"There isn't really much in the way of technology here," Leet said. "Certainly nothing in the way of an artificial intelligence."

I'd done my best to rebuild the helmet, but it hadn't brought my grandfather's avatar back. Going to Leet had been my only choice; of all tinkers he was the one who knew about every kind of technology, even if he could no longer build many of them.

I was looking through a window in at Leet as he worked on my grandfather's helmet.

"That can't be true," I said. "My gran... I mean I was talking to one this whole time."

"This isn't an artificial intelligence," he said. "But the technology that is here is actually an amplifier of some kind. It gives me a little bit of a headache really... whatever it amplifies shouldn't exist."

"Telepathy maybe?" I asked.

"Don't be silly," he said automatically. "Telepathy doesn't exist. Everybody knows that. But if I believed in something like that, I'd say yeah. Theoretically it could amplify mental defenses and maybe even the ability to communicate... if telepathy really existed."

"Can you fix it?" I asked.

"I already have," he said. "It should be working like it did before."

I hadn't heard a word from my grandfather since the helmet had been crushed. If what Leet was saying was true, it meant that his intelligence wasn't actually in the helmet, it was somewhere else and the helmet was simply the link.

I should have been relieved. My grandfather's intelligence wasn't gone; it was hidden somewhere. The problem was that I had no idea where to find it and I certainly had no way to communicate. It was frustrating.

Even though he'd been talking less and less, I'd depended on my grandfather for everything. I'd assumed that he'd been speaking less because I needed him less, but what if he'd been conserving energy?

Power sources didn't last forever, after all, and it was possible that it'd been flooded during Leviathan's attack and damaged somehow. But why wouldn't it have told me? I'd have found some what to move it, to protect it even if it was the size of a building.

"Thanks for everything."

"You really shouldn't trust anything that doesn't have a brain," Leet said. He grimaced. "It's trite but it's true. As far as modern day science... even by Tinkertech standards that thing might as well be magic. You can't trust magic."

"I barely trust things that actually have brains," I said. "Look at how people are reacting."

We were inside a mobile laboratory Leet had built. After he'd lost his last lab in the floods from Leviathan he'd decided that he wanted something a lot more secure. It was in an extradiminsional space through some sort of Tinkertech trickery. Doorways to various places in Brockton Bay had been set up, including one in the refugee camp.

I suspected that he'd bought the equipment from Toybox, not trusting his own designs. I didn't blame him.

I wouldn't have been allowed outside the camp otherwise. The whole place was cordoned off, with more and more military forces arriving by the hour. What was startling was just how many people had showed up and how quickly. Having heroes like Strider on call probably had something to do with it, but the amount of equipment involved made me suspicious that they'd been prepared for something like this.

Despite the people fleeing the scene, they'd been rounded up before they could leave the camp. Had the PRT been planning on keeping people in the camp all along?

Apparently there were concerns that the Slaughterhouse had released viruses on their deaths that would result in pandemics that would ultimately destroy humanity.

The PRT had sprayed the entire area with huge masses of a decontaminating foam, designed to kill bacteria and viruses of all types. Despite this they were worried that people were already infected, and they were taking no chances.

Even Leet was wearing a full bio-hazard suit. He'd insisted that I stay inside I decontamination chamber and he had never actually handled my grandfather's helmet, using machines and Waldo's to do all the work.

People were frightened and afraid, and this was undoing all the good work I'd done so far. Yet while I could easily break through the cordon, part of me had to wonder whether it was the right thing to do.

What if they were right?

It still seemed suspicious that while they'd had trouble bringing enough food and supplies for a couple of days, they had no trouble finding enough shipping containers to wall off the enormous area around the camp.

"What am I going to do?" I asked him.

"Fix everything?" he asked.

I scowled at him. Maybe if I'd had my grandfather I'd have been able to do something, but now I was just a teen-aged girl and I had no idea what to do.

"I'm serious," he said. "Everybody in the camp looks up to you. People should be celebrating the fact that you got rid of the Nine, but instead they're dealing with all of this. You have to give them hope or they'll fall apart."

"But how?" I asked. "I can't just magically create food or build houses for people. I can barely take care of myself."

"Look like you know what you are doing," he said. "That's sometimes more important than actually knowing. People who panic are people who do dumb things that hurt themselves."

I nodded and stared at him.

"How do you know all this?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I've seen war movies... not just the sci-fi ones. Mostly those, though."

Right.

"All right," I said. "Hand me my helmet."

