"I'm not joining the Wards," I said flatly.
Stepping back from me, Dad looked me in the eye. "You've wanted to be a hero since you were a little girl. I know better than to think you'll have powers and just do nothing with them."
I shrugged uncomfortably.
He scowled. "Capes don't last long on their own. A few months on average and then they are either dead or they're working for one of the villain groups. Do you want that?"
"I can't." I shook my head. "Not now...not ever."
"Why?"
Silent for a moment, I gathered my thoughts. "Shadow Stalker is one of the wards. She's also one of the girls who put me in the locker."
He stared at me, shocked into silence.
"I always wondered why they got away with everything they did to me...why the teachers looked the other way no matter how bad it got. Principal Blackwell was covering for her, on orders from the PRT."
"Maybe they just didn't know?" he asked weakly.
I snorted. "Maybe they didn't care, but that's not the only reason I can't join. You didn't ask me about my powers yet."
"You just showed me...:"
Shaking my head I said, "Who has powers like that in the wards?"
"Shadow Stalker?"
I nodded. "I steal powers...permanently. The first time was an accident. Sophia was pushing me around and I stole her power. They don't know it's me yet, but if I sign up with them it's only a matter of time."
"Who else?"
"The skinhead...right before he was hit by Glory Girl."
Dad winced.
"What do you think they'll do to someone who can steal the one thing that makes them all special?" I asked. "Being forced to join the wards is the best case scenario. It would be just as easy for me to have an "accident" while I'm being transported."
"They're heroes...they wouldn't..."
I understood his feeling of disillusionment. I'd felt it when I realized that the people I'd idolized my entire life had feet of clay. Was I overcompensating too far the other way? I couldn't be sure. It was possible that they might be sympathetic to my cause. Maybe they really hadn't known about what had happened to me.
"Even if they are, joining the Wards wouldn't keep me safe," I said.
"The gangs wouldn't attack the wards," Dad said. "That's the perfect way to get a kill order."
"What do you think the PRT would have me doing if I worked for them?" I asked. "Nobody would even need the Birdcage if I was around. One touch and the bad guy is no stronger than any other person. And I'd be stronger."
"You could make a real difference.," he said. "Change the balance of power."
"You think the villains wouldn't understand that?" I asked. "I'd be getting stronger and stronger and eventually nobody would be able to stop me. I might get to be as strong as an Endbringer. There would be no way they could stop me."
He stared at me for a long moment. "I'm not sure I see the problem with that."
"The only way to stop me would be before I had a chance to get too powerful. Capes don't usually try to kill other capes, but I'd be an exception. You don't even hear the sound of a sniper bullet before it's already dropped you. I doubt I'd survive the press release introducing me."
"You've thought about this," he said. "So what do you do?"
"Nobody can know I have this power," I said. "But there's a chance they might find out sooner or later."
Part of wanting to be a hero had been wanting the fame and acknowledgment that went with it. Working in the shadows wasn't going to work forever.
"If you start using powers that have vanished, people are going to know."
"I'm going to have to combine powers," I said. "Use them in unusual ways and make people think those are the only ways I can use them. To do that, I'll have to steal even more powers. I need money and information."
I'd already been thinking about ways to use the powers I had. With my ability to sense fear, I could detects the location of everyone in my range of several blocks who was feeling any. Other people would be invisible to me, but under the right circumstances it would be perfect.
I could even use fear to help me detect lies. That was part of what a lie detector did, after all. It wouldn't work for a sociopath or for someone who wasn't afraid of being caught out, but it would make people think I had some kind of a thinker ability.
With a little augmented strength I could launch myself in the air and then when I went into a shadow state I could jump far farther than I could with either set of powers alone.
I suspected there would be other things I could do if I thought about them long enough. Tactics and strategies would change as I gained new powers.
"So what's your plan?" he asked.
"I have to get strong enough that it's too late by the time they're realizing what's happening," I admitted. "Strong enough that nobody can stop me."
It was a daunting task. If the Protectorate got a kill order on me Legend could kill me from miles away before I even knew he was there. Alexandria could fight from a distance. Eidolon could just create a power that would put me out.
They wouldn't put me in the Birdcage. The chances of me stealing the powers of many of the strongest capes in the world and then using them to escape were too great. If they wanted me dead I needed powers to counter it, and I wouldn't find everything I needed in Brockton Bay.
It was going to require a lot of research, even as I trained myself.
"I probably need martial arts training," I said.
"You can steal their powers with a touch," Dad said. "Why would you need to know how to fight?"
Remembering the fight I'd been in with the two gang members I shuddered. I could have killed those two men; for all I knew now I had. I hadn't checked the web to find out in part because I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
"I have to touch skin," I said. "And most cape outfits don't show much. Even if they do, I have to actually hit them and I doubt they'll be sitting still. Plus, there's a lot of unpowered goons out there..."
