Den

Other than cosmetic damage, this wasn't as much a disaster as I'd first feared. It wasn't going to cause the basement to leak from the outside; the beam had been set to a wide dispersal so that it did less damage but over a wider area. If I had to guess, it had been made to deal with PRT armor. However, from the amount of damage that was there, I could tell that Leet had overestimated the likely defensive ability of the armor. While it was likely that the armor was tinkertech, I'd seen videos of troopers being thrown around.

I'd sen reports of them having concussions, which meant that throwing them into a wall hard enough would liquefy their insides, even if the armor itself was unharmed. It was no different than being in a car crash without a seat belt. It wasn't the collision that killed you. It was the collision of your body with the inside of the vehicle, and then the collision of the inside of your head with the inside of your skull. Those kind of impacts probably didn't do the organs a lot of good either.

Looking up at the damage, I knew there were going to be questions that I didn't want to answer. Dad rarely came down to the basement, but rarely wasn't never. Eventually I was either going to have to tell him that I was a cape, or I could claim that I'd been experimenting with pipe bombs for show and tell at school. Somehow I didn't think he'd see the humor in that.

On the good side; it meant that I was a tinker.

Tinker wasn't a power I'd ever really wanted, but any power at all was better than no power. I'd be able to use this to leverage my way out of Winslow, away from Emma and Sophia and Madison and their hangers on. It'd mean going to the Protectorate, being a ward, but it'd be better than living the way I had been living.

Any other power set and I'd have thought about going off on my own. After all, it was possible that the wards were going to be almost as bad as Winslow. Teenagers were horrible people. But tinkers required resources, and worse, people were watching out for the most likely places where they'd be trying to get them. Gangs desired tinkers more than any other power class because they were a force multiplier. You could be as strong as Lung, but you could only be in one place at a time. But a tinker could give laser pistols to twenty gang members. The only limit was how much time it would take the tinker to service and repair them. Eventually he'd spend so much time repairing the things he'd already built that he wouldn't have time to build anything else.

Still, rebuilding Leet's laser pistol wasn't going to be enough to get me in. I needed a couple of things of my own to convince them that I was more than just a glorified repairman.

From what I'd read, tinkers just got....Ideas. They'd look at a pile of junk and somehow know how to fit the pieces together to make something amazing. I spent the next thirty minutes gathering every piece of junk that I could, and putting them in a pile. I waited, but no ideas came. I didn't wake up four hours later with a finished gadget in front of me, like some tinkers were said to do.

Instead, I found myself looking at how the blender could easily be repaired with a couple of easy fixes. The old toaster wasn't really broken; there was just a connection that was loose. We'd replaced the old toaster already, and there wasn't any reason to actually repair it.

Was that my specialty? Repairing things?

What would I call myself?

Miss Fixit? The Fixer? Repair Lass?

The names made me sound either like a mafia enforcer, or an idiot.

Had I somehow gained the lamest power in the world? The ability that anybody could gain either by taking a few classes, or just by practicing long enough that they started to understand things?

Being a cape wasn't even an option for someone with a power like that. Even the gangs wouldn't want me; after all, what would I be able to do for them? Repair their cars or their phones? They could get any norm with some basic skills to do those things. Sticking a teenage girl in a silly looking outfit and putting her in combat would just get her killed.

I was so lame that even the Merchants wouldn't want me.

Maybe Emma was right. If she'd gotten powers, she'd have likely ended up as a master, or maybe somebody like Glory Girl. Me, I get a power that was so stupid that it was indistinguishable from being normal.

How did capes even get their powers anyway?

I hadn't known I'd had mine until I'd laid eyes on the pistol while trying to hide from Sophia, who'd been stalking down the block like she owned it. There were various theories online, but nobody really wanted to talk about it, especially online. There were people online who were convinced that the capes were keeping the method to themselves so they wouldn't have competition. Of course they were the same kind of people who believed that the government put trackers in the toothpaste.

Clearly if the government was going to put microscopic trackers in something, it wouldn't be toothpaste. I was convinced that half the boys at school would have been unaffected.

Instead they'd have put them in French Fries, because everybody ate some of those eventually. It was what fast food restaurants sold the most of, because it went with everything. People drank a dozen different kinds of soft drinks, half a dozen kinds of burgers, but fries went with everything.

It wouldn't matter if they were tracking me. After all, I didn't even have any secrets worth knowing.

As I climbed the stairs of the basement, I absently noted that we were going to have to going to have to work on the wiring down here; I didn't like the sounds coming from the lights and the pattern of the sounds from the florescent lights told me that we likely had another couple of years before we were going to have to do something.

Being a super repair person was going to suck; once you saw something, you could never unsee it.

As predicted, Winslow was a nightmare the next day, and for once not because of the Trio. From the moment I got to the school I could see the ways that it was falling apart. There were places that my power told me were going to be dangerous, likely in less than a year. The school would just hope that nobody would be there when it fell apart, and if anyone was hurt, they'd pressure them into keeping quiet, maybe giving them a little hush money.

I could see kids whispering, and glances directed at me.

The Trio had been quiet for a couple of weeks before school ended, and I'd foolishly let hope that it was all over make me sloppy. The people who were staring at me and whispering obviously knew something that I didn't. For that many people to know meant that it was going to be something big. The fact that so many people knew meant that they'd prepared something so horrendous that they wanted the entire school to know. That would both heighten my humiliation and send a message to anybody who might be willing to help me.

Stay out of it or you're next.

The closer I got to my locker, the more obvious that it was. Sophia and the others were all loitering, not next to my locker, and they were pretending not to have noticed me, but I could see small glances in my direction, the tiniest smirk on Emma's face.

I could smell something rank from more than sixty feet away. How hadn't a teacher noticed?

For a moment I thought that they were just going to have me open my locker to something horrible, but even videotaping me retching wouldn't justify all the effort they'd put into it. I glanced at them again, and I caught Emma making a small signal to Sophia to get ready.

My mind raced, and it was almost like I'd heard that ticking sound again, and then it all became clear.

How stupid did they think I was?

Did they really think that I was going to walk up to the locker like a lamb to the slaughter, ignoring all the evidence that my senses were giving me and let them push me in? They really had to think that I was dense.

I sighed and I turned around.

While I knew that the administration wouldn't do anything, and that the teachers didn't really want to do anything, I suspected that something bad enough would force one of them to act? Who was most likely to actually put up a minimum of effort?

I found myself at Mrs. Knott's room.

"Ma'am," I said. "I think that someone has tampered with my locker."

"I'm sure that the janitor would be happy to look into it," she said, looking over her lesson plans.

"I can smell it from all the way down the hall," I said.

"What?" she asked, looking up.

"It smells really bad."

I'd been approaching the whole problem the wrong way. If you gave someone an option to do nothing, they were going to take that option. I'd given up on the administration a long time ago, but in doing that I'd made it easier for them to do what they were already likely to do anyway. If I'd been enough of a pain in the ass about it, I might have been able to transfer schools. It was likely that the threat of a lawsuit from Alan Barnes was enough to give Emma a lot of leeway.

Parents bullied administrations as much as bullies did other kids.

How had I never thought about this before.

Mrs. Knott hesitated.

"I'm afraid it might be contaminated," I said. "They might even have to evacuate the school if whatever they put in there is bad enough. Might make the news if it's a slow news day. I mean a gun scare here is old news, but toxic chemicals, that might get them interested."

Her eyes narrowed at me, but she rose to her feet.

"Might even make national news," I said. "You know how they exaggerate."

She rose to her feet, and followed me.

She was angry at me for some reason, likely because she didn't like how manipulative I'd sounded. Well, I still hadn't had a lot of experience with it, but I suspected that with time I'd get better. After all, Emma had been doing it for years, and she was really good at it.

As we turned the corner she stopped.

The girls were still there, probably because they thought I was just waiting for them to leave before I reached my locker.

"Could be a sewage leak," I told Mrs. Knott.

