Sitting down, Mandy looked around the table at her friends. "So. Who or what is Cloak?" she asked with a grin. Everyone looked at Taylor, who stopped with her fork halfway to her mouth, glancing about.
"Why are you all looking at me?" she asked mildly, resuming the motion.
"Cloak is a creepy little person with a weird voice who does strange things, according to PHO," Lucy explained, smiling a bit. "The consensus is that she has to be connected to the Family somehow. Every weird thing these days is. The Family are at the DWU, your Dad runs the place, so..." She shrugged, as if it should be obvious.
"Why not look at Amy?" Taylor asked, stabbing another piece of chicken with her fork. "She knows the entire Family as well."
"Good point," Mandy said, all eyes turning to the healer, who now found herself the center of attention. "So?"
"Yes, we'd love to know more as well," Dennis said, appearing from nowhere next to Mandy, making her twitch and fumble her reach for her glass.
"Will you please stop doing that?" she snapped. "Ring a bell or something."
The red-head grinned, in a very unapologetic way, then turned to regard Amy, who was looking amused. "So? Either of you have any juicy gossip about Brockton Bay's latest little peculiarity?"
"Can't help you, Dennis," Amy replied evenly, putting her knife and fork down. "And even if I knew anything you know I couldn't tell you. And wouldn't."
"Aww." The boy looked disappointed. "But I want to know!"
"I'm sure you do," she snickered. "Tough."
"You are a cruel and brutal woman, Amy Dallon," he sighed, shaking his head sadly. "So bitter and twisted. You take pleasure from shooting down the ideals of others, mere innocents in your horrific game of..."
"Laying it on just a little thick, Dennis," the girl said with a faint smile.
"Too much?" he asked with a sudden grin.
"Definitely."
"Damn. I'll have to think of another way to get it out of you."
"Not going to happen." They stared at each other, before he laughed for a moment. Amy started snickering as well.
"You are so annoying, sometimes, Ames, but we love you even so," Dennis chuckled. "Dad asked me to pass on his thanks. He's doing well, says he hasn't felt so good in… well, more or less forever."
"I'm very glad to hear that, Dennis," she replied, smiling warmly. "Please tell him I was happy to help and I wish him all the best."
"I'll do that." Glancing at his watch, he added, "Oops, have to run, I need to see a teacher about an essay."
"The one you didn't do?"
"That would be it," he grinned, then dashed off. Everyone watched him, then laughed.
"What a silly boy," Mandy giggled. "I like him, though."
"He means well, but he has poor impulse control sometimes," Amy told her. Mandy thought there was a certain knowing air present. "Some of the pranks he's played in the past were… not entirely thought through."
"I remember a couple myself," Eric put in, a smile on his face. "I'm surprised he's not still in detention for one of them. The vice principal was very annoyed."
Lucy was looking at her phone, using the school wifi to connect to the internet. Leaning sideways, Mandy could see she was paging through PHO in the local news sub-forum. "Nothing new about Cloak?" she asked curiously. Her friend shook her head, still thumbing the screen.
"Nope. Lots of speculation, but no video or photos yet. Apparently two of the Wards and Assault ran into her late last night, and Kid Win has said she was, and this is a direct quote, 'As creepy as a creepy thing that was really trying hard to be extra creepy,' but all there is online is some chatter. I guess we'll have to wait for her to turn up again before we can find out more. I love the idea that she can make invisible staircases, though. That's really cool."
"As cool as a giant lizard that will let you ride her?" Rich asked, amused.
"No, not quite that cool," Lucy grinned. "But then, nothing is. It's still impressive. And she can turn herself invisible as well."
"And you want to meet her to complete the set, don't you?" Eric asked knowingly. Lucy giggled and nodded.
"Of course. I need photos for my Family scrapbook."
Everyone looked at her, then each other. Mandy poked her in the ribs. "You might not have wanted to say that," she hissed. "Now they'll think you're weird."
Taylor started chuckling, which set them all off. "She's in good company, then," the tall girl snickered. "We're all a little strange in our own way."
"Speak for yourself, I'm entirely normal," Mandy replied, stuffing the remaining half-a-burger on her plate into her mouth and chewing madly. Her friends watched with amusement, Rich immediately starting a betting pool on whether this time she'd choke or not.
