“Sooo, how’s the apartment hunt going?” Lisa asked me between bites of her Cajun-seasoned fries.

  I put my chicken tender down on my plate, dusted my fingers off, and cleared my throat.

  “Still looking sort of sporadically, but honestly, we’re not in any rush? We’ve got more space than we use, it’s sort of nice knowing that someone’s around when both of us are stuck at work all day, and Amy is very happy to have her close.”

  “Happy to have her close, huh?” Lisa waggled her eyebrows suggestively and smirked at me.

  “Yeah.”

  Lisa didn’t tend to like talking about matters involving intimate relationships as an avowed aromantic asexual. But she did like needling and teasing, so I guess her desire to poke at me won out.

  “And you…?” The smirk remained firmly entrenched on her lips. It was practically one of her default facial states. Her green eyes were sparkling in the direct overhead lighting in the booth we shared.

  I just gave her a flat look in response.

  “Week and a half, and you’re already rekindling old flames, huh?”

  I dropped my eyes to my plate and dipped a crinkle-cut fry in some ketchup. It wasn’t a secret, not that keeping secrets around Lisa was a viable long-term strategy in the first place, as the Wards were oh-so-often reminded.

  “Not even a week in, it’s like one of those best sellers for bored housewives, the kind with the oil-drenched, sweaty protagonist on the cover,” she snickered.

  I drew a figure-eight with my fry. It was one of the ones that got over-crisped, a touch darker than was desirable, with an extra crunch.

  “Less than a week?” My eyebrow twitched. I knew she had her eyes locked on me without looking. Sometimes I didn’t know how much of it was her using her power, and how much of it was her, having long since picked up all the tricks of the trade by using it.

  “Taylor, oh my god! The first night!?” There was a genuine note of scandal in her voice. As good as she was at reading people, being my best friend for these past years since meeting her, I’d also picked up my fair share of people-reading skills.

  I shot her an annoyed look when I made eye contact with her. It was less than I was irritated and more than I knew that she was going to wind up hitting herself with the overshare machine effect of her ability. I might have been lying to myself, just a little bit. A touch of self-comforting.

  “You’re not having a relapse, are you?” The teasing tone was back.

  I picked up a burnt piece of potato and flicked it over the table, aiming for her neckline. She laughed and swatted it out of the air like a cat playing with a string toy.

  Lowering my voice, I harshly whispered across the table, “I don’t have a sex addiction, you– menace!”

  College had been an interesting time for me– a conflation of several different, competing factors. I’d been able to experience what independent adulthood was like earlier than most, having run away from home at sixteen to become a villain. Some of the various allures that college students were typically drawn to weren’t quite the same for me. At the same time, I was figuring out a whole lot of new things for myself.

  My Human Plus Patch had kicked my ass pretty hard in the previous years. I’d made progress on my body dysmorphic disorder. Morgan had given me a quick, dirty, and substantial kick in the ass, and then I’d followed up with years of working with Jessica Yamada following her passing. I’d gone from the beanpole that I’d more or less come to terms with being stuck as by that point, to someone with the attributes I’d envied in others. It was a hard pendulum swing, and one that had caused its own share of issues.

  There was the experience of reintegrating with in-person classes after doing online classes to graduate high school. That was nice, but also spiked my anxieties about being in learning institutions. Exposure therapy and realizing that things wouldn’t be the same as before helped immensely. I found myself actually looking forward to attending lectures, and maybe even more shocking–meeting new people. I suppose there was an element of hormones present there as well, influencing things, as it was not just my view of myself that had changed, but also my opinion of other people.

  Girls, specifically.

  Having the benefit of hindsight, I suppose it was probably somewhat obvious that I’d been obtuse about things. My first crush and the person I’d lost my virginity to was Brian, before I’d left the Undersiders. I’d been head over heels at the time, and convinced that I was the straightest person who’d ever lived. Things with Brian had been nice. Now with experience under my belt, I realized that a big part of my crush on Brian had been because he’d simply shown me personal attention and kindness when I’d been hopelessly starved of both things in my life.

  It also helps that he’s a quite attractive and fit guy. I wasn’t exclusively into girls; there was an odd handful of other guys I’d fooled around with and/or briefly dated. The thing was, most of them wound up having difficulties with interpersonal dynamics with me, in or out of bed. Mostly cases of square pegs and triangular holes, and I’d sort of grown tired of how often insecurities translated into anger, vitriol, or bigotry.

