m down to these three guys, a few sabotage bugs and Obie after that Merchant raid. Speaking of which--” he looked around.

  “Out in my truck,” Danny said. He was busy setting up a digital projector. “Little nut nearly gave me a heart attack this morning. I left him in there. No offense but you’re not exactly in a good neighborhood.” Taylor’s father had no mask. After much debate they decided that full disclosure with the people they were asking for help was the way to go.

  Amy let go of the leaf of the semi-invisible plant and sighed. “Okay. So what is this all about? And when do we get those explanations you promised?”

  “Explanations?” Vicky said.

  “I told you about the Giving Tree,” Amy said to her sister.

  “Oh, your plant Case 53 friend.”

  “Right. Well I’m at First General the other day and I catch this guy--” Amy jerked a thumb at Bayleaf-- “breaking into the linen closet and stealing some scrubs. When I try demanding an explanation, he sprouts leaves at me and promises to explain everything that’s going on. Well, I’m here and I’m waiting.”

  “I am here because I owe Adrian here a tremendous favor, at the least,” Parian said. “I was told that it involved himself and a friend; I am assuming he was referring to his wolf ladyfriend here.” Taylor hunched up a bit in her chair at the attention.

  Bayleaf ran his fingers over his scalp. “Okay, answers. I’ll start at the reason I called you all here. The other day, Taylor here manifested. Thanks to a screw-up on my part, to multiple screw-ups, she’s in danger of having her secret identity exposed to the world. Mine is too, but that’s secondary. Basically, I’m asking you to help me put toothpaste back into the tube and secure her secret identity again.”

  “I think maybe you missed it,” Vicky said, crossing her arms under her chest and standing behind her sister’s chair in a cocksure posed. “But we’re from New Wave? We kinda gave up secret identities as a bad idea, ages ago?”

  “And I also know how it worked out for you,” Bayleaf retorted. Amy and Vicky both flinched as Bayleaf reminded them of the family member who’d lived the New Wave principle-- and how it had cost her life. Bayleaf didn’t even blink at Vicky’s angry glare. “Vicky, this isn’t about her and I being able to go shopping without being bothered by paparazzi. We’ve got reasons, life and death reasons, for trying to keep our masks.”

  “Then why not let the PRT handle it?” Vicky said obstinately. “They do that whole ‘scrub the scene’ thing for new capes, especially if they join the Wards-- oh what?” she snapped. Because Bayleaf and ‘Hemlokk’ were both shaking their heads.

  “Just watch the video, young lady,” Danny said, a touch sternly. Parental authority mode activated. “You’ll get your answers.” He hit a button on the laptop next to the projector. The projector lit up, throwing a rectangle of light on a bare patch of wall.

  Bayleaf sat down next to Hemlokk, who leaned into him. She passed him a bowl. He looked down into it in surprise. “Popcorn?”

  “You had some packets in your supplies,” she said impishly, handing him a bottle of cola.

  Up on the projection, an image of Bayleaf walked onscreen. He sat down in an overstuffed chair and addressed the camera and whomever was behind it.

  “I figure I’m going to be explaining all this a LOT in the near future,” he said with a faintly dry hint of humor. “So a little one-time recording will make things easier. I’ll edit it later, maybe do a PowerPoint Presentation...”

  He sat back and coughed, and even looked a bit awkward at being in front of a lens. “Okay, to start with, you should know I’m not from around here. Really, really, REALLY not from around here...”

  A slow hour crawled by as the Bayleaf on the projector talked, and answered questions, and more questions after that. When the video ended, the three young women Bayleaf had invited were staring at him, and each other, with obvious horror. “This can’t be true,” Parian said. “It can’t possibly!”

  “It isn’t,” Vicky said, her face thunderous. “This is garbage.”

  Amy was shaking her head, looking distressed. “It makes too much sense, Vicky--”

  “Too much sense?” Vicky exploded. “We’ve got a couple of Cape loonies who are claiming to have insider knowledge about a gigantic alien conspiracy involving the PRT, the Protectorate, Coil, Scion, some mysterious ‘Cauldron’ group, giant space whale things, and just about everybody except Fugly Bob himself… based on information they got from another group of aliens and oh yeah, they’re aliens themselves! This is crazier than that poofy-haired guy on the history channel!” She lifted her own hair over her head in pantomime of the notorious ancient alienologist.

  That brought Bayleaf up short. Of course they’d want proof. He cursed himself mentally. Agent had warned him that this was the reason so many Actors kept mum about their origins, or their information sources… it could be harder than proving Fermet’s last theorem to prove they were telling the truth. Getting dismissed as a loony or locked up as one was a good possibility if you bungled it.

  “Well?” Vicky demanded. “What kind of PROOF do you have?”

  “Well you could go to the Palanquin and talk to Faultline and her crew,” Bayleaf said dryly. “Cauldron spooked so bad when I told Faultline the truth that they dropped Contessa on our heads and tried to kill us all. I’m sure they can tell you the eyewitness account-- assuming you can find them that is. They were planning on packing their bags and disappearing into the boonies until everything was all over one way or the other.”

  This put her on the back foot, but she rallied. “So why haven’t these Cauldron guys attacked us right now?”

  “A couple of reasons,” Bayleaf said. “For one, Hemlokk and I are a sort of blind spot for thinkers, due to our extrauniversal powers. For another, I’ve been taking precautions. I managed to kludge together a little trinket that causes a similar problem for thinkers, and scattering them about by selling them as decorative wingdings.” He reached over and picked up one of the little arcane shard “firefly jars” from one of his shelves. “For a third, I think I pretty well ruined their day when they popped open that portal and I threw a portal of my own into their living room… I express mailed them every bob-omb, landshark, sabotage bot, mini-tonk and seaforium charge I had in my stockpiles. They’re probably still cleaning up.”

  “Convenient,” Vicky sniffed. Hemlokk bristled but Bayleaf patted her arm.

  “It’s okay, she has a point,” he said. “I could show you the Cauldron vials I captured from Skidmark, but not only would that be begging for trouble, it wouldn’t mean anything to you. Without force feeding them to someone, they’re just bottles of colored liquid.” He thought a minute. “I do know more than just the… um, the Cauldron conspiracy, let’s call it that. A lot of details that...” he darted a glance over at Amy. “If I tell them, I could hurt a lot of people. In a personal way...”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He looked horribly guilty, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “The need is too great,” he muttered. “And this needs to come out anyway, or it’ll never be fixed.” he stared at the wall, thinking.

  “Vicky,” he said slowly and carefully. “Amy is… addicted to your powers.”

  As he spoke Amy first felt her heart freeze. --NO! He knew! Somehow he knew that Amy was…. Was in love with her sister…

  It was Amy’s deepest secret, and her most terrible shame. She was Vicky’s sister. Her adopted sister, but still her sister. But… ever since they both reached about the age of twelve… Amy had been finding herself having… feelings. Indecent feelings for Vicky.

  It had been slowly ruining her life. All she could do was pine silently. All she could feel around Dean, Vicky’s boyfriend, was seething envy. And now Warcrafter was going to reveal it--!

  And then the second part of his sentence registered and suddenly everything made sense. In addition to Glory Girl’s personal forcefield, which made her conditionally invulnerable and gave her super strength, she had an Aura-- if she was in a good mood, you adored her. If she was angry or afraid, you were intimidated and afraid of her. She could increase it’s power greatly, putting people in a lovestruck stupor or in paralyzing terror. But despite training constantly and being constantly reminded, it was almost impossible for her to keep it turned entirely off…

  “What? No,” Vicky stammered. “I’ve got it under control. And besides my family’s immune--”

  Bayleaf shook his head. “Your blood relatives are immune,” he corrected her. “Maybe. Even your boyfriend Dean Stansfield is pretty much immune-- because he’s Gallant, and his emotion-sensing and blasting powers make him super resistant.” the others shot him shocked looks at revealing Gallant’s identity so cavalierly, but he pressed on. “But your adopted sister isn’t. And you’ve been unknowingly bombarding her with low level love-me radiation since before she hit puberty.”

  “This is bullcrap!” Vicky said, raising up off the floor. “You’re just making up random stuff and hoping you hit something! Admit it!” Her aura flared; everyone in the room cringed back, save for Bayleaf and Hemlokk, and even they flinched a bit. “Amy, tell him this is… Amy?”

  Amy wasn’t listening. She was curled up in her chair, her hands over her face. It was obvious to anyone, even oblivious Victoria Dallon, that she knew Bayleaf was telling the truth.