"Odd girl, that Mandy," Chris commented as his friends all watched the table twenty feet away, the young woman in question going a light blue color before she finally managed to swallow her meal. "Fits right in with that lot."
Vicky laughed, nodding a little. "I'd have to go along with that, but I like them. They're good for my sister as well." She leaned in, looking around suspiciously to check no one was listening. "So," she asked in a quiet voice. "Who or what do you think Cloak is? One of the Family in disguise? A new one? Or something even weirder?"
Chris peered around as well, not seeing anyone near enough to hear anything. Even so, he felt a little cautious about speaking about cape business in school. "My impression was that she wasn't… entirely… human," he admitted in a very quiet voice. "Or possibly at all."
"I'd go with not at all," Carlos suggested, looking a little discomfited. "It was very eerie, the way she climbed up stairs that definitely weren't there. I've never seen anything like it before. It wasn't flying at all in the normal sense of the word."
"You could swear she was standing on something real," Chris agreed. "It was so obvious you'd be certain something was there, but it wasn't." He looked around again for a moment. "We checked," he muttered almost inaudibly. "No sign of any stairs, or her either. Creeped me right out."
"So what are her powers?" Dean asked, quietly. "Stranger for sure, I guess, for the invisibility. Shaker as well, maybe? Affecting… I don't know, possibly making the air hard for a moment, or some sort of force field. Mover as well probably if she can run around on nothing as if it was a flat surface."
Chris nodded thoughtfully, glancing at Carlos who shrugged slightly. "Sounds about right. No one has any idea what was under that cloak. Assuming anything actually was. It was fucking weird, I could see right inside the hood at one point and I'd swear on a stack of bibles there was nothing in there. It was way too deep as well. A shit load of bullets and the gun went in with no apparent effect. She was able to pull the gun back and do… something, god knows what, to it. But it was sickening to look at."
"It was horrible," Carlos added. "Just looking at it made me ill. Like that thing Ianthe gave Mr Hebert at the party the other day, only worse if anything. I still don't like thinking about it, I feel nauseous when I do."
"That sounds like Family abilities, for sure," Vicky murmured. "They have an odd effect on reality."
"They have an odd effect on everything," Dean pointed out.
All four teenagers nodded.
"I wonder what threat rating she'll get?" the empath continued.
"Based on what was seen last night… Shaker 6 or better, Mover 5 at least, Stranger… around 6 up? At an educated guess." Chris looked to Carlos for support, the other boy nodding.
"I'd put it maybe a little higher, but without any more info we don't really have much chance to be sure. She might have other abilities as well, the encounter was pretty short. And there's still no obvious information on exactly how she stopped those Merchants, or what she did to the first ones when she saved that woman from being mugged. A lot of people are going to be curious about her."
"Seems to be a lot of weird new capes around recently," Dean sighed. "But from what I've heard about Cloak, she's one of the weirdest."
"Oh, god, yes," Chris said with heartfelt worry. "Saurial and the others are normal by comparison. I'm not sure whether I want to know what's really inside that cloak or not."
"Something horrible from the depths of time and space, with tentacles out to here," Vicky suggested, spreading her arms then wiggling her fingers. "Ready to grab anyone who probes too deeply."
The others all stared at her, then looked at each other.
"Thanks a hell of a lot, Vicky," Carlos grumbled. "Now if I see her I won't be able to stop thinking about that little picture."
"Hey, Dennis isn't here, someone had to say it," the blonde grinned. Looking at her watch, she added, "And still just enough time for dessert. Yay me." Jumping up she headed back to the food line, looking pleased. The other three teenagers watched her, then shared a look, before shivering a little and resuming eating, except for Carlos who seemed slightly unwell.
At their table, Amy and Taylor shared a look of mutual amusement, before going back to their own food, quickly finishing before the bell went. "I'll see you after school, Taylor," Amy said, getting up and piling her plate and other detritus on her tray, then picking it up. "And you guys. Vicky will meet us at your house, she said, she's got to see one of the teachers after school for a little while so she'll be a little late."
"OK. See you later," Taylor replied, watching as her friend left, then getting ready herself for the next class. "You guys are turning up about the same time as last time?"
"That's the plan," Mandy agreed happily. "Mom will give Lucy and me a lift."