His mechanical arms passed it though the slot, and another blast of disinfecting gas sprayed me and everything I was wearing. Undoubtedly he'd probably set the tiny anteroom I was in on fire the moment I left.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

The only way to know whether the government was right to Quarantine us was to wait. Diseases tended to spread best if they were asymptomatic but contagious. Bonesaw knew that and probably intended for there to be a maximum spread of the diseases she made.

I stepped outside and into the real world. I could hear people screaming at the perimeter, even as men with guns were holding them off. The storage containers were already up around thirty percent of the camp.

Lung was standing near the doorway, staring impassively at the chaos.

Glancing over at me, he said, "They intend to let us die. They will treat us like a city of Simurgh victims."

"They won't," I said. "I won't let them."

"I do not see you stopping them now," he said.

"They might be right," I said.

"And if they are?"

"I'll build a place on Mars if I have to," I said. "I'm sure Leet can show me how."

I was going to miss the instant access my grandfather had given me to Tinkertech designs, even if it wasn't actually Tinkertech.

If that had been the only thing I was going to miss it wouldn't have been that bad. The problem was that my grandfather's avatar had filled a void that I hadn't even known I had. Our family had never been particularly large, and when I'd had both Mom and Dad it had been enough.

Once we'd lost Mom, though, it had all changed. I'd lost my entire family, and getting a grandfather I hadn't even known about had filled some of that loss.

"So what now?" Lung asked. "Do we show strength, or do we abandon the plan?"

"We double down," I said. "If everyone dies none of this will matter. If they don't... "

"Then we will have tightened our hold on these people even further," he said. He looked at me strangely. "For all your claims not to be a warlord, you think very much like one."

I shrugged.

"Warlords rise when the system fails the people. That's what's happening now," I said. "We've got an opportunity to make things better for people, and we have to take it."

With that I levitated, floating toward the cursing people.

"People of Brockton Bay!"

Slowly the shouting and pushing stopped and people turned to face me.

"We have seen what the Protectorate and the PRT thinks of us," I said. "Because we were poor they think they can lock us away and contain us, forget us as though we were Simurgh victims."

I heard angry shouts at that, but people were listening.

"I won't let that happen. They fear that we may be diseased, and because of that that we must be separated from the rest of humanity. There is a chance that they are right."

The crowd fell dead silent with that.

"That is why I am allowing this, because otherwise the fact that they are surrounding us with metal shipping containers would mean that they were only giving me the weapons I needed to free us."

"They're trapping the uninfected in here with the infected!" a man shouted.

"How do we know which is which?" I asked. "How many of you have people you care about that are outside of those walls... friends, family... do you want them to die?"

The crowd murmured, their mood turning ugly. I was losing them.

"If there is a disease that Bonesaw created, it's going to be slow so that there's more time to infect as many people as possible. That's good, because it buys us time to fix it before anybody gets killed."

The crowd settled. This was apparently something that hadn't occurred to them.

"Panacea can handle the people here, given enough time, but if there is a disease and it spreads to the whole world she won't be able to do anything. I've got money now from killing the Nine. I will use some of it to hire the best parahuman healers and medical tinkers to come and help solve this problem."

The crowd looked up at me expectantly.

"What parahumans create, parahumans can solve," I said. "But if we start fighting each other and acting like animals then we will prove that we are exactly what the government and the PRT thinks we are... worthless specimens."

It was the same everywhere. In my grandfather's world, everyone had hated mutants. Here it was the poor and the disenfranchised. These were my father's people, and I was going to protect them, even if it was from themselves.

The crowd growled.

"These people are not our friends," I continued. "But we have to live among them. There will be a day of reckoning, but that day is not today. Today is a day for us to show that we are better than they think we are. United we will stand, divided we will fall."

"And if we start getting sick?" a man shouted out.

"You'd be just as sick out there as you would be in here," I said. "Do you really think Bonesaw wouldn't have spread the disease to the whole camp? Either we're all sick or none of us are."

It wasn't true, of course, but crowds tended to be stupid.

Seeing that I had them, I said, "I will see that something is done. In the meantime everyone should get some rest. If there is a disease, it's best if you have lots of rest to fight it off long enough for us to save you."

I wondered if Leet had ever made a healing machine. If he hadn't, I'd make sure he got the money to do so.

Floating to what looked like one of several gates that would be used to truck supplies in, I faced a PRT commander.

