"I see."
The squat, fairly unwell looking woman's voice was even.
"Yes, I agree. Thank you, Mrs Hess. I'll take care of it, trust me." She reached out and turned the small digital clock on her desk to face her more directly, her eyes hard and a vein at her temple pulsing a little, the only sign of how furious she was. "Yes, I would like to meet with you as well. Let's say, half past three this afternoon? Certainly. Thank you for letting me know."
The was a short pause. "Oh, I don't think you'll have to worry about that. Goodbye, Mrs Hess."
Putting the phone handset down very carefully she closed her eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, then picked it up again. Moving her mouse she clicked open a contact list on her screen, scrolled through to the right number, then dialled.
"Principal Blackwell, please." Another pause, then she smiled nastily. "Hello, Principal Blackwell. This is Emily Piggot. We need to talk. Now."
White-faced, Janice Blackwell put the phone down with a trembling hand. She was noticeably sweating, droplets running from under her hairline and coursing down her face. Taking a couple of facial wipes from a packet of them in her desk, she cleaned them away, then took a few deep breaths.
After a long moment she stood, adjusting her attire, before opening the door to her office. "Sandra?" she called to her secretary, who shortly appeared before her. "I'm going to be out for the rest of the day. Hold all my calls and rebook any appointments I have, please." Making a note the shorter woman nodded, returning to her desk without comment.
Janice went back into her office and picked up her coat, putting it on reluctantly, still trembling a little. Emily Piggot, the local PRT Director, had a way with words.
Not a nice way, but a way.
Picking up her handbag she slipped the strap over her shoulder, checked her car keys were in it, then left the room, her heels clicking on the floor, closing the door behind her.
Thirty seconds passed.
The door opened again, Janice going back into the office. She stared at her desk for a few seconds, biting her lip, then sighed heavily, before going to it and unlocking a lower drawer. Reaching in she popped the memory card out of the audio recorder she had concealed there, putting it into her bag, then relocked the drawer and left again.
PRT Agent Meredith Hamill looked up at the sound of a cough, to see her supervisor standing next to her desk. "The Director would like to see you, Agent. Right now." Apprehensively she began to log out her computer with one hand and pick up her PRT issue phone with the other. "No, leave it, please," the man said, his face blank. Behind him she saw two armed troopers who were waiting, apparently for her. Swallowing, she stood, then walked after him, one trooper behind and one in front.
Looking over her shoulder she could see two more agents already working on her computer and phone. Putting her gaze back to the front she wondered what to do.
Sophia Hess, the hero known as Shadow Stalker, twitched at the unexpected hand on her shoulder and nearly dropped the crossbow she was polishing in the Wards common room. Turning her head to snarl at whoever was daring to touch her she blinked to see it was Miss Milita, with Armsmaster standing beside her, both of them with grim looks on their faces, although she could only see the former's eyes. Armsmaster's mouth was set in a compressed line that she knew from experience meant the Tinker was angry.
"You need to come with us, Sophia," Miss Militia said quietly. "The Director is not in a good mood, so I wouldn't keep her waiting."
Not completely sure what was going on, the teenager ran various options through her mind. She had a sudden urge to run for it but knew perfectly well that she wouldn't make it out of the room, never mind the building, due to the vast amount of electrical wiring that ran throughout the walls. After a moment she nodded sullenly, putting the weapon down on the table and picking up her mask which she'd removed because it was a bit uncomfortable. She stood.
"Hold out your left arm," Armsmaster said in a neutral tone. Somewhat worried she did so, then watched as he clicked a high tech bracelet of some sort around it, the latch making a very solid sound. It beeped and a small LED lit up, blinking every couple of seconds. "That is a tracker and counter-measure for your phasing ability. If you attempt to shift state, it will deliver a sufficient electrical pulse to disrupt your power, and it would also be very painful. I'd advise not testing it."
She growled under her breath but followed obediently as they led her to the door, which they'd somehow bypassed the alarm on, then waved her through.
She knew this was all somehow Hebert's fault. One way or the other she was going to make the uppity Prey pay for it.
The room fell silent as the recording stopped, the screen on the far side away from the conference table retracting noiselessly into the ceiling. The silence went on for some time.
Emily Piggot slowly turned her head to fix Sophia Hess, Principal Blackwell, and Agent Hamill with a gorgon-like glare. They all swallowed, in a remarkably synchronized manner.
"How," she asked sweetly, but with an undertone of imminent danger, "is it that I, the director of the PRT, located right here in Brockton Bay not ten miles from Winslow High School, am only now finding out about something of this nature that occurred a week ago! Something that I should have known about immediately, if not sooner, and something that should never have happened in the first damn place!"
Her voice rose to nearly a shout, making everyone present lean away.