Rich and Eric both nodded as well. "All right, that sounds good. I'm getting some more food to go with what I got yesterday, so no one will starve. We have plenty of DVDs to watch as well. Should be fun, I think." Smiling, Taylor got up as the first bell rang. "Now, let us go forth and learn more biology, as is wished by those above us in the school hierarchy."
"You really are a little odd sometimes," Mandy giggled, shaking her head. "The things you come out with..."
"English professor for a mother, and way too much time spent in books," Lucy suggested wisely. "Bound to rub off in some strange ways."
"True, I guess," her friend agreed, studying Taylor who was grinning. "Come on, we have five minutes to get to class."
The group quickly put their trays in the racks set aside for such things and headed out of the cafeteria, joining the throng of other students doing likewise.
Rising to the surface a couple of hundred yards from shore, directly opposite the building that both her power and her nose told her that the Merchants were occupying as a base for their activities, Lisa let just the top of her head and her eyes part the water. The wind was strong enough that the bay was fairly rough, the swell she was floating in going up and down in long rolling waves, flecks of spray coming from them as a few curled over and broke.
Against such a background, with the overcast sky, it was practically impossible to make out her form, the light-absorbing black of her scales making her very difficult to see even if someone had been looking specifically for her. Idly making a mental note to see if Amy could tweak the bioconstruct to allow the red highlights to be turned off, which would give her close to invisibility in low light conditions, Lisa watched and listened.
With a little effort, she could distinguish at least thirty or forty different voices coming from the large abandoned warehouses, and smell the scents of even more people. Several of them were moaning or gibbering, clearly in the throes of some drug or other, and a number of them were involved in a pretty loud argument. She could also hear what sounded like a number of machines running, her power suggesting that these were something to do with the production of narcotics.
After listening for ten minutes or so, and carefully checking for any external signs of activity, she submerged again and moved closer, very cautiously. Surfacing twice more, she finally ended up just under a partially collapsed small wharf sticking out from what had been the loading entrance of the building a good forty years earlier.
From here she could make out a lot more of the conversations, although the content of the bulk of them was irrelevant or inane or both. Quite a few people soliciting sex from each other, one group apparently planning some form of robbery while clearly too intoxicated to have any chance at all of pulling it off, someone else talking on a phone to a street-level dealer, and things of that nature.
She spent another forty minutes listening and filtering out the random crap, her power letting her narrow in on anything relevant. Lisa gathered quite a lot of insight into the activities of the Merchants, and ended up with a reasonably accurate estimate of their numbers, approximately a hundred and sixty-five people, only about half of whom were actually in the building. By the sound and scent of it, they had a drug manufacturing lab in one end of the building that was producing crystal meth in copious quantities, and another one at the other end that was pumping out MDMA by the bucket-load.
'I could probably reduce the amount of drugs on the street in the city by about eighty percent if I burned this damn place down,' she thought, half-tempted. It would certainly remove most of the backup Skidmark had as well, but it was a somewhat drastic move. Deciding that her brief thought wasn't really the right thing just now, she carefully and slowly moved down to the other end of the building, only barely above the water, trying to find someone talking about something useful.
Catching a scent of machine oil and hot metal, she stopped, then back-tracked. 'I bet anything that's Squealer's workshop,' she thought, listening to the clinking of tools and a woman swearing to herself in an angry mutter. 'She sounds pissed. Wonder why? Or is she just naturally bad tempered?'
Lisa didn't know very much about the villainous Tinker, aside from her specialty being transportation, which mainly manifested in outrageously ugly although surprisingly effective vehicles. The woman also seemed to be oddly good at stealthing them. Leet had mentioned he'd salvaged one of her invisibility systems and modified it for his audio inducer widget, probably improving it considerably in the process.
Listening some more, she got the definite impression that the woman was ferociously annoyed about something. Curious, she looked around, then sank under the surface again and poked about for a while.
'Aha. I thought so.' Near the base of the sea wall, there was a very rusty wrought iron grating half-buried in the mud, covering the end of an old pipe some six feet in diameter. It was part of the storm drain network she still had nightmares about from their near-disastrous run-in with Lung weeks ago. Having practically memorized the plans she'd dug up for that operation, she'd been fairly certain there was one of the drains close by. A lot of the older buildings had them underneath and had routed their own drainage systems into them, everything being flushed straight into the bay.