All of the PRT were carrying Tinkertech weapons made of plastic. A quick check showed no metal inside any of them, an impressive achievement even if it wouldn't really do anything to stop me. The fact that their armor contained metal, probably because of the extra environmental equipment that turned these particular sets of armor into clean suits meant that the effort on the weapons was wasted.

It looked like they had Tinkertech filtration systems in their armor. The whole suits were designed to be hazmat suits without looking like Hazmat suits, probably in an effort to avoid looking threatening.

As though faceless men in black armor wasn't threatening enough. There were hundreds of PRT agents in the cordon around the camp, more than Brockton Bay actually had, which meant that they'd undoubtedly teleported agents in from other cities.

That also meant that these agents would probably be less sympathetic, in part because they didn't have relatives in the camp that they'd be tempted to sneak out.

I wondered if there were any native born Brocktonites under those masks at all. If it had been me I would have rotated them out and relied entirely on foreign agents. I wasn't sure if the PRT was that pragmatic though.

"You can't leave," he said.

I couldn't see his face through the mirrored mask, but he sounded anxious. Even if he wasn't a local he probably knew me by reputation. After all, I was the Endslayer, the Slaughterhouse Slaughter, the Empire Ender.

The PRT agents had all undoubtedly been briefed on me before they'd been posted here, which meant they had at least some idea of what I could do.

"I expect to see some progress on seeing these people diagnosed and treated," I said loudly. "If I don't, I'm going to start throwing things, and I doubt anybody is going to like that."

"That's not up to me," he said, holding up his hand. He very carefully did not aim his weapon at me like the PRT troopers had been aiming at the crowd.

The nervousness in his voice was increasing, though. If he shot at me, I was going to make him regret it. He had a metal pin in his hip, and it wouldn't take much to make him bleed.

"Find out who is responsible, and have them call me if they are afraid to come into the camp," I said. "Otherwise things might start getting ugly."

Not all of the crowd was gone; posturing for followers was one of the things my grandfather's avatar had taught me.

It was almost as important to look like you were negotiating from strength as to actually have strength.

Of course bullying a low level lackey wasn't really going to get us anywhere, and behind closed doors I would be more polite with the people who mattered. What was important was that people thought something was being done, whether it was or not.

As long as they had hope, something they could set their compass to they would remain calm. Let them lose that hope and they really would turn into animals.

The government could make all the promises they wanted, but they'd lost these people's trust in more ways than one. I still had it and I planned to keep it.

Still, in the end there a lot of what was going to happen involved waiting.

Hordes of men in bio-hazard suits were moving through the camp, taking samples and checking people's health. Those who had been checked were being stamped with a Tinkertech marker that couldn't be counterfeited, not with the equipment these people had.

I'd volunteered to be one of the first to be checked, in part to assuage people's fears that the government wasn't trying to poison us like some of the rumors I had heard.

The funny thing was that the men had already been on their way when I'd made my speech to the crowd, but now the people in the camp were assuming that I had bullied the government into finally responding.

Nothing the government men were trying to say would change people's minds, and while I probably should have felt bad for taking advantage of the situation, I didn't.

I really did believe that the people in the camp were low priority for the government, and I believed that it was mostly because they were poor. If the neighborhoods where the Arcadia kids came from had been effected there would have been all kinds of aid that simply wasn't coming despite everything I could do.

There were people who would deny it, but I knew it the way the people here knew it, in my gut.

I'd lost my grandfather; the last thing I wanted to do was to lose anyone else.

It had been two days since I'd made my ultimatum, and the men in bio-hazard suits were already thinner on the ground than they had been. I'd managed to call Dinah; her family had returned to Brockton Bay.

According to her there was a ninety eight percent chance that the camp was clean, which was part of the reason they were returning to the possible site of biological Armageddon. Despite her assurances, part of me would be worried until the very last test result had come in.

Still, if removing an Endbringer from the world hadn't increased my popularity, destroying the Nine was almost certain to have put my face on every magazine.

The PRT had an entire publicity machine designed to make their Capes popular and accessible. I would have to do it on my own, unless I hired someone with the money that was now flowing into my bank accounts.

Strike while the iron is hot seemed to be the one piece of advice to the newly famous, whether they were actors, musicians or reality stars. Fame was fleeting, and I needed to take advantage of my newfound popularity while I still had it.

Becoming a celebrity would advance my plans, but I felt a little uneasy about it. What did I know about magazine interviews and talking to late night talk shows?

Still, I could learn if it would get things moving for the people here.