prt

Jim Peters had been a PRT agent for nine years.

He'd been a marine before that, back when being a marine had actually meant something, and then he'd been a cop and later a police detective. The PRT recruited heavily from all of those backgrounds, and the pay was better as was the perks. There was a lot more danger of course, and being a police officer didn't have as great a chance of having your eyeballs exploded from your head, although it had been known to happen.

He'd actually encountered it a couple of times back in Detroit; there had been a case with a young gang member able to extract vitreous fluids from the eyes; that hadn't been the main part of his power, but it had become his signature, and he'd targeted the police force based on some sort of sense of grievance. Jim had been the one to put a bullet in his head, and he'd gotten a commendation for that, along with pressure to join the PRT.

It hadn't been until later that he'd realized that the PRT didn't want police officers killing parahumans; they'd done everything they could to cover the incident up.

Still, for all that they tended to shill for the parahumans, Jim couldn't help but feel that the PRT did good work. They helped keep the criminal element in line, they helped train the next generation of heroes, and they dealt with things on a daily basis that beat cops couldn't even comprehend. The only people who might even get close to the experiences he'd had were the intelligence services, and that was because they often dealt with parahumans working for enemy governments. They were a lot more likely to deal with unknown parahumans because most parahumans tended to be territorial.

Living in a city, you tended to deal with the same parahumans over and over. You got to know their personalities, who was dangerous and who was more reasonable. You knew what to expect, except when dangerous elements came from outside. You had your teammates by your side, and the heroes and your equipment, and on an individual basis it was a lot less dangerous than people liked to think.

Still, one of the things he liked the least was watching over the tourists who came to visit the PRT. Every one of them was a security risk, not just because it would be easy for a parahuman to slip inside and do something nefarious, but because civilians were often stupid. They'd pull fire alarms. They'd get everybody sprayed with containment foam by getting into a fistfight over inconsequential disputes. They'd try to wander off into areas they weren't supposed to.

If they'd actually gotten there, he had no doubt that they'd end up playing with tinkertech and possibly blowing people's heads off. He'd seen too much stupid behavior from people not to believe that someone would try to take a selfie next to Armsmasters activated Halberd and end up chopping their own head off.

It was like herding cats, which was why there tended to be at least four guards with every group.

This was a group of teenagers from Winslow, and so the numbers had been increased to six. It wasn't prejudice to say that Winslow was the Worst of the Worst. Winslow was filled with gang members, and it was likely that at least some of these punks were here to get information. The Empire kids at least were quiet and subdued, probably because they were keeping their heads down in the wake of their gangs recent issues.

The Asian kids were loud and obnoxious, reveling in their gang's current ascendancy.

"The Brockton Bray Branch of the PRT was established in 1993," the tour guide was saying. "At that time, the city was in an economic resurgence, meaning that we could build a better headquarters than we could have if it had been built only a few years later. As you can see, we are open to the public, and other than some areas which have to be closed for reasons of operational security, we're here to prove that we have nothing to hide."

A girl split away from the group to head for the front desk.

"Miss, you should rejoin your party." he said.

She was a teenage blonde, wearing large sunglasses even though they were indoors. She was dressed stylishly, looking like some of the kids from the wealthier part of the city. Something was wrong with the picture; Winslow kids didn't normally dress like fashion plates, and yet somehow she'd managed to fit in the middle of the crowd without anybody remarking on it.

"I've got an appointment," the girl said. She leaned forward and looked up at him conspiratorially. "Insight wants to talk to me."

She'd said the last part in a low voice, and he immediately tapped a button at his hip.

"Step right this way," he said.

Insight was a name that nobody in the public should have known. The fact that she did meant that either she really did have an appointment, or she needed to be interrogated about how she had information that she shouldn't have had to have. Either way, she needed to go upstairs.

"Hey!" one of the boys demanded. "How come she gets to go behind the rope?

"My Dad helps design costumes for the heroes," the girl said. She smirked. "If you guys think Armsmaster would look good in a kilt, I can put in a good word for you."

There were some approving cries from the crowd.

"Not sure he could pull off the hairy leg look, though," the girl said. "I'd imagine that he hasn't taken his pants off since the Carter administration."

"Let's go," Jim said after getting confirmation by radio.

A replacement was being sent to watch over the crowd; the tour guide would simply lengthen her presentation in the lobby.

They stepped into the elevator, and as the door closed, the elevator sat motionless as they were both being scanned for weapons, dangerous substances and anything else the Tinkers could come up with. He'd have worried about getting cancer, but this was his first time up this particular elevator. Visitors had already been scanned, but this was much more thorough.

"Must be terrible dealing with teenagers all day," the girl said. She glanced over at him and smirked. "Nobody likes teenagers. Even teenagers don't like teenagers."

"This is all part of the process," Jim said.

"Yeah, the metaphoric turn your head and cough," she said. "Except you don't even know you're being fondled. You know they can see your junk with that, right?"

He put his back to the wall, facing her. Elevator etiquette suggested that he should stand beside her face forward, but it wasn't a good idea to take your eyes off a parahuman enemy under any circumstances.

He didn't say anything.

Protocol was that you didn't give Thinkers anything to work with. The more Strangers learned of your behaviors, the easier it was for them to pose as you as well.

The girl leaned toward him.

"It's really weird, though. Clowns?"

He stiffened.

Had she been going through his search engine history?

The elevator started moving and he felt a sense of relief. The sooner he got this girl into containment and under observation, the better.

He escorted her down a hallway, turned right, and then down another. They put her in an interview room, one of the ones with double glass, but not the one they used for the gangs. Kids watched too much television. This one was nicely presented.

Locking the door behind her, he checked for confirmation that she was under observation. Two other PRT officers stepped into the hall, and took up positions facing the door.

He stepped into the room next door.

The window was large, and they hadn't even bothered to disguise it as anything other than a one way mirror.

"You guys have this until they send somebody?"

"Stick around," his immediate supervisor Paul Perkins said. "We've actually been waiting for her. They say this is Tattletale of the Undersiders and that she's here to join up."

"Weird," Jim said. "She been talking to Insight?"

"Yeah. Not sure how I'm gonna feel about having half the villains in town working under this roof." Paul shook his head, even as he clicked away at his computer. There were three other people in the interview room.

"Well, there's rumors that Assault used to be a villain. Nobody knows who, but he seems to be OK."

"Well, better working with them than fighting them, I guess. Less paperwork."

"For us. They've got more. You'd think a Thinker knows that."

The girl approached the window.

"I'm only talking to Insight," she said. "Also, bring me a Diet Coke and some cookies. I know you guys have cookie Thursdays, and its not yet soon enough for them to be gone yet."

They glanced at each other.

Thinkers really were scary.

"Intuition is on her way," a voice in his earpiece came. "Along with Miss Militia."

Right.

No point in leaving the Thinker in a room with an unknown parahuman who might assassinate her before she could get a word out after all. It would have been easy enough to pull a switch, after all, and replace the real Tattletale with a Blaster maybe.

They waited for the next two minutes as the girl took her seat and smirked at them from the other side of the mirrored glass. The creepy thing was that she was looking at them as though the glass wasn't even there. She seemed completely relaxed and didn't look as though she was worried about anything.

Finally, the door opened, and Insight stepped in followed by Miss Militia.

The girl sat down across the desk from Tattletale and the two of them stared at each other, even as Miss Militia stood at attention against the back wall.

There was a long silence between the two of them.

"Insight," the girl said. "or Taylor."

Jim could hear everyone in the room move restlessly. A villain knowing the secret identity of a Ward was dangerous. If she knew one, it was possible that she might know others.

Insight didn't seem perturbed.

"You've got access to the internal cameras," she said. "It could have been one of the moles, but... ah. He's a contractor. Haven't gotten around to vetting those yet."

Jim had a sense that Insight was speaking specifically for the recordings. Otherwise, it was possible that neither girl might have spoken at all.

"You'll never catch him," Tattletale warned.

"Thinker? Ah. Limited precog maybe?"

"Two timelines," Tattletale said. "He picks the better one."

She looked down at her hands.

"Oh."

Insight sounded shocked.

"You're sure?"

Tattletale shrugged uncomfortably.

"That's messed up. It would explain a lot. Makes lying a lot harder."

What?

What was she talking about.

"Makes sense you'd want to leave then," Insight said. She leaned forward. "But that's not your only reason."

"Mirtis," Tattletale said. "I've got information that the PRT doesn't."

"Moles in the Empire, the ABB and the Merchants. Somebody.... a worker in Faultline's restaurant?"

"Fuck, you're annoying."

"I'll bet you get that a lot."