"This is going to cost," he said. "Probably more than we have."
"There's classes at the community center for fifty dollars a month," I said. "The better schools are closer to one hundred fifty a month."
He winced. It wasn't like we were swimming in cash.
I wished suddenly that I'd taken money from the gang members I'd beaten. I hadn't thought of it at the time and didn't want to seem like a villain, but there wasn't any legitimate way I could think of to use my powers to make money.
Super strength was mostly useless in the business world; the Unions had gotten legislation preventing capes from taking union jobs.
Not that I minded; the Hebert house was staunchly pro-union.
Walking through walls seemed suited only for crime. It certainly didn't seem useful for anything else, unless I somehow started a service for people who'd left their keys in their cars.
Even if I did...didn't car doors have all sorts of electrical equipment running through them? I'd have to climb through the windows, and what would I stand on to get there? Maybe I could go through the trunk?
"I'll figure something out," I said. "Let me tell you about my other power."
I'd spent most of the day on Sunday with dad. After what had happened he hadn't felt safe letting me out of his sight, especially now that he knew I was a cape.
As though I'd go out on her own on a Sunday...hardly anything happened on Sundays.
One more day hadn't been enough to emotionally prepare me for returning to Winslow. Even with my new powers I couldn't face Emma or Sophia. If I attacked them without powers they'd have the school accuse me of being the bully.
Besides...Sophia had years of skills at fighting, even without her powers. I doubted that I'd even be able to get my hands on her.
I'd have a better chance with my powers, but the minute I revealed myself they'd call the PRT. They'd probably make me out to be attacking the school. The PRT would treat me like a school shooter, and I'd have to depower heroes if I was going to escape.
After that I probably wouldn't last a week.
My best bet would be to get incontrovertible evidence...but that would likely require me to get video footage...and that would require money, or at least some kind of a Tinker power. I might be able to sneak into Blackwell's office and look for incriminating paperwork, but I wasn't sure that she'd leave anything laying around.
I had more power now than I'd ever had, and yet was still helpless.
As I approached the school, though, I was startled to realize that I felt low levels of fear all through the school. It wasn't anything like what I'd felt during the attack on the market; it was a ghost of a sensation, but it was pervasive and there was enough of it that I could track individual people moving throughout the school.
It shouldn't have surprised me. After all, Winslow had made me afraid every day that I'd gone there. There were dozens of reasons for the other students to be afraid. I was hardly the only one to be bullied, although none of the others had been treated as badly as I had been, at least as far as I'd heard.
Even the students that weren't bullied had to deal with the gangs, with tests, with fears of being ridiculed and losing their place in the social order.
Strength was flowing into me. It certainly wasn't enough to make me a parahuman; no one person had enough fear to make much of a difference, but there were three thousand students in Winslow. Even the mere shadows of fear they were exuding added up.
I wasn't parahuman, but I was probably stronger than Sophia now.
I'd forgotten how pleasurable it was to feel the fear of others, and that worried me. It was one thing to take advantage of the fear around me to help me do things to help other people. It was something altogether to become addicted to it, to start making people fear so that I could get my next hit.
Was that how the skinhead had gotten to the point where he was robbing people in broad daylight on a Saturday morning?
Was that how Jack Slash and the Slaughterhouse Nine had gotten started?
I'd have to be careful that I didn't let any of this go to my head...and I'd have to be careful of what powers I stole. If I stole the powers of a cape with physical deformations, would that make me deformed? I could imagine myself ending up as someone like Crawler, an amalgam of several monstrous capes, growing more and more mutated and unable to live around other people.
Copying someone like Canary would give me feathers, something that wouldn't make keeping a secret identity easy.
Even someone like Lung would be problematic. He transformed whenever he got into conflict. What would happen if I was in the middle of school when Emma lit into me?
Winslow would burn to the ground.
The thought of the expression on Emma's face as I turned into a dragon was enormously tempting, but the bullet Miss Militia would undoubtedly put in my head was much less so.
So I started the school day with a sense of trepidation. Now that I knew all the teachers were intentionally contributing to my being bullied instead of just being incompetent, I felt even more trapped. It had made school even worse over the past few weeks.
It was hard for me to look at my fellow students in the eye considering that not one of them had protested my being put in the locker or even went to call a teacher. The fact that I passed out should have made at least one of them concerned.
Feeling their fear now did make me feel oddly better, though. The thought that they were all cowards instead of actively hating me didn't make me happy, but it at least made me a little more hopeful.
Nothing was done to me the first two periods, one of which I didn't even have any of my tormentors in. I'd used that time to look up the news after finishing my computer work. I was relieved to discover that I hadn't killed wither of the two Merchants on my first night out, even though I'd badly injured both of them.
As I was leaving my class, however, I felt a clump of people who had feelings of low level fear approaching me. To my surprise it was Emma, Madison and Sophia and their hangers on.