She frowned, as she smelled whatever was in the air.

"You should all get to class," she said sharply.

The girls scattered.

"You too Taylor," Mrs. Knott said. Her expression softened.

"I'm sure that somebody is going to try to say I did it myself," I said. "But I haven't had access to the school since I left for break. And something that smelled that bad couldn't have been put in my locker when everybody was still here. "

She looked at me.

"The athletes had access, though," I said.

Having her make these points to the administration made a lot more sense than me doing it; as far as the administration was concerned, I had no clout and my opposition did. The strong always got what they wanted, while the weak got screwed.

I felt better than I had in a long time as I went to class.

I'd been beating my head into the wall for a long time looking for solutions, but ideas were already popping up about how I could deal with my problems with the Trio.

As I was about to step into class, I froze.

What if my power wasn't just to repair things? Maybe I could repair relationships, and if I could repair them, maybe I could break them too. Divide and conquer and all that. After all, all you really needed to do was understand the problem and the solutions tended to jump right out at you.

After a moment I shook my head.

I'd never heard of a power like that, but it didn't mean it didn't exist.

What did make sense was that I wasn't a tinker at all. I was a Thinker.

Everybody said that thinkers were some of the scariest people around. I wasn't sure I agreed, but I was going to try to milk these powers for whatever they were worth. After all, using powers against ordinary girls would get you thrown in jail. Using plans, on the other hand might not, especially if you could plan your way out of whatever trouble you got into.

In a way, I'd lucked out. I'd heard that there were capes who had powers that turned them into cannibals, capes who had to tear the skin of their victims to fully use their powers. Some powers had aspects that were so gruesome that the PRT actually censored any mention of them.

I'd gotten very lucky.

For some reason I could hear the clock ticking in the back of my head.

Tick Tick Tick Tick.

The short lived feeling of euphoria I had after sabotaging the Trio's plans didn't last more than a day. While I'd been able to keep from being blamed for the whole thing, nothing had been done to any of them either. My locker smelled like bleach, and I was informed that I was going to have to pay for the ruined school books. I thought about protesting, but my own experiences as well as my sudden intuition suggested that nothing I could say would really matter.

Even if I was to get them on tape, they'd likely be able to turn it against me. Massachusetts was a two party consent law state; it was illegal to film or record another party unless both parties knew about the recording. It was a wiretapping law, but effectively it meant that I could go to jail while the school and the bullies would have the evidence thrown out as being illegally obtained. It meant that they could do whatever they wanted with impunity. Worse, they could get damages of up to a hundred dollars a day or a thousand dollars, whichever was more.

As I sat down in Mr. Gladly's class, I saw the others whispering about me. Presumably Emma had put out some kind of rumor that I'd been seeking attention, or that I was crazy, despite the fact that half the school had known about the plan the day before. Consistency wasn't exactly their strong point.

Madison had switched seats and she was sitting next to me. I looked straight ahead.

"Why don't you just leave," she asked in a low voice. "Nobody wants you here."

There were several girls up at the desk talking to Mr. Gladly, presumably to give Madison a chance to try to bother me. I wasn't sure why they bothered. Madison had never had the razor's edge that the others had. Her abuse had a minor edge of sadism to it, but for the most part she didn't have the sort of enthusiasm the others had.

"They don't really want you either," I said, staring straight ahead. "What do you think will happen when I leave?"

\

I could feel her eyes on me, but I didn't turn my head.

"They don't really need you, you know. How long will it be before Emma finds someone a little more...useful," I said. "Everybody needs a minion, but you aren't strong enough."

I glanced at her, and saw that she was frowning.

"Sophia loves to bully the weak, doesn't she, and where Sophia goes, Emma goes."

"That's not..."

"You think Emma is in charge?" I asked. "I guess she is, in a way, but she needs Sophia's approval desperately for some reason, so if Sophia asks for something, you think she'll argue? She's going to drop you like a hot potato. Maybe you'll be the next me...after all, Emma likes to turn on old friends."

As I spoke, I realized it was true, and from the look in Madison's eyes, she did too. My mind raced, thinking back on all the interactions I'd seen between the three of them. There had been a definite pecking order, and Madison had always struck me as more of a hanger on.

"I'll bet the other two keep secrets from you," I said, watching her face.

It was a hit, from the way her lips tightened.

"They're using you," I said. "They make you think they're sharing damaging stuff, because friends trust each other with things. But they hide the rest of it because they're grooming you to be the next me. They're stealing your secrets for ammunition, and they're giving you trash in return."

"I'll never be you," she said.

"Well, yeah," I said. "It'll be worse, because at least I'm generally not a rat. You'd rat right away, so they'd have to do something so horrible that you'd never ever tell."

"You don't know anything," she said.

"You think Sophia could get a box of rats?" I asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, I heard that the locker was full of bugs," I said. "Only way to top that would be to put somebody in a box where there was nobody around to help them. Maybe deliberately add in some spiders and rats. There was an old reality show that used to do those things, only they let people out when they screamed for help. You think Sophia would let you out just because you said please?"

"They were going to let you out," she muttered. "Just leave you in there for a little bit."

"That was a lie," I said. "I'd have been in that box screaming and gagging on that stench, and they'd have left me there until someone took pity on me; but this is Winslow. I might have ended the school day there, gone missing. I could have died. And if I had, who do you think they'd have thrown under the bus?"

"I didn't even know about it until yesterday!" she hissed.

"Your word against theirs," I said sweetly. "And we both know how that works."

She stared at me for a moment, then got up and moved back to her seat.

It wouldn't be enough to substantially change her behavior, but it would plant a seed in her mind. At the moment, the Trio seemed like an impenetrable monolith; but once cracks started to show, and you put the right sort of pressure in the right sort of places, even the strongest structure could fall. The trick was finding the right places to apply leverage. While Madison was the weakest link, she was also the least important. Neither of the other two would have told her anything damning, and she'd hardly be able to turn state's evidence.

For the rest of the hour she kept glancing back at me.

I'd never realized how easy it was to manipulate people. Maybe I'd never be a hero or villain, but I could certainly make my own life better. Maybe I could make some extra money doing small repairs; we certainly needed some extra cash financially. All I'd have to do was find some way to stop Emma and Sophia. Three days ago, I would have said the task was impossible, but my mind was starting to see possibilities, and that gave me a lot more hope than I'd had in a while.

At lunch, I ate in the cafeteria.

Sophia had been giving me looks all morning; it looked like she'd been outraged by my defiance, and planned to beat it out of me.

The smart play was to stay in view of enough adults that even Sophia wouldn't blatantly beat me black and blue. She'd humiliate me and ruin my lunch, maybe even pour noxious things over me and the adults would look the other way. However, they wouldn't be able to justify ignoring an outright assault for fear of getting involved in a lawsuit. Students had been known to film fights at Winslow and put them on the web, and if a teacher was seen in the background doing nothing, there was a chance that an outraged parent would do something.

Somehow the secret recording statute was never used against the students who posted things like "Stupid noob gets her beatdown!" or whatever. They always used titles suggesting that the victim had deserved everything she got, and a shocking number of people tended to agree with them.

I'd looked it up once, wondering why people tended to blame victims. It was something called the Just World Fallacy.

The thought that random bad things could happen to anybody scared the hell out of people. The idea that a cold, uncaring universe could just send a car flying through your windshield, a weird disease that anybody could get would affect saints and sinners alike, or an attack out of nowhere was terrifying.

It was much more comforting to believe that there was a plan in the universe. People got what they deserved. People who worked hard, got married and did what they were supposed to lived good, fulfilled lives and the people who made mistakes didn't.

It was why so many supposedly religious people ignored what their religion actually taught in favor of believing that the poor must have been deserving of what happened to them, and that billionaires in turn deserved every perk that they received, despite the fact that thirty five to forty five percent of wealth was inherited.