  Girls weren’t a magical fix-it solution. I still had compatibility issues, but in my experience, there had been less focus on physical attributes and more on personalities and chemistry. I might be biased, of course. I had a sort of vibe about me, one that I’d embraced with my fashion and subcultural choices. Some people were drawn to it, and to me, in general.

  It’d been hard at first. I started getting people’s attention in a pretty big way in freshman year at BBU, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I’d been told that I had magnetic confidence and grace. If people only knew the truth of the matter. Some not-insignificant portion of my attention and perception of the world was distributed and enabled by my swarm-sense, or ability to connect with and track individual insects through three-dimensional space, even if they weren’t in my line of sight. So I always knew where things were, and for the most part, where I was going, without having to really pay all that much attention to it.

  I also had the ability to push my emotions out into the insects in my range. To diffuse them by sharing out the load and distracting myself by putting a larger percentage of my attention on my bugs. After explaining it to her, Jessica had told me it was a coping mechanism, and wasn’t healthy to do too often, but was situationally useful. So things like feeling embarrassed giving a presentation in front of class, or by someone asking for my number, or feeling frustrated or angry with someone’s behavior were things I could selectively let roll off me like water off a duck’s back. Thus, I projected confidence.

  Funny how perception worked. People saw it as me being rock-steady and unflappable. In reality, I was hiding from my feelings by pushing them into millions of tiny insects, just about the exact opposite of what people thought. I wouldn’t deny the benefits, or that I liked having this reputation at work.

  In any case, I’d slept around when I started getting into the swing of things at college. Perhaps overly so. I’d talked with Amy about it–we’d been dating for quite a while by this point–and she’d made herself clear. She was my girlfriend, and I hers. Other people were okay, provided they didn’t interfere or affect us. That was never a problem, not one bit.

  Lisa had started teasing me about hypersexuality when my reputation got around to her ear. It didn’t take long. It was complete bullshit. I’d double-checked with Jessica about it more than once. I didn’t have an addiction, and it didn’t interfere with my daily life, job, or ability to hold stable relationships. It was just… something I liked doing, quite a lot.

  I blame the fact that I was isolated, alone, ostracized, and that I absolutely hated the way I thought I looked during the time when most people would be doing these sorts of things. I had my sexual awakening at a later age than most. It was awkward, but so was I during those years. Painfully so. Now? Now it was… almost like another language for me. It filled a need for physical contact and connection to others, it was fun, and I’d made a handful of real friends along the way.

  “Earth to Taylor, your tendies are getting cold while you stare at them. Or are you busy doing something else?” I glanced up to see Lisa gesturing vaguely at the air above her head.

  “Mm. No. Reminiscing about college, thanks to you,” I flashed my tongue piercing at her.

  “Pft, bite me!” She shot back.

  I mimed taking a bite of an invisible turkey leg with both hands, and she stuck her tongue out and made like she was going to hurl on the table with a sarcastic snicker. She held off on doing her rather convincing dry-heave sounds.

  It wouldn’t do to act out too much in the PRTHQ cafeteria. We weren’t Wards anymore, and we had image standards to uphold.

  I resumed eating my chicken tender. The ones they had here were lightly spiced with black pepper and what I suspected was cayenne. A little bit of zest and just a touch of heat in the crispy batter. They were surprisingly good, but the PRT didn’t skimp on the food budget, either. Or, at least, our PRT didn’t. Someone in the East Northeast administration recognized the benefit and value of having actual food. Visits to other offices had demonstrated that it was a bit of a mixed bag. Either food that qualified as edible or a strong suggestion by other capes and officers to utilize the per diem card.

  Lisa, or Insight, travelled more than I did. She wasn’t officially a member of the spooky Internal Affairs department, but she did consult for them several times a year to help root out rats, spies, crooked officers, foreign agents, and capes who were double-dealing or otherwise up to no good.

  Insight was extremely good at what she did, and the bonuses she got paid for her little excursions were very lucrative. I’d told her she should get into doing IA work full-time at one point, but she insisted that she’d go insane being largely cooped up in offices. So it was the working cape life for her. I liked to tease her that she’d fall flat on her face without me to bounce her ideas and theories off.

  Thinking about it, she probably didn’t have a ton of other friends she was really all that close to. She insisted she was a misanthrope, but I had my doubts.