In this case, she could tell from the scent that the pipe connected to the workshop, among other places, as there were traces of fresh fuel and oil coming out in the water that was sluggishly flowing from the grating. Prodding it in a few places and letting her power tell her where the weakest points were, she settled to the bottom and grabbed it with both hands, bracing her legs and tail against the stone sea wall.
Very slowly and gently applying increasing amounts of force, she smiled in satisfaction when there was a sudden snapping sound and one side of the grating broke loose, the ancient mortar failing under the bending metal. It was a matter of only a few more seconds to tear the entire thing out of the stonework, then yank it out of the silt and put it down out of the way.
Waiting for a few minutes, listening carefully, she then went back up to the surface and checked again, finding no signs that anyone had noticed her work. Satisfied, she sank back and entered the pipe, which was large enough not to present too much difficulty even though the bottom third was full of mud.
Swimming slowly along and keeping a wary eye out for any traps or alarms, she followed the pipe for eighty yards or so in a gentle slope upwards, finally breaking the water into complete darkness when it went above sea level. Pausing with just her head out of the water she listened, sniffing for any information her nose could give her.
When her power was happy that she was unobserved, she lit a couple of bioluminescent patches and looked around, seeing only a dank and muddy storm drain with a sheen of oil running down the middle in a thin rivulet. Twenty yards further, the pipe split two ways, one running directly into the rest of the docks and smelling of decaying sea life, the other one going right and having a distinct odor of machinery.
Lisa made her way down that branch, ducking down quite a long way as the ceiling was a little close considering how tall her 'Metis' body was. Luckily due to the inhuman formation of it, she could go almost to all fours with ease, passing along the passage without any trouble.
When she reached the point that the oil was coming from, she looked up to see a metal cover with a few rust holes in it, at the top of a short shaft. By the looks of it, the thing was a plate that had been dropped over the original access to the drain tunnels, probably some decades ago. There were traces of a similar iron grating sticking out of the walls just under the metal cover, which itself was very rusty and corroded. The salt air hadn't helped at all.
The shaft was just large enough in diameter that she could make her way up it, clinging to the rough rock walls with her claws. When she reached the top she stopped moving and listened intently again. What she heard was very interesting, the conclusions her power was giving her even more so.
This had some fascinating ramifications...
"Fuck. Fuck fuck cunt fuck," Sherrel grumbled, slamming tools down onto her workbench. "Stupid fucking Family. Stupid fucking Skids. Stupid fucking ME!" She picked up a wrench and threw it across the large workshop, hearing it hit something and clatter to the ground, but not looking. Her hands trembling from both emotion and the aftereffects of her latest hit, she leaned on the bench and breathed heavily for a few seconds, trying to calm down enough to get back to work.
"Fucking idiot, I'm such a fucking idiot," she muttered, reaching for the glass pipe and a lighter. A couple of puffs reduced the trembling a little, but didn't make her any less emotional. "Why'd I think he'd ever give this up? Man can't bear to be told he's fucking wrong." She took another puff, then exhaled harshly. "Like some super weapon is just going to fall into his fucking hands. Don't know what he thinks he can do against something half the fucking size of the fucking Medhall building. Shoot fucking Kaiju, she'll just step on him. And me. And everyone else."
Rubbing her forehead clear of sweat and grease, she turned back to the latest project, a wildly overbuilt thing that had started life as several different construction vehicles and was heading towards being something amazing. Even so, she was pretty sure it wouldn't be enough. Not against that thing.
Not that she really wanted to find out. In her more lucid moments, she realized that the man she'd hooked up with years ago had turned into a total caricature of himself, the drugs and the ego eating away at what had been a caring and intelligent man in his own way, once. She also realized that she herself was a sad mockery of the woman she'd been, not that she had really been anything to write home about. The Tinkering was the only thing that made her stand out at all.
Grumbling under her breath, she resumed work on the traction transfer system, lighting up an acetylene torch with a pop, then adjusting the flame to the right color. She kept muttering even as she was welding the next piece of chassis in place, not bothering to make it neat, only strong.
"Isn't it fucking done yet?" a voice said from behind her. Stiffening in anger, she didn't look, but kept welding.
"No. Fuck off and let me work, you ugly bastard," she snarled, adjusting her welding goggles with one hand. Sparks flew amid a steady hissing sound as she fed filler rod into the weld puddle.
