I flew across the skies with only one thought in mind.

  Why?

  Now that I was past the family gathering, my head had cleared a little, and my work had grown a lot.

  I made my daily ends meet by being a mechanic and doing custom jobs here and there. I would charge for both parts and labor, and if I really wanted to, I could make great money with it. But that would mean practically announcing my wisher status to most people. I would have to get numerous degrees or certifications before I could do that type of work out in the open with no suspicion.

  So I focused on cars and made enough to live on. I had roughly five hundred thousand saved up from heroing duties, and while Mochi pestered me to get that nerve regeneration surgery. I had other plans for the cash. I wanted to save up for a new suit.

  But that was all easy, the mechanic work that is. I just had to wait on the parts.

  No, it was my second job that kept banging around in my head.

  The first question was the payout.

  It was simply too low. Fifteen grand was nice and much more than my usual gigs. I was lucky, but when compared to the cost of those crates, the henchmen, the equipment, and the warehouse, none of it made any sense.

  Each of those crates went for forty-five grand and higher on the legit market, and if I assumed what they carried was even more valuable, then I should have gotten an even larger sum, even if I had only acted as a liaison between Cobra and the HU.

  But that was a small discretion, one that would have been forgettable if not for all the other stuff.

  Why had they used Diapherius? They wanted to bait Cobra, that had been my first conclusion. But Cobra had already beaten Diapherius half to death, and the shifter was walking around on her turf. If anyone would know it was bait, it would be Cobra. As soon as she saw him, she would have informed the HU through local law enforcement or any other means.

  If Cobra hated them that much, then they should have known her reaction.

  I thought they were human trafficking since the Wolf had mentioned that, but the crates weren’t big enough for that. Those crates were mostly tech in volume with a hole the size of a coffee table inside. Human traffickers were rare, but they had their own methods of functioning. Most of that tech came out of Valentine along with most of the trafficked people.

  Then there was the fact that they were staying silent, not letting any information go public about the incident. That had cut into my media pay.

  The last information was that this wasn’t a single incident. There had been numerous calls throughout the city similar to this one. No media leaks, no noise, and heroes involved in dealings with lesser-known villains.

  I had a picture, a puzzle and I had built out the edge pieces fairly well. Now, all I needed was the center image.

  “You shouldn’t be looking into this,” Mochi commented. “You always like the big stories, Burt, but this one smells like mailmen and Kimber’s litter box after a fresh poop.”

  “The big stories pay the best,” I replied.

  “That’s because you look for them! You like watching and waiting and figuring out things before doing anything! Remember that small time EJ ring we got? You worked on that one for two whole months before getting the Union involved!”

  “And the pay was great,” I retorted.

  “Yeah, but it took two months. You could’ve gotten the initial dealers, then let the cops or Union handle the rest.”

  “They would’ve just popped up again.”

  “Right, and that’s why you’re investigating something that the Wolf is already looking into and probably has more resources devoted to it than we could imagine. Just admit that you do it for fun, Burt!”

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  I smiled under the helmet as I heard Mochi munch down on some homemade beef jerky.

  “Watch your salt intake, Mochi. The vet said you have high cholesterol.”

  “Don’t change the subject!” She barked with a mouthful of food.

  I chuckled as I flew low to the roof of a building.

  Mochi didn’t leave the house much, and most of her excitement came from me fighting bad guys or her playing video games. At first, I had been worried about her need to socialize. She liked walks and parks and even the occasional game of fetch, but what friend group or people could she join publically? If she were revealed, there were high chances she’d get stolen or taken by the Heroes’ Union, and she refused to risk that.

  However, she had managed to find a way around the problem. One of her solutions was being perpetually online, and the other was living through my suit.

  “It is fun,” I replied.

  Mochi grunted through bits of beef jerky.

  I scanned the rooftops, eyes looking for any sign of my objective. Suddenly, a white gloved hand waved me down.

  It belonged to a man wearing a white and black suit. It was low-tech, at least by my standards. He had ray gun resistant armor and a few weapons on hand, but it lacked major tech components. It could shift color and heat output along with reflecting numerous forms of light, but it was meant for stealth rather than fighting. But what he gave up in combat, he gained in maneuverability.

  I slowly descended onto the roof.

  “You’re not being chased, are you?” I asked as I landed.

  “No, why did you see anyone?” He looked around curiously.

  He had on grey-green goggles, and they were probably the most high-tech thing on his person.

  “No, but last time we met, you were being chased by a horde of corpo drones. And you have that duffle back next to you.”

  “What this? These are just some of the things I brought. Just in case you were interested.”

  “I said this wasn’t about selling.”

  “I know, I know, but I do have a few things in mind if you’re curious.”

  I sighed.

  This was Tux, short for Tuxedo. He was a villain, technically. He was a tech thief, mainly targeting developed pieces of technology. He was a tinker by the rough definition of the word, but really he was just an enhanced. Enhanced was a classification of wishers who were just better. They were smarter, stronger, faster, more durable, and more capable in any way you could imagine.

  Tux here was a fifteen times enhanced individual, which meant he was fifteen times better at almost everything. He was fifteen times smarter, could run fifteen times faster, and was fifteen times as strong as a normal person. His reflexes, thought speed, memory, and calculation abilities were also on the same level.

  But enhancers had one major weakness, and that was that their abilities required an exertion. When I had made my wish, my brain had gotten rewired. It wasn’t a temporary change but an innate one. If I got my brain scanned, my results would be different from others. I ate about thirty percent more than I originally did, and I assumed that was due to my altered brain.

  Tux, on the other hand, had a limited amount of juice. He got tired if he used his powers for too long.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Well, I got some new schematics off of some old decomed military suits along with some new roach killer tech and suit OS.”

  Damn, that sounded good.

  Roach killer tech was technology used in space to kill the space roaches someone had made two hundred years ago. They lived on cosmic radiation, could get as big as a mountain and had infested our solar system. They were a big issue for the Mars colony, and they had taken over Venus.

  “Is it clean?” I asked.

  “I do not sell infected software!” He replied, feigning insult.

  I gave him a look.

  “You once sold me that helmet with-”

  “I was drunk, I was drunk, and I gave you a refund! When will you let that go?”

  I pulled out a small handheld computer and held my hand out.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Ten grand,” he replied.

  I nodded, and he handed me the drive. I plugged them into my computer and ran the programs. The suit OS was source code, and everything else was clean. Hacking nowadays was some tough stuff. Most information was communicated via trusted programs only, like Blackline and a few other file-sharing programs. Even the biggest of tech companies relied on one of the giants of the file sharing networks to encrypt and decrypt their information.

  Each of them had a quantum computer the size of a nuclear plant and were located right next to a giant nuclear plant running an immensely powerful AI algorithm.

  The whole of the internet was built around those companies, and every single one of them were routinely inspected by world governments and HU officials.

  But secure didn’t mean safe. Sure, the files were private, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t hack you. I ran the files on my own.

  I nodded begrudgingly as my antivirus did its checks. Then I sent over the cash through our blacklines.

  “Now,” I spoke as he shuffled through his bag. “What do you know about those string of crimes that happened three weeks ago?”