Entrances

Is this your first interrogation?" Agent Braddock asked.

He set a coffee down on the table beside me. We were on the other side of a one way mirror looking in on an interrogation room that was currently empty. It looked a lot like the interrogation rooms you saw on cop shows on television except that the one way mirror had been disguised to look like just another part of the wall using tinkertech.

I suspected that the look was deliberate. Crooks watched television just like everybody else, and that set their expectations. Sometimes feeding into those expectations would help get results; other times subverting them would.

"Yes," I said. "Seems like a conflict of interest for me to be sitting in on the people who were caught breaking into my house though."

I was tired and a little cranky from my night in the safehouse. Dad and I had ended up sleeping on the huge, three sided couch, despite the fact that the cushions had been hard, and I'd been plagued all night with the sensation that something was in the room with me, other than Dragon who had actually been in the room with us. The lights had been turned out, and the whole place just lit by the light of the fireplace in a pit in the center of the room. I'd actually liked that feature; it had been the warmth and the heat from the fire and the cracking of the fire that had finally let me drift off to sleep.

"We're less worried about arresting these guys than in the information we can get from them," he said. "If we were trying to make something stick, I'd keep you as far away from this as possible."

It seemed that we were mostly looking for information about the state of the Empire. There had been skirmishes here and there, but it was like the entire organization had gone to ground, and everyone had simply vanished from their normal spots. None of the few informants that the PRT had used in the past were anywhere to be found. It was like they'd all vanished with the wind.

"We've kept them isolated so far," Braddock said. "This is going to be their first time together, and so we're hoping that you'll be able to figure something out, maybe from what they're not saying or how they say it, or whatever. It's not likely that they'll know any top level information, but presumably they know why they're watching your house and general information about the gang."

"Do they have jackets?" I asked.

He opened his briefcase and slid three thin folders over toward me.

Karl Decker, Jerry Klein, and Bob Goldstein.

Huh.

They were all in their mid twenties, and between them they had half a dozen assault charges, six petty thefts and one attempted rape. Karl had been the one with the rape charge. Most of the charges had been dropped by the district attorney's office, and the rest had never gone to trial. It seemed that the Empire had been good for them. Should the DA be investigated, or had the Empire simply threatened enough witnesses that it was unlikely to get a conviction.

District At tourneys liked to keep their numbers up and so they usually tried to avoid cases they didn't think they could win. It tended to save the state money, but sometimes it ended up letting very bad people go.

They'd been on the PRT's radar, spotted at Empire rallies and Klein had all the usual tattoos.

"Is Goldstein Jewish?" I asked. "It seems like a pretty crazy thing to do to enter the Empire with a name like that."

It'd be pretty ballsy. It'd be like being a black Klansman, or a Trekkie in full costume at a Star Wars convention. The guys in the Empire thought my last name was Jewish, just because it sounded like Hebe, so how had a Goldstein gotten into the group?

"It's a German name," he said shortly. "Lots of Jews came from Germany, so they've got German names. Doesn't make everybody with those names Jewish."

The first of the men was brought into the room.

"That's Goldstein," Agent Braddock said.

Oh.

Goldstein was over six and a half foot tall, with a build like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator days. He was covered in Nazi tattoos, with the Empire 88 symbol on the side of his neck, and he'd shaved his head. The look in his eye was cold; he'd probably been made fun of since he was young about his name, and it looked like he knew how to fight as a result.

Would racists name their kid Ruben though? That seemed like a pretty Jewish name to my uneducated ear.

Maybe he really was Jewish, but he was so self hating that he'd won the respect of the others? Or he'd been able to intimidate the others into swearing that he wasn't. The way he was acting wasn't with the kind of self confidence that a man of that size should have had. He was overcompensating. It seemed to me that he'd probably spent years at the gym to attain that kind of body, and he'd gotten that many tattoos almost as a way of denying everything he had been.

Or maybe I was starting from a flawed assumption.

The next man, Jerry Klein was shorter and more slender, but he was still over six feet tall. He seemed worried more than the first man, and he had some tattoos, but not as many. He seemed a little nervous and when he sat down in the metal chair bolted to the floor in front of the table, his leg bounced up and down.

There were guards in the room, and they chained both men to the table and to the floor. There was enough room that they could lean back, but not enough that they could reach whoever was doing the interrogation. The table was larger than the ones on television, large enough to hold three people on each side and with chairs bolted to the floor.

They wouldn't want to leave any weapons for the men to use to attack their interrogators after all. I figured that was places like McDonald's mostly used booths and chairs attached to the floor; sometimes their customer base could get pretty angry over cold chicken nuggets.

The final man stepped into the room, and the other two men immediately stiffened and they both stared at him, reminding me a little of dogs sitting at attention.

Karl Decker was the smallest of the men; he wasn't much taller than I was. He was slender, but his muscles were wiry and tight. He walked with a sort of easy confidence that made him look like he was used to being in charge.

His eyes were utterly dead.

"He's killed people," I said. "And not just the usual beating that serves for initiations in the Empire. He enjoys hurting people, and it wouldn't bother him to murder everyone in the room if it profited him."

He strutted over to the third chair, the one the other two had reserved in the middle. He let himself be handcuffed to the table, casually and seemingly without worry. He really wasn't, either, unlike the other two, who were posing with bluff and bravado.

Was he a cape, maybe?

Why was he so confident?

Miss Militia stepped into the room.

I wouldn't have thought she'd be the first choice to lead the interrogation. After all, she was in their target demographic. She was brown, she was a woman, and presumably she was a Muslim. It would push all sorts of buttons for them. People who wanted to join the Empire feared the hordes of aliens who would take their jobs, who would drain social services by using up all the unemployment benefits and food stamps.

The fact that those two things were mutually exclusive didn't seem to occur to them. The ones who stole their jobs wouldn't need unemployment, and the ones on benefits wouldn't take their jobs. It was possible to be a little more nuanced and say that half the immigrants were crazy hard working and the other half were incredibly lazy, but nuanced wasn't exactly the impression I had of these guys.

Worse, she was a woman in a man's job. Worse, she was more bad ass than any of them, a parahuman and likely better paid.

Third she was a Muslim.

We had even less reason for intolerance on that front than Earth Aleph; they'd had some major terrorist attacks that we'd never had because the world had become too wrapped up in internal fighting and too many warlords had been more interested in stealing territory from each other to worry about spreading a Caliphate or calling for a Jihad. But people who would sympathize with the Empire still shared the same prejudices that their counterparts on Aleph did.

I'd given the team a few ideas to hit for the interrogation, but I'd been forced to go generic because they'd still been in the process of identifying the guys.

She sat down on the chair opposite to them, across the very large interrogation table, and she put her knife on the table.

Miss Militia didn't say anything. Instead, the knife just slowly started to morph into a different, larger knife.