  For a moment Vicky’s aura flared even higher-- then she flew off across the workshop, her own face in her hands, and hovered in a corner, refusing to look at anyone.

  Bayleaf leaned over and put his hand on Amy’s shoulder. It was a dangerous move; Amy’s power wasn’t healing, it was biokinesis. She could turn him into a blob of protoplasm if she was ever upset enough. But he risked it. “Amy, this is NOT your fault! It’s not Victoria’s fault either! It just happened! You’re both victims of a, a, an accident of circumstance. Murphy just got the drop on you two is all. But now that you know about it, you can try to start and fix it.”

  Amy sniffled. “If only it was that easy,” she sobbed. Bayleaf scrambled for a tissue but Danny got there first. She took the entire box and started mopping her face.

  “Even if she could fix brains,” Vicky said hollowly, not moving from her corner, “she can’t fix her own….” she kept her back turned to them. “I… I screwed up my sister’s brain--”

  “Not true,” Bayleaf grunted.

  “What? That my power-- lesboed my sister’s brain?”

  “Ieeee wwwouldn’t phrase it THAT way,” Bayleaf said, rolling his eyes and scratching his head. “But you didn’t mess up her brain. Just muddled up the brain chemistry a while. Figure out a way to block your aura and eventually it should go back to normal.” He suddenly snapped his fingers. “But we could fix it faster if we could get her power to work on herself.”

  “How?” Amy asked, more than a little sarcastically.

  “Come on,” Bayleaf said with growing enthusiasm. “There’s got to be at least one cape out there with the ability to duplicate powers, or borrow them temporarily, or--”

  “Hey yeah!” Vicky turned around and flew back to them. “That’s a great idea, it… oh no, no, it still wouldn’t work,” she said, deflating. “Ames’ power doesn’t work on brains.”

  Bayleaf said nothing. He just stared at Amy. Hard.

  Vicky shot a look at him, then at her sister, then back at him. “Oh come on! Amy… AMY!”

  Amy hauled off and punched the werewolf in the chest. “Why are MY secrets the one you’re blabbing all over, huh??” she exploded tearfully.

  “Probably because yours seem to be the ones that are hurting you the most by being kept,” Danny said solemnly.

  Vicky looked at her sister in confusion. “Why…?”

  “Because I don’t dare TRY to fix brains, Vicky!” She said angrily, her face blotchy. “If you screw up fixing an arm or a leg you get maybe a scar, or something. You screw up fixing a brain, you could screw up someone’s MIND. Or erase their memory. the tiniest little change and they’re really not THEM anymore!”

  This time the long sigh of frustration came from Parian. “You silly girl,” she said to Amy. “Hasn’t anyone given you any actual instruction in medicine?” This surprised Amy so much she simply stared at the tailor, openmouthed. “ I didn’t think so. Let me guess: your natural abilities made any actual book learning seem redundant, so nobody really bothered. All you’ve learned is secondhand, from hanging around doctors and from maybe a book or two you read.

  And here’s a better question: how many neurosurgeons do you even talk with when you’re doing your rounds as a healer? How many people with brain damage, or who are recuperating from brain damage, do you even talk with much less examine?

  “Next to none, I bet. Because after all, everyone knows that the great Panacea, alas, cannot heal brains… so your fears and lack of knowledge have become self-reinforcing.

  Parian laughed. “I’m a college student, and my parents were obsessed with raising an overachiever,” Parian said. “The medical track was just one of a few they tried to push me onto. But I think I’ve gotten more of an education in things like medical ethics and brain surgery than you have gotten in your whole life as a cape.

  “Panacea, people undergo brain surgery every day using methods infinitely cruder than your power-- scalpels, forceps, needles-- to remove clots or tumors, repair injury. Do you believe they have all had their “selves” destroyed or corrupted? That they have somehow lost their souls?”

  Panacea looked confounded. “I...”

  Parian shook her head in pity. “Yes, people often suffer changes in personality, loss of memory or function, but that is because of damage, the relative crudeness of our surgical methods. And any victim of a brain lesion or a tumor or an aneurysm would tell you it is far better to live with some minor side effects of a cure, than to live with a sick or injured or dying brain.

  “Has your power ever ‘flubbed’ a healing of any other organ? Have you ever given in to your imagined “dark side” No? Then why don’t you trust it? Why don’t you trust yourself? You’re not being ethical, you’re being self-defeating out of ignorance and fear.

  And that’s a more terrifying nightmare. Because then the only time you’ll cross that self imposed line, even in great need, even when it’s the right thing to do, will be when you’ve been pushed too far and you ARE out of control. Like a person who refuses to touch alcohol, then goes on a demented drinking binge the very first time they give in and try it.

  Someone, somewhere, taught you to hate and fear yourself and to see yourself as a monster waiting to happen. And may heaven have pity on them when the price for that sin comes back upon them.”

  Everyone else was listening, openmouthed. Bayleaf finally looked up at Hemlokk. “Dang, she’s good.”

  “That’s… I gotta think about all this… ” Amy said weakly. Vicky put a comforting hand on her shoulder. To Bayleaf’s relief, Amy didn’t flinch away. Maybe, just maybe he hadn’t ruined the two sister’s relationship.

  “What else do you know?” Amy demanded. “You’re holding back, I can see it on your face. No. Let him speak. Better to… better to get it all out,” she said.

  “Um, anyway… I’m hoping this one will actually help right away. Amy, I can tell you why Carol-- your mom-- isn’t... close to you.” He took a deep breath. “Back when New Wave was starting out there was this villain called the Marquis. He had a form of biokinesis. A bone generating power.” At the word ‘biokinesis’ Amy stiffened.

  “He was New Wave’s number one enemy, their nemesis--- Carol Dallon’s especially. Truth be told, Mrs. Dallon was probably terrified of him. He defeated them over and over…”

  “Till one day they finally got the drop on him, cornered him at his own house. In the battle he was distracted by trying to protect something in a closet from all the collateral damage. The New Wave heroes assumed it was some sort of weapon, so they attacked it-- Marquis threw himself in the way. He was injured, knocked out. They wrapped him up and handed him over to the cops.

  “But it wasn’t a superweapon or a secret stash or an escape pod or anything like that. It was a little girl. His daughter.”

  Someone gasped.

  “New Wave... they felt guilty for taking a father away from a little girl, so after a lot of arguing, the Pelhams and the Dallons decided that they’d adopt her. She ended up with the Dallons.” He looked at her, deeply sorry. “I think that you can figure out the rest.”

  “My… my father was the Marquis?” Amy said, She looked a little faint.

  “That’s why Carol has so much trouble being close to you,” Bayleaf said, his ears low and his eyes sorrowful. “She can’t help looking at you and seeing the man who terrified the life out of her all those years ago. And she’s become convinced that ‘bad seed’ myth is true, that you’re in danger of becoming a monster like him. You triggering and getting powers-- biokinetic powers-- just made it worse.

  “That’s why she’s so distant. That’s why she’s suppresses you using your powers, forced you to limit yourself to healing….even though it’s driving you out of your mind with sheer drudgery.” Several people shot him surprised looks, but he pressed on.

  “That’s why she guilts you into doing hours and hours and hours of miracle healing without even the compensation you’d get for running a french fry machine. Dont give me that look! We pay doctors and surgeons and nurses and even orderlies and candy-stripers get compensation. Why the hell are YOU supposed to be a free goodie dispenser? Even a whore gets paid.” That certainly made several people jerk back. “And… it’s why you’re so afraid of your powers. Carol Danvers trained you to be afraid of them. Day after day for years, in a thousand little ways. Not even aware she was doing it, probably.

  “How to fix that? I dunno. Probably years of family counseling. And you’re going to have to confront her about it, and there’ll be a huge ugly explosion and fallout and arguments and drama fit to choke a soap opera. But… at least now you know why. And you can choose for yourselves how to fix it.”

  He saw the expression on Vicky’s face. “Don’t believe me still?” he said sadly. “Go on. Call your Mom. Say one sentence to her, just one. Ask her what was in the Marquis’ closet.”

  As if hypnotized, Vicky pulled out her cell phone and moved off a short way for privacy. She dialed. “Mom? I’m sorry to call you right now. But this is important. I mean really important.

  “What… what was in Marquis’ closet?”