Tattletale grinned at that. "I suppose that's true. It's weird to be on the other side of it."

"So what about Mirtis?"

"People are going missing in all the gangs," she said. "He's planning on killing all the parahuman villains in the city, but he's looking for hidden powers so he's killing all of them."

"Why?"

Insight asked the question, but there was something in her expression that made Jim think that she already knew, or at least suspected.

"He's stealing brains," Tattletale said. "Could be a trophy, but brains rot and they decay. Something that lasts would make for a better one... jewelry, hair, anything other than a piece of meat."

"Eating them?"

"Maybe," Tattletale said. "But why focus on parahumans then? Low reward, high risk unless you have another reason."

"Oh," Insight said. "You think he's got another use for them then. Powers?"

"Yeah."

"Damn. That's going to make fighting them a bitch. You know he's a male?"

"Analysis of attack patterns," Tattletale said. "More likely male than female but not definitive. I'm sure you'd have come to the same conclusion if you had the same data."

The way she said it sounded a little condescending, as though she meant the opposite.

"Maybe," Insight said.

Again she didn't take the bait.

"Why not just leave the city?" Insight asked after a moment. "You've been embezzling the whole time."

"You just assume that because you'd have done the same thing," Tattletale said. She was silent for a moment. "I don't want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, looking for assassins who get two chances to kill me, while I only get one to avoid dying."

Insight nodded.

"Also, Mirtis might be able to follow you, and he's only going after villains."

"For now, anyway," she said. "He might not have a tracking power yet, but..."

"Right. No way to know about the future."

Jim heard his supervisor curse under his breath.

"What?"

One of the technicians asked, looking away from his monitor for a moment.

"They're saying Mirtis is another Glaistig Ulaine."

Fuck.

Jim felt a chill go down his spine.

The only reason Glaistig Ulaine had gone to the Birdcage was because she'd wanted to go. She'd had the powers of at least forty parahumans by that time, and possibly a lot more; he'd never read an official account. She was limited to three at a time through her spirits, but there didn't seem to be a limit to how powerful those spirits could be. They'd sent a small army of fifty parahumans after her, and thirteen of them had died and the rest had fled.

She'd essentially become an Endbringer lite by that time, and no one knew what would have happened if she hadn't agreed to go away voluntarily. There were some people who thought that she could escape from the Birdcage at will even now.

Glaistig hadn't even been all that aggressive in seeking out powers. Mirtis had been headhunting.

How many victims had he had?

Jim knew that the bigwigs would be accumulating a list of things he was likely to be able to do. It would easily explain how he'd overwhelmed his victims if he had an almost literal Rolodex of powers to choose from.

"So in return for our protection, what are you willing to offer?"

"My services," Tattletale said. "A name. Everything I have on him and his operations, enough that even with his powers you should be able to cripple him and keep him on the run. Where the money is. I might be able to give you Grue and if you were to help Bitch with her legal problems and give her a job training police dogs, maybe her too."

Insight nodded and tapped her finger to her forehead.

"She's telling the truth," Paul said. "That's the signal. The Director is watching this over a live feed."

"And what do you want?"

"Immunity," Tattletale said. "I haven't done any Federal crimes, and I was forced to work for Coil."

"No murders?"

"No," Tattletale said. "We've robbed other criminals, but haven't hit anybody else."

Insight tapped her finger to her head and leaned forward.

For the next five minutes both girls simply exchanged pleasantries. They talked like they were old school chums, even though there was an undercurrent of irritability in Tattletales tone and occasionally she'd scowl at Insight, seemingly for no reason at all.

"Shouldn't this part go at the first of the interview?" he asked Paul. "Getting the trust of the suspect, all of that?"

"It's a thinker thing," Paul said. He was staring at both girls, frowning. "They're talking in some kind of code."

"What?"

Jim had worked as a detective for years and he would never have caught on.

"I saw it once before," Paul said. "Two Thinkers trying to out-thinker each other. People used to do it back in courts in Europe, too. They'd say one thing, and unless you understood the current situations, you wouldn't get that what they were saying meant something completely different than what what it sounded like."

"Like talking about the King in ways that wouldn't get back to you. Is Insight turning on us, then?"

Paul shook his head.

"It's a pissing contest, I'd bet. Thinkers tend to be bitches when they think somebody's trying to be smarter than them. It's like dogs fighting for dominance, except that the less anybody else sees, the smarter they think they're being. It's a smug thing."

Tattletale turned her head to glare directly at Paul. A fraction of a second later, Insight followed.

"There's a reason Thinkers are creepy," Paul said without missing a beat. "If I was to, say, give them the middle finger, they'd probably find a way to screw up my bank account, my marriage and my relationship with my future girlfriend in about five minutes. That's why I'm very carefully not giving them the middle finger, and I'm backing away from this whole conversation."

They both stared at him a moment more, and then they went back to their conversation.

By the time it was over, Jim couldn't tell who'd won. He hadn't even been able to tell they were having some sort of battle, even after he'd been told they were. Was a twitch of an eyebrow a message, or was it just the result of an itch. Did a shift in their seat mean something?

They both kept their faces impressively neutral by the time it was over.

It was only later that he wondered if they'd set the whole thing up just to troll everybody else, pretending to have a battle while really just having a pleasant conversation, enjoying the fact that everybody was watching their every movement and wondering what it all meant. The weird thing was that they'd have had to actually been able to communicate that way in order to set it up, which meant they were trolling everybody twice.

Or maybe it had been a real battle of wits.

Fucking Thinkers. They gave him a headache.

It was probably Thinker arrogance, but I suspected that they were going to use Tattletale to double check things I did.

Her power was substantial; in some ways it was better than mine. She liked to tell people that she was psychic and then that she was super Sherlock Holmes; I'd seen a video of her interview with the Director when they'd had me double checking her, and her use of the term had a polished edge to it, like she used it a lot. The truth was, however, that she was more of a psychic than she realized. Her ability allowed her to gain information that mine didn't, even if she rationalized it as just intense observation.

I'd suggested that they list her as being postcognitive; she could get a glimpse into the past of people and objects. Other thinker would have seen something like that as visions or dreams. If they were weaker, it would be something like the color red, or purple. She also had an ability like mine, and she synthesized the two of them to gather more information that I could on observation alone.

She'd been a little smug about that, until she realized that I also had social thinker abilities, and that I was a tinker thinker. In a way, I had light versions of Master and Tinker powers that she just didn't have, and that irritated the hell out of her. She'd been shocked that I didn't get Thinker migraines. I'd suggested that she see if different aspects of her power triggered the Migraines; was it the Sherlock thinking or the Postcognitive abilities that triggered the headaches. It was possible that it was both, but it was just as possible that one side of her power caused more pain than the other.

If it was the postcognitive part that was the problem, then she could solve that about getting as much information beforehand as possible. If it was the deductive and inductive thinking, then there might be ways to deal with that too; maybe by focusing on the type of information she was looking for and then handing it over to me or another Thinker. Some of her ability use was uncontrollable, but in the PRT she'd have the ability to regulate the types of information that she was exposed to.

Fewer headaches was likely to lead to less frequent outbursts; she could be irritable at times and certainly loved to insult people even when she wasn't. I saw her insult the Director a half dozen times during her interview, and she actually wanted to make a good impression. I'd warned the Director in advance about it, and Tattletale had known that I'd done it from information she gained from the Director. That had made her irritated toward me and grateful at the same time.

The good thing was that she'd been accepted. They were going to rebrand her, of course, and they were hopeful about getting at least one of her teammates to join up, maybe two. Regent was deemed to be a poor candidate. Her assessment was that he was a sociopath and lazy. He didn't seem the type to care enough about anything to join the team because it would be too much work.

I wasn't sure how much help a guy who could just cause muscle twitches could really be. The Undersiders had figured out a way to make it work; he'd basically stood in the back and screwed up the fighting of the enemy. Greg would have called him a de-buffer or something; in the middle of a fight, it probably helped somewhat, but he needed the mobility to be able to keep away from the others.

Really, the Undersiders only had two good combat capes; Hellhound, who could turn regular dogs into giant monsters, and Grue, and even he was better at covering their getaway than anything else. I was surprised that Coil hadn't given them another heavy hitter; maybe he'd intended them to stay mostly under the radar until he was ready to use them. They certainly didn't have the army of normal gang members that every other gang in Brockton Bay had, with the exception of Faultline's crew.

"I hear there are going to be two of you now," Sophia said.