"She's just trying to scare us," Jerry said. He was starting to sweat as the knife began to slowly morph into a gun. He was still the most nervous of the three, and he'd been the first to crack under the impact of continued silence. It had taken less than thirty seconds. He'd probably be happy to talk, but he was the least likely to know anything useful.

Karl was the man to reach, but he'd be almost impossible to crack. He didn't just lack a conscience, he was a full blown psychopath. It was his trouble understanding fear that made him struggle to empathize with anyone else. It was impossible to empathize about an emotion you didn't understand.

All three of them were watching the process, and it was a little mesmerizing.

"You wouldn't do it," Jerry said nervously. "You're a cop."

She still didn't say anything.

Neither of the others said a word, but Ruben looked a little concerned. Karl was cool as a cucumber.

The door opened and a PRT agent leaned his head in.

"There's a problem with the recording equipment," he said.

She got up and left the room.

"That's a lie," Karl said. "They've got camera's in here, hoping we'll say something stupid. Doesn't matter; we haven't done anything illegal. The sand rat with threaten and she'll pretend to be a bad ass, but she's a cop, same as the rest of them. If they were really gonna kill us, they'd do it out in the field where there weren't any cameras, not right in the middle of their base."

"I dunno, man. You hear stuff about Masters going missing..."

"We ain't Masters. Keep your mouth shut and well be fine."

The door opened and Miss Militia stepped back inside the room.

"The cameras should be back up in fifteen minutes," the agent said. His voice was masculine, but his tone was uncertain and weak. It was obviously an acting job, at least to me, but it wasn't terrible.

"Who's in charge here?" Miss Militia asked.

"You."

"Close the door, and call me when the cameras are back up."

He hesitated a moment and then the door closed with an audible click.

Miss Militia glanced up at the visible camera on the wall. It was the old style camera, but it was likely a dummy. I could see a wall of screens behind Agent Braddock, and none of them were from the perspective of that camera. All the cameras in the room were invisible. Miss Militia, however, sold the idea that the camera was active; she switched her gun into a sword and tilted the camera up.

"It got moved in the struggle," she said.

"What?" Jerry asked. His nervousness had clearly jumped exponentially.

"Your people tried to attack an underage girl and her father, not just once, but three times," she said. "The question is, did you know that Vista and Shadow Stalker were there questioning the girl when you attacked them?"

What?

"What?" Jerry asked. His voice rose to a squeak.

"The thing is, most people don't like people who hurt kids."

She stood on the empty side of the table, which only had one seat, and she leaned forward.

The gun in her hands was changing forms faster and faster.

"They really don't like people who are trying to hurt their kids."

They all were staring at the gun, which she had her hand over. It was pointed directly at Karl, even though it was just laying on the desk.

"The Wards are our kids," she said. "And they're cops. People who try to kill cops don't go to prison very often. They tend to have accidents. Maybe they just have an attack of remorse and they hang themselves in the cells while the cops who are supposed to be watching them are out for a smoke break."

"Why would the Wards... ?" Goldstein asked, despite himself.

"They were visiting a traumatized girl, a friend of Panacea. She was scared to give a statement at headquarters. Said she didn't remember anything. She lives too close to the border between the Empire and the ABB to take sides, and she didn't want to get involved."

There was a subtle nod of approval from Karl. It was a story he must have seen happen a hundred times; people who were too scared to say anything.

"So we think that she might respond to kids her own age, send them over to warm her up, get her to trust us a little, maybe get her to tell us what she saw, or at least what happened. Then we find out that people were trying to murder two wards and a witness to a crime. How do you think that the brave men of the PRT reacted when people tried to kill their kids?"

"What happened to the guys?" Jerry asked. He looked like he wanted to throw up.

"They're dead," Miss Militia said. "And they didn't die clean. Couldn't have happened to a better group of guys."

There was a certainty to her voice that was unmistakable, and I could see that the others bought it completely. It helped that it was essentially true, even if not in the way she was implying.

"You people like to call my kind a lot of really ugly names. You make fun of us, but what happens when my people are wronged?"

She was playing into their preconceived notions. She was an Arab, and so she probably fit into any number of stereotypes despite the fact that she didn't dress like, act like or even sound like any of the Arabs they'd seen on television.

"You don't forget."

Miss Militia leaned forward.

"That's right. I don't forget, and neither do certain... people in the PRT. Most of us just follow the rules and collect a paycheck, but there are some who follow the old code. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

That had actually been a liberal improvement from the older code, which was basically you take my eye and I take both of yours, your legs, your wife and your kids. It had been meant to limit retaliation.

"So when we saw people who were trying to hurt kids, to kill kids, well..."

She grimaced, and then she reached into her pocket and she pulled out a small key and threw it to the other side of the table. It landed in front of them, and they stared at it like it was a snake.

"It's not murder if its self defense, right?" she said. "We're still cleaning house of Empire moles. Obviously one of them slipped you a key."

"You can't do this!" Jerry said. "We weren't after the girl!"

"Maybe I'd believe that if it had been a one time thing," Miss Militia said. "But it wasn't. You came back the very next day and waited to ambush her. Maybe it was murder on your minds, or maybe you were going to copy the ABB and do... worse things to her."

"We're not like those chin..." Jerry began.

Miss Militia slammed her hand on the desk, and said, "And why should I believe anything you have to say? Weasels like you would say anything to save your own skin! You call yourself the master race?"

"We were just... "Jerry said, and he was nudged by Karl, who directed an angry look toward him.

"You think your moles are going to get you out?" Miss Militia asked. "We've already got all of them, and just in case we haven't, we've got Agents from Boston watching over everything. And if you think that your capes are coming, well, from what I hear most of them are dead. And they never really cared about norms anyway. Normal people aren't really people to the rest of us. Whatever crap they told you, all those appeals to honor died with Kaiser. You think Purity is going to pull you out? That bitch?"

For the first time I saw a hint of uncertainty in Karl's eyes.

"She murdered the father of her own child," Miss Militia said. "Me, I could murder child killing scum, but what kind of mother could do something like that?"

Perfect.

Miss Militia had done a better job than I would have expected. I leaned forward for the first time and spoke into the microphone. She had an earpiece, and I said two words.

"They're ready."

"Karl was lying about their numbers," I said. "He was trying to make it seem that they were stronger than they really are."

Although Karl hadn't really been afraid in the sense that a normal person would have been, he hadn't wanted to die either. He knew the PRT playbook. They were a publicity organization first and foremost, even more than they were cops, and so they tended to be relatively careful about how they treated non-powered mooks. Miss Militia's behaviors differed from the norms, and so he'd attempted to lie with just enough truth that it would be difficult to verify. If he was released, the others could claim that he'd lied his ass off and the PRT had believed it.

Getting one over on the PRT would be considered a coup for these people.