"Skidmark wants to know," the voice pressed. "He's coming back soon, he said. He wants this ready to use when he gets here."
"I said fuck off. Both of you. It'll be done when it's done. Stop bothering me."
Footsteps preceded a hand grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her around. She swore and knocked the hand away with her free arm. "We need this finished, bitch," the man standing there said, glaring at her from bloodshot eyes. "Fucking hurry up."
"Touch me again and I'll fuck you right the hell up, Lee. No one touches me."
Lee wiggled his eyebrows at her lasciviously, looking her up and down. "Skidmark does. Clothes like that, you should be used to it."
Sherrel counted to ten under her breath, then brought the welding torch up, thumbing the gas valve. The flame lengthened and hissed loudly, the radiated heat making Lee step back. "I will burn your goddam face off if you don't leave me alone," she snapped viciously. "Go back to your fuckbuddies and your weed. I'm busy."
"Just tell me when it's going to be done," the man insisted, watching the flame a little nervously. "Skids is getting antsy about it."
"Do I look like I give a shit?" Sherrel asked, turning back to the vehicle she was building. "After what he did, the only reason I'm doing this is because I don't have anyplace else to go."
"You were begging for it, you slut," Lee commented. Picking up a crowbar that was next to the gas bottles she turned in one smooth motion and slammed it into his ribs.
"Say that again and I'll use you for target practice," she replied casually, as he collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. "Don't forget who you're fucking talking to."
"A mouthy bitch with big tits and a stupid voice who's going to get fucked when Skidmark comes back," he muttered, sounding pained. "Again. And you'll like it."
Hearing the torch stop, he looked up, then paled at the expression on her face. "Excuse me, you little cunt?" she asked sweetly. "What did you say?"
Scrabbling backwards on all fours as she hefted the crowbar, he rolled to his feet and ran for it, the heavy tool slamming into the wall beside his head as he made it out the door. "Just get it done you bimbo!" he yelled back as he ran.
She threw a couple more tools after him, and a box of bolts, before stomping back to the workbench and sitting on the ratty old chair there, the trembling now so bad she could barely stand up.
Grabbing her pipe and a new rock of meth, she was shortly sucking down the vapor while fuming nearly as much as the pipe bowl was. "Little fucker. I do most of the real work around here while those shits just make the stuff and complain. But does anyone care? No, of fucking course not. 'Squealer, make me a tank,' he says, or 'Cunt, build me a bitching boat, or a submarine, or something.' No thanks, just make this and build that, but he won't get me any proper materials, only this crap." She paused in her angry monologue to pick up an old engine management unit, give it an evil glare, then throw it across the room to join the tools.
"Then he gets a rat up his ass about the fucking Family and the damn Dockworker's Union and wants to attack them. 'Oh, baby, they're taking my territory' the asshole says. 'We can wipe them out and we'll be the tops dogs around here.' Yeah, like that's going to happen. God himself would be worried about Kaiju glaring at him and Skids thinks he can shoot her or something?" She took another hit from the pipe, her head spinning as a result. Dimly she recognized she was overdoing it but she was too fucking pissed to really care. "I loved that bastard once. Don't know that I still do. Not after what he did."
"Why stay with him, then?" a quiet voice asked from somewhere close.
"What else can I do?" she said in a weird mix of despair, fury, and drug-fueled disorientation. She didn't recognize the voice, she wasn't even sure it was real, but it had a point. "Look at me. I'm twenty-five, I dropped out of college, I'm so high I'm imagining someone talking to me, and the man I though I loved once nearly fucking killed me when I told him he was talking himself and the rest of us into an early grave. But I'm so fucked up I couldn't do anything else. It wasn't supposed to be like this, we were just going to make some coin and have some fun." Taking a last hit, she coughed violently, then in a surge of disgust at herself, tossed the pipe away, hearing it shatter somewhere.
"It's not fair. I just want to build bitching cars and drive them, not go off to fight a fucking sea monster because someone I used to care about is too fucking stupid to see he can't possibly win." She looked after the pipe, then down at the small bag of rocks on the workbench. "And now I have to find another pipe."
"Is that a good idea? You're right on the edge of an overdose. You could die."
