I'm on my way to the library a few days after my meeting with the city officials when I decide against going out with the Travelers again. We worked fine together but it seemed like they had a very specific team dynamic and I'm not sure where I would've fit within it. That, and I'm not sure if they'd still want to work with me, what with the whole crippling thing.

After I arrive at Brockton Public, I check out a book on anatomy. Most of it goes over my head but I pick up a few useful pieces of information. Don't hit the thighs, those have big blood vessels in them that can bleed people out fast. Concussions and head wounds in general are serious business. I'll have to cut down on the clubs to the side of the head. A broken jaw tends to be non-fatal and extremely debilitating, as are broken teeth. Club the front of the head, then. Don't stab people in the chest unless you want to kill them, so fewer needles. Sharp blades hurt less than dull ones. That doesn't make any sense to me, but cutting people up seems more like a villain thing anyway so I'll do my best to avoid it in general.

I'm pretty sure that educating a hero on how best to hurt people was not what the author intended when they wrote "Emergency Trauma and Injuries for Dummies" but I think minimizing harm is still an acceptable use for the text.

Dad and I share a quick dinner of take out pizza. We don't say much, but it's that nice kind of silence where neither of us thinks anything needs to be said rather than the silence of neither of us knowing what to say. After the food is gone and the box is in the trash we exchange our quiet nightly farewells, and I head up to my room for a quick nap.

I wake up and check my new burner phone. Eleven oh three. Not as long as I could've slept but my alarm clock is still broken. At some point I'll need a new one of those. Something to do with my new-found wealth perhaps.

I go to Dad's door and listen closely. Deep, even breathing. Early to bed and early to rise. Before I leave I take the time to make sure my window can be unlatched from the outside. No more creaking steps. I armor up, slip out the door, and start heading to one of the addresses that Tattletale gave me, cross-referenced with the other sites the Travelers have hit without me to make sure I go to a live target.

The sliver of moon doesn't do much to illuminate the night, and the street lamps are flickering at best. I add night-vision goggles to my list of things to buy. Not sure if I can find any that are also one half of a prescription lens and fit under a reasonable mask but who knows? Maybe there's some reverse-engineered Tinkertech I can get my hands on.

I stop on a rooftop a block away from my destination and force myself to plan. I don't have Trickster to feed me gang members anymore so I'll need to be either way more mobile or way more subtle than I was when I did this with the Travelers. I can always go from subtle to mobile when necessary, so how do I start out being stealthy with bones? Hang above people, maybe, or a bone gag from behind to muffle noises. That doesn't stop the noise I make though, and it doesn't make me any less visible.

Ugh. I examine at my target as I wrack my brain. An old, roofed dry-dock, a lot bigger than the packaging house, probably abandoned when the shipping industry started dying. I have no idea what's inside but chances are it's nothing pleasant. I can see some small boats moored next to the street, tied to large trucks with wooden boxes in the back.

It's also surrounded by Asian thugs in red and green.

Two guards with big, worn-looking assault rifles are at every door, and they speak briefly into walkie-talkies about every five minutes. The same rust-red pickup truck keeps driving around the area in a semi-random pattern, with a girl sitting in the bed next to a long object covered by a tarp. A frontal assault would mean wading through a lot of bullets, and I'm not sure I trust my armor that much.

They have guns and manpower, and I have bones. What do bones have on bullets and people? Quantity, medical applications, superior close-range combat, organic versus inorganic, intimidating, lighter, they let me move faster...

Nothing that gives me an advantage in sneaking.

I snap a toe in frustration. How do I approach without tipping them off? Bone white armor isn't exactly the most inconspicuous thing in the world. Maybe if I covered myself with something? Black spray paint? It's an idea for the future, but right now I don't think there's a Home Depot open at midnight waiting for a Rogue to come by and pick up some paints. Burrowing? Yeah, through asphalt and concrete with bone.