  Lisa took a sip of her soft drink. “So, besides that subject, are things going well? Is she still having trouble acclimating?”

  I drummed the fingernails of one hand on the table and thought about how I wanted to put this.

  “I’m a little concerned about her. Besides the memory issues and the… personality differences, you know?”

  Lisa popped a fry in her mouth and rolled her hand, motioning for me to continue while she ate.

  “Well, I’ve talked to Dragon a little about it, she said that I could be noticing oddities related to the abnormal structure of her brain, and that there wasn’t really a good playbook to operate off from. Nothing I’ve seen has really been anything alarming, and I don’t think she’s any danger to herself or others, but…”

  I let out a small sigh.

  “But what?”

  “Some of the things I’ve seen her doing are just strange, Lisa. I mean, she’s a little strange and a little different from what I remember. Part of me wants to say that it’s some kind of developmental challenge, or to try and relate to what I might be like if I were missing chunks of my memory and my brain was all… weird.”

  Lisa scooped up a few more fries and popped them in her mouth, wiped her fingers on a napkin, then leaned back to rest against the backrest of the booth, with her arms crossed. I recognized it as a thinking mode pose. I took a bite of my tender and waited for her to respond. The barbecue sauce in the little round individual serving cups was sweet and smoky, with a hint of acidic tartness. Very good paired with this chicken.

  “Can you give me any examples? Have any of it recorded?” Lisa asked after a beat.

  I nodded and pulled out my personal phone. It was linked to my home security system, which had cameras and sensors all over the place, and could pull up recorded footage. I’d made a few timestamp notations on specific cameras already, because my curiosity had gotten the better of me. I’d given her access to the entire apartment, but I’d been concerned when I’d reviewed some of the activity logs in the lair part of the apartment.

  I spoke as I went through the multi-step authentication process of remotely logging into the system, and started to pull the relevant parts that had my attention. “Well, you know she’s weird about sleeping, and consulting with both Amy and her sister, that’s consistent with how she used to be. Guess she suffered from regular night terrors ever since her trigger event, which, you know, is totally understandable. It’s normal for her to be sort of twitchy and active in bed while she’s asleep, but sometimes she gets up in the middle of the night.”

  I flagged one video, then went looking for the next while I continued. “Amy sleeps like a log. I’m a lighter sleeper, and sometimes she wakes me up getting in and out of bed. Two nights ago, she got up around three AM and went to the other room. I nodded off, then was woken up around four by weird sounds. So I went to check on her and make sure everything was alright.”

  I looked up from my food to make eye contact with Lisa, who was listening very attentively. “She was reading, but not… normally? She had several piles of books neatly stacked on the coffee table. From what I could tell, she was taking them from the bookshelf, from left to right, top to bottom. She had one of my literature class books on her lap and was just paging through it, like flipping a page every second. That’s what had woken me up, the consistent sound of it. Flip, flip, flip.”

  “Huh. I assume that you keep her tagged?”

  Tagging was a thing I’d learned very early on, back in my Undersiders days. I can sense where bugs are and use them to percieve shapes and locations, and in the case of typical household insects, I can get a pretty good mental map of a building or structure. So the logical next step was to start using insects on people to track their location and movements. It was surprising how effective it was, and I only needed a bit over a dozen insects to have a good ‘wire frame’ model of someone.

  Some people naturally carried around parasites that I could sense, things like fleas, lice, and other, less savory sorts. I couldn’t rely on that, though, so I’d often use small flying insects to carry even tinier insects to deposit on people. Tiny data points for me, and my power allowed me to keep track of all of them without paying close attention to what I was doing. It was like breathing for me at this point.

  “She could be sleepwalking; people can do some pretty complex activities in that state,” Lisa offered.

  “Well, I talked with her, briefly?”

  Lisa rocked her head from side to side. “Mm, less common, but still not a dealbreaker on the sleepwalking. What’d you talk about?”

  “I asked her what she was up to, and she said she was reading. I asked her if she was having trouble sleeping, and she said no. Which was odd? If she needed anything, she didn’t, and if she was going to come back to bed when she was done, she said yes.”

  “Okay, so, short answers to simple questions, not entirely sensical answers. Did it look like she was actually reading to you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. She flipped the page, scanned down one, then the other, then rinse and repeat. Oh! I did say that wasn’t the normal way most people read, too.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “And?”