It was the first time she'd come into the lab they'd set up for me now that there was no longer even a hint of pretending that I was still in the middle of power testing. They still videotaped me; my words were considered to be as important as what I wrote down and the diagrams that I drew. However, I no longer had scientists looking over my shoulder every second, and I didn't feel like a specimen on display in the zoo.

It was the first place I had here where I could actually feel like myself. I hadn't bothered to take a room, although one had been reserved for me, and now I was able to set things up the way I liked them.

"That's not true," I said. "Tattletale's way more a bitch than me."

She wasn't really interested in Tattletale; what did she want? There was a weird sense of urgency about her questioning me; why was that? It was a sense of anxiety, and I wasn't sure why; she wasn't anxious about me, for once. There hadn't been any new developments on the parahuman front, and she'd never come to me about personal issues, or family problems.

The only new factor that I knew was Tattletale, and it wasn't about Tattletale herself. It had to have been about one of the people Tattletale was trying to bring into the group.

I sighed and I reached forward, switching the camera and microphone off.

"Is it Bitch or Grue?"

She flinched.

"Right. You don't want Grue on the team why?" I asked.

"My powers don't work right in that darkness of his," she said.

It was obviously true; she disliked him intensely for that, and I was sure that I would hate somebody who put my powers on the fritz too, but that wasn't the entire picture. There was more to it; she was trying to cover up the truth by telling a truth. It wouldn't be a bad strategy for someone else. Against me, it was nothing at all.

"What did you do?" I asked.

She stiffened.

"Nothing."

Her jaw clenched and so did her fist. She was angry, but she was anxious too. She'd done something, and she was afraid that it would result in her going to juvie. She didn't use drugs as far as I knew, not even steroids, which probably would have been her drug of choice if she thought it would make her better at fighting the gangs. She hadn't been stealing; she liked money as well as anybody, but stealing would put her at the level of the gangs, and she'd convinced herself that she was better than they were.

"Did you shoot him with a crossbow?" I asked. "And not one of the regulated ones?"

"If you narc, I'll..."

"You won't do anything," I said. "Because you'll be the one to narc on yourself."

"Are you crazy?"

"Even if Grue doesn't want to join up, probably because he thinks you're a crazy, psychotic bitch, Tattletale is a hundred percent guaranteed to tell them. It wouldn't even be her being against you; she's psychologically compelled to tell people her secrets. That's why she chose the name. She's a tattler, and she doesn't like you. If she wasn't so occupied with getting accepted and ratting out Coil and his gang, she'd have already ratted you out."

Her face darkened and she took a step toward me.

"I wasn't the one who got her to join up. She came to me. How bad was he hurt?"

"Through and through, far as I could tell," she said. "I'd have heard about it if he ended up in the hospital."

"Well, remember the thing you did to me a few times? The whole running to the teacher and claiming that I was the one bullying Madison?"

She wouldn't have wanted anyone to think that she was bullied; they'd put Madison in that position, both because she was the weakest of them and because she was the most believable.

"You aren't going to do that," I said. "Blackwell wanted to believe you; it was easier to dump on a teenager nobody liked anyway than it was to fight Alan Barnes and the PRT. The Director, though, she's already upset with you for the bullying thing. She actually likes me, and I'm bringing enough money already that we might be able to have a Christmas Party this year. "

"I've got the best capture rate out of anybody," she said.

"It's part of the reason you're still here," I said. "Plus me being all reasonable about keeping you."

"Fuck you."

"Not my type," I said. "Even if I was into girls, and hey, from what I hear I won't know that until college, I'd like a little less bitch in my partner and a few more brains. Maybe somebody who didn't have so many skeletons in their closet that it rattles when they shake the door."

"You can't fight in the streets without getting a little dirty."

"There's dirty, and then there's crap your pants and sat in it. Didn't it occur to you that the PRT is obviously recruiting teenage criminals? The Undersiders were such a small group that they wouldn't be able to protect their members if they got caught. Fact that they haven't done anything worse than property crimes, and most of those against known criminals means that they were always going to be prime suspects for recruitment."

"Fuck that. I was going to catch them."

"Clearly that worked out. Now there's a thin needle for you to thread to stay out of juvie, and it only works if you go to the bosses before Tattletale, or even worse, Grue tells them."

She didn't say anything, but I caught the look of interest in her eye. She was seriously considering running, and that wouldn't fit my plans at all. Ultimately, turning her would be an excellent, if petty revenge against Emma. She'd dropped me for a new friend. Having her new friend drop her for me would be ironic and it would be the kind of punishment that she deserved.

Fuck Emma.

She wasn't really worth putting too much effort into, but I didn't want to let her off the hook either.

Also, I didn't want to move too quickly with Shadow Stalker, because that meant that I'd have to spend time with Shadow Stalker, and I had better things to do. It was a long term plan, but the fact that she hadn't tried to hit me was a good first step. She was already treating the others better too; everyone had noticed her change in attitude. It was all enlightened self interest, but I never would have called Sophia enlightened about anything, so it was actually an improvement.

"I could help you thread the needle," I said. "Wouldn't be easy, but I know how to fuck with people's minds. Nobody would expect it coming from you."

"I can fuck with people's minds!"

"Hitting them in the head with a rock doesn't count," I said.

She was silent for a long moment.

"Why would you help me?"

"Two reasons," I said. "First, I've seen you try to act better. You've been less of a bitch to people, and you've actually made an effort. I'm sure it's mostly self interest, but I'm sure it can't have been easy for you. Effort should be rewarded."

"And the other reason?"

"You go off to juvie, and that's it. A couple of years playing patty cake with Big Bertha and Stabby McStabberton, and then you're out in the public. You'll end up back in public as a worse person than you went in. You'll be all bitter, and instead of a bitch you'll be a raging bitch. Society already had too many of all flavors of bitches."

"Whiny bitches," Sophia said.

"Clingy bitches," I said.

"Loud bitches," she said.

I grinned at her.

"We do this, we'll be here all day, and you'll miss your chance," I said. "So lets save you some effort. Broke bitch, lazy bitch, loud bitch, stupid bitch... there's ninety different kind of them, and the boys all are the same way, they just don't get called bitches."

"I call them bitches."

"I'm sure you do."

She frowned.

"There's a fourth reason that I want to help you out, and keep you here as a coworker."

"Why's that?" she asked suspiciously.

"Because that means that you have to work with Gru," I said. "And with Tattletale. She's a smug bitch, and I think she'll love to fuck with you, which means that I won't have to. That's helpful, because I'm a lazy bitch."

I could see the realization of what two or three years of having to work with those two would be like, and I could see her weigh that against juvie.

"You stick it out, you'll get the fifty grand a year thing. Couple hundred thousand reasons to stay. Would be enough to buy a house with money left over, here at least. Or you could do the college thing, or just spend it all in Mexico on Cabana boys and booze. Might be a fun couple of weeks."

"Don't need money," she said.

"So you'll run?" I asked.

Her mouth tightened.

"I don't run from anything," she said.

Well, except that was literally what her power was designed for.

"You picked a great time for this to come to light," I said. "Director's going to need all hands on deck. If you'd waited a couple of months, until things calmed down a little, she wouldn't have needed feet on the ground. Even with the Empire imploding that just means that the Empire gang members are going to scatter like roaches. They might be starting their own smaller gangs, and there are likely groups that are going to move in due to the power vacuum. Once things settled down, she wouldn't need you."

She scowled, but she didn't deny what I was saying.

"That doesn't mean you aren't gonna get punished. The Director's gonna have to do something, even if it's just to satisfy Grue. I doubt Tattletale is going to care that much as long as you don't fuck with her; she'll enjoy pushing your buttons and trying to get you in trouble. Might be easier just to get a transfer out."

"I'm not going to transfer," she said, gritting her teeth.

Probably for the best. She'd have ended up someplace terrible like Alaska or outside Madison anyway, and that's assuming that her family would go along with the move. It was harder in general to move teenagers, because in addition to losing contact with friends and family members, their parents tended to have jobs, and unless the PRT had some pull with the companies they worked for, it wouldn't be easy for them to move.

Of course, moving to a better city might mean better jobs, but there would also be a higher cost of living. In that way, Brockton Bay was a little like places in the Deep South. Nobody had good jobs, which meant that landlords, restaurants and grocery stores couldn't charge much without going out of business.

I doubted that her mother had much of an education anyway, which would limit her upward mobility.

My parents had both had college educations, and they hadn't been doing too badly as a two income family. Mom had made more money than Dad, and it wasn't like college professors were paid huge amounts of money. Dad could likely get something better if he were willing to move, although we'd have to get a smaller, if newer house.