So people who saw me being beaten on video would laugh in the same way they laughed at shows making fun of the poor. If they saw how run down my house was, they'd tell me it was my Dad's fault for not moving or getting a better job, despite the fact that the economy had cratered, not just in Brockton Bay, but to a lesser degree everywhere else. Earth Aleph had no Endbringers and less parahumans, and their economy was booming along compared to ours.

"You think being a rat is going to save you?" Sophia asked.

I'd been eating quickly, stuffing my face. I'd known that they'd waste time looking in my normal spots, which would give me a little time, but that a sycophant would warn them soon enough.

Stuffing my face with the last of my burger, I shrugged as I swallowed.

I'd made sure to have by back against a wall; I'd been attacked from behind too many time not to do so. It ran the risk of me being trapped, but in a pinch I'd just have to start punching the weaker girls in the face. Unlike Sophia they'd scream and back away and they'd make a hole.

I'd pay for it later; I'd likely get expelled given the kind of testimony they'd give, but it would be better than letting them injure me. The stunt yesterday with the locker told me that I needed to be more careful. They were likely to escalate to the point of hurting me badly. Sophia might well send me flying down stairs in a way that would leave me a quadriplegic. She'd either claim that I'd tripped on my own or that it had been an accident.

"Are you saying that there's anything for me to rat about?" I asked. "I mean, you're the golden girl on the track team. There shouldn't be anything for me to blackmail you with."

There was a twitch. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there. Did she have something that could be used against her? She was violent, it was true, and I'd seen her beating up on some of the gang kids every now and again. She'd wiped the floor with them. How did a girl my age beat kids who outweighed her by forty to sixty pounds?

She'd been trained somewhere.

Clearly she wasn't a member of any of the major gangs. The Empire hated blacks, the ABB only took Asians, and she didn't show any signs of being the kind of person who would be with the Merchants. There were other, smaller gangs in town, but not many, and those tended to be transient and were often consumed into the larger gangs around them shortly after they were introduced.

"It's not like you are secretly a member of...well," I said.

Her eye twitched.

"You're full of shit, Hebert," she said. "You don't know anything."

She turned away, quickly, though, and Emma's look of shock at what I'd said sealed the deal. Madison only looked confused, confirming what I'd already concluded about being outside the loop.

Sophia Hess had received combat training from somewhere.

It wasn't one of the major gangs, and you didn't get combat skills like she'd had from a weekend or even a month of training. None of the minor gangs had lasted long enough to train her like that. She could have simply been with a martial arts club, but a lot of them had extra flourishes. They were sports instead of actual combat skills. Her fighting style was direct and brutal.

The only other large gang in town, by one meaning of the word was the Protectorate and the PRT. The PRT didn't accept people Sophia's age, not even as interns. The legal liability was too high.

The most likely conclusion was that she had powers, and that she was a Ward.

None of the other capes in town fit her description. They were either too male, too white, too Asian, or didn't fit her body type. Vista was too small and white, which left Shadow Stalker.

Sophia was Shadow Stalker.

Blackwell would have to know in order to facilitate her absences. It likely explained some of her favoritism toward Sophia, although Shadow Stalker hadn't been a Ward when she'd started bullying me. Blackwell had just been a bitch then.

The teachers wouldn't know; the more people who knew secret identities, the more likely the gangs would just find an English teacher and torture them until they squealed. Blackwell probably had a panic button on her just in case something like that was to happen to her. The fact that people thought all the Wards went to Arcadia meant the gangs were unlikely to look to the Principal of Winslow, which had probably been a selling point for her to agree to take Sophia on.

How hard would it be to ruin someone's life with Thinker powers?

Could I get her arrested, thrown into jail, have her lose her house?

For a moment I indulged in the idle fantasy. It would be easy, with just the right amount of planning. But nobody ever thought they'd get caught, and no matter how smart you were, there was always a chance that unexpected and unforeseeable circumstances could blow the whole thing right open. Also, other thinkers existed. Las Vegas hired a quarter of the thinkers in the United States to counter the Thinkers who thought they'd clean up at the casinos.

I was tempted to give myself away further than I already had.

Taunt her, say something cheesy like "don't go stalking off" or something like that. It would be deeply satisfying, but Sophia would run to the PRT and try to get me arrested for trying to reveal her identity. I needed to keep my identity a secret until I'd signed the papers.

\

This world seemed to work by power and leverage. Nobody ever moved unless you had a lever to move them with. Sometimes that lever was personal power; more often it was having money or other people backing you up.

I'd go to the PRT and I'd make my pitch.

I'd find out whether they thought I was more valuable or Sophia was. While people could, infrequently be compassionate and decent, organizations almost never were. They tended to be deeply pragmatic. If you were useful they kept you around. If you caused problems, they'd weigh those against how useful you were, and they'd get rid of you if the balance in the equation was wrong.

It was why a genius could be an asshole to people, while a janitor would be fired for just being a little rude. The main thing keeping the janitor hired was how much of a pain in the ass it was to find and hire someone else. In an economy like this one, finding someone else was easy. A genius was harder to replace, but there was a point where even he would get fired if he was too difficult.

Actors got away with a lot, but if they were too difficult they wouldn't find any more work. They might even get fired from the production as it was in place.

I couldn't help but think that Sophia was just as much an asshole at work as she was at school. That would make it easier to fire her, and lower her overall value. I'd have to look like the most easygoing, most helpful person who would never cause any problems.

Against that was the fact that Sophia had a high clearance rate, and my powers weren't likely to be useful for combat at all. Brockton Bay wards tended to be more combat oriented that the ones in most places, just because of how many gangs were here.

Well, it was possible that I was wrong and she wasn't part of the Wards at all. This was just speculation, and I wasn't stupid enough to believe that my power was all knowing. After all, feed a computer the wrong information and it would get the wrong answer every time. It would be better if she wasn't.

Then I wouldn't have to have some kind of power struggle with her.

I could remember a time when there were pay phones everywhere. They were gone now; even the ones that were supposed to be working had usually had their phone cords ripped out. Phone calls could be traced; normally that would be a problem, but I wanted to find out if they would accept me before I revealed my identity.

My only choice was to try to call from a school phone, or to go in person.

Sophia had track practice after school and the coaches were out running it. It was a simple matter to slip into the offices; normally they locked the doors, but I'd overheard the coach complaining that the door didn't lock and that he'd had several things stolen from his office.

I'd go to the PRT and I'd look into the Wards.

If I discovered that they'd actually and intentionally helped Sophia bully me, then I would find a way to hurt them. Throwing someone away because they weren't useful was one thing; it was how this entire world worked. But letting someone be cruel just because they could was stupid. It could easily become a scandal that would hurt the corporate image; if they were allowing it, it meant that they, or at least their leaders were sadists.

If that was the case, then I'd do my best to screw them all over.

But for the moment, I had to pretend to be the nicest person in the world.

After all, I had to seem useful, right?

"PRT," I heard a bored sounding voice say.

"I'm a parahuman," I said cheerfully. "And I'd like to join the Wards."

"I see," the woman said, sounding considerably less bored. "Would you like to come to the PRT or would you like us to send someone to meet you?"

Wasn't she even going to ask me about my powers?

It threw me off a little. After all, I'd expected to be treated with a little more suspicion. I'd gotten a whole speech ready to justify why they should take me seriously, and she wasn't even asking the question.

After all, didn't crazy people call the police all the time and pretend to be the killer? It would seem like it would be an even bigger problem for the PRT. How hard would it be for somebody to put a suitcase over their head and pretend to be a thinker, the one power than didn't have any obvious signs. There had been con men for years who had used cold reading to pretend to speak to the dead, or to have mental powers. Wouldn't people try something like that for the excitement and thrill of being a hero, or at least for the paycheck?

Teenagers would be even worse, given that their ability to assess risk wasn't yet fully developed, while their desire for reward was at an all time high. It meant you couldn't really trust any of my peers to do the responsible thing, because the back of their minds wanted to have sex, do drugs, get into fights or at the very least avoid homework in favor of spending three days doing nothing but playing video games.