  I chuckled. “She said she was not a normal person.”

  Lisa snickered and broke into a wide grin at that. “Ain’t that the truth?” She glanced down at my phone. “What else do you have for me?” I handed it over to her with two videos queued.

  “I don’t know. Now that we’re talking about it, I sort of feel like I’m overthinking things and being one of those people talking about her behind her back like this.”

  Lisa made a tsk sound at me, then watched both video clips, which were only a couple of minutes long.

  She passed the phone back over to me, and I stuck it back in my pants. “Well, in one video I see a girl who looks like she’s 90 pounds soaking wet demolishing a whole pizza and order of wings by herself in the middle of the night, which, while impressive, sorta says more ‘stress eating’ than it does anything else. I imagine she’s probably feeling a lot of pressure, even if it’s mostly in her head.”

  I let out a soft sigh and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I have to agree with that take.”

  Lisa pursed her lips and glanced upwards. “The second video is admittedly pretty strange. Did she go through and sample everything in the kitchen and fridge?”

  “Yeah. Everything. I think that’s what put me down this path in the first place, because seeing someone take a swig of olive oil, a spoonful of shortening, and a spoonful of raw flour pretty much back-to-back made my skin crawl. And you know I have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing.”

  “Okay. I think that’s a little too deliberate to be a sleepwalking thing. Was that a tin of cloves she munched on like breath mints?”

  I made a face, confirming her suspicion.

  “That’s intense. Talk about morning breath from hell!” She straightened up a little in the booth and adopted her real talk face, the one that often came out when dealing with the Wards. “So, I agree that it’s odd, but besides the slim chance of getting E. coli poisoning from raw flour, I don’t know that it’s harmful? Have you tried just talking to her about it?”

  I shook my head. “No, I haven’t. I’ve been thinking about it, though. I wish I had more vacation time to try and spend with her, but Amy and I try to keep a rainy-day fund, in case anything goes sideways. And admittedly…”

  Lisa cut in. “Admittedly, you suck at separating work and life?”

  “Well, yeah,” I huffed. “But there’s also shit going on, too, and I want to stay apprised of what’s happening, as it develops, and not days or weeks after the fact, when I’m trying to juggle four other things at the same time.”

  I finished up my last few bites of lunch, then wrapped my fingers around my paper coffee cup.

  “Something else on your mind?” Lisa asked after picking at the remains of her meal.

  “Mhm. We got another batch of missing person reports from BBPD. It’s bothering me some, I can’t help but think…” I let the sentiment linger in the air between us.

  “Yeah, I’ve been working on that myself. I know Haven’s investigating it as well, although there’s no telling how seriously they’re taking it.”

  Haven, ugh.

  Haven was one of a few corporate teams that had moved into Brockton Bay. Haven was the All-American, Good, Christian team. They had big-budget PR departments and even bigger pockets for lobbying in Washington. They weren’t technically able to perform law enforcement duties, but that technicality didn’t get brought up very often. They, like several other bigger-name corporate teams, tended to operate in a similar area that bounty hunters did, except that, unlike most bounty hunters, they had significant political clout to throw around.

  In the two years since they opened a branch and started operating out of Brockton Bay, they’d been a fairly consistent thorn in the PRT’s side. You’d think that we were ostensibly on the same ‘side’ as it were, but they were more interested in trying to arrange positive PR events for their teams, and so, weren’t overly keen on full cooperation.

  Often, this took the form of not sharing data that would be particularly useful or relevant to our investigations. Or letting things progress to a point where it would make for a better story for the shareholders, rather than the more boring rank-and-file sorts of ‘police work.’

  I glanced around the half-filled cafeteria to scope for wandering eyes, then scrunched up my face in Lisa’s direction.

  She let out a snort in response. Although we weren’t supposed to badmouth the corporate teams in the city, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between us. The Director asked that we take the high road and act professionally, and take our complaints to our management, behind closed doors. I trusted her judgment on the matter.

  “You trailed off. Were you going to say something else, or just lost in thought?” Lisa asked me.

  “Maybe a little bit of both things,” I admitted. “I was going to say that I’m worried that there are more missing people that are going under-reported, or not reported at all. With the homeless situation on the outskirts, there’s no telling.”