Fortunately, this branch of the PRT didn't have a thinker as far as he knew, and he wasn't important enough for them to call one in. He'd been wrong, of course, and being able to parse out truth from lies had made getting some information out of them a cinch.

He'd claimed that they still had eighty percent of their unpowered members still ready and waiting to fight, and that moral was still high. The incredulous looks the other two had given him had probably been blatant enough to be caught by Miss Militia and the others, but they'd told me even more. The lack of morale was enough that it was blatant even to the rank and file. They'd clearly lost members to desertion, and there were reports that houses were being put up for sale all over the Empire parts of the city.

Since most of their lower level members were poor enough to still be living with their parents, or to live in apartments at the very least, it meant that higher level members were moving out.

It had helped having the other two there; on his own Karl would have been harder to crack, but seeing the other two wavering had convinced him that he needed to take control of the narrative. Normally police interrogations did involve lying about the severity of a crime, but splitting the group up to check their stories against each other would have been more normal. However, I'd thought I might be able to get more from the interplay between the three of them, their body language telling me what I needed to know.

"How much of a lie was it?" Miss Militia asked.

The Director would receive a written report of the proceedings, but there were worries that my influence might be enough to call her competence into question. I suspected there was some truth to it; after all, there were elements who weren't happy to see me still in the Bay, and if they could call her leadership into question, they might be able to get me somewhere else. However, I also suspected that some of it was her not wanting to be influenced by me.

If I'd really wanted to put a lot of effort into it, I could have influenced Miss Militia into writing a glowing report, and then I could have written my own reports in such a way as to influence her indirectly. Most Masters had to be in the room to influence someone. If I knew enough about the person, I didn't. However, it would take more effort than I wanted to bother with, and it was unnecessary for the moment.

"Well, I couldn't say for certain, but it's likely that they've lost half their normal membership. They could try to threaten them to keep them in the group, but that would pull more people from the front lines. The only reason they haven't been overrun so far is that they still outnumber the ABB, even at half strength."

I'd read a number of PRT reports; none of the gang members had given up very much, but little pieces here and there had started to form a pattern.

"He didn't say anything when we asked about Mirtis," Miss Militia said.

"He's afraid of Mirtis; they all were. The incidents that have come to light are just the tip of the iceberg. The Empire has been hiding as many of the deaths as they could because they were afraid they'd end up losing a lot more members if they realized just how many attacks there have been."

She nodded.

"They wouldn't have been as afraid of him as they were if there had only been the few attacks that we know about. The fact that Karl was more afraid of him than the others suggests that he was more informed about what had been going on than they were."

"I thought you said they were hiding the deaths."

"They aren't the government," I said. "The people who are supposed to cover things up sometimes tell loved ones or other people. Fear of them Empire keeps them from spreading them too widely, but word still spreads. All they're doing it putting their finger in the dam; cracks are showing everywhere else, and its only a matter of time before the whole thing falls apart."

"You don't think Purity will be able to get the loyalty of the Empire?"

"She's got her own power, and her two thugs from Germany, but she doesn't really have the loyalty of the rank and file. A lot of people know that she killed Kaiser, and that's an automatic disqualification as far as some of them are concerned. We're having to let some of the people in the Empire go because of a lack of evidence. I have an idea of some things that we can have them overhear that would further put a monkeywrench in any plans to rebuild the Empire."

She frowned.

"If we pick agents who can actually sell whatever they're saying, and make sure that the prisoners think they weren't meant to overhear it, it should work," I said. "Rumors are a little bit like cancer; once they start spreading they are impossible to stop."

"Have you considered that if this works, we'll either be handing the city to the ABB, or we'll end up with a hundred little small gangs?"

"The small gangs can be taken care of by the police," I said. "Without any capes, a group of five to ten people are only as good as their individual members. They'll go to ground, but ordinary law enforcement can take care of them. If they start fighting among themselves, we can handle small groups."

"They might not be small groups," Miss Militia said. "The Empire has enough people that they could split into multiple groups with over a hundred members. If they start fighting among themselves, then life might actually get worse for the ordinary citizen because there would be a continuous gang war everywhere instead of just at the borders."

"Either they'll work together to fight the ABB, or the ABB will roll over them," I said. "But most of the smaller gangs won't have the money or the connections they need to be real players. I'd expect that if they do, it's because the parahumans have split up and taken over some of the smaller groups. Presumably they'd have access to drug connections and the like."

"It doesn't change the potential for greater violence."

"I know you want me to consider the consequences for normal people," I said. "But the gangs have been bleeding the city dry for years. I've got a friend who is scared to be seen out on the streets because she's afraid the ABB will snatch her, rape her and then force her into a brothel. As long as we keep making the decision that what happens to a few people is less important than how it makes us look in the media, people will still keep getting hurt."

"And if things get worse?"

"They will no matter what we do," I said. "Kaiser, for all his flaws was a smart man. He knew just how far he could push and what kind of crimes were likely to bring a response by the PRT and he did his best to avoid those. He's been bleeding the city slowly, but inevitably. Unfortunately the people working for him aren't nearly as smart. They're going to be jockeying for position and there are large numbers of them who won't work for a woman no matter what color she is, especially when she killed their last leader."

"We'll take your suggestions under advisement."

They'd admitted that they had been looking to interrogate me and Dad to find out what had happened to the last group that had been sent after me. The three men who had been interrogated were going to be released; apparently Miss Militia had "exceeded her authority" in threatening them and they were going to be freed as a result.

Karl at least would understand that the entire thing had been orchestrated to send a message to his bosses. Don't attack civilians, and even more importantly, don't attack Wards, or the gloves would come off. Part of the whole point of the interview had been to preserve my secret identity and keep the Empire from keeping attacking me.

It was unlikely that they would reveal how much information they'd given up, and even less likely for them to realize just how much information they'd unconsciously projected. I'd give the rest of my impressions in my report. Jerry had already agreed in a separate interview to become a mole, and we'd doused their clothing in a tinkertech substance with a distinctive radioactive signature. It would dissipate within three days.

It was probably an unnecessary precaution, because the Empire lacked any Tinkers, but they were as capable of buying from Toybox as anyone, and word was that Purity was hiring mercenaries to try to shore up the organization. If they were able to replace enough parahumans, it was possible that they might be able to stop the hemorrhaging of troops that was turning the Empire into a dying beast.

"Thanks," I said. "I've already got most of the report written up. I'll look over it before I submit the final version tomorrow."

She nodded.

"They're getting a couple of air mattresses, right?" I asked.

"I'm taking care of it personally," she said. She hesitated, then looked up at the ceiling. "If I'd been there before, I'd have gotten them before I took you."

There was only so much that we could say inside the building; after all, there was still a possibility that people were watching, and it didn't even have to be the moles. They'd likely be looking for things to use to justify forcing me to leave, where I could be better supervised.