  There was a brief silence. Then a loud angry voice could be heard coming over the phone. “Mom, it doesn’t matter who-- Mom, will you stop shouting?” The voice on the other end of the line was now shouting and screaming. “No, Mom, I’m not-- Mom, will you listen to me?? Will you just---” there was a crunch and a tinkle of falling plastic bits. Vicky had crushed the phone in her grip. “Dammit,” she said. Her voice was cracked.

  She came back over. Her face was haunted. “Now do you believe me?” Bayleaf said sadly. “Now do you believe that I have ‘knowledge from outside time and space?’ About the Endbringers, the PRT, Cauldron, everything?”

  The Dallon sisters were beyond crying, it seemed. They were somewhere between tears and sheer emotional exhaustion. “You know, I was kind of expecting a supervillain with a secret lair full of deathtraps or something,” Vicky joked weakly. “That would have been easier.”

  Danny sighed and rubbed his head. “It’s been a day for drama,” he said. “A week for it.”

  “Are there any other deep dark horrible family secrets you’d like to drag out of the closet for us?” Vicky asked Bayleaf with a sarcastic smile on her face. She nearly fell out of the air when Bayleaf got a pained look on his face. “MORE??”

  “Well, I--” Hemlokk was perched on the arm of his chair: she reached over and clamped both hands around his muzzle. “Mrmph!” he said, rolling his eyes over and giving her an aggrieved look. The laugh everyone got from that broke the building tension. Amy was the last to stop giggling. It was good for her to have that laugh. The poor girl looked like she’d been run over by an emotional truck.

  “I’m calling Aunt Sarah,” Vicky said. “--oops. Uh, Amy?” Vicky looked sheepishly at the workbots sweeping up the remains of her phone.

  Amy pulled out her own cellphone and handed it over. “Try not to smash this one?” she said. Vicky grabbed it and started dialing. “I ought to carry a bunch of burner phones on a bandolier,” Amy said dryly.

  “I get the feeling you two may need a place to crash,” Bayleaf said to Amy sympathetically. “Things are going to be a little mental at both your family’s houses, I suspect. You can stay here if you like-- “ He snapped his fingers. “Or better yet…” he fished a key out of his pocket. “I have a little one-room walkup still. It gives me a second mail address, which is useful. It’s cramped but it’s someplace to go. Hemlokk and I have to stay here… She still has trouble controlling her shift and the neighbors there might notice a six foot tall werewolf girl coming and going.”

  “Why are you helping us out?” Amy asked. “And yeah, I’m a mess cause of what you told us--” she wiped her face. “But I got it together enough to know that you’re trying to help. So why?”

  He gave her a lopsided smile. “End of the world in ten years, if we don’t fix things,” he said. “We’d better darn well start helping one another now, if we want to survive.”

  “And as to helping out each other,” Parian said. “Perhaps we should get back to why you asked us here in the first place.”

  Bayleaf sighed. “Okay, to begin where OUR problem starts,” he said, tilting his head to Hemlokk. “Hemlokk-- Taylor-- is a student at Winslow High. For just about two years, she’s been a victim of a bullying campaign by three students…”

  “So you showed up, began tearing through the school yelling for Taylor-- by name,” Amy repeated.

  Bayleaf nodded, ears drooping.

  “You ripped apart her locker, thinking she was inside it-- then realized she must be in her gym locker, and rampaged your way to the school gym-- just in time for Taylor’s trigger event.”

  Bayleaf nodded again. He slouched down in his chair.

  “Then you ripped apart the OTHER locker, got her out, and then were seen fleeing the scene with a girl more or less matching Taylor’s description tucked in your arm.”

  Bayleaf slouched more. “Eeyup.”

  “Straight to the hospital.”

  “I made sure to destroy all the records,” Bayleaf said sullenly. “Paper, computer, video tape, everything.”

  “I know,” Amy said, a trifle aggrieved. “Poor Gladys...”

  “That should have cut off the trail,” Amy went on. “Except for the fact that a female werewolf was seen riding away from the hospital on a reindeer. The same reindeer that paid a visit to the PRT just before Christmas? Handing out gifts made with your particular look and style?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that any reindeer bearing gifts made by myself was seen at the PRT…” He began reciting. Taylor cuffed him on the back of the head. “Ow.”

  “The same sort of things he’s been selling on the Boardwalk and at the Market,” Parian said. “Which makes things easier for that part, actually.”

  “How?”

  “Paperwork,” Parian said simply. “And one thing I know from being a businesswoman, it’s paperwork. That still leaves the lockers, and the school, and a couple other things,...” She saw the look on Bayleaf’s face. She hadn’t known him long but she was already learning to recognize that smirk. “For which, you have a plan,” she finished.

  “It depends on a few things. How well do you work in furcraft?”

  It was a dark and stormy night. It was a port town; every now and then the night did that. Winslow High was empty, it’s lights dark and its doors locked with the very best padlocks and bicycle chains welfare-state money could buy. The teachers and principal and staff were at home snug in their beds-- or snug in the bottom of a bottle of bourbon-- enjoying their rest after a long hard day of making sure the next generation was just smart enough to repeat whatever it was told, and just dumb enough to think that made it well-educated.

  It was just about the time that the street lights surrounding the school succumbed to the distant lightning and flickered out, that a lone pickup drove slowly past, slowed to a halt, then resumed its travels. Someone watching carefully might have noticed five dark figures darting from under the tarp in the back of the truck, over the fence, and up onto the dark unlit roof in that time, though few would have seen and fewer would have cared.

  Five figures spread out on the roof. Three took lookout, one at each corner-- one of them hovering slightly, one with a scarf that floated about her without any breeze, one with a distinctly jittery step to her walk; one went to examine the access door to the roof; one was at the ventilation ducts, feeding something that bleeped and wriggled its little arms and legs in through the grate.

  About fifteen minutes after Bayleaf let his small team of bots loose in the ductwork of the building, he got a beep over his headphone signaling the all clear. That meant the little mechanical saboteurs had found, and disconnected, the wires for the school’s burglar alarms. He waved for the others and they all joined Hemlokk at the rooftop door. She had a few bits of wire between her teeth and a look of disgust on her face as she fiddled with the door lock. There was a click and it swung open. She spat the wires into her hand and tucked them into her fanny pack. “This school has all the security of a can of Pillsbury biscuits,” she said as they crept down the stairwell.

  Bayleaf’s throaty chuckle greeted this proclamation. “Okay, Hemlokk, you’re our safecracker and computer gal,” he said. “You take Blackwell’s office. Glory girl and I will hit the gym; Parian, you and Panacea will handle the Trio’s lockers. Once we hit our targets we’ll meet in the cafeteria and go from there. Everyone got it?” Everyone nodded. “Everyone got their cellphones?” Everyone tapped the buttons on their headgear. Bayleaf had dipped into his bankroll (after his sales, his occasional beachcombings and the loot he had taken from drug dealers and other criminals under cape Asset Forfeiture laws, he had quite a phat stack) and gotten a round of smartphones for everyone-- ones cleverly made so that they could be held in hand, worn on a wrist mount, or mounted on the side of the head with a special strap and used like a GoPro camera. They had plain mounted headcams beat hollow.

  “Let’s go!”

  They split up at the bottom of the stairwell and scattered.

  (Earlier that day)

  “The point of gaslighting isn’t to just make the target doubt the one thing you don’t want them to see,” Bayleaf said. “That just underlines what you’re trying to hide, like screaming “ignore that man behind the curtain.” The point is to make them doubt their own perceptions, about big things, small things, random events. People are naturally forgetful and inobvservant. If you make them AWARE of just how inobservant they are, they’ll start to debate whether what they remember, or what they see NOW, is the correct version.”

  (Now)

  Hemlokk barely had to try to pick the lock on the office door. She slipped inside and seated herself behind the secretary’s desk and booted up the computer. The password was readily available on a post-it note stuck to the underside of the keyboard. She quickly pulled up Sophia, Madison and Emma’s files. “P1 and P2, I have the numbers,” she whispered into her phone.

  “We copy, H, what are they?” said Parian.

  “315, 322 and 326, combinations 11-33-22, 14-14-15, and 12-01-21. Move to these lockers instead...” she typed them into her phone for good measure.

  “Got it. We’re good.”

  Hemlokk took a few moments to switch the trio’s names in the files to the currently unused lockers and combinations.

  “H, this is B and GG. Your new gym locker is A-12. Enjoy.”

  “Got it,” Hemlokk said, updating the appropriate file.