Sherrel emitted a harsh laugh. "I'm going to soon enough, anyway. If the meth doesn't kill me, fucking Kaiju will. Or Skids, when he comes back all fucked up and angry about something. He's always angry about something these days. Might as well go out high."
"You could always leave. Get clean, go and find somewhere else to live. Maybe talk to the Protectorate or the PRT. You haven't killed anyone that I know of, they'd probably take you."
"Yeah, right. Sure they would. A junkie Tinker is right at the top of their list of people they're looking for," she retorted scornfully, leaning back on the bench and closing her eyes, her head spinning. "Fuck, really overdid it this time," she mumbled. "I'm seeing three of everything."
"I can hear your heartbeat from here, it's way too fast. You seriously need to stop with the drugs."
"I can hear my heartbeat from here, too," the woman said, shaking her head violently, then regretting it instantly. The spinning got worse, her heart going like crazy and thumping in her ears. "Fuck. Way too much."
She tried to stand up, only managing to slide to the ground as her legs gave out under her. Now genuinely worried that she'd finally managed to kill herself, she whimpered a little, grabbing for the chair, but only succeeded in pulling it over on herself. "Ow. Fuck it," she said faintly as the thing landed on her. Barely managing to push it off she rolled onto her back and waited for the room to stop moving like the entire building was at sea.
"Are we having an earthquake?" she asked the voice, still unsure if she was talking to someone real, or a hallucination. Or her own mind finally snapping from stress.
"No. You're suffering from a methamphetamine overdose. And too much alcohol, I think."
"I could do with a drink," Sherrel said deliriously. A moment later she vomited, coughing most of the last meal she'd had all over herself then spitting weakly a few times.
"No, trust me, you couldn't. That would kill you for sure."
"I'm dying, right?"
"Well, you're definitely not in good condition right now." The voice was still quiet, but sounded somewhat regretful. "You might survive. This time."
"Are you real?"
"Some people think so. Some people wish I wasn't," the voice said, with a note of humor present.
"Huh. Now, did I imagine that too, or is all this actually happening?"
"It's happening." The voice was silent for a few seconds. "I can help you if you want."
"Help me?" She thought as hard as she could with her brain doing backflips in her skull.
She knew it was, she could hear it, over the sound of her heart, which was now thumping erratically. Her chest hurt too and she was pouring sweat.
"Why would you help me?"
"Call it the right thing to do. I don't particularly want to see someone kill herself right in front of me, especially accidentally."
Trying to work out whether any of this was actually happening made the pain in her head worse. Feeling trapped and beginning to panic, she looked wildly around, then let her head drop to the floor again. "Why not?" she asked herself. "What's the worst that can happen?"
The sound of metal scraping lightly on concrete came to her ears, the sound echoing around the large room. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted something huge and shadowy moving. The voice laughed a little. "Bad question, you never want to know the answer," it said. "Sorry about this. You'll feel better when you wake up. Trust me."
About to ask a question, Sherrel heard a low pop sound and felt a sting in her neck. She twitched, then the world went away.
Lisa looked down at the sleeping woman as her healing tendrils retracted. She'd had to dart her again because the healing process had flushed the drug from her body, at the same time she'd fixed the immediate problems with an overdose, then all the other damage caused by years of narcotic and alcohol abuse. Her power was telling her that she'd also reversed the chemical dependency as well, which she'd expected to happen. Whether it would have any effect on the psychological addiction she didn't know for sure, but it would probably help.
Listening carefully, she tested the air, picking up the scents of the other inhabitants of the old building, but none of them being close enough to worry about for the moment. Going over to the door she checked the corridor outside, then closed it very quietly and wedged it shut with the crowbar that was lying nearby. That would prevent any of Squealer's little friends finding her for the moment while she recovered.
While she still wasn't certain where Skidmark was or what he was doing, except for shopping for some sort of weapon as they'd expected, and possibly backup, it seemed clear that he was intending on trying something fairly soon. She thought probably within a couple of weeks at the outside. Poking around the weird amalgamation of machinery in the middle of the big room she shook her head. It was one of the ugliest things she'd ever seen, but in a very weird way, also close to a work of art. None of the vehicles that had been cannibalized to form the new one were intended to do what they were now doing, but somehow the Tinker had made all the various parts work together.