"Then that means you're going to have to suck it up," I said. "Whatever shit they give you, you'll have to grit your teeth and push through it. It sucks not just being able to punch your way through something like that, being forced to take it because there's people with power over you and you don't have any way to get out from under their thumb."

She was silent for a long moment.

"You're really enjoying this, aren't you?"

I shrugged.

"If I wasn't, you'd be on your way to juvie," I said. "Because I wouldn't save you if you were on fire and I was holding a fire hose. But yeah, it's kind of poetic justice, seeing you forced to grin and bear it, the same as I did. If it's any consolation, my best bet is that it'll last less than the year and a half that you put me through. That is, assuming that Tattletale doesn't finally get the best of you and you end up just assaulting somebody."

"I might," she admitted.

"Of course, then you'll be proving them all right."

"Who?" she asked suspiciously, staring at me.

"The Empire."

"What?"

"Well, isn't one of their arguments that Blacks are thugs who can't control themselves? That the ones that aren't lazy are stupid and aggressive? They act like the world needs to be protected from a whole race of people even as they put their boots directly on their necks."

Her whole body tensed.

"But they said that even more about you in school," I said. "I didn't talk to anybody, but I listened. You were good looking and relatively popular. You were athletic and you could defend yourself. That was like acid for some of the skinheads. You were everything they wished they could be, and you were the antithesis of their ideas about people like you. So what did they tell themselves?"

"What?"

"That of course you were a good athlete, because everybody knows that people like you are good at that stuff because you've got nothing else. The only way to be good at basketball is to spend thousands of hours at hoops, and a kid who's got a good chance at college isn't going to waste that kind of time. Somebody who sees that as their only way out though..."

"I've got options," she muttered.

"And then they looked at how you acted... a bully, all aggressive and up in people's faces, and they told themselves that of course you were like that... isn't that just the stereotype of every angry black woman? It's not like black women have any reason to be angry, right?"

"Shut up."

"They took everything that you'd genuinely accomplished, not because of your power, but because of your own hard work, and they dismissed it as though it meant nothing because in their minds, you were just a stupid black thug. It made them feel less emasculated, I guess, because admitting that a black woman could be strong was to spit in the face of everything they believed."

She was steaming, and I could see that it would take only a little bit for her to punch me in the face. The fact that I'd been Whitesplaining blackness to her probably didn't help. But I didn't want her to hit me. After all, then she'd go to jail and that would be it.

"You could prove them right, or you could stick it out, and show everybody that you're more than just a stupid thug. I've got powers, and I can see hints of a good person in you. Deep, deep..... deep down inside."

"Fuck you Hebert."

"So what are you going to choose?"

She was silent for more than a minute.

"I'll stay."

"Good. Here's what we're going to do."

"I didn't think that I'd be able to get a day off the way things have been going recently," I told Ruth. "It's been crazy at work."

Even though she was technically a sub-contractor, there were limits to the things I could actually tell her. But given the state of things she had to have known that we'd be busy. She could be more honest with me, since I had already technically been read in to most of her secrets. If there were things she'd been told not to talk about, that was different.

"Yeah," she said.

She scowled.

"They had me close a thinnie," she said. "But I couldn't tell them how long it would be before it opens again. I wish I could understand the patterns; it would make everything so much easier if I could just walk by and say 'we've got a hundred years on this one' or whatever."

"Well, it's slow going on Dr. Haywire's stuff," I said. "It's way more advanced than anything I've seen before. It's kind of like there's a hierarchy of Tinkertech. The stuff that's like laser pistols are kind of like twenty years in the future stuff. Ninety five percent of the thing could be built already, so the only thing to really worry about is that last five percent, which is usually power systems. But the higher the tech level, the more stuff has to be figured out, and the harder each thing is to figure out. Ideally, they'd have me start with the low level stuff and work my way up. The low level stuff is going to take the least work to understand and to integrate into the tech that we already have."

"That makes sense," she said. "But they've got you working on my stuff."

"Well, this stuff would be a problem even without you," I said. "And we wouldn't have a bit of warning."

It would have been nice if we'd been allowed to go to the mall and the movies by ourselves, but it seemed that the both of us were too much of a threat, or that we were in too much danger, so we had a minder.

Agent Carpenter was a tough looking woman; I'd sparred with her a few times, if by sparred you meant having my face slammed into the mat over and over. They seemed to believe that I'd learn better through intense pain, and weirdly enough, it seemed to be working, even if they made me run on a treadmill instead of out in my neighborhoods.

I'd asked when I'd get the steroid injections like that Russian fighter in Rocky, but they didn't seem to have much in the way of a sense of humor.

"Bad information gets people killed," she said. "This last incursion, we'd have been looking in the wrong places for a while, and people would have kept dying. You're saving lives with what you do, both of you."

I liked Agent Carpenter, but the truth was I liked most of the PRT agents. There were exceptions, but the men on the front line tended to be dedicated and hard working. The PRT had fewer problems with their men than the police did, for a number of reasons.

First, police often worked alone or in duos, often with a younger partner who was easily cowed by someone with more authority. Being alone meant that they could throw their weight around and they often had a lot of negative interactions with the community. That made it easier to justify to themselves being violent and difficult. If all you saw were terrible people every day, it wasn't long before you started thinking everybody was terrible.

In contrast, the PRT worked in squads. They had very little interaction with the community, and when they went out they were focused on the mission. Except when they were busy with crowd control or something they didn't have to see the average person being terrible.

The PRT agents tended to be the elite too; police departments tended to vary wildly in terms of who they accepted, and I'd heard that in Earth Aleph a lot of the best candidates had joined the military in the wake of a major terrorist attack, leading some departments to have to lower their standards. It was worse here; the PRT had stolen budgets from the police departments, and they'd also stolen a certain amount of the cops' pride in themselves. They knew that people considered them to be low men on the law enforcement totem pole.

PRT agents tended to be more optimistic and less bitter, and Agent Carpenter seemed to be pretty happy in general. She seemed to be in a good mood most of the time, and she'd never shown the same fear toward me that a lot of her teammates had.

"Thanks," Ruth said. She looked down at her hands. "I just wish that thinnies weren't a thing, or that my power was just to open doors. Then I could just not do it."

"Well, then somebody would be out to kill you," I said. "Because of the threat of mass pandemics or whatever," I said. "This way, you have job security."

"You think they'd hire my Dad?" she asked. "He can do everything I can do, and he hasn't had a job in a while."

"Well, hopefully he's better at negotiating than you were," I said. "But having two troubleshooters is more valuable than one."

Agent Carpenter slowed the vehicle to make a right handed turn.

We were all in a Suburban, making her look like a Soccer Mom. She looked back at Ruth through a window.

"Your father has the same powers you do?"

"Yeah," Ruth said. She looked up. "I thought you knew?"

Agent Carpenter shrugged, but there was something weird about her tone.

"The exact same powers?"

"Yes."

She knew about the second type of parahumans, or at least the theorized type that Ruth said had been there since before Scion. I'd never told anyone in the PRT and neither had Ruth. It wasn't the kind of thing she wanted known, and I had the impression that the people who had powers and did want to be a cape simply kept their status quiet. The last thing anybody wanted was to be a guinea pig in a lab somewhere for PRT bio-tinkers who wanted to give super powers to normal people.

That would be the holy grail after all. If you gave entire armies powers, then the reign of the gangs would be over. You could simply throw masses of parahumans at them until they either died or surrendered. The likelihood was that the smarter ones would just give up.

Had she been introduced to the second type in her own life, or was she working for another organization as a deep cover mole? Maybe she was one herself.

She glanced at me, and although she tried to keep her expression blank, I could see the realization that I knew that she knew.

Turning into a parking lot, she found a parking space.

"I'm supposed to go with you," she said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm here to ruin your day. Pretend that I'm not here."

It seemed that she wanted to wait to talk to me alone. I could wait.

It had been a long time since I'd gone out with a friend to do anything; the last time had been Emma, unless you counted meeting Ruth at Lord's Market. It was weird, talking about going to the movies and shopping as if they were normal things for us to do. I hadn't had that kind of money in a while, and realistically, I'd lost Emma right before the age where I might have been dropped off at the Mall or been allowed to go off on my own. When we were younger it was always just playdates with parents supervision.

"What movie are we going to be watching?" Agent Carpenter asked.

"Hanna," I said. "It's a movie about a young parahuman girl raised to be an assassin, out to kill the people who killed her father."

"No romantic comedies?"

"I wasn't sure that it'd be a good idea for a social thinker," I said. "It's already hard enough to turn my brain off so that I can't tell what the actors were really thinking during the scenes without knowing that their partner's breath smelled during a kissing scene. Frankly, I may end up watching a lot of cartoons."