"The only reason I do know about it is due to an extremely uncomfortable conversation I had with your mother, Sophia, who asked the entirely reasonable question of why no one in the PRT seemed to have acted to punish her daughter, said daughter apparently going about business as usual. That might just be because no one mentioned it!"
She pointed. "You, Agent Hamill, should have reported this to me the second it happened. Leaving aside the fact that you should have been reporting the little hobby dear Sophia here seems to have all along, for example any time in the last six months, rather than covering up for her as seems to be the case."
The finger moved one space to the right. "You, Principal Blackwell, should have come directly to me the first time Agent Hamill failed in her duty. You most certainly should have consulted me before meeting with Danny Hebert. That was the arrangement when you were read into this program. Instead of that you decided it would be a wonderful idea to call the parents of the three girls involved in one of the most horrific attacks of bullying it's ever been my displeasure to hear about, then take on Danny Hebert, a man with a long memory, more negotiating experience than almost anyone else in Brockton Bay, and who is undoubtedly smarter and more cunning than you and Agent Hamill put together, in a battle of wits in which you were obviously completely unarmed."
She paused for breath, wincing a little at the pain in her kidneys and shifting slightly in her seat. Blackwell went pale, then red, but didn't say anything.
"Yes, I've heard of him," she added, as both Blackwell and Hamill looked slightly surprised. "The Mayor respects him highly although he also wishes he'd never met the man sometimes. He just doesn't give up. From what I just saw, neither does his daughter. She played you to perfection, Sophia." Sophia looked up from where she'd been staring at the table, surprise on her face since she'd removed her mask again as everyone present knew who she really was anyway.
"What do you mean?" the girl couldn't help blurting out. Director Piggot narrowed her eyes at her.
"You didn't realize? All of that, the whole talking like an automaton, being all depressed and passive, that was an act, masterfully arranged to get you and your co-conspirators to confess on camera to several acts of assault, theft, and general bullying. Which you all obligingly did. Even the punch at the end, I'm certain she saw it coming and let it happen, just to make sure they had evidence of what you were capable of doing." She shook her head as Sophia's face froze in anger.
"I'd have hoped you weren't open to such manipulation, but she's clearly a lot smarter than you. Why she let it get to the level it did I have no idea. If it was me I'd have shot you in the head a year ago and made it look like an E88 hit."
Piggot smirked nastily as the girl flinched. "She's obviously a decent person. Too decent, for high school, or at least the version of it that you seem to run, Principal."
Principal Blackwell was wise enough not to say what she was obviously thinking.
"I am absolutely furious about this entire debacle," the director continued in a low voice. "Between you, you three have opened the entire PRT up to more bad publicity, potential lawsuits, and possibly worse outcomes, than anything I can think of for years. We'll be lucky in the extreme if we can keep a lid on this all. God help us if Danny Hebert ever even suspects that it was a Ward who was the co-ringleader of a two year campaign of terror against his only daughter."
"He's only one man, Director," Sophia tried, only to close her mouth so fast she nearly bit her tongue when Piggot focused her entire attention on her.
"He's only one man, yes, quite right, Shadow Stalker. He's one man that knows or is known by, and in many cases deeply respected by, probably over a thousand people in this city one way or another. Just the Dock Worker's Union alone is more than three hundred and forty people right now, and almost every one of them owes him their jobs. If he wanted to he could practically paralyze half the city with a few phone calls, I'm certain. I DO NOT want him to do that." She glared at the girl, who despite herself shrank back into her seat. "Understand this, he may in many ways be a small fish in a big pond, but he's got big teeth. If he got angry enough to pull out all the stops we'd be lucky if we could stop that getting on the six o'clock news, at which point we're all fucked." She waved angrily in the direction of the now absent screen.
"I don't know how many copies of that recording he has made, but I guarantee you there are backups in places we won't find them. In something like this the only safe rule is that there is one more copy than the maximum number you thought there were. So we can't even deal with it by trying to confiscate them, we'd never be sure we got them all until we found out the hard way we didn't. Leaving aside the little issue that doing that would let him know exactly what we don't want him to know in the first place."
She leaned back, in some pain, and angry to a level she hadn't been in years. There was quiet in the room again for a while. Armsmaster and Miss Militia were listening silently to one side, as was Aegis as the very recently newly promoted leader of the wards. The young man was obviously also extremely disturbed but was keeping his mouth firmly shut.
"He tried blackmailing me, Director Piggot," Principal Blackwell suddenly said. She pulled a memory card out of her handbag and held it up. "I have a recording of it right here."
Piggot stared at her in mute disbelief for some seconds.
"I always record meetings like that," the Principal went on, sounding pleased with her own cleverness. "Just in case I need leverage later."