They surrounded me, and I saw Mrs. Knott look in my direction then head off in the other direction.
"Got contacts, Taylor?" Emma asked.
My eyes had been fixed by Panacea...presumably in an attempt to keep dad from suing New Wave. I looked better without my glasses, so of course Emma would have to comment on them.
"I guess I know what you spent your first paycheck on," Emma said.
"What?"
"I wouldn't have thought you were following in your mother's footsteps, Taylor," Emma said. "Becoming a villain's henchwoman."
"What?" I asked stupidly.
Julia called out, "You didn't think any of us would be at the Market when you and your bosses terrorized everyone?"
Oh.
"They literally caught you holding the bag," Madison said. "How stupid can you possibly be."
Weirdly, all of them had the same low level anxiety that I senses in almost everyone else, although I could tell they weren't anxious about this.
"Pretty clever pretending to have your dad taken hostage," Emma said. "Trying to throw attention off of you."
"So am I stupid or am I clever?" I asked peevishly.
"Pretty clever of your bosses," Emma said. "Although considering they were caught ten minutes into their big debut, I guess they were pretty stupid too."
None of them believed anything they were saying. I could tell that, and I knew they they knew. There wasn't any point in my staying around.
"I think it's important that the school knows what kind of criminal we have here," Emma said. "After all, there are innocent children at risk here."
Knowing Blackwell, she'd find some way to punish me just to keep on Sophia's good side.
"If I was really a villain's henchwoman, do you really think we'd be standing here today?" I asked. I saw Emma flinch at that, with a small increase in her anxiety and I wasn't sure why.
Sophia slammed me into a locker. "Is that supposed to be a threat?"
I'd meant that I probably would have dropped out of school, but now that she mentioned it...
"It'd mean that I had real power, not like somebody who was washed up," I whispered in Sophia's ear.
She flinched. Losing her powers had to be devastating. However, I couldn't let her know that I knew...that way would only lead to badness.
"How long has it been since you won a track meet?" I asked. "And what happens when you leave school? You aren't exactly a rocket scientist. You aren't good enough to make it in college sports and there's no way you could make it on your academic skills."
I could feel her anxiety rising at what I said, and it was like ambrosia to me. Making Sophia afraid, even a little was intoxicating
I leaned forward. "You'll be lucky if the Merchants offer you a chance to be their whore."
Sophia had only one way to deal with her fear, and that was to hit it. I knew that, and yet, buoyed by the fear I felt around me I found myself not as afraid as I once would have been.
When she punched, I punched back.
Sitting in Blackwell's office, I knew I'd gotten the worse of the fight. I was probably going to have two black eyes and I felt bruised all over, but it still wasn't as bad as my fight with the Merchants.
I was a little tougher than I should have been because of all the fear in the air, and yet I'd managed to avoid outing myself as a cape.
Sophia was going to have a black eye, however, and I wished her luck explaining it to the Protectorate. I felt a strange sense of satisfaction at that. Maybe the aggressiveness I was getting from my new powers wasn't an entirely bad thing.
"We have a no tolerance policy for bullying, Taylor," Blackwell said, frowning at me. "Or for criminal activity."
She'd spoken to the other girls at first, leaving them in a group so they could get their stories prepared before talking to me.
I chuckled bitterly. "Really? You want me to call the PRT?"
A sudden spike in her anxiety made me lean forward. Maybe the Protectorate didn't know what their errant ward was doing.
"After all, they were the ones who investigated what happened with me and cleared me. I'm going to have to talk to them again before the trial, and I'm sure they'd be happy to know that you are so...supportive."
She was actually sweating. Feeling her fear was even more intoxicating than Sophia's.
"They wouldn't be interested in schoolgirl squabbles."
"Oh?" I asked. "It was serious crimes a moment ago."
I narrowed my eyes and leaned forward. "What is it that you don't want the PRT investigating?"
"We aren't talking about me," she said quickly. "We are talking about you. Sophia would be in her rights to have you charged with assault and battery."
"She won't though," I snickered. "Because it would make her look weak. Are the gangs paying you off?"
Her anxiety lessened.
I couldn't let her think I really knew anything, but I also couldn't let her have the upper hand.
"Or are you protecting a parahuman?" I asked. Her anxiety spiked again. "You don't have as much of a poker face as you think you do."
"Blackmail is a serious crime," she said.
"Are you saying you have something to be blackmailed about?" I asked. I smirked. "I'm sure the PRT would be interested in knowing that you are shielding someone. Is it one of the girls who are bullying me?"
Her anxiety spiked even more. If I hadn't known Sophia was a parahuman before I'd have been certain of it now.
She'd been planning on expelling me, but in the end I only got one day of detention.
Even better, Sophia got the same. I was going to pay for that sooner or later, but for the moment I basked in the feeling of victory...especially when I saw the expression on her face when she learned she was going to be punished too.
Victory was sweet.