  Hemlokk was tempted to go utterly amuck, but she remembered Bayleaf’s cautionary warning: for this to work, they had to be subtle. She stuck to the plan, and proceeded to play with the calendar program.

  Last night she had discovered that this particular calendar program had an annoying hidden feature: it could change weekly schedules on a prescheduled basis. For instance if you had meatloaf scheduled for lunch on tuesday on the weekly calendar, the program (if told) could consult the hidden master schedule for updates and move meatloaf to lunch on thursday once a certain amount of time passed.

  Hemlokk put in a command line that simply moved all Blackwell’s future appointments up by one hour… then after 24 hours, moved them back. Then to do the reverse in the next cycle. It was programmed to do this every 24 hours for the next two months.

  Blackwell lived and died by that schedule. The fact that her own copy would never agree with the one in the school computers would drive her mad.

  Hemlokk hummed happily as she contemplated her work. Then she took a few minutes to reverse the order of the drawers in the filing cabinets, and then moved all the items on Blackwell’s desk three inches to the left, and all furniture in Blackwell’s office three inches to the right.

  “So why did you come along?” Parian asked Panacea. “You aren’t exactly a front line kind of girl.”

  Panacea sighed. “Well, once “GG” heard the plan she was all “I am SO in,” so I figured I’d better come along and keep Collateral Damage Girl from setting off the fire alarms or something.”

  Parian giggled at that. The two were preoccupied with breaking into the lockers of the Bitches Three, stealing the contents, and then moving them into new ones, padlocks and all, one floor up or down from their current ones. Madison’s locker had been an especial pain, since the girl had plastered the inside of the door with vomitously cute stickers. Panacea had come up with the slick solution of modifying one of the bacteria on her skin to eat glue. One fingerprint and the entire batch of stickers peeled away in a single sheet. A quick smear of a different bacteria and they had a fresh coating of glue, and stuck it inside the new locker door.

  They finished carefully putting everything back in the lockers the way they had been in the old ones (pictures taken with the camera helped.)

  In Sophia’s locker though they had one more item to include. A slim, sleek black rectangle that was a perfect duplicate of the first phone Taylor had owned-- and lost.

  Almost, because it really only was meant to LOOK like a functional phone. It did only certain things. It was nigh indestructible. It played flashy graphics on its screen if you fiddled with the buttons. It played Taylor’s favorite ringtone. Most importantly was the third feature. Azeroth had a certain “lost mail” spell adventurers would cast it on items they didn’t have the time or room to carry. The object would disappear into the twisting nether. After a certain amount of time, the object would pop out of the twisting nether and appear in the caster’s mailbox, ready to be claimed. Bayleaf had managed to kludge together a similar spell, almost from first principles, and cast it on the phone. Now, whenever it was lost-- or hidden, or thrown away-- it would reappear a random time later, somewhere near or on the owner’s person, and begin playing a cheery ring tune (Taylor’s favorite, coincidentally) as loudly as it could. The owner being whoever first picked it up after it was activated.

  Parian put it on the top shelf of Sophia’s locker and activated it.

  “What about you?” Panacea asked.

  Parian couldn’t help giggling again. “I grew up on a steady diet of eighties teen movies,” she confessed. “I’ve ALWAYS wanted to do something like this.”

  Bayleaf and Glory Girl quickly made their way to the gymnasium and to the girl’s locker room. Not quickly enough, in Bayleaf’s opinion: Glory Girl apparently felt the urge to comment-- aloud-- on anything and everything she saw in Winslow.

  “Erh. Ma. Gerd. I cannot believe you have to go to school in a DUMP like this!” she said for the sixth time in ten minutes. She looked around in horror at the graffiti on the stained walls. Lord only knew what she would have thought if she’d ever seen the student body.

  “Neither can we,” he muttered. They found the locker quickly enough. It was still torn open, and stained from its former vile contents. There were police “do not cross” tapes still up. Apparently the PRT had been here, going over everything with their little tricorders or whatever they used at Trigger sites. Glory Girl made a gagging noise as she stared at the locker.

  “They filled it full of--?” she said.

  Bayleaf nodded. “At least they picked up the loose stuff.

  “And then locked her inside--?”

  She hovered there, staring for a long minute. “People suck,” she said finally.

  “They certainly can,” Bayleaf said. He tore the tapes down. “Let’s get to work.”

  Some rough work with a mop and a bucket of cleaner pilfered from a janitor’s closet cleaned up the worst of the stains. Then without ceremony Glory Girl twisted off the hex nuts holding the locker in place and pulled it out of its slot. With a loud screeching and crunching she crushed the desecrated locker into a wadded-up ball.

  Bayleaf glared at her till she had finished making her racket. “’Stealth’ is just a vocabulary word for you, isn’t it,” he said.

  “Um, oops?”

  Bayleaf sighed and pulled what appeared to be a miniature locker out of his haversack. Brockton Bay did have a few more schools that had been shut down and abandoned ages ago as city funding dwindled; raiding one for a few things, like, say, a couple of lockers sufficiently battered and rusty to match the rest of Winslow’s décor was simplicity itself. He set the shrunken steel box on the floor and used the Gnomish shrink ray to unshrink it to its proper size. A bit of work putting the hex nuts back on and putting the locker number in place, and it was done. “H, this is B,” he said over the phones. “Did you switch gym locker numbers yet?”

  “Oops.” there was a clattering of keys. “My old number right? Right. Done.” Bayleaf was already sifting through the contents of the coach’s office. He found the locker assignment sheet and meticulously changed the number for Taylor Hebert to the empty locker she now claimed.

  “What do I do with this?” Glory Girl said, tapping the mashed locker with her foot. Bayleaf gave her a look, and pointed the shrink ray at it.

  Smeeerp.

  He pocketed the marble-sized lump of metal. “Come on, we gotta go do Taylor’s school locker next...”

  Willoughby yawned and shuffled down the hall of the school, flashlight beam wobbling around the floor. Late night guard duty. At a school. What a waste of money and time. Well, if they wanted to pay him time and a half to spend all night alternating between walks around the school and napping in front of the camera monitors, fine by him.

  The security cameras were out again. Black and white pieces of crap, fifteen years old if they were a day, all it took was a little rumbler rolling in off the water and they conked out. Eh, whatever.

  He came around the next corner and found himself facing two figures in black. One was a girl, and was hovering off the ground. The other was a giant male wolf man, hunched over one of the lockers with a screwdriver. They both froze and stared at him with wide eyes.

  Willoughby squinted. “….Adrian? That you again?”

  “….Uh. Yeah.”

  “Cape stuff again, I’m guessin’.”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “….You didn’t break nuthin’, did ya?” Willoughby said, with just a hint of suspicion. No sense letting these young whippersnappers get cocky.

  “No sir. In fact we fixed a couple of things.”

  “Oh. Well, all right then. Be sure and lock the door behind you when you leave.”

  “Yessir.”

  “See you later.” Willoughby walked off.

  Glory Girl and Bayleaf looked at each other. A silent consensus was reached; they tightened the last screw, grabbed their tools and bolted.

  The day was proving vexatious for Principal Blackwell. Nothing was going right. She’d had several brief meetings scheduled today, but every one of them had been an hour late. At least according to the times she remembered her secretary noting down… yet three appointments in a row showed up at the wrong time, throwing everything off the rails. They of course had gotten angry with her, claiming that they were here at the times she had said, but that was nonsense.

  Then she’d gone and checked the schedule on her computer. They were all wrong. Then she’d checked the secretary’s computer. Then she’d checked her own again, and the times were what she recalled.

  She was having fits finding anything in her own office too. She could have sworn the A through D files were at top, but instead they were at the bottom. She didn’t remember switching them, but who else would?

  What was most annoying was that she kept barking her shins on everything for some reason. And she kept forgetting where things were on her desk. She’d reach over for her pen or her coffee cup and miss it entirely two or three times before she looked up and saw where it really was.

  She wasn’t still hung over was she?

  There was a knock on the door. “Enter!” She barked. When it opened she nearly swallowed her tongue. Standing in the doorway was someone she never expected to see darken it ever again. “Wha-- What are you doing here?” she said, half rising out of her chair.

  “Uh, I missed yesterday and I was told I had to give you this written excuse,” he said, giving her the fakest puzzled look she’d ever seen. “I had a plumbing leak at my apartment and I had to stand around all day watching to make sure the plumber didn’t steal the toilet, or something.” He gave her a half grin, as if he thought it funny. “Had the plumber and the landlord sign the bill.”