The Youth Guard was trying to reestablish some control over my life, but the PRT was using my recent kidnappings as a way to fend those actions off. However, the kidnappings gave power to the parties who were trying to put pressure on the Director for me to leave. After all, if I was as valuable as everyone said, why not have me in a safer city?

"Are you going home?" she asked.

"I'd hardly call it home," I said. "But I'm going down to talk to the others. Leaving these things for too long lets them fester, and next thing I know they'll be demanding that I be sent to another city."

"They aren't bad kids," she said. "Just give them a chance."

"I'm just worried if they'll give me one," I said. "It's not like I'm a Master. Nobody likes those guys."

"Right," Miss Militia said.

For some reason, her tone of voice wasn't as convincing as I'd like. There were strategies I could use to convince her; it would just take a while.

"If I was a Master, would Sophia still be a bitch?" I asked.

"Taylor," she said sternly, but she relaxed a little.

I followed up with a smile.

They'd been worried about how I'd interact with Sophia, but I'd managed to convince them that everything between us was fine. It wasn't, of course, and it likely never would be, but I was at least able to avoid causing problems, and I'd been sending Sophia just enough messages through body language that she hadn't been tempted to lash out at me. Ultimately Sophia was practical enough to avoid attacking someone who could actually defend themselves.

They'd made it clear how important I was, which meant that any attack on me would mean she'd end up in juvie. If she tried to bully me verbally, I'd be sure to tell people who would listen, and the whole process leading to jail would start over again. She was still sarcastic and snappish, but those were ingrained habits that were beyond her ability to control. I could have pushed her to become aggressive easily, but so far I'd avoided doing that.

Heading for the elevator, I said, "And the stun gun? I really wanted that."

"Both of them should be ready tomorrow. Don't take them to school, even if you can sneak them in."

"Fine."

Half the kids at Winslow had weapons, and I was pretty sure that Chris had a secret locker somewhere that he could access a spare costume and weapons, just in case the school itself was attacked, but me they kept from having weapons. It wasn't like I was going to run around stunning people and hanging them from flagpoles.

I wasn't Dennis after all.

The door to the elevator opened.

"Hi Dennis," I said. I smiled widely.

He looked up from the console and he winced slightly. Then he realized that he winced, which caused him to overcorrect. He smiled even more widely than I did, but I wouldn't even have had to have a power to know that he felt like he'd screwed up.

"How do you deal with Dean?" I asked. "If me knowing how you feel freaks you out, then why doesn't Dean?"

"Dean couldn't talk me into mooning everybody at lunch if I pissed him off."

"It wouldn't take powers to get you to do that," I said incredulously. "Like you'd do that for a candy bar and a peck on the cheek."

He stared at me for a minute, and then he grinned. "Is that an offer?"

"The PRT officially prohibits using food to train human beings," I said. I stepped over toward him, and I took a seat next to him at the Console. "They have no sense of humor at all. It's all paperwork and training, and they have no time for naked chinchillas."

"Are chinchillas really a thing?"

"They're like weird mountain squirrels that can't sweat," I said. "They live in herds and they bathe in dust, kind of like half of Congress."

"That's just eighty year old skin cells that pop off whenever somebody slaps them on the back," Dennis said, grinning. "I think the EPA has banned congressmen from getting candles on their cake for fear of global warming."

"Well, and the wax shortage," I said. "Singlehandedly propping up the wax industry."

He chuckled.

He really did like his bad jokes, although they were a means of deflection as often as not. Comedians tended to be people who had been exposed to a lot of pain in their lives. His father's cancer had affected him deeply, and it was clear that he was hurting.

"So the whole Empire thing."

"They were practically at each others' throats anyway," I said. "I barely had to do anything. It'd be like calling me a master for getting Sophia to punch me."

"Right," he said.

"What worries me is that everybody is acting like I'm a freak now," I said. "Not Chris, of course, but the others."

"Well, Vicky told Dean that Amy said you were scary," he said.

"That's the most high school thing I've ever heard," I said. "It's like a game of telephone; the message gets more and more garbled the more people its transmitted through."

"I suppose that's true," he said.

"Besides, almost any of us could be scary if they really wanted to."

"Oh?"

"Well, Sophia could hide in walls and start sniping people. Imagine just being out in the open, and crossbow bolts start appearing in the middle of people's heads because she made them solid just as they were in the middle of them. There wouldn't be anywhere to run, especially if you didn't know where they were coming from."

"Right. If Sophia was a psychopath," he said. He snickered.

"If she was more about results than about getting to fight and release her anger," I said. "She could be death on wheels with a little preparation. The assassin's assassin."

"And me?"

"If you were a psychopath?" I said. "Go to a highway. Run a thin wire from one tree to another at neck height for a driver. Cars on highways sometimes clump together because a couple of slow guys back everybody up. Use your power on the wire right before the lead car reaches you, and then leave. The carnage would be impressive because at over fifty miles an hour nobody could stop. I can't even imagine what it would look like, but it wouldn't be pretty. You'd be great at setting up other traps too."

He looked a little green.

"Missy?"

She could basically shoot people in the head from point blank range by warping space. You ever have a nightmare where you run and you aren't going anywhere? She'd be like just like that. She could hamstring you from a thousand feet away, and cut your throat before you even knew what hit you. Your only defense would be to get a crowd of people around you, and then she could just drop crap on you. I bet she could probably lift a car by warping space underneath it, move it over you and then drop it easy as pie."

"Carlos?"

"He's basically Jason Vorhees who can fly." I said. "Give him a chainsaw and a hockey mask, and you're set."

"Dean?"

"He's a little tougher," I said. "I mean if he'd already kidnapped a girl, I guess he could use his powers to brainwash her by giving her terror every time that she did something he didn't like, and giving her happiness every time she obeyed. If he could make his beams invisible, he could do the same thing out in public."

"You've got a real mind for this sort of thing. You're kind of scary even without your powers."

Despite saying that, he was a lot more relaxed than he had been when I'd stepped into the room. It was exactly the effect I'd been hoping for. With a little more work, he'd be able to chip away at the others before I even had a chance to talk to them, which would make it easier for me to convert them.

"We're in the business of being scary," I said. "It's not like we can just give people the Care Bear Stare, right? Uh... except for Dean I guess."

Dennis grinned.

"You don't mind if copy that joke, do you? I'm sure Dean would just love to hear it."

"Oh, please do," I said. "Just don't tell him I said it, because then he'll be convinced that I've hidden secret messages in it to convert him to Taylorism."

"You've got your own cult now?"

"It's a work in progress," I said. I grinned back at him.

"I think it's going to work out," Ruth said. "My new... uh... job."

We were in second period together and had just sat down. Ruth seemed happier than she had in a while, and maybe the consultant job was working out better than I'd thought. At least she wouldn't be required to get into fights with the ABB or the Merchants.