There were some interesting aspects to the electronics, something that her power told her was a version of the invisibility cloak that Leet had talked about, a power source she wasn't sure about, but was definitely functional, and mounting points all over it for what would undoubtedly be weapons. All in all, a fairly terrifying urban tank, made from scrap.
'She knows her stuff,' she thought with reluctant admiration. 'Pity she's hooked up with these fuckwits.' Turning to look at the comatose woman on the floor, she studied her closely. Her clothes sense was appalling, her mouth was even more prone to obscenities than half the dock workers, and her drug habit had come very close to killing her. But on the other hand, she was clearly not entirely stupid, as she had worked out something that apparently her boyfriend was incapable of, that his crusade against the Family was going to end in tears.
And a lot of screaming, probably.
'We'll see what happens, I guess,' Lisa thought. 'Hopefully I haven't made a horrible mistake. Oh, well, if so I can always come back and fix it.' Turning to the drain cover she'd lifted off the shaft in the floor, she paused, then turned back. Digging in her harness she found a notebook and a pen, quickly jotting down a couple of lines, then tearing the page out and folding it in half. She tucked it into the unconscious Squealer's hand.
Soon she was clinging to the wall of the shaft in the floor, lifting the ton-plus corroded steel plate back into position, carefully aligning it with the rust marks on the concrete. Lowering it until the edge was only a few inches off the floor, she took aim and shot the woman on the floor in the neck with another dart, this one loaded with the counter-agent for the sedative. Quietly lowering the cover the remaining distance, she dropped into the mud at the bottom of the tunnel, then headed back the way she'd come, carefully erasing her footprints with her tail as she went.
Someone would be able to tell something had come through, but hopefully not exactly what.
When she exited the storm drain into the bay, she replaced the grating, shoveled silt around it to hold it in place, rose to the surface for one last quick check, then began swimming home again, thinking over the things she'd learned.
Blinking a few times, Sherrel stared at the ceiling with a confused expression. What the hell was she doing lying on the floor?
Sitting up, she looked around, then down at herself. She wrinkled her nose. There was horrible stuff all over her and it stank worse than Skids did after a week-long bender. Oddly enough, except for a ghastly taste in her mouth, she felt fine.
Better than fine, she thought after a moment. Really good. Much better than she could recall for… years, probably.
And she was absolutely fucking starving.
Rolling to her feet, she looked around again. There was no sign of anyone else present, but she could distinctly remember something about a conversation with a shadow, one that had offered to help her. Was that real, or the meth?
Wandering around she couldn't find any obvious signs of someone else being there. Aside from the huge sliding doors that the vehicles went in and out, which were firmly locked, and the door into the rest of the building, there was no way in or out. The room didn't even have windows. Going over to the interior door she stared at the crowbar which had been firmly shoved into the jamb, with enough force to embed it into the heavy wooden frame about three inches. No way anyone did that from the other side. And there was no way to open or close the door with it where it was.
Shaking her head a little, she tried to work out what the hell had happened. Had she really talked to someone… or possibly, something…? that wasn't here any more, having apparently walked through the wall?
"It looked like a shadow, maybe it really was," she mumbled, putting her hands on her hips and turning around on the spot, hoping to see something to explain the last twenty minutes. Feeling an itch in her neck, she reached up and removed a tiny gray-black dart-like thing about an inch long, staring at it in puzzlement. "What the hell is this?"
It was only at that point that she realized there was a small piece of paper stuck to her rather sweaty hand. Putting the dart down on top of an oil drum next to her, she peeled the paper off her palm with her other hand and inspected it. The paper seemed to be a perfectly ordinary page torn out of a small notebook, folded in half and now pretty damp. Opening it carefully, she looked at the writing on it in total confusion.
'If you want to talk, call me. I might be able to help. There's almost always a way out if you really want one.' This was followed by a phone number. There was no name given.
"What… the… fuck?" she finally said out loud, totally confused. Another glance at the tiny thing she'd pulled out of her neck left her none the wiser, except to suggest that someone had stuck her with it for some reason.
After a long pause, she carefully folded the paper again and put it in her pocket, then went to find a hammer to knock the crowbar out with. She need to get something to eat, then try to work out what had happened.
Not to mention figure out why, for the first time in several years, she had no desire at all for any drugs.
"And fuck me I need a shower," she grumbled, trying not to smell herself. Picking up her favorite sledgehammer she headed back towards the door, thinking hard.