  Homelessness was a pretty major problem in Brockton Bay. As much as the city and various companies rushed to stand up affordable housing, the massive influx of people over the past several years had property values and rental prices soaring, and we never were able to fully get ahead of the curve from all the people who’d lost their homes from the Leviathan tsunamis. More often than not, the appeal of living in Cape Central outweighed common sense, and people would have an unexpected expense, medical accident, or similar and wind up out of work and homeless.

  Heading due west from downtown, once you get to the city’s outer limits, that’s when you start hitting the tent cities and shantytowns. Temporary housing had been a fact of life since Leviathan in the city, and the arrangements and locations varied from acceptably habitable to downright ugly. Conservative estimates had the count at twenty-five thousand people; more aggressive counts said it could be as high as three times that number. We’d be one of the top cities in the nation for homelessness in either situation, one of several on the East Coast that made the top five.

  A significant portion of the homeless were people doing day laborer jobs. Many were waiting on housing to become available or were already wait-listed. There were portions of the cities where homes were significantly over capacity, and landlords were packing people in spaces like they were old-time navies, with people stacked almost on top of each other in hammocks. It was ghoulish, but debatably better than living in a tent under sheet metal roofing-covered shelter areas. You were stuck with communal bathrooms in both situations.

  It went without saying that the outskirts of the city had both significantly higher crime rates and major substance abuse problems. Desperate people looking for ways of improving their situation, be it through the rapid acquisition of wealth or escapism.

  These were, for the most part, BBPD and Social Services issues, and not PRT and cape issues. We occasionally would get requests for additional backup or to act as deterrents for periods of social unrest, but the PRT was always concerned about optics. And for good reason, too. Elsewhere in the world, anti-government sentiment could rapidly transition into anti-parahuman sentiment when the government overly relies on parahumans to solve social and systemic issues. We didn’t want that here.

  “You know, there’s a really good person you could talk to about that. Get a better feel for things, maybe an inside scoop.”

  I tilted my head a little as I thought about who Lisa might be referring to. Her lips rapidly transitioned from a smirk to a shit-eating grin.

  Does she mean…?

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I deadpanned back at her.

  She just slow-shrugged and spread her hands out widely. “Just saying, construction hires a lot of day laborers, and you know how people talk while they’re at work, doing manual labor-type stuff.”

  I squinted at her and tossed back the remainder of my coffee. “I’ll think about it. I have another housecall I need to go make today, official unofficial.

  Code for civilian clothing, but still handling PRT-related business. Most capes didn’t do plainclothes work, but it was entirely impossible for Amy and I–and most of the other early members of Brockton Strong–to keep our civilian identities secret. People talked, and money walked. My life had been hell for a solid three-month period after the tabloids picked up the stories, and it was all over the front page of PHO, always trending.

  Teenage Bullying Victim Turned Supervillainess

  Nerd Rages, Goes Nuclear!

  Rap Music and Devil Worship: Inner City America

  Admittedly, some of the tabloid articles and rumors were pretty funny to read about, after the fact. The concept that I’d become a super villain because I supposedly listened to gang rap and wore dark clothing was pretty damn funny. I had a goat skull pentagram tattoo on one shoulder for the irony.

  Plus, it looked really cool.

  I brought my palms to rest on the table and prepared to get up, lunch over and done with. “And what about you, Insight? Any plans for the rest of the afternoon, or do you want to go buddy-cop this with me?”

  She stuck out the tip of her tongue at me, and the freckles on her cheeks danced as she grinned widely. “I’ve got training scheduled with the Wards this afternoon. Going to be doing some analysis on their tactics and team dynamics and offer them some free pointers.” The mirth carried through to her voice. “Don’t have too much fun without me, though!”

  I knew that she liked her adopted role of sort-of cape mom for the Wards. And they liked her, too. She was good at handling them more informally than some of the other members of the Protectorate. Even though a lot of what she did was on the same page as Director Piggot, the way she went about doing things mattered more to the Wards.

  I carried my tray over to the waste bins, then headed to the locker rooms. When I wasn’t in costume at the office, I tended to dress in my own take on business casual, which often involved slacks and button-down shirts. For what I was doing, and where I was going, I’d just wear my street clothing. I didn’t want to draw too much attention.

  A few texts later, I pulled out of the underground parking and hopped on the highway to the northwest part of the city. Not terribly far from where I’d grown up, same direction, just further out, and a bit further north. Downtown turned into inner-city-adjacent, then into mixed commercial and residential. Expensive places, more than a touch gentrified, with eateries, local parks, and gastro-pubs galore. The quality and property value of houses continued to decline as I approached the outskirts, and there were the odd industrial-zoned building and vacant lots here and there.