I look around the environment for any weaknesses but the ABB have picked a good spot. There aren't even any convenient nearby rooftops. Maybe find a manhole cover and go in through the sewers? Nah, I have no idea what the sewage system looks like. I'd be more at risk of getting lost down there than anything else.

I look at a wastewater pipe emptying into the bay. Maybe I can go through the pipe? I shake the idea out my head almost as soon as I have it. Apart from having to bathe in waste on my way in, I can't imagine there are many openings large enough for me inside the building, even if I could figure out which ones go into the hideout.

Then I look at the sea again. Maybe...

Humans are naturally buoyant, but bones aren't. It still take a bit to make a snorkel long enough for me to be able to breath, longer to figure out how to exhale. Also, it's dark, even though I'm just a few dozen feet beneath the waves.

On the other hand, those are all solvable problems.

Thanks to some creative use of my power, not even half an hour later I'm walking fairly quickly along the seafloor with what a long hollow pipe poking out above the water feeding me oxygen, nearly blind from the pure blackness, relying on cilia as thin and flexible as I can make them to tell me where things are. It's like feeling my way across a dark room, and I have to walk slowly or else my feelers will shatter and I'll have stop moving to grow them out again.

I feel unusually proud of my roundabout water-breathing, even with the freezing cold and moments of sharp-but-barely-there pain when a sea current breaks a section of cilia. There might be easier ways to get into the warehouse, but there probably aren't any that will be more surprising.

I feel myself getting light headed and hold my breath, closing off my connection to the snorkel. Cap the tube, form a hole at the bottom, and pull down the cap. I imagine a bubble of CO2 being forced out by the descending cap, oxygen being dragged into the tube by the sudden pressure difference, and then the cap comes to the hole and the tube is filled with oxygen again. I open up the connection again and take in a breath of air. Then I get back to walking alongside the coast, feeling for the gap in the wall that leads to the dry dock.

Maybe fifteen minutes and half a dozen false alarms later (I'll be taking a thirty-minute shower when I get home), the wall my cilia were touching falls away. I move closer, detecting the corner. I snap a toe bone, chiding myself. I'm not sure if this is it yet. I form another branch off of the tube and bring it down to my ear. Then I listen.

"-and tell Liao he owes me twenty bucks," a voice with an Asian accent says." She was a-"

Annnnnnd that's enough of that. I close off the tube and pull it back, trying desperately to not imagine the end of that sentence fragment. This seems like the place. I refresh the air in my tube, then take a deep breath. In. Out. Mask on. I pay attention to my armor and thicken it, throwing in a few thorns here and there for weapons to catch on. I have no idea what I'm going to be facing up there. None. It could be six gangbangers, it could be sixty. All the fire power could be outside. The people outside could be scouts, and the armaments in the main area could be twice as scary. I don't know.

I ripple my ribs at the fear. No. Mask is on. Fear is useful when you're running. When you need to be paranoid. I'm on the offensive here. I'm the one making shit happen. I'm the goddamn protagonist. Time to provoke people.

I web my fingers and start increasing the volume of my bone armor. I start floating up, but not fast enough. I push at the water, extending more bone into something like flippers and kick, just like I did all those years ago at the pool when Emma and I did swim team, before she turned on me and earned herself a shredding!

I don't push back the thought, but warp the face of Emma into the accountant's. That brings up the girls and I turn the sorrow and regret into more rage, more sharp and angry murder. I can feel the cold retreating as I shoot through the water, burned away by pounding blood and writhing bone, propelling me faster than I can ever remember achieving on my own.

I erupt from the flooded dry dock, shooting out of the water, clearing the three feet of empty air between the surface of the sea and the edge, and front flip over two shocked Asian men carrying a long wooden crate. I pull in the flippers and webbing to stick the landing, crouch lightly, grow a pair of batons, and bare my teeth behind my mask.

Lets fucking fight!

The areas is littered with well-ordered boxes, and bright fluorescent lights are casting deep shadows onto the concrete floor. There's a balcony clinging to the side of the building, and I'm moving before I register what the gangsters on it mean. Constant fire. I need cover.