"Aren't you going to ask what I can do?" I asked.

"Only if you want to tell me," she said. Her voice was professional but warm. "The people you'll be talking to will deal with any details that you'd prefer not to discuss over the telephone. Joining the Wards is going to be a good decision. The city needs everyone it can get."

Ah.

That was the reason they were so hands off. They needed bodies in the seats, and if they scared parahumans, especially kids off then the odds were that some gang would snap them up sooner than later. They'd be turning an ally into an enemy. Having kids join the Wards wasn't just gaining more power for their side, it was also denying the enemy any extra bodies.

Compared to that, a few false positives weren't a big deal at all. Most likely they'd only send PRT agents at first until it was confirmed that I had a power; after that I'd get to see the actual heroes. Better to saddle a lowly paid employee with weeding out the crazies than force heroes to deal with them.

"If I name a location, can you have someone pick me up?" I asked. "I don't have much of a costume yet and I'd prefer not to walk through the lobby."

"Have you chosen a name yet?" she asked.

"I'm sure that the PRT has image consultants," I said. "So any name I chose will likely be overruled. For the moment I'd like to be called Intuition."

"All right," she said. "Where you you like us to meet you?"

I named a spot two blocks from Lord's Market. My house was only four blocks north of the Market, and the location I named was to the East of it. Normally I wouldn't pick a spot so close to my house, but the Market was a central location visited by everyone in town, so it was less likely to arouse suspicion.

"I'm going to be bringing a weapon," I said. "As part of my power demonstration. Will that be a problem?"

"Please do not brandish it," she said. "I will let the people who are picking you up know you have it. Please keep it out of sight and don't act aggressively. Nobody enjoys containment foam."

"I'll do my best," I said. "I'll be there in an hour and fifteen minutes."

"It will be a nondescript windowless blue van without any markings," the woman said. "After you tell the driver who you are, he should tell you he's Agent Murphy."

"And if he's a different agent?"

She was silent.

"Right. If he's there to pick me up, he's Agent Murphy. Have you had a lot of trouble with people intercepting these calls and trying to pick up new recruits?"

"We're a national organization and we need to be prepared for anything," she said. "We've taken every possible measure to protect this call from being listened to directly, but information in computers can be compromised. The agents code name will not be logged in and I will give it in person to the people picking you up."

It didn't preclude the possibility of bugs in the room, or simply bribing or blackmailing some of the agents, but it was better than nothing.

The PRT agents would likely be on edge; I was sure that people had called them out like this and then ambushed the agents. It couldn't be terribly common, or they simply wouldn't do it anymore, but all it took would be once. It was dangerous on both sides of the equation.

I'd have to be on my guard; thinkers were less likely to get in a windowless van with people they didn't know, but they were also less able to defend themselves if someone decided to come after them. I knew the area, and I already had an escape route planned. It likely wouldn't have helped if I hadn't had a weapon, but I could use the laser pistol to help slow them down.

Leaving quickly, I made sure nobody saw me exiting the coach's office, and I slipped out around the building on the other side of the school from the track team. I made my way to the bus stop; Winslow didn't have the money to actually bus people, and they claimed that Brockton Bay public transit was excellent and safe.

It was actually mostly true. It smelled of urine and body odor, but the gangs mostly left the buses alone because most of them didn't have cars either and they didn't want the added expense of having to get cars for everybody. I'd only seen a stabbing once, and that was two homeless guys getting into a squabble over...something.

I slipped on board, and I tried to ignore the people around me as I made my plans. Most of the people on the bus were huddled together on the front of the bus because there was a homeless man talking to himself. He smelled really bad and he was saying things that didn't make any sense. After the stabbing a couple of months ago, most of the regulars had gotten a lot more cautious around some of the homeless.

However, I knew this guy. He was schizophrenic, and he mostly tried to keep the fact that he was seeing things and hearing voices to himself. He knew it disturbed people. The fact that he was acting like this now meant that he was having an episode. Most mentally ill people weren't dangerous to other people. Instead they were dangerous to themselves or were more at risk of getting hurt. The two homeless guys who'd gotten into a knife fight had been addicts, who were much more dangerous.

The gun could go in my backpack, and the only costume I could make on this short a notice was a hoodie, a pair of darkened goggles and a handkerchief. The combination would obscure most of the details of my face and would make it harder for facial recognition technology to get a lock on my features. It was possible that I was going into a trap but I'd deal with that as soon as I could.

It was a cheap costume that wouldn't pass muster, and it was sketchy as hell, but it didn't have to last all that long; just long enough to get me through today. After that, the PRT would be paying for everything, or was it the Protectorate? I assumed that the PRT had the money, but it was possible that I was wrong. It wasn't something I'd ever looked up or been interested in finding out, although if I joined I would certainly do so, if only to see who held the reins.

I could hear explosions in the distance, and I could see evidence of a battle; smoke rising from the next street over. I heard people talking about it in a low voice.

The driver called it in and spoke to the dispatcher in a low voice. He was silent for a moment, and then used his microphone to speak to the rest of us.

"I'm taking an alternate route," he said. "If you need to get off at the next two stations, you'll need to get off now. However, I can't recommend it. According to dispatch, there's a battle between the ABB and the Empire. PRT and Protectorate are on the way, but things may get dicey for a while."

Nobody got off at the next stop, and the driver made a left.

I had four stops to go, so I wasn't going to be inconvenienced too much as long as there weren't further delays. Looking around at the people around me, I could see the worried looks on their faces. Several of them were chattering away on their phones in a variety of languages at a rapid pace, presumably making sure that their relatives were keeping their heads down. I didn't understand what they were saying, but I could see how tense everyone was. It had been like this when the homeless guys had been escalating before the stabbing too. Everyone saw the danger, but nobody had known how to deal with it.

Things calmed for the rest of us as we got further away from the battle, but the people who presumably would have gotten off on those two stops were still talking loudly on their phones. Normally that would have irritated people; they'd be getting glares and angry looks. Today, nobody said a thing.

Everyone was tense, and I could understand why. These kind of battles could easily spill out into the surrounding area; while it was on one block at first, five minutes later it was somewhere else.

If I was a better person, I might have done the stupid thing and gotten my laser gun and run over and tried to help. I'd have gotten killed too; civilians with weapons in the middle of a situation like that just added to the carnage and to the fog of war. I'd have been as likely to get shot as to help anybody, and it wasn't like the gun had a stun setting, which was weird considering who Uber and Leet were.

Leet didn't seem to like to repeat himself; maybe he'd already done phasers a lot. They seemed iconic enough to revisit, but he seemed to be pretty egotistical. Repeating yourself was inevitable when you were dealing with mass media properties; there were tropes that showed up often enough that bending over backwards to not reuse things was just silly.

Or maybe he was just bragging that despite his sloppiness as a builder, he seemed not to have a theme like other Tinkers. I refused to believe that video game was a theme. He could build anything, just not well.

"Does it sound like the explosions are getting closer?" a middle aged black woman asked her companion.

"Yeah," the boy said grimly.

She was right; the sound of explosions had been getting closer for a while, even as we should have been moving away from the battle. They were intermittent, but when they did occur, it was like firecrackers, a lot of discrete explosions in a short amount of time. They were far too loud to be firecrackers, even from this distance. I'd never heard anything like it, and so I had nothing to compare it to.

The bus was slowing; this was my stop.

I rose to my feet. I was sitting on one of the side seats, as far away from the smellier people as I could, and the front of the bus was to my left. Through the windows on the other side I could see sudden movement at the top of one of the buildings across the street.

It looked like a giant mass of whirling blades, somehow in the shape of a wold.

There were explosions around it, which could only mean that Hookwolf was trying to either kill Oni Lee or to get him away from the more vulnerable members of his group. We were at least ten blocks from the original fight, so I suspected it was the former.