  I pulled into my destination and killed the engine, taking a moment to give myself a once-over using the sun visor mirror and to mentally prepare myself.

  It also gave me time to collect, organize, and mobilize a small swarm. I wasn’t expecting to have to use it, but after years of doing this now, I knew better than to walk into a potentially dicey situation with my pants down.

  I was armed, of course. My ever-present pepper spray and a more-reliable-than-most folding knife tucked away out of sight, and I had my concealed carry handgun against my lower back. The gun was primarily for violent criminals of the unpowered variety. The knife, spray, and swarm were enough to handle most run-of-the-mill parahumans.

  I didn’t like to talk myself up, but I was pretty good at what I did when it came down to getting into a physical confrontation. I had the scars to prove it.

  I put on a pair of aviators, gave myself a toothy smile, then flipped up the shade and stepped out of my car, silently locking it and arming the security systems behind me.

  I was parked behind an old bottling plant, which was maybe five or ten years out of service. It wasn’t in terrible condition, all things considered. Sort of a rough neighborhood, with a tall chainlink fence and barbed wire surrounding the lot. The gate had been left open for me, and I was expected.

  I walked up to the door, glanced up at the boxy, armored security camera, and waved with one hand. There wasn’t a response. I thumbed the door buzzer and intercom and waited.

  Thirty seconds or so passed, and then a man’s voice came over the speaker with a background buzz of static. “Who is it?”

  I pressed the intercom button when the speaker clicked off. “You know who it is; we have an appointment.”

  “Going to need to see some ID, and not the easy-to-fake kind,” the voice came back, slightly snippy.

  I sighed and glanced up at the camera once again, and pressed the button. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  I rolled my eyes behind the glasses and pulled out a black, rectangular puck from my jeans pocket. I held it up, one face pointed at the camera, and pressed the button on the side. The glow of my PRT holo-badge was visible from this side, and in the reflection of the tempered glass on the front of the camera.

  A moment later, the door buzzed. I pulled it open and stepped inside to cool air conditioning and a slightly musty-smelling receiving office. I could hear thumping footsteps overhead, and a moment later, my contact stepped in.

  An average height man wearing a lab coat with a near-total rainbow hue of various stains on the white fabric. He was thin, with short, frizzy brown hair, dark brown eyes, dark rings around his eyes, and the noticeable smell of reefer.

  Rey Andino, cape name: Blasto. A biological tinker and medical school dropout. Early thirties, although he looked older than he was, probably because he, like many other tinkers, tended to neglect anything resembling self-care. It wasn’t entirely their fault. Most tinkers would get struck by inspiration somewhat randomly and go into a creative fugue state with varying levels of intensity, where they’d often forget to eat, sleep, bathe, or handle other non-essential biological functions. Everyone was slightly different; some weren’t impacted as badly, for others it was a manic, compulsive behavior until they finished what they were working on, or worse.

  I took off my sunglasses, tucked one arm into the neckline of my tee, and extended a hand to Rey. He made eye contact, looked at my hand, back up at me, hesitated, then eventually took my hand and shook it. I shot him a genuine smile.

  “Hey, Rey. A bit overdue for our meeting, I wound up taking a brief vacation on short notice.”

  He nodded and gestured with his hand to a dilapidated, but fairly comfortable-looking couch against one wall. I momentarily glanced around with my ability and took the offered seat. I was relatively sure that we were alone, with the exception of some of his creations. Notable by the presence of fur on mostly humanoid body shapes. I still tagged them, regardless, as they moved around quietly upstairs and elsewhere in the bottling plant.

  Rey pulled out a high-backed desk chair and moved it in front of the couch, sitting on it backwards and resting his forearms on the back. “Hey, no worries. Shit happens, you know how it goes. Sorry about the paranoia, but you can’t be too careful with Strangers and Changers running around out there.”

  He reached into his lab coat and fetched a box of cigarettes and a lighter. He had the courtesy to offer me a smoke, and then a blunt, but I refused both. I waited while he lit up and took a few drags from his cigarette.