  Both signatures were from his landlord, a fellow Bayleaf had come to call “Mister LiesForBucks” in his head. The guy was an ex-con with an eclectic mix of less than legal but highly useful skills, as well as a highly flexible set of ethics. He was perfectly willing to do a little forgery for a fast fifty. (Ironically he also did a little plumbing on the side, so the receipt was technically legit.)

  She gaped at him like an outraged flounder. “I-- you and the Taylor Hebert girl-- the day before--” Bayleaf could guess the source of her momentary tourettes; the Unwritten Rules again. The Unwritten Rules meant she couldn’t just scream for security and accuse him of being a Cape, not unless she had visible evidence of him being a cape right in front of her. As in Superman’s-open-shirt kind of immediate and visible. Pouncing on an underage Cape and forcing them to unmask was a one way ticket to trouble town.

  “Taylor? What about Taylor?” Adrian frowned and looked out the door. “Taylor, did something happen yesterday?”

  Taylor Hebert’s head popped around the doorframe. “What? No, I had to take a half day,” she said. “Food poisoning.” She held up a paper. “I’ve got my doctor’s excuse...”

  “Jimmy Hoffa Loaf, huh.” he said.

  Taylor shook her head. “Chipped Beef on Toast.”

  “Ahh, good old Troll Snot on a Shingle...” Adrian said, as if reminiscing fondly. “Yum yum.”

  Taylor let out a brief snort of laughter.

  “We have footage of you two!” Principal Blackwell announced triumphantly, suddenly remembering the security cameras.

  At that precise moment Willoughby stuck his head in. “Miss Blackwell, I finished erasing and recycling the security tapes,” he said. “Could we please get some new ones? These things’re older than Methusaleh...”

  “I never told you to do that!” Blackwell said, turning a little green. The PRT investigators were going to be furious when they came back. “I told you to hold onto the week’s tapes for the PRT--”

  “That’s not what it says on the memo I got,” Willoughby said, looking down at a printout sheet in his hand.

  It was the return of Flounder Woman. “Uh,” Adrian said. “Taylor and I got classes; we’ll just leave our notes here with the secretary…?” The two students dropped their notes on the counter and fled.

  What the hell had happened?

  After a few moment’s gasping like a dying trout, Blackwell gave up and picked up the notes.

  Then turned and barked her @#$^@ shins AGAIN.

  The Terrible Trio were many things, most of them unprintable. But one thing they had never been before was jittery. The day before yesterday, everything had been going great. They’d stuffed that little toad Hebert into her gym locker, locked her in and made a break for it. Clean getaway.

  Then things had gone wrong, fast. Sophia had stopped and started swearing. “The phone!” she said, and gone racing back. They’d come back and seen the faint light of the glowscreen through the slots on the door. “You idiots, she’s got the phone in there with her!” Sophia had snarled, and she’d obviously panicked because she’d phased out and reached through the door to grab the phone, right in front of Madison. It had been a serious “oh crap” moment; Emma knew Sophia was Shadow Stalker, but Madison didn’t. Hadn’t. This was epic trouble; one of the things Sophia had pounded into Emma’s head was that you could never ever know for sure if someone would blab, and for all Madison was brilliant at lying her cute little face off to teachers, she was a gossip and a half. Maddie could make all SORTS of trouble for the Trio just by being her bubble-brained self.

  Sophia had grabbed the phone and they’d bolted. Maddie had been yammering and stammering OMG you’re a cape, you’re shadow stalker how long have you known Emma, and Sophia had been snapping at her to SHUT UP you little idiot, when disaster two had struck. Sophia had been striding along in those big long legged strides of hers trying to get as much distance from the gym as possible when suddenly she’d stumbled and faceplanted, going straight down like a ragdoll.

  Madison let out a little shriek, and for an instant Emma thought that Sophia had stroked out or had an aneurysm or something. But before she could move to check on the athletic black girl, Sophia had woken up and scrambled to her feet, holding her head and swearing. “What was that?” Emma asked.

  “That was--” Sophia’s eyes went round. “That was a Trigger Event,” she hissed.

  Emma’s head jerked back. Sophia couldn’t mean she’d had a-- then she remembered. It was one of those weird Cape things Sophia had told her about; When someone had a trigger event, every nearby Cape got knocked out for a second.

  And there was only one person in the school who could possibly be having a Trigger Event right now--

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh son of a biscuit eater.”

  “What’s going on?” Madison pleaded.

  “Run,” Sophia said. For the first time since she’d known her Emma heard FEAR in her voice. “We gotta get out of here now, just RUN--”

  None of them got to run a step. Before they could even react a werewolf-- eight feet tall, larger than life, dressed in nothing but the over-stretched rags of a sweatsuit, went tearing past them. In its arms, Emma saw a girl: a girl covered in filth and writhing in pain, with a flowing mane of black curls she would have known anywhere…

  And then… nothing. A van of PRT field agents had shown up, gone crawling all over the girl’s locker room, taken photos and readings of the locker, Taylor’s school locker, the monster had ripped open first, taped everything up with yellow police lines and then left.

  Taylor Hebert had Triggered. Taylor Hebert had TRIGGERED. The one person in the world who had every reason to hate their guts and to want to rip those guts OUT with her bare fingers was a Cape now. And as if that wasn’t enough, the single most dangerous Rogue in Brockton Bay was her boyfriend.

  And nobody knew where they were.

  The three of them had waited all that day, and the next, for the bomb to drop. Nothing. It was telling on them. Sophia was keyed up like an agitated jungle cat, snarling and lashing out at everything and everyone. Madison was screaming and jumping and shadows.

  And Emma? Emma felt like someone on Death Row.

  Emma had once been Taylor Hebert’s best friend. She and Taylor had grown up together. But then during the summer after Taylor’s mother had died, Taylor had gone off to camp to try and get away from her memories, leaving Emma alone.

  Then Emma and her father had been carjacked by a bunch of ABB initiates who decided the way to earn their colors was to carve up a pretty white girl’s face. They’d dragged her from the car, pinned her against the door, and had argued back and forth whether to cut off her nose or put out her eye… She’d fought back-- and Shadow Stalker had swooped in from above and saved her.

  Then Shadow Stalker had unmasked to her, told her she was strong, become her friend. And when Taylor returned, all Emma could see was weakness. She hated her for that, for being weak… for reminding Emma that she’d been weak once too.

  So, she betrayed her best friend, and became her worst enemy. Emma had turned the first two years of high school into hell for Taylor, punishing her for her weakness. Only now when it was too late was she realizing that Taylor was stronger than Emma had ever been, because Emma had done things to Taylor that, had they been done to herself, would have shattered her… and Taylor never broke.

  Until now. And wondering what had been made out of Taylor when the pieces came back together was absolutely terrifying.

  Today was also proving confusing. They couldn’t get into their lockers. When they’d gone and complained at the office, the secretary had pulled up the file and confirmed their, quote, “actual” locker numbers. They had argued till they were blue in the face that the numbers were wrong, that they’d had their current lockers ALL YEAR-- but the block-faced woman behind the counter had stubbornly insisted that they were on record with different lockers. Fuming, they had returned to the hallway where their “correct” lockers stood-- and the combinations worked. Everything was inside; even the decorations Madison had put up inside hers. It was absolutely bizarre.

  “Okay, what. The heck,” Sophia said. She stared into the depths of her locker as if she expected to threaten answers out of it. Then she noticed the cellphone sitting in the upper compartment of the locker. Mesmerized, she reached out and picked it up-- and nearly dropped it when it began playing a cheery little ringtone. Dweedle deedle dee.

  She tried to answer it. She tried to hang up. She tried to turn it off. It was only when she was about ready to start banging the thing on the wall that she noticed the inch high letters scrolling on the screen:

  PROPERTY OF TAYLOR HEBERT

  Hastily she did the only thing she could think of: she stuck her hand through the wall and dropped it down inside. She sighed in relief as the tinny jingle disappeared down inside the hollow spaces of the building’s structure. “Okay, what the hell is going on??” she demanded.

  Emma had a stroke of genius… or maybe paranoia. “Come on,” she said, taking off at a fast walk.

  “Where are you going?” Madison asked.

  “This isn’t the only locker we need to check on.” Emma said over her shoulder. It was the only explanation she needed to make; the other two hustled after her. They got down to the hall where Hebert’s locker was, turned the corner and nearly had triple coronaries.