Cartoons still had voice actors, but there were less distractions and I could actually enjoy myself. Reading didn't bother me at all, though, so I was getting back into books when I had the chance.

We stepped out of the vehicle, and I noticed that Agent Carpenter's eyes were scanning the area intently. She was watching for any sign of danger, no matter how mild.

Walking toward the mall, I found that her paranoia was getting to me a little too. I'd seen a lot of stress on the faces of some of the PRT agents recently, and I'm made inquiries until Miss Militia had finally just told me. They were keeping the information from the rest of the Wards for some reason, but she'd gotten permission to tell me. Given the information that they had, it looked like at least some of the things hadn't gone back into the portal they'd come from; they'd eventually found a hole gnawed into a wall behind a bed, and it looked as though some of them had crawled through the hall and down into the floor. The house was built on a pier and beam, which meant there was plenty of room under the house for them to have escaped.

They needed to be found, considering that a single German cockroach could have ten thousand descendants in the space of six months. I'd have expected them to reproduce more slowly simply because of their size; as a general rule larger animals tended to reproduce more slowly, meaning that there were fewer generations in the same period. Still, a single cockroach could give birth to two to three hundred individuals in her lifetime, so a hundred females escaping would be terrible.

As the sliding doors opened, I took a deep breath. I hadn't been to the mall in years, but it still smelled exactly like it had when I was younger, even though I saw more stores boarded up than I had remembered. I'd heard that malls weren't doing as well as they had been in the past, but this was still a good place to come so you didn't have to drive all over the city, or go to the Boardwalk, where everything cost three times as much money.

It didn't look as though there was a war on at all here; people walked around and chatted and on the surface it looked like no one had a care in the world, even if I could see the underlying anxiety in almost everyone. People were putting on a brave face for their friends, but I could see that a lot of the teenagers here were just as worried as the adults. Why, though?

I mean, I'd seen some anxiety in Arcadia, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it was here. People smiled, but they moved just a little too fast. Their steps were just a little too long and their spines were just a little too stiff.

It was a strange aura of uneasiness that made me uneasy too, and Carpenter was picking up on it too.

"There's something wrong."

My mind was racing.

I'd read something about this, somewhere. Oh, right.

"It's low frequency sounds," I said. "Some people think it's why some people experience ghost phenomena. It can create feelings of fear, blurred vision and feelings of dizziness."

Just below the frequency of human hearing, infrasounds had been discovered by an engineer in 1980. He'd discovered it accidentally in a lab that had been considered eerie by his colleagues. He'd studied other supposedly haunted sites as well. It didn't apply everywhere, but it was certainly one theory. Odd electromagnetic fields also caused similar issues, and those had been found in supposedly haunted castles.

"Or it could be a parahuman effect, but they're typically less subtle than this."

"I've been here before, and it was never like this," Carpenter said. Her eyes were twitching, and for a moment it almost looked as though her face blurred for a second. I rubbed my eyes. "Whatever this is, it's new."

"Well, maybe their air conditioning system has come off it's mooring, but otherwise, it's possibly either a parahuman thing or maybe an open portal with something weird on the other side," I said. It wasn't as though a storm was brewing outside, or there was an earthquake happening. We weren't zoned for that.

Agent Carpenter was already on the phone, speaking code words rapidly in a low voice. I guess when the team Thinker tells you that something is about to happen, then you called in the cavalry.

Looking around I could see that the effect was subtle enough that no one had noticed it yet; it was a little like the boiling frog myth; a frog thrown in boiling water would jump out immediately, while a frog left in lukewarm water with the temperature gradually rising wouldn't realize that it was in trouble. These people were uneasy, but not yet to the point that anyone could pinpoint why.

The crowds were sparser than usual, though, or at least that's what the disappointed reactions of a couple of salesgirls I could see in clothing stores nearby. They presumably were paid by commission. My guess was that people were hurrying up with their shopping.

Suddenly, the public address system came on, even as the doors behind us slammed shut and audibly locked. Considering that they weren't designed to do that, being locked with keys, that was a problem. I could see the metal cages that the stores used at night all roll down simultaneously, trapping people inside the stores and leaving the people out in the open trapped in a different way.

Fog was rising throughout the mall, and now people were starting to notice.

"In a world..." I heard Leet's familiar voice begin.

I'd seen his show often enough that I knew his voice. He was excited to start another Youtube stunt, and I felt myself starting to relax.

"Where'd all this fog come from?" I heard Uber's voice say.

Even though they'd pretended that something was going wrong a couple of times, it wasn't their general M.O. Worse, Uber sounded genuinely confused by the presence of the fog.

There'd been a fog producer at the battle with the Empire, but I'd read the file that had been hastily assembled based on his activities in Germany. He'd never been able to generate enough fog to cover the entire mall; if he was here, though, that meant that his partner was here too.

"They aren't kidding," I said in a low voice.

"There are thinnies here," I heard Ruth say. She sounded worried. "I normally just see them, but I can feel them too now."

I could feel them too; I just hadn't noticed it because I'd mixed it with the underlying dread from the infrasound.

"Earthquakes cause infrasound, right?" I said. "And that can agitate animals. If the thinnies are strong enough to feel, then that means that they're either big or they're numerous. Either way, people need to get out."

And Uber and Leet had just locked the doors.

"Whatever, dude," I overheard Leet say. It sounded as if he'd forgotten the mike was on. "Let's just get this done and the footage uploaded."

Everyone in the crowds were frozen. They still thought all of this was an Uber and Leet prank, but people had been hurt before. They were listening to hear what they'd be facing.

"Today's episode is a callback to the heyday of video games, to the classic arcade game, only with a twist. We're playing the part of Pack Man There will be ghosts, and you, dear audience... well, you're going to be Pac Man's meal! Wacka Wacka!"

I heard screams as the sound of an engine came in the distance.

I grimaced and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

They were going to be driving around in a giant Pac Man vehicle eating people, and they didn't think that people were going to get hurt? There were people who were so frail that just tripping would break a bone, people who would get fatal asthma attacks from ear and from running, people with heart conditions and worse. This would have been a disaster even if there wasn't a possibility of weird alien animals.

"Let's go," I said. "We've got to get these idiots to let everybody out before somebody gets hurt."

Carpenter grabbed me.

"You aren't in costume."

"People could die," I said. I grimaced. "Maybe I'll steal a handkerchief from one of the stores nearby. We need to move."

I could hear people screaming in the distance, and what worried me was that I couldn't tell if they were screaming because they were being scooped up by Leet's machine, or if it was because of something out. This had the possibility of being a bloodbath, and the idiots wouldn't even realize it until a lot of people died.

They really had a knack for taking a bad situation and making it worse.

Carpenter hesitated, then nodded.

"You don't have any safe thinnies here, do you?" I asked Ruth.

"I've never been here," she admitted. "My Mom's kind of a snob about clothes and says this stuff is overpriced crap."

"Well, keep an eye out for thinnies and point them out," I said. "I'd like to know what we're up against."

If I was really unlucky, we were going to have to work with a couple of idiots once I convinced them to let everybody out.

The familiar waka waka sound of the Pac Man game was interspersed with the sounds of crashing furniture. Presumably whatever vehicle or construct they were using was larger than human and was rolling through furniture. Uber and Leet didn't worry too much about property damage, but they usually weren't out to hurt people. Usually was the operant word; the recent Grand Theft Auto debacle was a terrible exception.

"Velocity is already here," Carpenter said in a low voice. "But he can't get in. He's checked all the outside doors, and they're all locked tight as a drum."

"Right," I muttered. "Can't let the audience just run away, can they?"

"We'll have Agents on the ground outside in ten. Aegis can be here in seven minutes, and Vista can be here shorter."

"She can enlarge the space between the door and the wall, can't she? Could she use that to let people out of the back doors of stores?" I asked. "Or will the Manton limit make that plan a no-go?"

"She says she can do it," Carpenter said.

We were huddled in a corner behind a giant planter. I wasn't going to be able to get to a scarf, and covering my face was going to be difficult. Everyone had done their best to find places to hide, and there were cell phones out everywhere, pointed into the darkness.

"As long as no one dies, we can blame it all on Leet," I said. "Some kind of mistake maybe."

Nobody else was running toward the sounds in the fog, everyone was huddled against the wall. Most people probably figured that since Pac Man was a ball, that it wouldn't be able to get at them if they pressed up against a wall. It was better thinking than I'd have expected from them. If Uber and Leet had really wanted an authentic experience, they shouldn't have announced themselves. Why had they?

"Have her start letting people out of the stores," I said. "If she can bring some of the others with her, that would be better."