I heard people scream around me, and I felt my stomach clench.

"Get down!" I screamed, dropping to the floor. I rolled under the seat I'd just been sitting on, huddled with my face against the wall, my eyes tightly clenched shut.

I heard screaming, and a moment later the sounds of an explosion so loud that it made my ears ring. There was the sound of shattering glass, and a moment later, I joined in the screaming as I felt the bus turn over.

Everything went silent for a moment, and then I heard the sounds of sobbing in the distance. The bus hadn't been particularly full; it had to have been twenty five years old at least, with a maximum capacity of forty people; less than half that had been on the bus.

I was face down now, which meant that Hookwolf had likely hit the bus hard enough to knock it on its side. I could feel a dull ache in my back; the bus hadn't been so old as to not have safety glass, but even pebble sized shards were going to do some damage.

I struggled to my feet. The sounds of explosions were retreating off into the distance.

Everyone on the bus had been thrown to the left side, and they were now lying in piles. I didn't have a lot of medical experience, but I was at least mobile and that was more than could be said for a lot of these people.

There were people on this bus that I'd seen every day for almost six months. I only knew the names of the loudest of them, the ones who made a habit of speaking loudly to the people they were with. That meant that the better patrons I didn't know much about.

I did know Mrs. Kwan. She wasn't loud, but she was a grandmotherly type who had a kind word for everyone.

"Mrs. Kwan?" I asked.

She was one of those who had been on the other side of the bus. She had blood running from one ear as well as lacerations from small pieces of glass embedded in the side of her face.

She groaned, and she looked semi conscious if anything.

Most of the other people on the bus weren't any better. Oni Lee had been using a variety of grenades, presumably trying to see if one of them worked better than the other on Hookwolf. From the injuries that I could see, it looked like the bus had been hit by a fragmentation grenade closer to the front of the bus than the beck, where I had been.

The front of the bus had traditional school bus type seats, which meant that the people on the right side of the bus from my perspective had not only gotten the worst of any fragmentation damage, but they'd also been thrown violently onto the people on the left side.

The schizophrenic behind me was curled up into a ball, but he didn't seem to be hurt very badly.

There was nobody else who was around and able to hurt.

Scowling, I pulled up my hoodie and slipped a handkerchief onto my face. If my ears were ringing, everybody who had been closer to the explosion had to be at least temporarily almost deaf.

Mrs. Kwan usually had her phone in her bra. I gingerly pulled it out and pressed her thumb against the button. I dialed the PRT number.

"PRT," I heard the voice on the phone saying. It was the same woman I'd spoken to before.

"This is Intuition," I said. "I won't be able to make my meeting with Agent Murphy. Hookwolf and Oni Lee were fighting and they've overturned a bus on the corner of Maple and forty second street. A grenade was involved. While they seemed to have moved on, I wasn't sure whether the Ambulances were likely to come, and so I haven't called 911."

Sometimes the drivers refused to show up until the battles were over, especially in poorer areas.

"Were you in the bus at the time?" she asked.

"I can function," I said shortly. "Should I call 911 or will you do that for me?"

"I've got agents on the way," she said without breaking stride. "We already had people heading toward the main fight. That location is far enough from the main fighting that ambulances will respond."

So not all of the paramedics in the city were cowards.

I could hear the sounds of a keyboard typing.

"Neighbors have already reported the incident," she said. "And Ambulances are on the way. Do you need help with what to do?"

"I'm a thinker," I said. "Knowing what to do is my thing."

My mind was already analyzing the bodies in front of me. Mrs. Kwan had been the farthest from the explosion, and despite having been thrown to the other side of the bus, her prognosis was good. The bodies closer to the site were in worse shape.

"But I've got no supplies and poor upper body strength, so the sooner help arrives, the better," I said.

Switching off the phone, I stuck it back into Mrs. Kwan's bra.

Some of the less injured were going to be waking soon. Most of them had just been stunned. Getting out was going to be a problem, and so was finding space to work on people. On a school bus we would have just kicked out the emergency door in the back. The large windows on a bus were designed to be kicked out, but they were now over our heads, and so were the doors that led out.

I didn't have any real supplies other than the clothing of the people around me, but I was already making connections about what needed to be done.

"I'm coming up on the site of the attack," Chris said. "It's just like she said. Bus is on its side, damage on the starboard side with that side facing up. It's pretty consistent with some of the damage from Oni Lee's grenades I've seen in the past. There's a huge dent in the side upper side of the bus, about right for Hookwolf."

"What's the situation?" Gallant asked. "Orders are to get out at the first sight of Oni Lee or Hookwolf."

"I know," Chris said irritably.

It wasn't like he wanted to be anywhere near either of those psychotic bastards, not when they were doing crap like this.

"There's a lot of people spread out on the side of the street," Vista said.

She'd already caught up with him; she always did. It felt a little unfair considering that part of the reason he'd built his flying board in the first place was to finally have something cool for himself. It had led to multiple infractions for running out ahead of his partners, but part of the appeal of flight was not to have those limitations. But Vista was a major league player despite her age; she was already damn good with her powers, and if it wasn't for Watchdog rules she'd already be out on the front likes stopping those Empire bastards.

Oni Lee had assassinated Othala, a clear first step in a war with the Empire. Without their healer, the capes of the Empire wouldn't be able to throw themselves into battle after battle with impunity. They'd be forced to hold back the same way as everyone else. Chris wouldn't have thought the ABB smart or ballsy enough to try something like that.

He was coming around the side of the bus and he could see what Vista was talking about now.

Transit buses were supposed to have safety hatches on top for just this reason; sometimes they were in the floor. The hatch on the top had been rusted shut; the Brockton Bay bus fleet had last had new buses twenty years before. But a lot of the fleet was even older than that, and this bus had to be twenty five or thirty years old.

The passengers had escaped through the front of the bus.

"It looks like fourteen passengers," Chris said. "Five are mobile but injured. The rest are on the ground. The driver looks to be dead."

The passengers had been laid out on the roadway in front of the bus in rows. He'd have expected them to have been pulled out and laid haphazardly, but the organization was obvious.

More badly injured passengers were laid out closest to the bus. The farther from the bus they were the less injured they seemed to be, at least on first inspection. Normally in this sort of thing there were people milling around uselessly, but here, the people who were actually mobile were all busy. Three were checking the injured and two were watching for oncoming traffic. They were on a side street a block away from the normal stop.

Uninjured people had come out of their homes and had brought blankets and water. They were doing what they could to help the injured without further injuring them.

Chris landed and stepped off his board and Vista appeared beside him in a blaze of twisted space.

"Is somebody in charge of all of this?" he asked.

"Girl's inside," a burly looking man said. He didn't seem all that impressed with Chris or Vista.

Truthfully, Clockblocker would have been better for this, at least to stabilize people until help was able to come, but he didn't have the mobility for this kind of emergency. Chris had been the closest; he'd been at home, which was closer to this part of town than those of the other wards. Vista could get anywhere in the city pretty quickly if she wanted and she'd joined him, a PRT agent replacing her at the console.

"Insight?" he asked, looking into the recesses of the bus.

There was a figure in a hoodie huddled over a body. Two others were applying pressure to two others.

"Six more passengers inside the bus," he said.

"Intuition," the girl said. "You have an ETA on the ambulances?"

She didn't even bother to look at them. She was doing something to a figure in front of her.

"You aren't supposed to move bodies," Vista said. "You might injure their spines."

"You think I don't know that?" the girl asked. Her voice was tense. "People were piled on top of each other, and it was like a game of Jenga to get them outside without permanently leaving somebody crippled. These are the worst of them, too badly injured to risk moving because while I can see how to support their bodies, the people doing the lifting can't. They did the best that they could, but it was a nightmare just getting people out from under them so they could be moved."

"Anything we can do?"

"You got a dermal regenerator?" the girl asked. "I figure most of you tinker types love Star Trek, so maybe you've got one on you? It wouldn't work on the thirty seven broken bones this guy has, but at least it would keep him from bleeding out before the paramedics get here."

