Reality Intrudes
Part Eleven: Fallout
[A/N: this chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
PRT ENE Building
Director Emily Piggot
Triumph grimaced as Shadow Stalker's ranting died away along the corridor. "A pity to see someone with so much promise go bad," he said. "I can't help thinking there should've been something we could have said or done, to avert this."
Emily shook her head. "We gave her every chance. She chose to keep offending, and trying to cover it up, even after she was brought into the Wards under you as an alternative to juvenile detention. This was her last lifeline, and she chose to throw it back in our faces."
He tilted his head, a slightly overdone gesture to compensate for having only the lower part of his face visible. "What you said to her, about having Taylor Hebert come in as her replacement; do you really think that's an option? We know extremely little about her at the moment, least of all whether she's willing to even join the Wards."
Emily nodded. "That's true. Fortunately, I've got people on that."
Taylor
She was just finishing breakfast when her father looked across at her. "Considering what happened yesterday, and how badly Winslow's been falling down on the job so far, I'm going to give you a lift into school and explain how I'm really invested in this shit never happening again. Also, so they don't suddenly get the bright idea to blame you for everything."
Taylor nodded. "That's … I'd like to say they probably wouldn't do that, but I've kinda lost all faith with them to be anything but totally self-serving, so that's probably a good idea. Thanks, I'll definitely take you up on that." Getting up, she started to clear the table.
"Good." He finished his coffee and pushed his own chair back, just as there came a knock on the front door. Frowning, he looked at Taylor. "Were we expecting visitors this morning?"
"Um …" Taylor quickly went back over what Morrigan had done on the previous day. Did she leave evidence that led back to me? "Not sure. I'll go see who it is."
She put the plates down again and trotted through the living room to the entrance hall. Slotting the chain into place on the front door, she opened it slightly. "Who is it?" she asked.
"Ah, hi," a guy's voice answered. He sounded chatty and personable, even though she couldn't see his face. "We're here to read the gas meter. Do you mind if we come in?"
"Uh … what? We don't have the gas on here. Dad!" She raised her voice. "They say they're here to read the gas meter!"
"That'll be a good trick," he called back. "We don't have the gas on." She heard his footsteps coming along the entrance hall. "Who's out there, really?" he demanded.
"Brockton Bay Gas and Illumination," the cheerful voice insisted. "Here to read your meter. We'll be in and out in a jiffy."
Danny stepped forward and motioned for Taylor to get behind him. "As my daughter and I both just informed you, we don't have the gas connected to this house. I'm going to need to see some ID, or we're calling the police, right now."
"Certainly, sir." A wallet was slipped through the gap. Open, it showed a badge and an ID card … one that identified the holder as a member of the Parahuman Response Teams. "And now that we've established to any nosy neighbours that we're just here to read the meter, would you mind letting us in for that chat, sir?"
"Not just yet." Danny seemed to be considering his options. "Who do you want to talk to, and why?"
"Your daughter Taylor, if we could." This was a second voice, a young woman.
Danny turned and looked at Taylor, with his eyebrows raised in query. Why do the PRT want to talk to you?
While she could think of several good reasons, she made herself shrug. Back when she was spending time at the Barnes household, she'd heard any number of stories from Emma's dad about how people accidentally confessed to things they weren't even suspected of. No matter what they got her on, there was no point in making it easy for them. "Maybe the Shadow Stalker thing?" she hazarded, keeping her voice low. One of the things she recalled from the 'movie' was Morrigan-as-her telling her dad about that.
He nodded briefly. "Makes sense," he murmured in reply, then raised his voice. "Why?"
The woman answered again. "Because we'd like to get Taylor's side of what happened with Sophia Hess yesterday. And we'd really rather not have to do it while standing on your front doorstep."
Danny grimaced and glanced at his watch. "I can let you in. Ten minutes, max. Any questions for my daughter come through me. Any questions I don't like, you're out of here. Got it?"
"Absolutely," agreed the guy at once. "We only want to talk."
"Hm." There was a grimace on Danny's face, as though he didn't totally believe them, but in the end he closed the door and took the chain off the hook.
"Hi," enthused the man who stepped through the doorway. "Ethan Saunders, at your service. This is my partner and totally my best friend, Jess Everett." He shook Danny's hand firmly. "Danny Hebert, yes? And you must be Taylor."
Drawn in despite her own misgivings, Taylor found herself warming to him. "That's me," she acknowledged. "What do you want to know about Sophia? Because I can tell you a lot, and none of it good."