"Armsmaster and Militia are out of position on the other side of town," Carpenter said quietly. "They're stopping a gang fight between the ABB and remnants of the Empire. The others are also out of position. It'll be fifteen before any of them can arrive."

"We'll deal with what we've got, then," I said.

Hopefully this wasn't going to end with newspapers talking about an off duty PRT agent shooting Uber and Leet in the head.

The fog was getting thicker and I grimaced.

"They want us to stay down," Carpenter said. "Both of you are high value assets who... "

WAKA WAKA WAKA

The Pac Man machine was fifteen feet tall, and it looked like it was made out of hard light projections; I could see the individual pixels. People were screaming as they were sucked into the may of the machine and vanished.

Uber and Leet weren't murderers, although they were jerks. There wasn't room inside the machine to hold the people they were presumably eating, and so it was most likely that they were being teleported away, likely to a safe spot.

"We need them to eat as many people as possible," I said. "They've got a teleporter, and given the power requirements, it likely leads out into the parking lot."

"Confirmed," Carpenter said. "Vista just arrived and people are appearing everywhere out in the parking lot."

"Good. Have her move them away; there are going to be more incoming."

She nodded and relayed my instructions. She never took her eye off the hallway in front of us. The sounds of screams was coming from the distance and nobody was talking. It was a little eerie being in a quiet mall. The only sound was the sound of the Pac Man, which was getting closer rapidly.

From the sound oi it, the Pac Man hadn't started all that far from us

"BOOOOOO!" I shouted. "BOOOOO!"

"What's this?" Leet sounded almost amused. "A heckler? Are we allowing hecklers this episode?"

I could see him staring out of one of the eyes of the Pac Man, and Uber was looking out the other.

"IS THIS PAC MAN, OR IS THIS KIRBY?" I shouted. "DID YOU EVEN BOTHER WITH GHOSTS?"

People were staring at me like I was crazy. They were turning their cameras toward me, but fortunately the fog was thick enough that they likely couldn't see my face.

"An interesting question, Uber," Leet said. "Do we owe our fans authenticity, or are we allowed to make acceptable deviations in the name of fun?"

"She's got a point."

They'd been waiting for just this objection. There were enough fanboys in the world that they'd almost expected this kind of reaction. That was why I had fed them the line.

"If you believe in authenticity that much, how about you take on the role?" Leet shouted triumphantly.

I felt a tingling over my entire body, and I saw that Ruth and Carpenter were both rising up off the ground. The world around me was turning blue, and we were levitating. They were depending on the fact that it would take us a while to figure out our new vehicles, leaving them time to easily continue to do what they wanted.

Weirdly enough, them doing what they wanted happened to be what I wanted too. Presumably they planned to rob the Mall after they got rid of the people; they could have done it without getting rid of all the people, but that wouldn't get them as many likes or views as the other way around.

This whole ghost costume was made of light, but there were controls that reminded me a little of a motorcycle. Presumably all I had to do was touch them, and the Pac Man would vanish, only to reappear. There were likely some kind of power up balls that would change the color and turn us vulnerable. Then they'd eat us, and we'd be out in the parking lot. My bet was that they'd open the gates and then they'd eat everybody else. They'd closed the gates so everyone wouldn't just run into the stores to avoid them. People weren't that stupid.

Well, some were, anyway.

I'd never driven a car or a motorcycle, but the thing was balanced so that I couldn't fall off. My hips were held in place by pillow like constructs and I as I pushed the handlebars forward, I moved forward. So nothing like a motorcycle, then.

My ghost staggered forward, and I saw that I had multiple screens in front of me allowing me to see in all directions. He'd really went overboard in designing things for his opposition. Most people would have been terrified being inside one of Leet's machines, but I ignored that. I moved forward, and headed directly for him.

I could communicate with the others; my guess was that Leet probably was listening in.

"We can heard him to where we want," I said. "Let's stop him from eating any more people! This guy's an idiot and doesn't know Pac Man from Dig Dug!"

"Right," the other two said, and I understood that they understood my meaning.

"All wings check in," I said.

"Red two standing by," Carpenter said.

"Uh... red three standing by," Ruth said hesitantly.

Using a Star Wars reference would irritate Leet considering that we were in a Pac man simulation.

"Using Star Wars references in Pac Man..." Leet said in a chiding tone. His voice was a little nasally and irritating. "And I thought you called me inauthentic."

"You put us in ghosts with Tron controllers," I said.

From his tone, I understood that we were on a private channel. The only sounds from outside were the waka waka sounds.

I was picking up speed and only occasionally running into a wall.

Leet was creating a vortex to pull people into Pac Man's mouth, one after the other, and we were speeding up. People were screaming and they were running as they saw that being on the edges of the hall wasn't working.

"You know Red Leader was blown up, right?"

"Women have better reflexes than men," I said. "I think I could have done better."

"Not without the Force!" he said smugly.

We were moving faster and faster, and I was quickly picking up how to maneuver. Carpenter seemed to already know; was it gaming experience, or was she a motorcyclist? Either way, she was careful to never quite reach Pac Man, even as he careened down the hallway hoovering people up like a demented vacuum cleaner. I followed behind, but Ruth was struggling to even control her ghost.

"Who needs the Force when you've got skillz!" I said. "Hell, I figure someone like you could have figured out how to maneuver a bomb through all that turret crap without even risking a living guy. Put a stealth suite on the whole thing, and the Death Star wouldn't even know what hit it."

"Yeah. I could have done that," Leet said wistfully.

As in the past? Why was it different now? Everyone knew that Leet's stuff was unreliable crap, which was part of the reason that he was such a joke. He'd been a joke for years, even though he'd done some brilliant work at first.

Had he been losing his powers?

Looking around at everything he was doing now, I couldn't believe it. Teleportation tech couldn't be any easier than interdenominational tech; they probably had a lot of similarities. So why would he be nostalgic?

"But the Force is cooler," he said. He tried to sound confident in his statement, but he didn't.

"Cooler than transporters, than Warp drives, than replicators and light sabers and phazers?"

"Yeah," he said. "It'd be better to have a power where you could just will things to happen. Tinkering's a lot of work. You think all of this just happens? It takes forever to build all this crap, and then it doesn't last."

Temporary?

No.

I'd watched some videos of Leet since I'd gotten my powers and it looked like he reused some of his stuff sometimes. That only made sense considering that equipment cost a lot to build, but he did it sometimes even when it looked like it would be better served to have built something new. He'd even put himself at a disadvantage sometimes.

"You can only build something reliably once," I said.

"What?" he sounded shocked.

I could see him gesturing toward Uber, who was doing the driving.

There was a glowing ball hanging in the air up ahead, and Uber quickly moved to head toward it.

"Block them off," I said.

The last thing we needed was for them to chase us backwards along the mostly empty hallways we'd just left behind.

Carpenter was moving to intercept. She was a bad ass, but she didn't have Uber's preternatural abilities, and he managed to leap the Pac Man up in the air, jumping over her instead of moving to the left or right.

"Three-D, bitches!" Leet yelled enthusiastically.

However it sounded like he was still worried about my revelation. People didn't know that was his problem; they wouldn't have made so much fun of him if they knew he was the Tinker who could make anything once. The would, however, have made fun of wasting it on video games and You Tube channels.

The moment his Pac Man ate the pellet, the ghost forms of Ruth and Carpenter changed colors, and the sounds changed.

"Go," I said.

We needed to get ahead of them, flee and lead them to keep sending potential victims away. Otherwise things could get ugly.

I spun by him, and Carpenter did so too.

However, Ruth's ghost was sucked into Pac Man's maw and vanished.

It didn't bother me, not really. After all, Ruth was probably safer where she was, although we might need her to close the portal later. I could call them on my phone and have Vista deliver her if there was an emergency.

The important thing was to make sure that everybody got to safety.

Uber had been underplaying his talents.

Thinking quickly enough to avoid him was going to be a problem as suddenly Pac Man got a lot more agile than it had been. I barely avoided getting caught, and I knew that I didn't have the kinds of reaction speed that Uber had. If I was going to get ahead of him, I needed to make plans in advance.

Carpenter was drawing them off, and she was a lot better at driving her ghost than I was. Uber almost seemed to enjoy the cat and mouse game between the two of them. She was moving through people, and... Right.

We were larger than life in our ghost forms. If Pac Man was fifteen feet tall, we were nine feet tall, and it looked as though our ghost forms were just projections. Hunched over like a rider, that meant that we could pass directly over people, especially since they tended to hunch without harming them. We were supposed to be ghosts, after all.

That made it a lot easier.

