I finally caught up with her in an alley behind the Lord Street Market. It had taken almost four days to track her down. Tattletale and her group weren't overly active or ostentatious, but luckily for me they weren't overly paranoid either.

They used the same vehicles for cape and civilian transport. They met with costumed figures while they were in civilian dress. The girl was a big spender in small tourist stores, which people tended to remember even in this city.

It wasn't so much like looking for a needle in a haystack, as a needle in a bag of sand. Not difficult to feel out, provided you were willing to risk your skin.

The girl was in her late teens, just a kid. She looked kind of small out of costume and loaded down with bags from the market. I knew from my surveillance that she had a grin she showed the world like a puppy baring its teeth. Luckily for me this one was all bark, no bite.

"Lisa."

The girl stopped and turned. She sized me up, spent a long time looking at my mask. Some people get uneasy at the sight of a smooth, featureless face, but Lisa wasn't one of them. She was assessing me, I could almost see the fireworks going off behind her eyes.

"It is Lisa, isn't it?" I asked.

"Yeah? What do you want?"

That cocky toss of her head. Either she'd already somehow worked out what this was, or she had guts of cast iron.

"I'm looking for some information," I said. "Heard you might be the one to ask."

"Someone told you to talk to me?"

"Someone told me to talk to a tattletale."

Her eyes widened, just a little. They didn't like it when you knew who they were, when you knew what was behind the mask. Surprising, given how little care so many of them take with that particular secret.

Did anyone really think a thin strip of fabric could actually hide anything? I was no artist, and even I'd been able to fill in the blanks behind Tattletale's domino mask with a pencil and a lighting reference. Someone with a surplus of resources could track down private identities without much trouble at all. Nobody did it. Nobody even suggested it. It was the kind of idea that got you demoted and ostracized.

I knew I'd played with fire by making that connection in front of her, that I could be putting myself in danger for knowing too much, but I was no stranger to that. All the fragments I'd pieced together told me she was a professional, or at least that she put on a good act, and I needed to get her attention.

I could see her muscles tense as she processed what I'd said. It looked like it was fight or flight time, but this girl didn't have the edge on me in either. I mentally prepared myself to chase her, there was no way she could get away from me on foot. Just as I thought she was about to bolt, the tension went out of her and she fixed me with a disgusted stare.

I'd approached her wearing my mask. Not a costume - just a simple precaution against casual identification. Important when your business is exposing the crimes of powerful people. Maybe it was hypocritical to hide my identity while using hers to make contact, but it wasn't my fault 'Tattletale' wasn't in the phone book.

"Shit, keep your voice down. Not here."

"Then where?" I asked. "I'm not dressed for a tea party."

She'd want to get me somewhere public, maybe even somewhere she could call the PRT. Independents like me thrived in the gray area, but I was on the suspect roster for too many break-ins and data intrusions for them to take my word over hers, not if someone called me out for harassing a 'civilian'.

"You know the coffee shop on the north end of the boardwalk?"

"Masks would get too much attention," I said. That whole strip was packed with cape tourists every day of the week. "I thought you'd want to keep this out of the public sphere."

"I meant out of costume," she said, like she was talking to an idiot.

"Nice try," I said. "No."

She turned to walk away. "Fine."

I took a step after her. I let my foot scrape against the ground as I moved, to let her hear me, to let her know I wouldn't just let her just walk away without hearing me out. She rounded on me.

"Shit, you don't even know about the unwritten rules."

"I know them," I said. "They don't apply to me."

"You're not a cape," she said, light dawning in her eyes. "Well, okay, you're a cape. You're not a parahuman."

"Bingo."

"You're just an ordinary guy. No, not totally ordinary. Martial arts training. History in law enforcement? The PRT? Discharged on health grounds. Mental illness, right? Paranoid schizophrenia?"

"Only if you believe my discharge papers."

"Fuck. You're not a cape, you're just a nut."

I smiled behind my mask. "I heard you were a smart cookie."

She sighed and I saw her relax. She thought this was over. Typical 'para' attitude. Just because I didn't slot into her world-view of enhanced humans and undifferentiated government antagonists, I was suddenly beneath her. She wasn't the first person to discount me just because I wasn't a threat.

"Listen, you're walking blind into dangerous territory," she said. Her voice was gentle, kind. "In respect to your condition, I'm gonna let it slide today. But the people I work with, the people I work for? They're not all the live-and-let-live type. Get it? If they figure out you've been harassing me, they'll come after you. If my boss finds out you know who I am -and he might already know- he'll kill you."

"Gee, I've never been threatened before."

She spent a few more seconds scrutinizing me. What was going on in that head?

"You live in a rat's hole of an apartment on the edge of the trainyard, because those tenements are the only places that'll have someone with no references and no history," she began.

I could hear venom in her voice now. This must have been why Faultline had been so touchy about her. If I'd been anyone else I might have got my feelings hurt.

"You can barely afford to eat after paying rent on your shitty box-room office, and despite having no money, no friends, no job, and no powers, you're still trying to mess around with capes. What you're doing would be suicidal for an independent cape. Doing it as a regular, powerless guy is beyond a death wish."