  Standing there in front of her perfectly whole and undamaged locker was Taylor Hebert. She was dressed in her usual outfit; an oversized hoodie big enough to hide in, jeans and junk-brand sneakers, camouflage for social cowards. Her hood was down and her hair was trailing down her back. There wasn’t a mark on her.

  Madison screamed. Taylor nearly jumped out of her skin. She slammed her locker door and spun around. “WAAH?… You three?” Her face dropped into a neutral, defensive mask and she glowered at them through her enormous glasses.

  There was a loud thump. Madison had fainted. Neither Emma nor Sophia had bothered to try and catch her; they were too busy shifting their stares back and forth from Taylor to her locker and back. Taylor started backing up, her eyes flicking back and forth between them and their unconscious friend on the floor. “Look, I don’t know what you three are up to but I’m not putting up with it today,” she threatened. “Touch my stuff this time and I’ll get Blackwell on you if I have to camp out in her office to do it. I mean it--” she beat a hasty retreat around the corner.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Sophia was standing in front of the locker, patting the door, looking for flaws beyond the usual chipped paint and rust. “This thing was trashed, I saw it,” she muttered. “It looked like Hookwolf had got mad at it.”

  Madison sat up. “Wha happened?” she whined.

  “You fainted, Maddie,” Emma said.

  “Why does my head hurt?” Madison said, clutching her head where it had hit the floor.

  “Probably because hollow things bruise easier,” Sophia snarked. “I’m gonna take a look--” She went shadowy and started to stick her face through the door to look inside.

  FZZT.

  Sophia went stiff and toppled backward, falling flat on her back. Her hair was singed.

  “Sophie?!” Emma said in alarm, kneeling beside her.

  Sophia’s eyes opened. “...Again?” she said plaintively.

  Emma got up and went to Taylor’s locker. She slipped a strip of metal out of her purse and fiddled with the lock; it snapped open in a moment. “How’d you do that?” Madison blurted.

  “Oh please,” Emma scoffed. “Watch a Youtube video already, Mads.” She pulled the door open. It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. The inside of the locker door was covered with festive Christmas wrapping paper featuring dancing snowmen and the words “HAPPY HOLIDAYS.” Trimming the door was a string of battery powered Christmas tree lights. Several of the bulbs at about face height were blackened and charred.

  Madison peered in over her shoulder. “What kind of lame-o decorates their locker like this?” Emma just stared at her. “Whaaaat?”

  Dweedle deedle dee.

  Sophia’s bookbag began playing a cheery ringtone. All three of them froze and looked at it. Sophia sat up (twitching a bit from her little jolt earlier) and opened the bag. Inside was a familiar glossy black rectangle with a glowing screen scrolling the words

  THIS PHONE IS PROPERTY OF

  “What the hell?” Sophia jammed it into the floor this time. They all stared at the spot in the floor where the phone had disappeared for a moment as if they expected it to reemerge. Sophia shook herself. “Let’s get going, I don’t wanna deal with any crap from any of the teachers,” she said.

  “Yeahh….” Emma muttered. They beat a hasty retreat down the corridor.

  The PRT agents who arrived after lunch for their followup were not happy. Not happy in the least. The security tapes they had requested had been “routinely” erased. The school Principal was of a mind to be a pain as well, quibbling with them over being “an hour late,” and taking an eternity to shuffle through her files to find the information they’d requested on the students who owned the lockers. Which turned out to have the wrong information to boot.

  Then they’d gone to examine the locker of one “Taylor Hebert” that the Principal claimed the attacking Cape had ripped open. It was in pristine condition… not as if it had been repaired but as if it had never been damaged. The lead PRT agent was starting to get a headache; he had photographs from the agents on the scene showing the locker ripped apart like a sardine can. The gym locker was the same way-- after he got done reading the dithering Principal the riot act on letting anyone into that changing room

  Then the “abducted” student and her “suspected abductor” turned out to both be in the school, taking their regular classes. Questioning the students and staff was proving a futile exercise too. While a number of students claimed to be eyewitnesses of the Trigger, or of the wolf-man tearing through the school with a girl in his arms, the stories were typically erratic... and while the event took place before noon, several of the teachers absently recalled that Taylor Hebert had been in school till well after lunch and had come down with a case of food poisoning. One student told how “Taylor’s Boyfriend” had called her and asked her to pick up class assignments for them both, since they were both missing school….

  Forget the security guard’s testimony. He was about a thousand years old and had a memory like an old LP-- full of scratches, skips and a tendency to jump from one part of the record to another if you bumped it too hard. If he had witnessed an actual Trigger event, then he’d filed the memory somewhere back in a mental room dating to the roaring Twenties.

  They took one last shot; they sent in their female member to examine the gym locker and to confront the Hebert girl and maybe get some answers. Agent Jones marched into the locker room just as the girls were suiting up for class. “Miss Taylor Hebert,” she said formally.

  A bespectacled girl peeked from the far back corner of the locker rows. She was seated on a bench, tying her sneakers. “Here?” she said timidly.

  Agent Jones looked over the locker the Trigger event supposedly took place. Inwardly she was seething; the entire room was supposed to have been cordoned off and untouched, and here were teenage girls all over the place, throwing their sweaty clothes around… though as for preserving evidence, there didn’t seem to be any. The ruined, filth coated locker the first response crew had photographed and given the once over was now indistinguishable from the lockers all around it. She tapped it with her baton. “Miss Hebert, is this your gym locker?” she said.

  The girl looked baffled. “No, my locker is here.” She pointed to the open locker she was seated in front of and spoke slowly, as if explaining something to someone simple. “Where I’m sitting. And my clothes are.”

  Agent Jones pressed her lips together and sighed through her nose. Teenagers: sarcastic little bastards. “Was it yours two days ago, then?”

  “No, I’m on the assigned chart for A-12, not A-1,” Taylor said. “It’s on the permanent chart, ask-- Coach!” she shouted over her shoulder. “What locker was I assigned? The PRT lady wants to know?”

  The girls’ coach could be heard grumbling and digging through her files. “A-12, as you well know, Hebert,” she said. “It’s been that way for years.”

  “Is that correct?” Jones asked the other girls in the room. Fortune was smiling on the Gaslighting team: few of the girls had been present the day of the locker incident, and none in the locker room when it happened. And like any other normal person, they didn’t waste time paying attention to what lockers other people had. The general response to the question was traded looks and shrugs.

  “But according to the report the first agents filed two days ag….” Jones closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “Forget it. Obviously a mistake.”

  “Officer Jones?” Taylor asked, her brow creased. “Two days? Why did you wait so long to come back and investigate?”

  “Because everyone is over at First General going out of their minds trying to figure out what the hell happened there,” Jones said tersely. “That and they’re running around the Twin Pines mall-- what’s left of it-- figuring out what happened THERE. Place turned into a freaking war zone and nobody noticed till it was halfway over. OR they’re running around to the hospitals, freaking out because some biotinker has been planting “healing trees” in the hospital greenery… In short this week has been a complete bughouse.” She heaved a sigh. “Anyway-- thank you for your time.” She turned around and marched out of the locker room.

  A moment later Sophia and he backup duet came in. “Fashionably late again, Hess?” the coach barked. “I think we’ll be starting your day with a few extra laps on the track, then. You too, Clements, Barnes.”Madison and Elle commenced whining. Sophia didn’t even seem to hear her. She was staring at the A-1 locker with a barely suppressed expression of disbelief. “Hess! Did you hear me?” the coach barked again.

  “But...” Sophia waved her hand at the A-1 locker. “How--”

  “I don’t know what your problem is today, Hess, but you’d better put a hustle on, or I’ll double the penalty laps till you do!”

  Dweedle deedle dee.

  Sophia stared at her bookbag like a live snake had crawled out of it. “Answer it already Hess! Then turn it off!” The girl’s coach had never been a pleasant woman and she was rapidly building up a head of steam.

  Dweedle deedle dee.

  “Answer it before she gives us all penalty laps for the whole hour, Hess!” One of the other girls hissed. Sophia flipped open her backpack; there was the cellphone yet again. To the utter mystification of her classmates she picked up the phone, walked to the nearest window, opened the window and threw the phone out with all the savage fury she could muster. She slammed the window shut and stomped off to her locker, radiating an unspoken threat of death to anyone who questioned her actions.

  Taylor crossed her fingers. Blackwell was confused. The school staff was confused. The Trio was confused. The PRT seemed confused.