I started moving directly through people. It actually cost Pac Man a little movement every time it sucked someone in.

"A vicious little thing, aren't you?" Leet taunted. "Throwing people under the bus like that."

"Better than throwing my talent away," I said. "You ever think about doing something productive with these abilities of yours?"

He snorted.

"It's impossible. Being a Tinker's a trap. It lures you in with the promise that you can do all this stuff, but in the end it disappoints you. Even if everything works out the way it's supposed to, you still have to maintain all your shit. That means you either have to abandon some of it, or you limit yourself."

"You could have made things that made things," I said. "And auto fabricator."

"That's one of the first things I made, you twit!" he said. "It got destroyed by some stupid gang banger with a bat because I didn't want to join his little gang. Burned my whole lab down. It's like a bucket of crabs; you try to get over yourself, somebody is going to drag you down. It's the law of the wild. Take your eyes off the prize for just a minute and somebody will steal all your shit."

"So you make sure that none of them will want you?" I asked. "Trash your own reputation so they won't come in and almost kill you? Everybody wants a tinker, nobody wants one who makes things that might explode in their faces."

"Shut up, bitch! You don't know anything!"

"I mean, if you really want to go media, why not use your drones to film cape fights, and start a commentary show about that? I hear Vegas has betting pools about villains; you think they wouldn't pay to have high quality video of that stuff? Use stealth drones and nobody would even know you'd been there until it was too late. You'd be Cape journalists, and people would still watch you, especially if you put a funny spin on things."

"That's... not terrible," he admitted. "But the PRT would shut me down faster than you could say cheese."

We were getting to the end; the mall wasn't as big as what I'd remembered. I guess I'd been smaller then, and the mind sometimes plays tricks, like going back to a county fair you remembered as being gigantic when you were a kid, only to realize it was dinky and small.

"Well," I started, but then people started screaming up ahead.

"What the hell?"

Leet was completely surprised; this wasn't some weird mashup that had been set up by him.

People were fleeing in out direction.

"That's a teleporter, right?" I asked Leet.

He was silent, but finally grunted in the affirmative.

"We need to get people out of here," I said. "It doesn't matter whether it's a mass shooter or an attack by the ABB; if people die, you're going to be held as an accessory, and with murder on your sheet, the gloves are going to come off."

He muttered something muffled to Uber.

"Right."

"Make the announcement."

"People of Earth!" Leet shouted. "Pac Man is offering a one time offer. Jump into his mouth, and get a free trip to the parking lot!"

Shit.

Nobody was going to believe him.

"Put me on the speaker," I said, irritated.

There was an audible click.

"Leet has decided to help for once, people. Pac Man is going to teleport people to the parking lot. There are people outside who will help you! Do not panic! The exit is through Pac Man. Whatever you are seeing is not a stunt by Leet."

Some people were too panicked to pay attention at all, but many headed directly for Leet's vehicle, to be sucked through the portal. Leet helped by switching to show daylight through Pac Man's open mouth, and the parking lot on the other side.

That caught people's attention, and Agent Carpenter and I moved to block those who were too panicked to see what was happening. We were essentially insubstantial, although they didn't know that. One man tried to push through me anyway, and I kicked him in the head.

It took almost five minutes to get everyone out; likely two hundred people. There were people still trapped in the stores, but I heard Carpenter murmuring into her cell phone beside me.

Everything was dead silent.

"I don't suppose you have any offensive weapons in that thing," I said to Leet.

"You're pretty bad ass for a civie," Leet said. "Stone cold."

"Not everybody can be a Japanese guy in a Godzilla film," I said. "I've never been that good at running and screaming."

"Actually..." he started.

Then we saw what had caused the commotion in the first place.

"Crap," I heard Leet say.

There were black tentacles feeling their way around the turn in the hallway up ahead. The ends of the tentacles opened up like flowers, with three separate "leaves," and inside were thousands of teeth. The mouths were moving, but it looked as though they couldn't see, because they were feeling around.

An old woman in her seventies was desperately pushing herself in her wheelchair, barely avoiding the maw that threatened to devour her entirely.

"What the fuck?" Leet shouted.

It didn't look as though the thing could hear either, although I'd bet that it could feel vibrations as it was moving toward the lady who was struggling to get out of the way. She was pushing herself as quickly as she could, but it didn't look as though she had a lot of upper arm strength, and her endurance was flagging. The tentacles were large enough to easily swallow her, and they were faster than I would have thought. I wouldn't be surprised if people had died already; if they hadn't, it would be entirely due to the lack of hearing and sight.

"Less talk, more shooting," I said. "Or were you just gonna run from the PRT?"

PAC-Man broke down into pixels, and it reformed into two figures.

Mario and Luigi.

Carpenter and I were dumped on the ground as the ghosts vanished. I stumbled to my feet wincing, even as the tentacles slammed forward.

Carpenter was already moving, even as Mario and Luigi were reaching for some kind of power ups. I'd never played the games and the pixelation was kind of crude, so I couldn't really tell. It didn't matter; just as long as they had something that would help.

Uber leaped forward. Rolling underneath one of the lashing tentacles and kicking the lady's wheelchair so that it spun forward, even as Carpenter moved to intercept it. She was blazingly fast and agile; it would have been easy for the woman to have overbalanced and fallen to the side, but the managed to stabilize her and get her out.

I could hear the sound of gunfire.

Carpenter was drawing the attention of the thing with her gun to give the two of us time to escape.

The thing looked as though it could force itself through small openings, so sticking her in a bathroom was out.

"Open a nearby grate," I told Leet.

He was standing back, strangely frozen.

"If we can get her through, I've heard that they're trying to open the doors to the outside. It's probably strong enough to go through a grate, but it might not bother while it's exploring the empty hallways."

"You knew about this," Leet accused. He was staring at me, and I turned quickly so that my hair concealed my face under the pretense of helping the old woman.

A gate started to open nearby, and getting behind the woman, I pushed her wheelchair into a boutique store. There were racks of overprices blouses and purses, and I was surprised that anyone would buy any of it. It was almost as expensive as the stuff on the Boardwalk, but at half the quality. Ruth had complained about it; I suspected that she'd gotten a lot of her information from her mother, who worked on the Boardwalk and so she was biased. Still, I could see prices that didn't seem to match what you'd be getting.

Maybe coming had been a bad idea, even beyond the whole tentacle monster.

The woman was hyperventilating.

Grabbing my cell phone, I dialed the PRT with a single push of the button. As a Ward, I didn't have to go through the secretary; I patched directly to the Ward who was running the operation.

"I've got a handicapped woman and I'm heading for the back door of Katie's Dress Shop. It's in the southwest part of the Mall, near Dillards. Get the door open."

Dennis was on the other end of the line.

"All the doors unlocked at once. Looks like Leet decided to let everybody out."

"There's a tentacle monster here; mouths and teeth. We haven't seen the main body yet. This woman is going to need some medical assistance; it looks like she has breathing problems and she's in a wheelchair."

"Ambulances will reach the staging area in three minutes," Dennis said. "Vista will get there and then she'll take over. The bosses want you to..."

My phone lost signal.

Shit.

"Stay here," I said, as I pushed the woman next to the door. She had barely been paying attention to me, focused on what seemed like an asthma attack.

"Do you have medication?" I asked her.

Nodding, she fumbled for her pockets.

I rifled through her pockets until I found an inhaler, then I watched as she took a deep inhalation. I'd learned from a classmate in elementary school that the usual asthma inhalers worked better if you waited five minutes between puffs; giving the airways time to open and allow the second inhalation to get deeper into the lungs. Many asthmatics either didn't know about it, or they didn't have the discipline to wait so long if they were panicked about not being able to breathe.

"Help will be here in a couple of minutes," I said.

I hesitated.

Undoubtedly Dennis had been about to tell me that I was to hold back and let the others take over. It would undoubtedly be the smart thing to do. I wasn't good at combat, and I could hardly use social engineering on a monster that didn't even speak my language. I didn't even know whether it had social cues.

But the failure of my cell phone worried me. An EMP burst might well cause problem with Leet's tech, and that would lead Agent Carpenter to be using a gun that didn't seem to do much against a creature of that size.

"I've got to go," I said.

Before she could respond, I dashed back through the store. Even as I did it, I knew I was being stupid. This was the kind of thing that I needed to leave to people who had the power to do something. All I'd do was slow people down.

Reaching the place where the gate was halfway lifted, I carefully peeked around the corner.

The holographic images of Mario and Luigi were gone; whatever had caused the burst had disrupted their equipment.

"Fuck!" Leet was shouting.