"Well," I said. "I personally don't think they're paying you enough, but I'm sure that the perks help make up for that."

"The pay only stays this low until the perks run out."

She meant that once they found her father or his body, they'd be able to raise her wages. The Director presumably convinced her that the costs of looking for him would be substantial and she and her mother had agreed. After all, surveillance drones and scanners didn't come cheap.

Of course, unless those drones were destroyed by native lifeforms, they'd be able to reuse them both to explore other thinnies, and to search the city for criminals. Tinkertech rarely went unused, and so there would be a good chance that the cost of the search would be negligible other than salaries and hazard pay. On the other hand, there was a chance that a pterodon or some other lifeform would destroy the drones, and so it might be expensive. I could understand her reluctance.

Organizations never wanted to pay more than they had to. Sometimes they did in order to keep the best people, but in a less competitive environment they'd try to pay them the least they could and maybe give them cheap perks.

"Well, take them for what you can get," I said. "Don't undersell yourself."

She nodded gravely, but she still seemed upbeat.

Kid Win and Armsmaster were almost finished with the drones. They were fitting them with as many sensors as possible, and the drones were going to essentially be placed on small dirigibles with a solar skin covering them. The solar skin wouldn't be enough to provide all power, but it would extend the life of the tinkertech battery by a long time. The idea was that they'd send the drone through and then they'd let it spend at least a day or two executing a preprogrammed search pattern. We'd open the gate after that and send a request for a data packet.

While we were analyzing the data, it would continue to gather more. Hopefully that would help to stop the possibility of being in a world which was safe during the day but a hellworld at night or something similar. The drone would scan a spiral pattern out to a twenty mile radius over the course of a day. Hopefully that would give us enough indications of anything dangerous that we'd be able to plan accordingly.

It would scan for infrared signatures by night, radiation, viruses, and it would be programmed to lock onto any artifacts that seemed to be man made, or at least intelligently designed. They were using a program from Dragon for that.

It wouldn't just help find Ruth's father, it would also help to look for signs of civilization.

At least once a night, the drone would rise high enough in the air that the horizon grew to eighty miles; it would look for light sources indicating possible towns or villages.

The scanners would have everything they could stuff into them, and I thought it was a good idea. They'd be able to sell it to Ruth as them going above and beyond, and to the Directors as being a reasonable way to assess the danger of different thinnies. My job was going to be to figure out a way to industrialize those few parts that weren't just bog standard; the battery, some of the sensors and the computer work, which meant that I was going to study programming.

It would be a proof of concept at least as much as anything else.

If we were able to mass produce it, and we were somehow able to get the theoretical portal detector mass produced as well, we'd be able to create something that could be used on an individual basis to keep cities safe. Eventually we might be able to scan entire cities, do an analysis of the portals that existed and focus on the ones that looked like they either opened often enough or were soon to open and we'd be in business.

It was possible that we might even create an entire new agency; possibly something like the Office of Extradimensional Affairs or something. It probably wouldn't be named that; I was terrible at naming things.

All that was contingent on the idea that we could build a portal detector based on vague descriptions from a fifteen year old girl and that I'd be able to figure out the patterns based on whatever the portal detector was able to detect. That was a lot more ifs than either I or the PRT liked, and so we were starting small.

Given that everything really depended on Ruth, I suspected that she was getting screwed on the deal, but she seemed happy enough.

"Take your seats," the teacher said, and the conversations in the classrooms came to a halt with a suddenness that still shocked me after weeks. At Winslow, it took half the teachers at least five minutes to get people's attention. It wasn't that this teacher had control over her class; it was that all of them did that was shocking.

The class afterward was an actually interesting take on Chaucer and his influence on Western literature. We had a class discussion that wasn't just the teacher letting people sit around and talk to each other for most of the period, and I actually participated a little.

My third period started more quickly than I would have expected.

I was taking computer classes, and I was working particularly hard in this class. Although my power was incredibly useful, I needed at least some information to start with. Human bodies made sense to me, but it wasn't like I was just going to be able to speak Chinese without at least hearing a guy speak the language.

Once I learned enough about coding I'd be able to help more with the programming parts of Tinkertech. Unlike my classes in Winslow, classes here were self paced. That meant that I didn't spend half my period on the Internet while the teacher helped the slow kids. The good thing was that I had been good at programming even before my powers had kicked in. Now I was advancing at a rate fast enough that I suspected that the teacher had suspicions that I might be a Tinker.

I'd had to force myself to slow down a bit and spend the last fifteen minutes of every class surfing just to keep to a pace that she might be able to believe from a gifted but not genius student. It meant that I had to study more on my own time, but it couldn't be helped.

Logging onto P.H.O., I flipped through the various discussions.

It looked as if the collapse of the Empire was the main thing that people were talking about. The information blackout from both the PRT and the Empire on Mirtis was still holding. I still didn't know if New Wave had been informed, although I assumed that they had. It wasn't as though there were many if any independent heroes in the Bay. It also wasn't like the Merchants would listen even if we tried to warn them. Mirtis hadn't been targeting the other gangs as far as we could tell either.

I froze as I saw the heading of one post.

Anyone have an Insight into the Fall of the Empire?

Well, that was blatant as hell.

That single capital as much as declared to the world that the writer knew what had happened and knew who had done it. The only way that they would have any idea would be if they had contacts in either the Empire or the PRT, or potentially both. It had occurred to me that a smart villain would let his moles think that they were working for someone else. That way, when they broke, they'd deliver the wrong information to the enemy.

An even smarter villain would simply have their moles in a fellow villain group work their way up to a position where they were the ones that villain group's moles responded to. Not only would they have the same information their enemies had, they'd even be able to filter it, making sure that their enemies didn't hear certain information until it was too late.

This person had added an extra F to make it seem as though they just had a weird capitalization fetish. The message was meant for me, or at least the PRT.

Clicking on the message, I read it quickly.

I'm a Reporter looking for verifiable information on the events a few days ago. I'm on a Deadline, so I'm Hoping to get some responses over the next few days. My Boss is on my Case so I'm anxious to get some information.

There had been a few responses, but TheAllSeeingEye hadn't replied to them.

I quickly began to look for other posts by her. She'd made a lot of them. I was looking for patterns to make sure that I wasn't just getting paranoid. It was possible that a mis-used capital was just a mis-used capital. There was no reason to believe that the other person was targeting me unless I had other information.

By the end of class I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

The AllSeeingEye was a Thinker. If it had just been one of two posts, I could have believed that I was just reading posts from a bright, if overly sarcastic poster. However, there was a definite pattern.