There were spots on her back where blood was seeping through her hoodie. She'd been injured too, but the pain didn't seem to bother her.

"Uh...it's not my specialty," Chris said. "Maybe I could work on something later, though."

"I could move space around them instead of moving them," Vista said slowly.

The girl looked up. She was wearing a handkerchief with Armsmaster's face on it. She'd pulled her hair back, but her eyes were kind of pretty.

"Would you be certain they wouldn't move?" she asked.

"Well, if they rolled it would be bad," Vista admitted. "I'll have to do it in stages, and we'd have to land on top of a roof. It's a crap shoot what condition those will be in."

She shifted and Chris could finally see the man's face. It looked like hamburger. The entire top half of his body looked like it had been shredded and Chris wasn't sure how he could be alive. The girl's hands were buried inside the man's armpit, plunged into the wound.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm applying direct pressure to four different veins trying to keep him from bleeding out," the girl said. "And if you think that's easy with two hands, it's not. I know what I'm doing, but my hands are getting tired."

What he could see of her face was sweaty and her face looked a little white.

"I managed to get the others stabilized, but this guy..."

Chris could hear the sounds of sirens getting closer.

A closer look showed that she'd used duct tape and bandages on all of the people who were down. The man's face was bleeding sluggishly and his color wasn't good, but she ignored that bleeding.

Voices outside were directing the paramedics into the bus.

Two men stepped inside, and the girl said, "These men all have severe spinal injuries, but this one is the worst. He's got punctures to four of the veins in his...I don't know the words, but he's bleeding to death and I've got my hands on all four spots."

The paramedics took over, but it took six men to try to keep him alive.

The girl's hands were dripping in blood. She looked white, and she staggered back, her face pale as the paramedics started to carefully slide people onto backboards.

"He's got three crushed vertebra," she called out to one pair of paramedics. "The third from the top, fifth and sixth."

It was getting crowded, and Chris carefully pulled the girl out, careful not to touch her arm or hands, which were dripping. He'd had to step over the metal where the windshield connected to the top of the bus; that piece twisted along with the space around it and it all became flat so that the paramedics wouldn't have to struggle to lift the gurneys and risk injuring the victims when they sat them down.

A woman rushed up to her with a white towel, and Intuition thankfully took it and started wiping her hands and arms, a little more forcefully than necessary. She looked a little woozy.

Some of the people who were standing were directing the paramedics toward the most badly injured patients, even as others were groaning.

"You told them what to say?" he asked.

"One of the passengers had a set of Garfield stickers. I had them put one on everybody's left shoe. Odie is the least injured; full of energy. John is in the middle and Garfield is the worst because he's the least healthy one and will almost certainly be the first to die."

Her hands were shaking now; Chris had seen it before. He'd experienced it before himself after a fight; when the adrenaline rush faded and the sugar deficit from putting the body into overdrive finally kicked in.

"But yeah. I had one guy write everything down while I was working on the others," she said.

"Impressive, getting everybody to listen."

"When nobody is doing anything and one person starts giving orders, it's easier to follow, especially if you order them as individuals. Otherwise they just wait for someone else to do something."

There were only ten ambulances waiting, likely because this wasn't a rich area and had fewer available. They'd have sent more from some of the richer hospitals, but those would take a lot more time to get here.

Vista said, "I'm going to help them move the ambulances. Faster we get them to the hospital the faster they'll get back."

People were crying on the ground, those who weren't unconscious. They all had injuries that were painful, and many of them had broken bones.

"They'll probably call Panacea in," Chris said. "None of these people are likely to have any money, and the hospitals are strapped for cash as it is. It'll be better for them anyway; a few days off work can mean getting fired in this economy, and nobody wants to be in pain any longer than they have to."

"I'm sure we could get Panacea to look at you," Chris said slowly.

She shook her head. "Not until everybody else is treated first. My injuries aren't anything compared to what they're dealing with."

"Well, I've got nothing better to do," Chris said. "I can sit and wait with you, make sure that none of these people get hurt any worse than they already are."

She nodded shortly.

"Sorry about getting your name wrong," he said. "I can get a little scattered sometimes."

"It's fine," she said. "As long as you don't screw things up like Leet, you're doing all right. Besides, Insight is probably a better name than the one I picked."

"Well, his stuff blows up a lot," Chris said.

"Poorly insulated wire next to a heat source," she said. "Fine until things heat up too much, and then a little while after that. Next thing you know, you're missing a hand!"

"You're a tinker too?"

"I don't think so," she said. "Or at least I haven't been swarmed with ideas about how to build things. Mostly I can just see what's wrong with things...I've only repaired one laser gun; it's not like I've got access to a lot of stuff to check it out with."

"Well, they'll do power testing," he said. "If it's a repair thing, maybe they'll give you some old crap and see what you can do with it."

"Might be nice," she said. She stared out at the carnage around them. "I should have been able to do more."

"Is there anything you could have done, especially in the time you had?" Chris asked mildly. "I mean, from what I heard it came up on you pretty quickly, at least from what the 911 callers reported."

"Still. I should have managed to convince more people. But it took them too long to understand what was going on and to react."

"If you'd had Lung's powers, could you have done better?" Chris asked. "Saved a single person that you didn't save?"

"Well, no," she said.

"You might have been able to kick Hookwolf and Oni Lee's ass, but then how many people on the bus would be dead by now?"

"Six," she said. "With an extra three paralyzed, at least until Panacea got to them. The least injured would have gotten out OK, but even the mid range injured would have done worse, especially if people weren't careful about how they moved. I wasn't kidding about it being like a game of twister."

"Just because you can't blow people up directly doesn't mean you aren't valuable," Chris said.

"It would have been a lot more satisfying to blast both of them," she said. "Maybe I could have, but for some reason I didn't want to bring my laser pistol to school."

"We've all had urges to bring our laser pistols to school," Chris said. "In my case mostly to have something to play with while my history teacher drones on. But they keep telling me I'm not allowed to...secret identities and all that."

"I'm sure parents would be happy having their kids sitting next to you while you're working on a live laser pistol," Intuition said dryly. "And I wasn't saying I wanted to shoot the place up. Would have been nice to have had it, though."

"It'd just have gotten you killed," Chris said. "Or the people here. Unless it's really bad ass it probably wouldn't take Hookwolf down in a single hit. If it was that strong, they probably wouldn't let you fire it in the city, because it would likely go through two or three buildings if you missed. Oni Lee is really tough to hit, at least the real him and not one of his clones. He would have just popped in and dropped a couple of grenades inside the bus. That would have been a lot uglier."

"I know," she said. "It just feels like my power is kind of useless. Not good in a fight, can't build things to make other people good in fights...I might as well be a normal person."

Chris knew how she felt. What good was a tinker with dyscalculia? Math was an integral part of tinkering, of any kind of engineering. Furthermore, he had troubled paying attention, which meant that he was scattered when he should be focused. He didn't even know his own specialty, which meant that he couldn't focus on the things that he was good at, because he didn't even know what those were.

"Thinkers are considered some of the scariest people out there. The PRT uses a lot of them. Your power seems particularly useful. Did you have any medical experience before this?"

"No," Intuition said. "But human bodies are just squishier machines, right? So figuring out how to fix them isn't all that hard, even if I don't yet know what to call everything."

"Well, a lot of thinkers are a lot more specialized than that. We've got precogs that tell us a situation is a six, or purple, or some other nonsensical crap that doesn't help much, but the PRT is happy to have them because that's better than nothing. Somebody who can just maintain tinkertech would be worth their value in gold; and given what you've done today, I'll bet your power has aspects you haven't even thought of yet."

The stiffness in her shoulders relaxed a little.

"So were you hoping to go out on the front lines and start punching people?" Chris asked. He grinned, glad that his costume would let her see him smile so she wouldn't think he was making fun of her.