Armsmaster and Miss Militia exchanged glances, then looked back to see what happened next.
"Your school isn't the White House and you certainly aren't Richard Nixon," Piggot finally sighed. "You do realize that this is a two party consent state, don't you?" Blackwell looked slightly confused, making the Director cover her eyes for a second or two in despair. "It means that telephone conversations and other private communications require all parties present to consent to the recording of them, except for law enforcement purposes, in essence. You are not a law enforcement officer, licensed private investigator, or cape involved in crime fighting. Recording conversations taking place in your office without telling anyone you're doing it is illegal and inadmissible as evidence."
The principal's face fell. After a moment it brightened again, causing Piggot to sigh. "And no, we can't try to use that against Mr Hebert and his daughter. As he rightly pointed out, if we try to arrest him there's nothing to stop him releasing the recording himself. Even if he was arrested the police would use the recording as evidence, which would be as bad if not worse than him letting it out."
She shook her head in disgust. "Face it, you lost. He stomped you flat. As far as I'm concerned, I'm quite impressed. Pity it could drag my people in, otherwise it would be rather funny to watch." She glared at Agent Hamill and Sophia, who both looked extremely worried now.
"No, this is what we're going to do. You, Principal Blackwell, are going to make sure that he gets everything he asked for, including a very generous settlement. With any luck that will satisfy him and he won't bother taking things further." She stared the other woman down until she was sure she was sufficiently cowed. The principal nodded, looking even more pinch-faced than usual.
"I would suggest you add to the settlement documentation a request for the deletion of unspecified video recordings, but I'd be more than a little surprised if he complied. Just to be safe. And we'd never know for sure anyway. We can't do anything about that without making the whole situation worse, so we'll just have to live with it and hope to God it doesn't bite us in the ass at some point."
Shaking her head in irritation she turned to Hamill. "You are suspended without pay subject to the results of a very exhaustive investigation into your activities over the last few years. When that's completed, the results will determine whether you get reassigned to a containment zone for the next decade at half pay, or just end up in prison."
The agent paled horribly, slumping into her seat, but said nothing.
Finally Director Piggot turned to Sophia and stared at her for a few seconds. "Your mother is, as I'm sure she has explained at length, absolutely disgusted with your behavior to this Hebert girl. She told me to do anything I thought necessary to deal with the situation. So, we're starting with confining you to base for the moment. You'll be on console duty, if you're not there you'll either be sleeping or in the cafeteria. That's it."
Sophia glared at her.
"I'm arranging a discreet investigation of your activities as well, both at Winslow and elsewhere. To be honest, I'd love to just throw you straight into Juvenile Hall, but for some reason people higher up the chain seem to think you might still have some use. But depending on the outcome of the investigation, I might still be able to do that." The director smiled a little in an unpleasant way at the look that crossed the girl's face.
"Phone." She motioned with her hand. After a second or two, Sophia put her PRT issued phone on the table and slid it across, deliberately pushing too hard. Piggot slapped her hand down on it. "The personal one too."
"You can't do that!" Sophia sneered at her.
"That's where you'd be wrong," the director said calmly. "Personal phone. Now."
After a staring contest she did as ordered. The second phone joined the first one.
"You are not to attempt to contact anyone outside this facility in any way. If you try to escape, we'll find you, and you won't enjoy what happens then. Understand me?"
With ill grace the teenager nodded sullenly.
"Good."
She raked her gaze along the other side of the table. "Understand this. From my point of view you're all expendable, if it keeps the PRT as a whole safe from the sort of fallout something like this could produce. It should go without saying that nothing we've talked about leaves this room, but because I have very little faith in your abilities to think things through, you'll all sign an NDA before you go." She snapped her fingers, causing Miss Militia to wordlessly get up and hand out a set of paperwork to each of the three, carefully putting a pen on top of each pile of papers.
"Breach that and you won't believe what happens next. So keep your mouths shut." The director watched with eagle eyes as all three of them eventually signed on the relevant line, none of them bothering to read the papers. Satisfied, she waited for them to be returned to her by the heroine, who then sat down again, still silent.
"Goodbye, Principal Blackwell," she said firmly. "Oh, before you go, give me that memory card." The woman slid it across the table to her, looking very annoyed. "I'd advise either telling people you're taping them in future or just stopping doing it, by the way," Piggot stated with a small hard grin. She waited for the woman to leave, a PRT trooper outside the door guiding her out.
When the door was shut once more, she looked at the remaining two. "You damn idiots," she growled. "Get out of my sight. Stalker, run and I'll crucify you, you hear me?"
"I hear you, Director" the teenager snarled with ill grace, standing and putting her mask back on. She turned with a dramatic flare of her cloak and stomped out, the disgraced liason agent following behind, looking distraught. Hamill was intercepted outside the door by another trooper and led off in a different direction to that taken by Blackwell.