  Rey was, for lack of a better term, one of my pet projects. He was an independent villain with some loose affiliations with a larger villain group here in the city. Originally from Boston, he’d migrated to Brockton Bay not too long after we’d started making progress on restoring power to the city, and had kept a fairly low profile throughout. He created genetic mashup creatures that usually had some blend of mammal, plant, and human DNA. Some had a degree of intelligence; all could be commanded through various means, and all were sterile.

  I kept tabs on him, we chatted and shared data–usually in the form of me greasing his palms–and he would oblige from time to time to allow verification that he wasn’t breaking any of the big no-no rules. In exchange, we got bits and pieces of intel about the underworld, usually stale, but occasionally still useful for context. That, and we looked the other way about his involvement in selling ‘arms’ in the form of his creations.

  He wasn’t going around and attacking people or committing crimes directly, outside of the intermittent self and property defense incidents. His creations weren’t technically governed under arms manufacture and distribution laws, so he got to sit in a gray area. He’d been involved in some bigger-name crimes back in Boston, but since he’d separated with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Bad Apple, he’d mellowed out. In exchange for not breathing down his neck too much, we got the occasional early tipoff that something bigger was going down, especially when it had the potential for a lot of collateral damage.

  He was very distrustful of Big Brother and The Man, but was seemingly content enough with me or Insight talking to him. We were sort of rather notorious criminals once upon a time, and these visits were off the record. Making contact and inroads had been initially difficult, but we finally got it through to him that we weren’t just looking to set him up for a bust.

  We chatted about recent events from the past two months. I inquired about the disappearances, but he wasn’t in the know about them, outside of routine news report stuff.

  One curious point did come up when I was getting ready to leave.

  “I heard a rumor, through the grapevine,” He’d ventured.

  “Oh?” I asked. It wasn’t too strange for Rey to make his own data inquiries, but it wasn’t a regular thing.

  He spun his cheap plastic lighter between his fingertips and gave me an appraising look. “I can’t help but notice that your vacation lined up with some chatter I heard, wild stuff, not entirely sure I believe it, you know?”

  I crossed my arms, one ankle over my knee, sneaker bouncing in the air. “You know I prefer the direct and simple route of doing things, Rey. Just come out with it already.”

  That got a lopsided grin out of him, and he chuckled. “Fair enough. Some people prefer to drag it out, make a game of things. The story is that a distinctive-looking woman has shown up in town. Oculocutaneous albinism vibes, you know? Like, all-white?”

  I kept my voice level and my face straight. A nod, and a half-interested “Mhm?”

  “Yeah, normally, that sort of thing is sort of whatever, right? Thing is, she showed up in one of Damsel’s stomping grounds, supposedly talked some shit to her face in a way that most people–sane people–wouldn’t. And, the strangest part? She supposedly has a strong resemblance to a big-name figure.”

  “Who specifically? Do you know?”

  His grin grew a little wider. “Melody Rivera. Eclipse.”

  Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. We knew this was going to get out sooner or later. Do I want to confirm it to him? Possible that he is in direct contact with Damsel of Distress, and Morgan did use her first name with Damsel.

  Hmm.

  I didn’t have to think it over for long. Chances were, she’d been ID’ed already, and the info was out there, and he could be fishing for reactions from me. There was some risk associated with telling him the truth, but at the same time, that risk shrank daily as she continued to live and exist in the city. It was ultimately inevitable that she got outed at some point.

  I licked my lips and held eye contact with him.

  I told him, as I would state a simple fact, “Morgan Rivera is alive.”

  His eyes grew marginally wider with the statement.

  He hadn’t known, or hadn’t believed it to be true. Unfortunate.

  He paused playing with his lighter, and his brows drew together. “But wait– I was under the impression that her body had disintegrated, and there wasn’t anything left that was useful?”

  I nodded curtly. It wasn’t a memory I was fond of revisiting. I’d been over it enough over the years, though, so the sting wasn’t quite the same as it had been. “That’s correct.”

  “So it’s not a copycat parahuman? Someone playing games, but…” He trailed off, rubbing his stubble-covered chin with one hand. His eyes were still pointed in my direction, but he wasn’t looking at me, his mind no doubt running 800 miles per hour with other theories.

  “So, wait, that was Apex who wasn’t taking Damsel’s shit? I mean, I guess there’s something to be said for arrogance, but that seems uhh… short-sighted?”

  I pulled in a lungful of air through my nostrils, then sighed. “Yes, it was, and she didn’t know who Damsel was, besides another woman with a similar appearance.”