I interrupted her. "Question - did you get all that just from looking at me?"

I was impressed. If this girl weren't throwing around so much stolen cash, I might be offering her a job.

"I'm psychic," she said. There it was. That vulpine smile.

"If that were true, you'd be screaming by now."

The smile was still there, but it no longer reached her eyes.

"You look down on me because you think I'm powerless," I said, "but I don't accept that people are powerless just because nobody gave them a magic gun. Anyone can make a difference. Anyone can make ripples, if they thrash hard enough."

I had to deal with the para world view a lot in my line of work. Most of the time I could deal with it, but sometimes it grated.

I sighed. "You work things out, am I right? You make connections. You have some kind of super-detective power. My build, my accent, my vocabulary, my smell. It's all you need to build up a total history of me. Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains must be the truth."

Her silence was answer enough.

"Then listen to this. I've only got a couple of questions, there might even be a job in it for you, and all you have to do is hear me out. But if you keep trying to dance around me, I'm going to start talking, and then you'll work out a few things you'll wish you didn't know."

"Sorry," she said. The grin was back in full force. "You just ran out of time. Remember those people I told you about?"

Ah. She'd been stalling the whole time. The whole frightened-puppy ready-to-bolt routine had been an act. I spun on the spot, looking around. I couldn't see anyone, but that didn't mean much where capes were involved. I felt something on my leg and looked down.

Cockroaches, crawling up my pants legs. Well, that was fine. I lived with roaches, they were like pets to me. A swarm of flies began spilling from a nearby dumpster, buzzing round me in a thick black cloud. It looked like I'd drawn the wrath of some kind of bug man.

"I'm not here to fight," I said, holding up my hands at the bugs. "I need information. There's something rotten going on in city hall. I think Lisa can help."

The flies stopped in mid air, hanging still. Ah. I had someone's interest. Someone was listening.

"I think someone's setting this city up for a fall," I continued. "I need to find out who, before they make their move. If the gangs end up going head to head, it's going to be bad for everybody. Undersiders included."

The flies withdrew to mask the entrance of a girl. Tall, skinny, coming around the corner behind Lisa. She was wearing a dark hoodie, baggy enough to hide any number of concealed weapons, and was wearing some kind of gray-black mask with yellow plastic eyes.

"Shit," Lisa said, pressing a hand to her head. "He's right."

I pressed my point.

"Question - why in the fall of 2009 did the city remove all greenery from the south Docks and Trainyard residential zones, when Parks were over budget for that year?

"Question - why were the commercial strips zoned out of the residential clusters all along the west side of the city, south of Captain's Hill, only to be left derelict for two years?

"Question - why is eighty percent of the city's schools budget directed into Arcadia, leaving Winslow and Clarendon to decay into crumbling abattoirs for the mind?"

I looked at the two girls. The bug girl seemed interested, and Lisa was holding her head. She got it. I thought I might as well spell it out.

"Damaging public areas, cutting and education and outreach programs, creating ghost towns out of poor districts. These actions were all taken to actively promote gang crime. Someone's turned Brockton Bay into a machine, churning out a steady stream of dispossessed and desperate recruits for the gangs, while strangling the economy enough to put them at each others' throats and creating derelict zones for them to operate in. Social engineering on a city-wide scale. Each movement is subtle, but the pattern is undeniable."

"That's just the tip of the iceberg," I said. "Someone's pouring gasoline into the Bay, and I want to know who before they toss the match. All I need is five minutes of your time, Lisa. To show you some documents, and ask a few questions."

"No way," Lisa said forcefully, then turned to the masked girl. "Take him down already."

The girl in the hoodie turned to her. "But-"

"He's just a psycho. He won't let us leave, you've got to take him down."

I took a step forward. "When I first heard of your group, I couldn't decide if you were the Undersiders, or the Un-deciders. Both seemed to apply." A buzzing passed closed to my ear, and I resisted the urge to twitch. "You've been staying at the edges. Small jobs. Never getting involved with the gangs or drawing the attention of the police. You've been neutral so far, but you can't stay neutral."

The cloud of flies around me was steadily growing. I held up my hands and stayed my ground. "This is where you decide. If you want to leave, I can't do anything to stop you. But if you want to help, it will only take you a few minutes, and I can pay you back in return."

Lisa tossed her head again, and put a gentle hand on the bug girl's arm. They exchanged a look, some silent communication passed between them, and they turned their backs on me and started walking away. My last sight of Lisa was of her disappearing around the corner, into the crowds of the market.

I sighed. I'd played my hand, she'd played hers, and hers was better. I didn't know what bugs could do to me, but I was willing to bet finding out would be unpleasant. Even if I'd had any defense against them, there was no way I could force Tattletale to help me.

I turned and stalked away, back into the crowds flooding out of the mall. One on one, a guy with a blank face stood out, he was alarming. But in a crowd? He blended in better than you could imagine.

AN: The effects of mental illness are bad enough without also having to suffer the kind of ignorance and prejudice Tattletale demonstrated in this chapter. I wrote her dialog, but I don't condone it. Being offensive, acerbic, and taking problematic cheap shots is an unfortunate and unavoidable part of her character.