The door closed again and she relaxed, her face in a rictus of pain. "Jesus Christ," she breathed. "What a cluster fuck."
"Are you all right, Director?" Armsmaster asked, actually looking a little concerned. "Your heart rate is far too high and you are running a fever."
"I'm overdue for dialysis, Colin," she said in a much less angry voice than she'd been speaking in for the last half hour. "I'll live." Tossing him the memory card, she requested, "Play that, please."
He inserted it into the computer built into the desk which still had the USB stick with the video recording that Danny Hebert had given to Principal Blackwell plugged into a port, then fiddled with it for a moment. They listened to the surprisingly clear audio. Miss Militia was smiling under her scarf by the time it ended, and Armsmaster seemed impressed. "That was efficiently done," he commented, high praise coming from him.
"He walked all over her," Piggot noted. "I'm half tempted to offer him a job. We need people like that."
"I think it's unlikely he would accept, Director, and in any case it would be a security risk under the current circumstances," the Tinker replied.
Miss Militia nudged him. "It was a joke, Colin."
After a pause, the man nodded. "Noted. Thank you."
She sighed but seemed to be amused.
"I can't believe Shadow Stalker was involved in something like that," she added.
"I'm afraid I can, Ma'am," Aegis said quietly. The three adults looked at him, the director motioning him to continue. "She's… not well liked by the wards. While she's never done anything that extreme she's surly, short tempered, rude, and dismissive of most of the people she meets. Some of the things we've heard her say are… very disturbing."
"Why has this never been brought to my attention, or to that of Armsmaster?" the director asked in a somewhat dangerous manner.
"I received a number of reports about Shadow Stalker's unpleasant attitude some time ago and talked to her about it," Armsmaster interjected. "I was assured that she would modify her behavior."
"She didn't, not really," Aegis sighed. "Although she has been slightly less insulting for the last couple of months."
"Make sure all the Wards are interviewed about their impressions of Miss Hess," Director Piggot instructed. All three of the others nodded.
Reaching out Armsmaster retrieved the folder of photos which the Principal had been instructed to bring, opening it and looking through them, his mouth a thin line.
"One thing concerns me about all this," he began.
"Only one thing?" Miss Militia sounded surprised. "The entire thing concerns me. A lot."
He turned his head to look at her, then went back to the photos. "This was a very unpleasant, indeed horrific, situation for a fifteen year old girl to find herself. It went on for over twelve hours. In my opinion it is a prime candidate for a Trigger Event."
They all looked at him. "You think Miss Hebert Triggered?" the director asked, frowning.
He shrugged a little, the shoulders of his power armor rising then falling. "It is certainly not impossible. You'd be hard pressed to find a better cause, from what I know of the entire situation. Many people have had far less traumatic triggers."
The Director sighed, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. "Oh, just perfect. So we might have a new cape out there as a direct result of something one of our own Wards did. That would bury us if it got out."
"It's only supposition, Director, although I would suggest we keep our eyes open." Armsmaster plucked the USB stick from the port in the media computer and looked at it thoughtfully. "I know for a fact that Shadow Stalker, despite her many flaws, is a very competent fighter. She has a solid right cross better than many men twice her size. Miss Hebert seems to have taken that right in the mouth, then several vicious kicks to the ribs, yet moments later got up, laughed, and walked away. That might indicate at least a low level Brute rating."
Piggot thought, feeling sick and annoyed. Her head was spinning from lack of dialysis and low blood sugar, making critical thinking unpleasantly effortful.
"Should we look into it, Director?" Miss Militia asked very tentatively, clearly not happy about the way something like that would skirt very close to the Unwritten Rules.
"No. I don't want to risk giving either of the Heberts any ammunition to use against us." The Director sighed. "Hopefully you're wrong, but even if you're not, we should leave well enough alone unless we have no choice. Leave the Heberts alone and hope that they decide to just get on with life."
"I wonder who let her out," Aegis mused out loud. Once again, the other three looked at him. He looked back. "From what I know she was in the locker until after midnight, with no way to escape. Based on those photos there was no damage to the thing so presumably someone let her out, unlocked the locker, for example. No one seems to know who. The school should have been empty that time of night."
They exchanged glances, then Piggot winced again. "To be honest right now I don't care. I need to get down to medical, spend three uncomfortable hours getting my blood cleaned, then have a meeting with Mrs Hess I'm not looking forward to." She struggled to her feet, Miss Militia helping her.
Lisa watched the hacked feed from the supposedly completely secure internal camera network in the PRT building with interest, curled around her laptop on her bed in her apartment. When the last of the participants had left the room, she closed the screen and sat there for a long time, thinking hard.