Leet was bouncing around, avoiding the mouths, which seemed to have gotten a better handle on locating him. They were less sluggish than they had been before, and they were faster. Were the things connected?

Leet had retreated a hundred feet back, and he was struggling with his equipment.

"Bad time to have your shit blow up, Bro," Uber shouted.

Fuck.

Leet had probably intended to use an EMP to stop pursuit; he'd have been able to shut down the PRT Vans, and the Armscycle. Some of them had probably been hardened against EMP, which meant that Leet had probably built something with similar effects that would bypass that.

The EMP would have affected the cameras in the mall too; assuming that Uber and Leet hadn't already shut them off. They'd want to manage the narrative, and having other people show poor video footage of their attack would make that harder. Also, if they were caught, they probably wanted to be able to pick and choose the footage available to convict them. The recent Grand Theft Auto fiasco had likely shown them the kind of backlash they could get.

I wasn't sure that they understood that teleporting people a few hundred feet could still get them three hundred or so kidnapping and assault charges. If anyone died they could be charged with manslaughter or felony murder.

Looking around me, I found a scarf that cost a hundred and fifty dollars. Well, either I'd return it, or the PRT would pay for it.

"Let me look at that," I said, running up to him, and grabbing for the item.

"What they hell, you stupid bitch?" he demanded.

He'd opened up the panel on a sphere the size of a basketball. I could tell that he felt hopeless; it seemed that he hadn't had much success on repairing his own equipment once it had blown up. The EMP bomb as laying nearby. It had gone off early, but his hard light tech was supposed to have been shielded against the EMP. Both plans had gone wrong at the same time. Uber and Agent Carpenter were being pushed back, and we'd be out of options soon.

Was a retreat the best option?

If everyone had already been evacuated, then we could just leave this place behind, and we could call in the Triumvirate if things got to be too bad.

I opened my mouth to say something, when I heard a scream.

A thirteen year old girl was stumbling out of the bathroom, peeking outside now that the screaming had stop. Seeing the tentacles, she started screaming.

Fuck.

"You've fried these wires," I said. "You had them too close to the casing and the insulation is too thin. You do shit like this all the time. Open the case on the EMP bomb, and we'll have this done in a second."

He'd done a great job of insulating the rest of the system, even to the point of providing surge protectors for the rest of the system, but this one critical part connected the power source to the rest of it, and it hadn't been shielded for some reason. It was like his power insisted on leaving a back door to any of his designs, like a trash chute on a death star.

He stared at me for a second, and then he watched as I deftly used one of his multi tools to remove some of the damaged wiring. He nodded.

I had a sense that the main body of whatever was coming through the portal was having to compress itself to fit into the already large space inside the mall hallways. It was likely the only reason that the tentacles had only gotten so far. Once they reached the atrium, they'd have more room to move.

The girl kept screaming, and I looked up.

"SHUT THE HELL UP!" I shouted. "THERE'S AN OPEN DOOR THROUGH THE GATE BEHIND ME AT THE BACK OF THE STORE. THE REST OF THE MALL IS A TRAP."

She actually did shut up.

I didn't bother looking at her; instead, I kept working on the tools even as the tentacles slid five feet closer to us.

"You need to get out," Agent Carpenter said. "I'll do what I can to stop it, but I'm almost out of ammunition."

Ignoring her, I gestured toward Leet.

"I need replacements for these, now."

He was staring at me, but he was already working. I could sense a growing sense of excitement in his expression. He'd never been able to do more than minor repairs on his equipment; it was almost as though he had a mental block. If there was someone who could let him re-use things, he was very interested in me.

I'd have to make sure that he didn't try to kidnap me before we got out of all of this.

Agent Carpenter reached out to grab my shoulder, but the connections were made and the power switched back on, and a moment later I rose to my feet. I was eight feet tall and I was in a Mario outfit.

A glance at Leet showed that he was staring at me like I was the holy grail. I probably seemed like the solution to all his problems and the fact that I had just stolen his Mario machine didn't seem to bother him.

I planned on keeping it if at all possible.

There was a HUD inside the cockpit, and I studied the control systems for a moment.

Uber was caught by one of his feet, and he was lifted into the air by his foot even as the other two mouths moved to rip him apart. I chose Uber as a target, and a moment later he was enveloped by the force fields of hard light that formed the Luigi form. He managed to kick off one of the tentacles and spin, pulling back.

The hard light projections didn't really weigh anything. That would have limited the force that we could project, but the system compensated for that. What it did mean was that we had enhanced strength and we could jump really high. There was a battle computer that would enhance fighting skills, presumably because Leet needed to be able to match Uber and wouldn't be able to do it on his own merits.

"Get Leet and the girl out," I said, looking down at Carpenter, and a moment later I sprang forward.

I jumped higher than I'd thought, but the machine took over, and as my head hit the ceiling, a shower of virtual coins exploded around me.

It looked like Leet hadn't actually required power ups to gain extra abilities; he would have just restricted himself until he hit the virtual flowers or whatever; that way if he had to fight the Protectorate he'd have all the powers that he needed.

Launching myself at the monster, I called fire, and the thing hissed and pulled back.

"Leet said that takes a lot of juice," Uber said. "You sure those repairs you made will hold?"

"Long as I don't get knocked around too much," I said. "Never played too much Mario."

"Why didn't you give the suit back to Leet, then?"

"He's got no nerve for this," I said. "He strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn't like to take chances. I'll bet you guys have an escape plan, and I'll bet he'd have left us if things got hairy."

He was silent for a moment.

"Maybe,' he admitted.

"Well, if this thing gets to an area where there's a lot of glass doors and windows, it's going to explode out into the parking lot. Where did you guys put everybody?"

"The parking lot."

"And I've got a feeling that these things are like an elephant's trunk, just with more teeth. If the main body gets out, it might have eyes. If that happens, it's going to get a lot more accurate and people are going to die. Maybe not as bad as Leviathan, but we need to keep it here until the heroes show up."

"OK," he said slowly.

"Also, if you're fighting against a greater threat, I can probably convince them to consider this as fighting under a smaller version of the Truce, and it'll look a lot better to the courts when you guys finally do get caught?"

"You're Protectorate?" he asked. "I haven't heard of any female Tinkers in the Wards."

"I've worked with them in the past," I said. "And I'm good at convincing people of things."

He ducked under the mouth of a vine and he grabbed it, swinging up onto it and riding it like a rodeo rider. He put his hands on the neck of the tentacle where it met the flower, and ice started spreading from his hands, freezing the vine.

A sound that made my bones rattle erupted. It was so low that I felt it more than I heard it.

Uber's hands turned into hammers, and he smashed downward, hitting the ice with a crack that sent the mouth and the head of the flower head falling to the ground.

The tentacles suddenly started whipping around whit a speed that I wouldn't have thought them capable of. Uber easily bounced off a wall and did a flip over them, but I was caught and smashed into a wall.

There were red flashing indicators all over the HUD; my repairs had been temporary, and while the system had managed to cushion the blow using some kind of inertial dampener, it was raising the power output beyond what the system was designed to handle. My unit was projecting the power suits of both me and Uber.

Suddenly I had a face filled with grinding teeth as a mouth tried to devour me whole. Despite the fact that I was now eight feet tall, I was being drawn in to the darkness.

The control panel had symbols, not words for the power ups. I didn't recognize most of them. When had Mario used a carrot, or a frog, or several caps. There was one that I did recognize.

I focused on the mushroom, and I activated it; the system was designed to be operated by cranial impulses so the user could have his hands free. I would have expected someone like Leet to want to call out his attacks, but maybe he'd already done voice recognition.

Suddenly my form exploded outward. My Mario form had already been unnaturally fat and bulky; now I doubled my size in all directions, and my strength had increased as well. I tore my way through, and I realized that the teeth were pointed backwards for quite a way down.

The sound was increasing again. I could feel it in my teeth, and my eyes were blurring, despite the protections offered by the suit.

"We're about to lose the suits," I said, crawling up from the floor where I'd landed. "It's time to go."

"Roger that, Red Leader," he said.

A moment later we were running, even as the sounds of bricks and mortar exploding came from behind us.

Worse, there was a sound coming from behind us; the sound of thousands of legs running in unison.

I tore my way through a metal grate, and a moment later we were moving through rack after rack of clothing, heading for the glass doors at the other end of the store.

Pain exploded as the suit dissolved around me, and I fell forward onto my left knee.

Uber grabbed me, pulled me up, and a moment later we exploded out into the sunlight. I was blinded for a moment, but there was a crowd of people there, and they were screaming.

I turned and saw that the mall was collapsing behind us.

This wasn't going to be fun.