"God no," she said. "This was horrible enough. I was mostly hoping to stick back and work on fixing things. Get a transfer of schools maybe and some extra money to help out around the house."

"They're going to stick you in a costume," he warned her. "Make you do the press conference, maybe take a couple of laps around the Boardwalk and get a few pictures. They won't force you to fight; sticking somebody without offensive powers in front of Hookwolf is basically throwing people away, and they aren't interested in that."

It was all about perception. Even if she was useless in a fight, her name would be added to the roster, and it would make it look like the Protectorate in Brockton Bay was stronger than it really was. Sometimes being perceived to be strong was almost as good as being strong; at least that was what some of the others kept telling him. They'd likely conceal some of her powers, maybe even give the public the wrong impression like they had with Gallant.

Missy was already returning with the ambulances, and everyone was occupied with getting more victims into the ambulances. Nobody was near enough to listen.

"Of course, if you really wanted to get into a fight, I could always make you some powered armor. You could maintain it yourself."

He was supposed to give any prospective new recruit the spiel, but he actually liked this girl. It seemed like having her on the team would be a good thing, and if building something would get her to join up, he was more than happy to try.

Her head snapped up, and she stared at him.

"Really?"

"I mean, I can't guarantee that it would be all that good. It's not like I'd be able to make you able to fight Crawler one on one. But it would be better than nothing."

She patted his hand.

"Thanks. I might take you up on it."

"Looks like we're up," he said. He reached a hand out to help her up.

Missy was transporting some of the ambulances away, and there was a couple of paramedics left who were assessing the remaining people, those who had remained ambulatory.

"We'll get you checked out," he said. "And then maybe we can head down to the Rig and see about that application."

Perfect timing, just finished reading the previous chapter.

Chris said it, but I still don't think she realises how useful repairing or understanding Tinkertech is.

A lot of tinkers left behind some really powerful stuff. Hero, to name one.

I don't know how the other aspects of her power work but I'm sure she's a lot more useful in other ways too.

Also do I sense a little budding crush? Chris X Taylor is rare.

Keep these chapters comin y'all

"Do I have permission to heal you?" Panacea asked.

She looked run down and upset, and something told me that it wasn't just about being called to deal with healing twenty random people. As far as I could tell, she was taking about five minutes to deal with each person; less for those who were less injured and more for those who were worse off. So the whole incident had taken about two hours, and it was now about six in the evening.

"Sure," I said.

Kid Win had been called away as we'd waited, presumably to give his reports. Now that they were in the hospital, none of us needed guarding, and I was at least nominally volunteering so they had no reason to hold me.

"You're the one who patched everybody up?" she asked. She stared at me for a moment. "Are you really going with an Armsmaster's mask for a costume?"

"Uh...yeah, and no? I kind of had to throw something together at the last minute."

"Impressive work," she said. "Any medical skills?"

"I've seen House," I said. "I was pretty sure that it wasn't Lupus though."

She glanced up at me and smirked.

"I think most people could have figured that out," she said. "With the faces half blown off and everything. Most people wouldn't have known to shove their hands in and put pressure on four different spots. How did you do that?"

I showed her.

It required twisting my hands worse that that Vulcan salute thing Greg was always trying and failing to do. I was more of a Next Generation person myself, and a casual watcher at that.

She winced.

"Looks painful."

"Well, they'd have died otherwise, and I didn't have what I needed to pack the wound properly."

I could feel warmth rising up my arm as she was doing something.

While the others had been treated in a single, large area, I'd been ushered into a private room, probably out of respect for my nominal identity as a cape.

"Hmm," she said.

"Yes?"

"Well, I don't do brains,' she said. "But I can see them, and your gemma is weird."

"Oh?"

"I've only seen it three other times, and it was always people with powers, so it's got to be a weird mutated form of Gemma, even though my power doesn't think its a Gemma at all. There's a natural variation in location with all parahumans in the Corona and Gemma both. But at least the structures are similar enough to be recognizable as a Gemma."

"So it's unprecedented?"

"Well, Case 53s...their Gemmas are sometimes in the wrong place or weirdly configured. I've even seen them split up into a dozen smaller versions, so it's not unprecedented. It just doesn't usually show up in people who look normal. Maybe yours is just weirder than normal."

"Is my weird Gemma likely to cause problems?" I asked.

"Not that I can see," she said.

"I'm not secretly a Case 53...not likely to grow like a beak and octopus arms or a tail or anything."

"There's not guarantees," she said. "Because nobody knows what causes Case 53s. Maybe they're normal people who go through a transformation. But people have tried to look for missing persons cases and correspond them with Case 53s, an they've never found anything."

That was a comforting thought.

"Well, you had some low level infections," she said. "Were you rolling around on the bottom of a public bus or something?"

I shrugged.

"Anyway, I fixed those, the injuries to your back...would you like me to fix your vision?"

"Sure," I said.

She hummed for a moment, and my vision grew blurry.

I pulled my glasses off and squinted for a moment before realizing that I could see perfectly.

"I won't give you bigger boobs," she said before I could say anything.

I stared at her.

"Should I feel insulted?"

"Girls at school ask me almost every day. I'm tempted to give them watermelons, and then people would stop asking."

"Maybe you could charge for cosmetic surgery," I said. "I mean people think of healing as a calling or whatever, but nobody expects a nose job for free unless they're a personal friend."

"What are you saying?"

"Find a cosmetic surgeon, get some business cards made. They start asking about boobs, hand them his card and tell them the rates. They'll shut up about it, or they won't and you'll be a few thousand dollars richer."

She frowned.

"You're what, sixteen, seventeen? You don't want a nice house when you grow up? Maybe a dog? Dogs eat a lot, or at least that's what I got told when I was five. Or maybe you could make a dog that gets food from sunlight, but it would probably look weird. Get enough money, and you could go on vacation every now and again, and get away from the blood and the guts. Oh, and from all this hospital work too."

"Anybody ever tell you that you're weird?"

"I literally get that every school day," I said. "I'm sure my Dad would tell me that, but he's pretty weird himself, so I have ammunition if he gets too mouthy."

She stared at me for a moment and then smirked.

There was a knock at the door, and we both looked up.

"All done?" Kid Win asked.

I nodded.

"Maybe we should get going."

I glanced up at the clock. It was almost six; Dad would likely be home by seven or seven thirty. If I decided to join, I could call from the Rig, but if I didn't then I'd need to at least have an excuse about why I wasn't home.

"We've got a PRT van waiting out back," he said. "There are already reporters in the front interviewing people. Somebody must have heard me calling you Insight, because that's what they're telling the reporters you're called."

"I see some of those people every day," I said. "Are they going to out me?"

"You're a teenager. Did you ever tell anybody your name?"

"No. I barely talked to anybody."

"Well, you're likely fine then," he said. "It's dangerous for normal people to talk about cape secret identities...if it's a hero, there's always a risk that a villain might try to torture the information out of you. If it's a villain, well, the guy you just outed isn't likely to be happy. Most people aren't stupid, although there are, of course exceptions."

I gestured to Panacea as I rose and left the room and she gestured back.

As we walked down the hallway I could see that things had calmed down a great deal from even thirty minutes ago. The emergency room hadn't been large enough to hold all the patients and while normally they'd have been shunted to another hospital, the fact that Panacea had agreed to take them had been seen as important by everybody.

The hospital was a little run down, but it was in vastly better condition than Winslow. It was serviceable; it just wasn't one of those new hospitals funded by outrageous prices that had everything all gleaming.

A nurse was passing by, and I stopped her.

"You should get your air conditioning system looked at soon," I said. "It's struggling. It'll cost a lot less to have it repaired than to have to replace it."

"How did you..." Kid Win said, and then he stopped. "Yeah. I can hear it. She's right. It's not really this nurse's responsibility though. I'll send a note to the administration letting them know. Hopefully they'll take it seriously."

"You'll remember?"

He flushed a little.