  Now all that was left to wrap up Operation Gaslight was the last move, by Bayleaf and Parian.

  Adrian set up his pushcart in his rented spot at the Market, along with a little infrared heater, and settled in. The Lord’s Street Market may have been seasonal due to its open-air setup, but even in the depths of winter there were a few diehard holdouts who kept their little stalls open and their cash registers ringing. He had just started the battery powered toys on their repetitive little dance routine when the rumble of two motorcycle engines filled the air. Armsmaster and Miss Militia came rolling in. They parked, dismounted, and came striding over with the air of someone with serious business to deal with.

  Correction, Miss Militia came striding over with the air of someone on serious business. Armsmaster came striding over with the air of a smug small town cop in a 1980s movie who thought he was going to teach someone a lesson or three about AUTHORITY. “Mister Adrian Smith?” he said. Aaaaand there was the cambot, swooping around to get a wide angle shot of all three of them with Armsmaster in the foreground.

  “That’s me,” Adrian said with a hesitant smile. “Something I can do for you two?”

  “We have some questions for you concerning your possible associations with the Rogue Cape known as Warcrafter,” Armsmaster said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  Adrian’s smile froze. He got up from his folding chair and motioned them over to the side, stiffly. “Can I have a word with you two?” Armsmaster reluctantly moved to follow while Miss Militia stood back and kept watch, his camera hovering close by. “Could you leave the camera somewhere else?” Adrian added impatiently. “I don’t appreciate the invasion of privacy.”

  “The cambot is for legal and investigative purposes and contains a live feed to--”

  “Fine, have it your way.” Adrian was suddenly right in Armsmaster’s face. “Are you trying to get me killed, you idiot?”

  Armsmaster barely resisted the impulse to put the boy in an arm-bar. Or rather his armor did: he’d expanded on his social interaction “cheat sheet” program to warn him of serious possible faux pas. His HUD flashed a red warning against it at the last second that putting an unarmed civilian in a submission hold would look rather bad to anyone watching at home. “I am trying to conduct an investigation into the actions of a Rogue Cape--” he said sternly.

  “And did you stop to think that maybe tromping up to me out in public, bellowing like a foghorn about how you want to know how I know this Warcrafter guy, might get someone’s attention, you retarded robocop?” Adrian snarled. “There are skinheads, junkies and ABB punks out there looking for this guy, looking for a little payback-- and you’re out here practically putting a spotlight on me, fingering me as being tied to him!”

  “You’re not in any danger if you speak to us or the PRT,” Miss Militia interjected from where she was standing.

  Adrian snorted. “Why, because all the rapists and killers and sociopaths in Brockton Bay took a Boy Scout oath?” he said to her. “I’ve already had people wearing gang colors sniffing around, asking for answers, flexing their muscle if I say no… Those Unwritten Rules of yours work great-- if you’re a Cape. It’s a little different down here on the street!”

  Adrian ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “Look, I don’t know the guy. I just take orders from him.”

  “What kind of orders? Orders to do what?” Armsmaster demanded.

  Adrian looked disgusted. “Mail orders, you dope. He likes my stuff. Every now and then he puts in an order for like a dozen of my toy tonks or my little robot toys… sometimes just for the cases. I’m guessing once he gets ‘em he stuffs his Tinker tech stuff inside them. Sometimes he even has some stuff he lets me sell for him on consignment, little bits and bobs and stuff, jewelry, desk trinkets, things like that. Here, look...” He went back to his pushcart and opened up the inside. A cash box and papers were inside. He pulled a bill of sale out and handed it to them. It was an order for twenty alarm-o-bot piggy banks. “He pays by cash, has a third party pick up his completed stuff or drop off stuff to sell, and the most I see of him is the signature at the bottom of the paper. Strictly business, and only so much of that.”

  Armsmaster took the receipt and looked at it. It was amazing how much sour disappointment he could project with just a bearded chin. “We’re sorry about disturbing you then,” he said stiffly. “If we could possibly have access to any record--”

  Miss Militia stepped between them, putting up a hand to silence Armsmaster. “We apologize,” she said. “But we are investigating a separate but parallel incident from a few days ago, and are trying to follow all leads.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get that,” Adrian said, untensing a little.

  “We’d appreciate it if you stayed in contact with the PRT or its representatives,” Armsmaster said. The unspoken You’d Better hung in the air. “I think we’re through here for the moment--” he reached over to stuff the paper back into the depths of the pushcart’s compartment.

  “No wait, DON’T--!”

  “BUTTHEAD DETECTED, BUTTHEAD DETECTED!”

  A klaxon and red alert light went off, and with a loud FOOMP Armsmaster’s entire right side was doused in foam. He stood there, croggled, as Obie came waddling out of the depths of the pushcart, lights flashing and siren wailing.

  “BUTTHEAD DETECTED ATTEMPTING TO STEAL FROM THE CART! CALL THE AUTHORITIES! BUTTHEAD DETECTED!!”

  “Halt! Stop! Deactivate! Stand down!” Adrian yelled. The alarmbot finally stopped shouting and stood still…. Its strobe kept turning at low level, all the same. Adrian stood there with his hands in his face. “He, uh, heard I was having trouble with threats and thieves,” he tried to explain. “So he rebuilt this one to… well. Yeah. This.”

  Armsmaster was standing with his arms akimbo, blobs of foam all over him, sticky strands running from his hands to his chest to his arms and down to his legs and… essentially everywhere. He looked like he’d been dunked in marshmallow filling. “Yeah, I think Warcrafter was trying to make his own version of containment foam,” Adrian went on. “It isn’t quite… um. Yeah. It washes off with soap, so if you ride through a car wash it should--”

  Miss Militia made no move to assist. She was laughing too hard. She was draped over the back of her Harley, laughing so hard she was crying.

  A squawk came over the CB style radio on her bike. (She kept it even though she had the standard issue earbud. She felt having bulletins come in over a CB on occasion gave her a more authoritative impression, and it also made it easier to make excuses for bailing out suddenly.) “This is Kid Win, Shadowstalker and Aegis reporting in. We have spotted Warcrafter, over.”

  Miss Militia grabbed the mike (what’s the point of having toys if you don’t play with them?) and responded. “Kid Win this is Miss Militia, please repeat?”

  “I repeat, we have Warcrafter in line of sight. He and another cape are engaging some criminals attempting a convenience store robbery, over. One of the criminals appears to be a cape with-- some form of blasting power, electrical sparks he can control….Shall we assist?”

  “No, remain in position and observe, we will join you shortly.” She suppressed a sigh; she could already imagine Shadow Stalker throwing a hissy over being kept out of the ‘action.’ She hopped on her bike and kickstarted it. She switched to her earbud. “Can you give us an ID on the second cape?” Armsmaster was stickily mounting his own vehicle.

  “No, but-- it looks like a female version of Warcrafter,” Aegis replied over the line.

  “Repeat?”

  “A female version of Warcrafter,” Aegis said. “A werewolf girl.”

  “With a slammin’ silhouette,” she heard Kid Win remark. “Oh crap, did I say that over the--”

  “You horny nerd” came over the commlink in Shadow Stalker’s voice.

  “We’re on our way,” Armsmaster cut in. His own engine thrummed to life. The two of them roared off down the street.

  It was only two or three blocks over, but even in that short time it was all over but the shouting. The first two crooks were down and being guarded by the female werewolf, while the male-- Warcrafter-- had just closed range with the Blaster. Armsmaster and Miss Militia arrived just in time to see Warcrafter give the spark-flinging Blaster a jabbing thrust to the chin with his staff, knocking him cold. The worgen moved quickly, zip-tying the downed criminal by the hands and feet.

  “Warcrafter!” Armsmaster shouted, waving a hand to signal him. The wolf-man looked up and regarded him with gleaming yellow eyes. Then before either Protectorate cape or the Wards on the nearby roof could react, they leapt up to the side of the building and climbed their way up, swift as geckos, their claws leaving little chips in the stone facade. They dove up over the edge and onto the roof and disappeared.

  Aegis and Kid Win glided down to join them. “Should we follow?” Aegis asked.

  “They’re long gone by now,” Armsmaster said in disgust. He oozed off his bike. “Let’s settle for securing these perps.”

  “Man, I kinda wanted to talk with Warcrafter,” Kid Win said. “I can get it if he doesn’t want to join the Protectorate, but why doesn’t he want to at least hang with us?”