  Rey paused for a moment, and his eyes focused on me. “It’s probably a very good thing that Damsel didn’t know who she was, either. You know how she is when it comes to meeting other capes.”

  “Pft, yeah, that’s the truth. You can just call her what she is, a clout chaser. And I don’t say that to belittle her, that’s just an accurate description of her behavior.”

  Damsel of Distress was, to put it bluntly, a legend in her own mind. She was absurdly egomaniacal. What PHO would call a C-list villain, she had an incredibly destructive ability: she could fire energy blasts from her hands that vaporized nearly any matter instantly. It also generated a powerful recoil thrust when she used it, was barely-controllable, and a hazard to virtually everyone around her, save for herself.

  She wanted to be a world-famous villain, but her ability bordered on useless in terms of useful application. She was more of a menace to public property than she was anything else.

  Damsel was also being directly subsidized by the PRT, which paid for her secret lair and ransoms, which were mostly threats to destroy various landmarks. In her mind, she was extorting us. In reality, we were making sure she had a place over her head, groceries, and some pocket money so she didn’t feel the need to try and rob a bank or something.

  Like Blasto, we kept regular tabs on Damsel of Distress. She seemed mostly content to talk shit on local PHO boards, play dress-up villain a few times a month, and attend some honestly helpful social events in her totally-not-obvious civilian identity, Ashley Stillons.

  Riley Davis, formerly Bonesaw, and one of the creative geniuses over at Ambrosia, had made some prototype schematics of cybernetics that had the potential to allow Damsel to make something of herself and her ability. We’d talked to her about it and told her we’d be willing to give her assistance, but only on condition that she give up her desire of being #1 Top Villain USA. To date, she hadn’t taken the offer, but it remained outstanding.

  Rey had seemed like he was busy musing over something as well, and had been quiet since I’d spoken last. He broke the momentary silence before I had the chance. “So why haven’t we seen Apex? I’d have to think that people would celebrate and do a backflip if she turned back up. Although the conspiracy theorists would probably have a field day. Wait…” He looked back at me with his attention sharply focused.

  “You’re in communication with her, aren’t you?”

  I gave him another quick nod. “She’s…” I thought about how I wanted to put it. “She’s been given the rare opportunity to be able to walk away from the life cleanly, you know? I don’t know if she fully recognizes that, but right now, she’s trying to figure herself out. See what she wants to do in the future, maybe take up a civilian life, or something.”

  Rey drew in air like he was about to say something, but he seemingly changed his mind mid-thought. Instead, he sighed, his shoulders slumped, and he just looked exhausted. “Yeah. Yeah. It is rare to be able to just walk. Start a family, raise some kids, take up gardening, no sweating over loose ends and looking over your shoulder at every shadow. I don’t know what I’d do in that situation. It’s not that I don’t love this…” He waved a hand to one side and then above his head. “...but it comes with strings attached, doesn’t it? The good old Faustian bargain. Power, but at what cost?”

  He rummaged around and pulled out another cigarette, lit it, and looked out one of the blind-covered windows. Almost absent-mindedly, he asked, “If she ever does get back into these things, you think you could arrange a meet? I’m pretty sure samples are out of the question, but getting a close look at her anatomy alone would be worth it.”

  I couldn’t help it; my poker face slipped, and I snickered at him. He gave me a hurt look for a brief moment, then blinked.

  I slapped my thigh with one hand. “Hey girl, let me see that anatomy up close.”

  He clapped a palm to his face and groaned. “Not like that! You know what I meant! Ugh, it really does sound pretty bad out of context.”

  I stood up and stretched my shoulders and back. The sofa was soft and comfy, but the support just wasn’t there. “Well, Rey, with that, I’ll split out of here. It was good talking, and I’d appreciate it if you kept that to yourself, at least until some major news outlet covers it or an announcement is made, or something.”

  He looked up at me with a glint in his eye and the hint of a smirk teasing his lips. “Will it get me a good word in?”

  “I’ll tell you what, you keep quiet, and I’ll see about making a connection if she does get back in the cape business, but no promises. What I will promise is that I won’t tell her that you were testing out pickup lines that would make your average PHO user cringe. Deal?”

  He squinted at me for several long moments, then offered a hand up to me. “Hard bargain as usual, Skitter, but I’ll take what I can get.”

  We shook on it.