I wouldn't make the mistake of assuming that just because the Empire didn't have a public thinker that they didn't have one. It would be a weird mistake for me to make. However, they tended to loudly announce every new Cape that they had in an effort to make themselves seem even more dominant and powerful. Sometimes appearing the strongest was all that was needed to be the strongest.

It could be a new presence in the Bay, which was always possible.

None of the Thinkers in the Bay fit the profile of someone who would write and think like this, with the possible exception of Tattletale. The PRT really knew very little about her, although her name was fairly indicative of her powerset. Normally I'd have thought that it was more strategic to use a name that didn't shout to the world what your powers were, but after the first few encounters, it tended to be broadcast to the entire world anyway. Heroes and villains were internet sensations after all.

Tattletale and the Undersiders had managed to beat the odds, and there wasn't a lot known about them other than the bare basics of their powers.

Assuming that it was Tattletale, and not someone from outside the Bay, what was she trying to say anyway?

She was a reporter... did that mean her secret identity was that of a mole? It was likely that that at least wasn't true; as far as anyone knew, the Undersiders were teenagers. She could be saying that she was a mole in her own gang, but her gang was small enough that nobody would need to have a mole.

She mentioned a boss, though, and it didn't seem likely that she meant Grue. As another teenager, he wouldn't have the sheer weight of authority for her to consider him her boss, certainly not if she was in a gang that small. Boss tended to connote someone who had a lot of authority. If she was in an abusive relationship with him, but she had Internet access, it would be easy enough to make a cry for help, especially since she was a Thinker and he, presumably was not.

Was someone else running their group?

It would be a clever scheme. Pretend to be running one group when you were really running two. You could let the other team take the heat while you stayed under the radar, and they could do things that wouldn't raise any red flags because they had no obvious interests in the consequences of their actions. If those consequences happened to benefit you, well, sometimes there were lucky breaks. Your real organization could work behind the scenes while the other one took the heat.

It didn't fit the model of the Merchants; they were too flamboyant and they bragged too much. The Empire wanted everyone to know about their successes as a recruiting tool so they could get more members. The ABB was somewhat quieter, and they might certainly hide their involvement with a group of primarily Caucasian teenagers just as a matter of principal. But the Undersiders were petty thieves. They'd be best used as distractions from activities to draw the Protectorate and the Wards away from your real activities.

Lung didn't seem that clever, and while some of his normal subordinates might be, I suspected that Lung would see a normal employee gathering a group of parahumans together as a threat to his power, even though the Undersiders weren't in his weight class.

Faultline's crew were mercenaries and most of their activities were done outside the Bay; it was one of the ways that they'd managed to stay neutral. They might be a good candidate to have a second group doing their bidding in the Bay, but the amounts of money the Undersiders stole were small potatoes compared to Faultline's reputed fees and a quick Internet check showed that Faultline's crew had been out of town three quarters of the time the Undertakers were known to have been active.

While it might be a good idea to throw randomness into the events to obscure patterns, every time you put a unit out in the field you risked disaster. All it would take was one bad day for half the Undersiders to either end up arrested or dead.

It was possible that an outside organization was intervening in the Bay, but it was impossible to know who that might be; there were too many candidates, and I was working on thin information as it was. I'd have to simply watch and wait to see if that was true. I'd been looking through PRT reports during the time I'd been benched, and I hadn't noticed any unusual patterns that would indicate outside involvement, though. If someone was operating from the shadows, they were doing such a good job that it wasn't making the police reports.

That left a single remaining candidate.

Coil's organization was supposedly the only one that didn't have any parahumans. It didn't have parahuman leaders, and it didn't have parahuman mercenaries. What it did have was crews of professionals who used Tinkertech, presumably purchased from Toybox. That meant that whoever the organization's backer was, it was somebody with deep pockets.

Tech billionaires didn't fund supervillain groups. They had too much to lose if they were found out. Anybody with the kind of money needed to support a criminal organization probably didn't need to, at least for money.

Coil's group had a small territory and they dealt a limited amount of drugs, but overall, they were a nonentity in the Bay as far as the PRT was concerned. They barely maintained enough of a presence to keep any other group from just moving in, but they didn't seem to do much more than that. Yet they'd spent a lot of money in hiring trained men and giving them tinkertech weapons. You didn't spend that kind of money unless you expected a substantial return, the kind that small time drug dealing just wouldn't cover.

This seemed like the exact kind of organization that would use proxies to avoid attention. Hire somebody to rob a bank when the point was really to upload a virus to a server that wasn't connected to the Internet. Use a professional assassin to kill a member of another group, and make it look like the attack had been perpetrated by a different group, setting them against each other.

Had Coil been the one to have Othala killed?

There was no proof of that, but it seemed like the kind of thing someone like that might do.

If Tattletale and the Undersiders were working for Coil, I'd assume that only Tattletale knew who their employer really was. The fewer people who knew, the fewer who could tell the secret. It couldn't be hidden from her as a Thinker, because she'd be driven to find out who he was.

The question was, why was she sending me the message?

The fact that she knew my hero name meant that she had inside information, presumably through her employer. That suggested that Coil had moles, or at least had previously had them.

So why send the message at all?

She hadn't asked to meet, and if she knew the kind of powers I had, she'd know that I certainly would have no interest in meeting with her. Hopefully I'd see through a blatant trap. Her boss wouldn't want it known that she even had a boss, which meant that this was at the very least an attempted rebellion against him, or maybe an attempt to make me think that she was rebelling. Hoover, the knowledge that she was working for someone was so sensitive that I doubted that it was something her boss would have signed off on, even to gain a momentary advantage.

She had to know that I'd report what I'd found to the PRT, which meant that me reporting it was part of her plan.

Was she wanting to defect? If she did, why now?

How had Coil planned to keep her from talking in the first place? The only way I could think of was that he had enough men in the PRT that it would be a death sentence for her to get captured.

The only reason for her to be trying to come in now was if enough of his men had been removed in the recent sweep that she felt relatively safe coming in. There was no guarantee that the offer extended to all of the Undersiders, either. If they didn't know that Coil was their boss, then they'd have no reason to want to leave. There must be something that Tattletale didn't like about her boss, something that made her want to leave badly enough that she'd risk alienating her teammates and risk having her boss try to kill her.

If the Director allowed it, I knew the message I'd send, although they'd have to help me figure out how to disguise its origin. Maybe send it from a burner phone?

Nobody's gonna tattle, Reporter. Anybody that did would be a low down dirty snake. Maybe you need to get a different job.

Something like that anyway, assuming that the Director allowed me to.

This could be dangerous," Hannah found herself saying. "How do we know this isn't an attempt to assassinate Taylor? If what she's saying is true, then the best option for this Coil would be to have Taylor killed and then make it look like a revenge killing by the Empire,"

People like Taylor scared even her a bit, despite the fact that she was fairly certain that the girl was at least close to what she portrayed herself as. She was smart enough to have concealed the social aspects to her power if she'd wanted to run free reign in the Protectorate. She'd have been found out eventually, but she'd have done a lot of damage in the meantime. Instead, she'd been fairly straightforward about everything except the Portals.