"Armsmaster had me add a system to my visor to remind me of important stuff. It doesn't always work, but it helps."

"OK," I said. "Not sure why you're embarrassed though. In my parents' day people actually memorized each others phone numbers. Now? Lose your phone and you're screwed. Twenty years from now, people are going to have to have reminders to put their pants on. It just means you're ahead of the curve."

Well, at least that had been the way it had been when I'd actually had a cell phone, before everything.

He glanced at me, then smiled a little.

"That's one way to think about it."

We arrived at a door in the back; like most hospitals, this one was large and there were multiple entrances. This one was further from the main entrance than the others, and mostly it seemed to be used for employees to arrive. It was the closest thing the place had to a back door. Stepping outside, I saw that a black featureless van was waiting for us. There were no windows.

"My parents always told me to never get in a van like this."

"I'm Agent Murphy," the woman driving the van said.

She was an attractive Middle Eastern woman with nice eyes. Her hair was good too. If everyone who worked there looked this good, I suspected I'd be stuck in the back room away from the cameras.

Kid Win seemed to recognize her and he seemed comfortable around her and so I decided to give her a chance. If it turned out to be a trap, I'd lunge for Win's gun and I'd already figured out how to use it. It surprised me that he hadn't put a trigger lock on it, but it wasn't like his fingerprints would be available in those gauntlets and maybe he was afraid that if it was linked to his gloves that he'd lose access to his gun if his gauntlets were damaged.

Kid seemed nice, but teenagers had been lied to before and tricked into participating in terrible things. I'd reserve judgment.

We clambered into the back of the van and closed it behind us. There were two men in PRT armor, the shiny black face masks giving no clue as to their intentions.

"Why the escort?" Kid Win asked.

"It's the new protocol," Agent Murphy said. "The war between the Empire and the ABB is only likely to heat up, and we're traveling in larger groups now."

The agents sat with their hands on their weapons. Those weapons were supposedly loaded with non-lethal rounds, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't been switched out for something more dangerous, what with Hookwolf and the others being on a rampage. Even non-lethal rounds could be lethal under the right circumstances, and being shot from two feet away sounded like one of those circumstances.

We were all silent as the van started moving.

"Anybody hurt?" Kid Win asked.

"Panacea has taken care of our wounded," the woman said. "Civilian casualties number twenty, including the driver of the bus Intuition was on."

"He died almost immediately," I said. "If it had just been him, I might have been able to do something, but there was only a twenty five percent chance of his even surviving to see the paramedics, and the chance of his reaching the hospital dropped even further. There were too many people dying for me to take the chance."

It had seemed so clear at the time, but looking back on it, I felt horrible. I'd made a decision that resulted in a guy who had just been doing his job dying. I could try to comfort myself with the survival of the others, but I wondered if his relatives would have felt the same way. If it hadn't been for Panacea, at least two of the people I'd treated would have likely died, unless they'd gotten gifted medical teams. Why hadn't I abandoned them in the same way?

I'd been hyper focused at the time on doing what had to be done, and it had all become a problem to be solved. I

"You shouldn't have had to make that kind of decision," Agent Murphy said. "You shouldn't have been put into that situation."

"Nobody else was doing anything," I said. I scowled. "I think half of them would have died just from confusion."

I was exaggerating, but they would have likely worsened their injuries, and some of them would have died.

I didn't like the look Kid Win was giving me. I couldn't see his eyes, but the bottom part of his face was expressive enough. I didn't need sympathy; I just needed for situations like that to stop happening. It could have been my Dad if it had happened in traffic instead of on a bus. I could have been at home wondering where he was, and the next thing I would have gotten a knock at the door, with cops and social services waiting.

That might be what was happening right now at the bus driver's house.

The whole system was broken, and something needed to be done about it. I wasn't stupid enough to think that there was a simple solution; if there was, somebody would have already done it. When something was truly simpler and easier than previous ways, it tended to get adopted quickly. However, seemingly simple solutions often had hidden downsides that kept them from being implemented.

People are hungry in Africa?

Give them food and clothing. Unfortunately, free food and clothing meant that local farmers and clothes makers were put out of business. This meant that the next year there wasn't enough food and so people were hungry, creating a never ending cycle.

In the days of British rule over India, administrators had been worried about the cobra problem in Delhi. They put out a bounty on Cobras, but the numbers never seemed to go down. They learned that people were farming cobras for the bounties. When they removed the bounties, the Cobras were worthless, and so they were now dumped out on the street, resulting in many more cobras.

Human nature was the hardest variable to deal with, and so simple mathematical models wouldn't work unless they took that into account.

I let my mind wander about possible ways to change society so that this crap wouldn't happen anymore. I could see some things that could help, but nothing could be done without influence; political, economic, or at the very least a cult of celebrity. The strongest cape in the world couldn't change the hearts and minds of the people without some of these kinds of influence. No cape was capable of simply mastering the entire population; that was what would be required to truly reform society easily, and at that point, it wasn't really society anymore.

Time seemed to pass quickly, and soon I could see that we were passing into an underground garage. We were going to the PRT base downtown instead of the Rig. It made sense' the Wards were stationed here, and I suspected that visitor passes would have been suspended currently for both locations in consideration of the approaching gang war.

The van came to a stop, and Kid Win rose to his feet. He pushed the doors open, and I looked out into what seemed like an ordinary parking garage, except the it was underground and was lit by electrical lights instead of being open to the sun.

I stepped cautiously out into the garage.

There were row upon row of PRT vans, along with other vehicles. I suspected that these were owned by the employees and by the heroes. The vans were parked closest to the elevator and attached stairs, presumably so that agents could deploy as quickly as possible. Three quarters of the spots designated as PRT Van only were empty. Presumably the vans were out and being deployed.

"We're being scanned from here," Kid Win said.

"Yeah," I said. "You've got six cameras visible from here, what looks like a retinal scanner near the door, container foam launchers there, there and there and I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I can't see."

He looked impressed.

Agent Murphy and the PRT agents followed us.

"Isn't having agents in outfits like that violating some kind of evil overlord rule?" I asked. "I mean having full face masks make it a little easier to sneak inside."

"Bio metric signatures of all agents are matched to their equipment," Agent Murphy said. She smiled at me. "A stranger might be able to spoof that, or a tinker, but there's only so much you can do."

I needed slowly.

Agent Murphy was dressed in a leather jacket and blue jeans. She didn't look much like an agent at all, except for her military posture. Of course, she wasn't supposed to be noticed while driving, and looking like an agent would be counterproductive.

There was something about her that made me suspicious though. Maybe it was the shape of her eyes that seemed somehow familiar. I wasn't suspicious that she wanted to hurt me; she didn't give me the impression that she was going to attack me. Instead, I suspected that she was more than just another agent. After all, Kid Win had barely interacted with the PRT agents, but he'd known Agent Murphy by sight alone. He'd also spoken to her familiarly.

Was she a supervisor, or maybe she was one of the heroes. Miss Militia was the only Protectorate hero that would fit, and the longer I looked at her, the more convinced I became that she actually was. Or maybe she was Miss Militia's body double. Presumably the Wards at least had body doubles when they were giving speeches at the school they attended so that they were seen in their civilian identities in the same place as their alternate ones.

Stepping into the elevator, I sighed. The whole thing was filled with containment foam sprayers, and it felt like a single wrong move would have me stuck in a claustrophobic nightmare. I'd heard that the Protectorate used Thinkers to help vet employees sometimes. Would I be able to fool them if the organization turned out to be corrupt? Would I be able to escape?

I was standing in the middle of a large elevator surrounded by people who could kill me.

Paranoia that I could be an Empire plant was understandable, but the display of power seemed like an attempt to intimidate me. It might be that it was completely unintentional; my own history with authority figures likely made me more sensitive to things like this than other people. Still, I'd have thought that Miss Militia at least would have been more sensitive to how this all looked.

As the elevator rose, I wondered if I was going into the lion's den.