Then I catch sight of three Asian teens in red and green between two stacks of boxes, scrambling for their weapons. I switch back towards them and lean into the run.

The first I catch with a blunt jab low to her right side. The liver. She bends into the blow and falls, one hand extending out to catch herself but by then I've moved past her. The second one lifts his arms into something like a fighting stance. It doesn't matter, as when he intercepts my baton with his raised arm it breaks with a wet snap. He falls, and I feel something red, angry and proud at the efficacy of the injury.

The last one turns his weapon on me but hesitates a moment, concern in his eyes. His friends behind me, maybe? I grow a barb on a baton, hook it around his gun, and pull it out of his hands. His loss. On the backswing I clip his chin, sending him spinning face first into a tower of boxes with a spray of blood, the liquid transforming into sparkling rubies in the too-bright light.

Two gunshots echo out, and one of the boxes near me splinters. Need more cover. I cut right to break line of sight and run, pulling at the soft wood of the boxes with bone hooks when I need to corner faster. The gunfire trails behind me but the few hits I take barely put me off balance. I hear the distant pounding of feet, as well as the sound of grinding metal. Are they bringing back the car? I'm not sure if that means I should run before I find out what's under the tarp or if I should try to take the initiative and charge towards the entrance.

I lose the chance to choose when I body check someone and go stumbling. Something that sounds like a thunderbolt and feels like a sledgehammer hits my right breast. I fall onto my ass, the impact banishing my shock. I roll backwards, heels over head, then push up with my batons, breaking my ear drums to prevent further hearing loss. Who's run afoul of me now?

Five gangsters, one on the floor holding his face, one ejecting a shell from a shotgun, and the rest of them bringing their rifles up to their shoulders, a combination of surprise, terror, and bravado on their faces.

I lower my head and charge.

The chatter of gunfire is a physical force, shaking my armor just from the noise and nearly forcing me back with the few bullets that do scrape off my shoulders. Then I'm below their firing arcs and among them.

The next few seconds are all bone, blood and bashing. Baton to the chin, kick to the side of the knee, power through a blow from the butt of a gun, elbow to the neck, fist into a girl's teeth, flex the frills on my arms to cut open someone's face, twine some needles around a neck into a noose and pull, then there's no more shaking of my armor, just a pair of gangsters slowly turning blue as bone encircles their necks.

I drop them when they go limp and get back to moving. When I'm not immediately followed by bullets, I duck behind a tower of boxes, fix my ears, and listen.

There's still gunfire, but it's moving away from me, punctuated by panicked chatter in some foreign language. That, and the sound of a chainsaw being applied to a chain link fence except fifty times louder. I re-shatter my ear bones and start heading towards the rumbling. I'm not sure what I'm running towards but chances are it's where the action is.

On the way I run into a pair of ABB goons. A kidney punch for one, a straight right to the jaw for the other, a follow-up elbow to the temple for the first, and they're down. The scent of copper is thick in the air and I wipe my face, trying to make sure that there's no blood on it. When I pull my hand away, there's a small red smear on my ring and pinky finger and I shudder a little.

I fix my ears after cuffing the two gangster together with bone and listen for the sounds of violence. The metal-on-metal noise is less angry now, and I can smell cordite as well as copper. I don't like it, but if someone's going around murdering ABB members-

I turn the corner and walk into a scene right out of a nightmare.

Blood and chunks of flesh are everywhere, the floor completely sticky with the stuff. Mutilated gang members lie on the ground, moaning or deathly still, scattered about like so much chaff. Bullet casings litter the area like little golden tears, and the smells of spent gunpowder and spilled vital fluids are nearly overwhelming.

In the middle of it all is a creature of hooks and blades, maybe the size of three or four cars, the silver metal of the paws tainted by red. It turns towards me, opening a maw made of whirling death.

"Heya Rosie," Hookwolf grinds out, followed by a laugh that sounds like silverware in a garbage disposal. "How's your night been?"