If she didn't make at least a few impulsive mistakes, it would have been hard for Hannah to believe that she was even a teenager. There were people who had essentially been gutted by their powers; who they'd been had been entirely supplanted. It typically occurred during rare kinds of brain traumas. Hannah had only seen them a couple of times, but there was literature about others. It was always terrible; what replaced the people who had once been was utterly alien and not remotely human.

It was kept from the public for fear of making people afraid of heroes as well as villains.

The thought of something like that sitting behind her eyes, making decisions and making them all think that she was their friend would have kept her up at night if she'd bothered sleeping anymore.

"The smart thing would have been to snipe me as I came out the door or as I passed by my window," Taylor replied. She seemed unbothered by the thought of people trying to kill her. "But that might have called down more attention than Coil would have liked. My guess is that he planned to have his people create failures that would help the other Directors to have me moved. Either I'd leave this city, or I'd leave the Protectorate. Either outcome would fit his plans better than a massive investigation of the assassination of a Ward in their civilian identity."

"There's not a lot here to go on," the Director said. "If you weren't a Thinker, I'd say that these were the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, like the people who claim that the moon landing was a hoax, or that Scion is secretly Elvis Presley, or the ones who say that the PRT secretly sells powers to the highest bidder so that we can get political favors."

She was only present by voice conference call. While communicating from a distance wouldn't help nearly as much with a Social thinker as it would with a Master, it was the best she had. She wouldn't be able to see Taylor, and the experts said that body language and expression could be used to influence people almost as much as the words they spoke, although intonation was still a risk.

It would also rob Taylor of visual cues to help her tailor her message to better fit what the Director wanted to hear. The girl already knew enough about the Director to have a profile on her, but human profiles changed over time, just as people did.

Thinkers from outside would also go over transcripts of the conversation to see both if there had been influence and if the plan itself seemed rational.

"I haven't seen any Senators flying around," Taylor said. She grinned, although the Director couldn't see it. "Although sometimes I wonder if some of them don't have anti-aging powers, given how long they've been in office."

"Some of them buy anti-aging medications from sketchy Tinkers," the Director said. "It's not technically illegal, but its skirting the edges of the law. We're keeping an eye on it."

Taylor looked surprised.

"Really?"

"Looking young and vital helps keep their opponents from claiming that they're too old," the Director said.

Assault likely would have said something about it helping with interns too, but he wasn't here. It was just Miss Militia, Taylor and the intercom.

"The question is, do you want her?" Taylor said. "If you look at the patterns of the Undersider's successes, it looks like they've got the services of a very capable Thinker. We're fairly certain of the powers of the others, and so unless they've got unknown members working from the shadows, I'd suggest that Tattletale is pretty good at what she does."

"You couldn't tell that from her posts on PHO?" the Director asked.

Her tone was slightly sarcastic, but Taylor didn't seem bothered by it.

"Well, assuming that she's not deliberately portraying a persona, which is certainly likely, her posts make her seem like a person who likes to see herself as the smartest person in the room. She's sarcastic, somewhat vicious and a little vindictive."

"So what makes you think that she'd fit in the Protectorate?" the Director asked.

"She's asking for help," Taylor said.

She was quiet for a long moment, and there was static on the speaker.

"And?" the Director finally asked.

"She's a Thinker," Taylor said. "Which means that she's likely already looked at all of her options and worked out whether any of them would have been a good fit. She wouldn't have tried to come here unless she thought she had at least a chance of succeeding."

"And suppose that she doesn't, that all of her other options were just worse?"

"Then its our job to make sure that she does succeed," Taylor said. "Isn't that part of the whole point of the Wards? It's a sales pitch and brainwashing scheme for the Protectorate?"

"What?" the Director asked.

She sounded annoyed.

"The Wards are where you work out all the independence that teenagers have so that they'll follow the party line," Taylor said. "Smoothing out those little personality quirks like free will and obstinance so that they can be good little soldiers when they become adults. It's a little like football, right? Some people have had their kids in football since they were in the third grade. The Pros depend on that pipeline so that they can fill their rosters as the players end up in jail for abusing drugs, wives or girlfriends, or for the occasional dog fighting ring."

"Are you not happy working here?" the Director asked, her tone dangerous.

"I'm fine with it," Taylor said. "Individuality and free will are overrated, right? People are all for it because it either doesn't affect them, or they assume that they'll be the special snowflake who won't be brainwashed with all the sheeple. Thinkers are even worse about that."

There was silence on the speaker.

"Go on," the Director said.

"She's a teenage Thinker doing jobs that net her a couple of thousand bucks a job once she splits the take with the rest of her teammates," Taylor said. "She could be making a lot more money with her abilities, even despite all the government efforts to make sure that Thinkers don't make anything."

"Oh?"

"I could probably predict horse races, for example," I said. "Hire some homeless dude to pretend to be my Dad, win a couple of races a week, keeping them under the $600 tax threshold. Maybe even have three or four guys working for me. I could probably predict the winners of races ninety five percent of the time. Maybe sixty percent on Trifectas. The more variables you add, the more chance that random events are going to screw things up."

"So you'd make what?" Hannah asked.

"The same as Tattletale without the risk of running into Mirtis, the Empire, Lung," Taylor said. "Very little downside; even if your employees were caught, as a minor and with a crime that's not technically illegal, since you don't have knowledge of the future and you only have the information that's available to everyone."

"Vegas has more Thinkers per acre than any place on Earth," Hannah protested.

She'd met the Vegas Protectorate members, and they'd been really clear about what life in their city was like.

"That's why you hit small local racetracks that aren't on Vegas's radar, and you stick to small numbers over a long period of time. The problem with the big score is that your patsy is too likely to run off with the money, and you'll get discovered."

"You think like a criminal," the Director said.

"I think," Taylor said. "Just because most of them are stupid doesn't mean they all are. The point is, there's dozens of low risk, high reward schemes that Tattletale could use to make a lot more money than she's making for a lot more risk. If she was in this for the fame, the Undersiders would have had a much larger profile. They've stayed in the shadows precisely because they aren't interested in fame. My guess is that most of the others are in it for the money. Hellhound has been known to donate money to animal shelters; she seems to have a soft spot for dogs. The others likely either have similar projects or they're just poor. Their sights are set too low."

They did seem like low level offenders, with the exception of Hellhound and her murders. They didn't have any evidence of serious crimes for any of the others, given how new they were, even though there was a possibility that some of them were rebranded.

"And Tattletale?"

"She could do better."

"What kind of crime would you do if you were a criminal?" Hannah asked, wondering why she felt compelled to bring the question up. Surely the girl would say that she wouldn't do anything; even if nobody else believed her, that would be the normal response.