  The sneer in Shadow Stalker’s voice was deep and cutting. “Cause he knows we’d see he wasn’t half as hot as he thinks he is if he did,” she said.

  “Because he has priorities,” Miss Militia corrected. She was crouched over the prostrate crooks. When she stood up she had a piece of paper in her hand, with writing in big block letters:

  MAYBE AFTER YOU’VE CLEANED HOUSE

  “...You’re right,” Armsmaster said. “Priorities. Before we spend any more effort chasing Warcrafter down, we need to concentrate on getting the fox out of our own henhouse. Everything else gets put aside. We focus on Coil.”

  He stood there, hands on hips, dripping slightly. “Uhh,” Kid Win muttered to Miss Militia. “Is there a reason Armsmaster is covered in Oreo filling?”

  Breedle-deedle-dee.

  “AAAAAARGH!”

  “Honestly,” Parian said. “I only intended to make them leap a few rooftops. The store robbery was just blind coincidence!” She was holding a bottle of pop and a slice of pizza and sitting in one of the Comfy Chairs in the Lost Workshop. Next to her on a couple of folding chairs were two neatly folded stacks of cloth, leather, and fake fur… the deflated and inert cloth “puppets” she had animated to imitate Bayleaf and Hemlokk.

  “Well it certainly worked,” Bayleaf said. “I’ve never seen anyone look as confused as Armsmaster did when that report was called in.” He chuckled and bit into his slice of pepperoni. “Of course that could just have been getting sprayed with that foam...”

  “The PRT stopped by the Dockworker’s Association offices,” Danny said. “They were seriously confused to find out I had spent the last day and a half at home tending my sick daughter.”

  Aisha cackled. “Did the teachers really insist they’d seen you, Taylor?” she said. “All ‘cause I picked up your homework and dropped a bug in their ear? Dang, I may be a black girl but I’m queen of the Snow Job!” She did a little victory dance in her seat.

  There had been a bit of uncertainty about introducing the non-cape girl to the circle. But Bayleaf had insisted, and had pointed out the girl had helped them pull off Operation Gaslight with such success. So she had been welcomed in. “And Blackwell. What did you DO to her, girl?” the ADD-typical girl said to Hemlokk. “She’s spent the last two, three days trippin’ over things and just looking confused as hell.”

  “Nothing much,” Hemlokk said smugly. “I just moved everything in her office about three inches to the left…”

  “Oh, that old gag,” Danny chuckled.

  “And everything on her desk three inches to the right.”

  “Ooh, nice added twist,” Danny saluted.

  “Aaaaaand I may have stopped by Gladly’s classroom and done a little of the same to him,” she said with fake innocence.

  “Yes, but will anybody notice?” Aisha quipped. “That man has been lost at sea since the Carter Administration.”

  “Well, everybody,” Bayleaf said. He raised his pop bottle in a toast. “Blackwell is confused, the school staff is confused, and the PRT is confused. I’d say Operation Gaslight has been a roaring success!” Everyone applauded.

  “Hear Hear!”

  “Now comes the hard part.” Bayleaf was suddenly serious. “This was just the first block of the Jenga tower. Shadow Stalker has to be dealt with. She’s a lot more dangerous than anyone thinks. Enough that Cauldron was willing to put a psychopath on a team of teen Capes because they thought her powers might be “useful.” That alone is enough to send chills down my back. So she has got to GO.”

  “I haven’t told any of you this yet, but part of the reason I brought Aisha in is because her big brother is Grue, leader of the Undersiders.” There was a mild commotion at this. “He’s being played for a stooge and a fool. The Undersiders are on Coil’s payroll and don’t know it-- and the one who does know, Tattletale, can’t do anything about it because Coil has a gun to her head. They have got to be pulled out of Coil’s grasp.

  Then Coil has to be dealt with. Permanently. If that is fumbled we face Echidna. If THAT gets fumbled, the Cauldronborn”-- Bayleaf’s name for the heroes, villains and rogues that had been dosed with Cauldron’s potions-- “will go off the rails. If that happens, our chances against the Endbringers drop through the floor. If we handle the Endbringer attack poorly, the Slaughterhouse Nine will find Brockton Bay a cakewalk…. And if we don’t deal decisively with the Nine, especially with Jack Slash-- the end of the world gets triggered DECADES early, when none of us are prepared for it.”

  Aisha spoke for them all. “So what kind of chance do we have?” She said, fidgeting with her fingers in her lap. For once she looked serious.

  “Better than you think. Parian, my sources tell me that your power-- your ‘true use’ of your power-- makes you an effective threat against Behemoth. I don’t know what it is, and neither do they. But it exists. If you can figure it out.” This statement startled the dressmaker so severely that she nearly dropped her plate. “Aisha, your brother’s darkness powers stop all forms of light, including radiation. That makes him another one effective against Behemoth.

  “Panacea, I have a plan that might, just might, enable you and me together to cure Echidna and get the Travelers out from under Coil’s control. Trickster is one of Simurgh’s TykeBombs--” this made several more people nearly drop their plates or drinks. “But there may be a way to fix that as well.

  “Vicky, in the other timeline your forcefield actually stood up to a blow from Scion.”

  “Holy carp,” Glory Girl muttered.

  “I know of at least two Capes who are able to get past the Endbringer’s invulnerability and actually kill them with a well-placed shot, if they know about it and where to aim. And in every reality, Scion has an Achilles heel.. we just have to find out what it is. For now, that means buying as much time as we can, and removing as many of the nasty, small-potatoes players from the board that will hinder us.”

  “You mean ‘small potatoes’ like Jack Slash and the Nine?” Amy asked sarcastically.

  “Amy, the only reason the Nine persist is because Cauldron has been keeping them alive. They’re all the same wet meat as the rest of us. Mannequin is just a brain in a box. Shatterbird is a sniper’s wet dream. Siberian is a projection: kill the fat little man in the white van following her around and she disappears in a puff of nothing. Jack Slash is a baseline human who can project cutting edges and can mentally “stab” at your insecurities. Bonesaw’s just a little girl-- she’s a biological horror but biology versus immolation, biology loses. Even Crawler could be eliminated by a powerful enough incendiary.

  Haven’t you wondered why the US government doesn’t just drop a MOAB down Jack Slash’s shorts and call it a day? Because Cauldron, in their infinite wisdom--” here his snort turned into a snarl-- “has decreed that the monstrous suffering of tens of thousands of innocents is less important than how useful Jack Slash and his playmates MIGHT be for their Master Plan of ‘Punch the Space God In the Face.’”

  “Our enemies are NOT omnipotent, they are NOT invincible. They’re… nasty little brats playing at being God, who think they can’t be touched,” Bayleaf said. He couldn’t help but think of Gray Boy-- the vicious little psychopath who’d trap people he tortured in bubbles of time ‘for all eternity’ and was effectively immortal and indestructible because his shard instantly repaired any damage by “rebooting” him from the past. He’d died all the same. His victims still suffered in their time traps; chalk up another thing on the “to do” list.

  He was going to have to visit Labyrinth, see if she could take him on a scavenger hunt for shards of Time… he shook himself, bringing himself back to the present.

  “We have all the power we need to defeat them. ALL of them.”

  “More importantly you have the knowledge,” Danny Hebert said. “Where to find that power, how to use it. You’re starting the game a dozen moves ahead. The trick is going to be maintaining that lead.”

  “That’s the nice thing, though,” Parian said. Everyone looked at her curiously. “Something I noticed from Bayleaf’s story. He may have been given a ridiculously huge lead, or a ridiculously small one, depending on your outlook. But in spite of everything that lead keeps getting bigger.

  “And I notice that it’s not just because he’s following some brilliant, cunning Path to Victory like Cauldron is. It’s because each step of the way he tries to do something right. Something Good. Even when it looks in the short term like a setback.”

  “Even if it was, I hope I’d still do it anyway,” Bayleaf said soberly. “We don’t just have to survive, we have to be worthy of surviving. And people who stomp on little people and blame it on the ‘big picture,’ well-- they’re not.”

  “Do the right thing, and it’ll all work out?” Vicky suggested.

  “Do the right thing, even when you can’t see the way;” Bayleaf said, as if reciting something from an old memory. “Have faith that God will see it through to the end-- even if you won’t.”

  Danny held up his bottle. “Here’s to doing the right thing,” he toasted soberly.

  “To Doing the Right Thing,” everyone chorused, clinking pop bottles together.