"I'd likely try to convince a lot of people to create a social movement to screw over institutional investors short selling stocks that are about to collapse," she said. "Pumping up the price artificially."

"The stock market has the second highest number of Thinkers in the country," the Director said.

"I'd convince a few other people in real life to start the movement months after I'd already bought the stock," she said. "There's ways to do it so that they think ti was their own idea and they wouldn't even remember the conversation. As a minor, I can't have an account without a cosigner anyway, and I'd be one minnow in the middle of a large school of fish and would be unlikely to be targeted. I could probably multiply my starting money forty times; eighty if I bought on margin and avoided margin calls."

It might work.

Hannah didn't know much about the stock market other than that her retirement account seemed to be doing fairly well despite the economy in general having tanked for several years.

"So why would this girl put herself in this situation of she had better options."

"She said it herself," Taylor said. "Deadline. She's being forced, or at least she's claiming to be."

"And does the positioning of the word and have some kind of meaning?"

"It suggests that she's five foot two, has red hair, likes cats and enjoys doing Sudoku," Taylor said. "Which is all a lie. There's limits to these kinds of things, at least at the level I'm at now. Also, Sudoku isn't any fun if you know all the answers."

"Fine," Director Piggot said. "Make it happen. You can use a disposable telephone, create a false account and make sure that the message is sent from a neutral place. Arrange for a meeting. We'll consider letting her join depending on what she has to offer us."

"She could have just walked up and turned herself in," Taylor said. "So I'm sure she's hoping to get concessions."

"We'll deal with those when we have her in custody," the Director said. "If she has actionable intelligence and valuable powers, she might just earn some concessions."

With that the meeting was over.

"Do you really think that things will go that smoothly?" Hannah asked.

In her experience things rarely went to plan, especially when plans involved parahumans.

"A lot depends on whether we really have gotten rid of all the moles," Taylor said. "And what kind of Thinker power Tattletale really has. I'm making some assumptions from her name and from her online presence, but all Thinker powers aren't created equal."

Hannah had heard enough vague precognitive predictions to know that was true. Taylor's power was a particularly good one.

The Director had upgraded her threat rating to Thinker 7, Tinker 0, and Master 1. Threat ratings were necessary for employees because if a Hero was themselves mastered, PRT agents needed to know how to deal with them. Locals usually did, but Heartbreaker had taken a couple of Independent heroines across the country and local agents wouldn't know how to rate them.

"Well, they've got me working on some old, broken tech left over from Professor Haywire's era. It's a long shot; that stuffs got to be complicated as hell, but if I can figure out even part of it, it'll get us that much closer to reproducible thinnie detectors."

The attitude of the Directors had changed considerably once they'd learned about the potential massive security threat represented by the naturally occurring portal network. Wayfarer's first assignment had been to describe the worlds she knew about; both the ones that she'd been to personally, as well as the ones that her father had been to and told her about. She'd already taken a team including Armsmaster to visit a couple of those worlds.

They'd brought back the corpse of a six foot long scorpion and footage that Hannah hadn't seen; it was apparently classified above her level. It had been enough apparently to release Taylor to immediately start working on Haywire's technology, this taking priority over all other technological projects.

"All right," Hannah said. "I'm glad you contacted us before jumping in."

"Well, I had to get an agreement before I replied or I'd be leading her into a trap," Taylor said. "Besides, the best person to fool me is going to be another Thinker. Somebody with my power set and a lot more experience could likely run rings around me."

"Most Thinkers tend not to believe that anybody is as smart as they are," Hannah said neutrally.

"Most Thinkers aren't as smart as me," Taylor said, grinning.

Despite herself, Hannah felt herself smiling back. Was it so simple to manipulate someone? Say the right thing, give the right expression? Even though she knew it was probably a manipulation, Hannah couldn't help but feel amused.

"Let's table that," Hannah said. "I've got work to do."

Taylor nodded. She gave a little wave and then headed toward the elevators.

"Militia," Armsmaster's voice came over the earbud in her ear. "We've got another Mirtis sighting."

"On my way," Hannah said. "Location?"

"Fifth and Weston."

Right.

That location was near a known Empire drug den. The PRT knew about it, but didn't attack hoping that there would be some actionable intelligence. The Empire likely knew that they knew, but they made sure to staff the place only with low level flunkies and they made sure to only keep small amounts of product on the premises. They sometimes fed information to those flunkies as a way of leaking it to the PRT during their occasional sweeps. Usually it was either false information or true information about their competitors.

She arrived there within fifteen minutes.

There were PRT agents everywhere, and there was something off about their body language. They all looked tense for some reason.

She nodded at them as she stepped inside the building, and she was hit by a wave of smells. There was the familiar coppery smell of blood, but there was also another smell that seemed familiar but alien at the same time. It was a musty, oily pungent odor that was overpowering.

The whole place was run down and dilapidated to the point of needing to be condemned. The smell seemed to be coming from the back.

Armsmaster stepped out of the back room.

"My initial intel was wrong. This isn't Mirtis."

Hannah stepped around him.

The walls of the room behind him were sprayed red, and there were bits of viscera everywhere. Skeletons with meat still attached filled the room and there were bullet holes in the walls.

The PRT's profile on Mirtis was that he was careful, perfectionistic, and that he went about his murders with a cold and calculating mindset. The bodies on the other side of the door had been ripped apart, and it looked as though they'd been fed on.

"What do we know?" she asked.

"We had cameras watching the property. No one was seen entering through either the front of the back doors. There were screams, gunshots, and the guards on the outside rushed inside. It took almost a minute and a half from start to finish."

"And no one was seen leaving."

He nodded.

"What do we know about the attackers?" she asked.

"This looks more like an animal attack than an attack by a human being," Armsmaster said. "A visual analysis suggests that that the wounds are more consistent with mandibles than with claws or jaws."

Now that she thought about it, the smell did remind her of times when she'd entered houses with a massive cockroach infestation; obviously the deaths hadn't been caused by cockroaches as they didn't have mandibles. Ants would have been a more likely candidate.

"Extrapolating from the bite marks, I'd assume that the attackers were approximately three feet long."

"There had to be hundreds of them to have done that much damage in that short of a time," she said. She winced as the smell grew worse as the heater kicked in. "So where are they now?"

"That's the question," Armsmaster said. "The other question is where they came from."

Hannah felt her heart sink. If they were lucky they were just facing a bio tinker in the city. Normally that would be a terrible cause for alarm. But the other option worse. At least a bio tinker could be caught and killed or imprisoned. But if there was a world filled with swarms of ravenous insects twice the size of lobsters, hopefully this was the only entrance to that place. But they already knew of at least one world that had a minimum of two entrances to Brockton Bay. If there were two entrances, then why not more?