"That's exactly what we're looking for." Agent Everett slipped past her partner and shook Taylor's hand. "Is it okay if we come through and sit down? Because the last thing we want this to feel like is an interrogation."
Even though that's exactly what it's gonna be. Taylor wasn't sure where that thought came from, but she wasn't about to disagree with it. "Say, if this is about Sophia, I've got some stuff upstairs that might throw some light on the subject, if you're interested?"
"Definitely," said Agent Saunders. "We'll be interested in whatever you've got to show us."
"While she's getting that," Danny said, "come on through. Can I interest you in a cup of coffee?"
"Now there's an offer I can't refuse," Agent Saunders agreed. "Lead the way, Mr Hebert."
As Danny went through to the kitchen, Taylor darted upstairs. Heading along the corridor to her room, she glanced suspiciously over her shoulder in case either of the agents had followed her. Neither one had, so she ducked into her room and retrieved the stack of pages from under the tacky Christmas sweater on the top shelf of her closet. The bulldog clip she was using to hold them together was having to strain a little, and she made a mental note to get a bigger one.
Morrigan
I'm dozing in my rack when the PA system grinds to life. "Morrigan to Operations, stat. That means get your butt here now!" It's staticky and distorted, but I can pick out Loki's smarm from fifty yards in pitch darkness under heavy gunfire.
It's tempting to dally around for ten or fifteen minutes to teach him a lesson about who's authorized to give orders to whom. Case in point: he is not my commanding officer, and never will be.
But right now, it's more important to get there fast, because it sounds like Taylor Hebert's in trouble. If she gets injured or killed, her career as our conduit into the Earth Bet server would be set back to square zero. Also, I'm getting kind of attached to the kid. (Especially since she called Loki an asshole).
So I get there as fast as humanly possible, pausing only to put pants on. As I swing around the hatch-frame into Operations, I focus on the waterfall display in front of Loki and the Captain. Taylor's still in her house and uninjured, which is good, but there are two strangers in the house as well. "Who're they?"
"ID says PRT," the Captain informs me tensely. "I've got my doubts."
I'm already dropping into the chair and fastening my restraints. "Local criminals, trying for a stealth recruitment after they saw her performance yesterday? Or maybe Agents?" I haven't seen any of the latter yet (if I discount the maybe-sighting of one by Danny yesterday) but the mission hasn't hit the forty-eight hour mark yet either.
"Possible, but it's more likely that it's two of their 'capes', investigating the chance that she's one as well, since you roughed up one of theirs yesterday. After all, would you send non-Operatives to check in on another Operative?"
The Captain's voice is non-judgemental, even as Loki sneaks me a smug look behind her back. "Hey," I say defensively. "That little cow totally had it coming."
"I'm not saying she didn't," Hornblower agrees. "However, it did have the undesired side effect of putting you on their radar."
"Gotcha," I say, and slide my arms into the wrist restraints. "So, am I going in now?"
"Not yet, but be ready in case you have to." The Captain studies the screen intently. "They don't seem to be there to arrest her, but I honestly don't know how she'll do under pressure."
I shift in the chair, lining up my neck with the hole for the Matrix jack and trying to relax at the same time. "From the letter she wrote after she saw what I'd been up to, pretty damn well."
There's a snort from Loki. Nope, he hasn't forgotten the 'sounds like an asshole' comment, either. "Let's hope so."
Taylor
When she got back downstairs, the two agents were seated in the kitchen, and Danny was just pouring coffee for Agent Everett. "Here," she said, dropping the pages on the table in front of the female agent. "Feel free to take photos, but I want to keep the original."
"What is it?" asked Agent Saunders and Danny more or less simultaneously, but Agent Everett was already reading the first page.
She went through two more, then pulled out her phone. "I'm definitely going to want pictures, yes. Is this just from September of last year?"
"Taylor, is that what I think it is?" asked Danny at the same time.
"It's what they've been doing to me. What the school's been letting them do to me, while they carefully look the other way," she said in answer to both. "It started in two thousand nine, but I only started keeping track last year."
Agent Everett nodded. "I'm going to want to get pictures of all this. Saunders, would you mind handling the questions?"
"Fine." Agent Saunders affected a put-upon tone. "I'll ask the boring old questions." Taking a sip of coffee, he nodded to Taylor. "So, yesterday. Sophia Hess and Emma Barnes. What actually happened there?"
Taylor glanced at her dad, who nodded. She took a deep breath, ready to launch into her tale of woe, then she paused. The more details she gave, the more they'd be able to tease out of her, until they had something to incriminate her on. But on the other hand, if she told them something they could never disprove, with the only witnesses being people who were predisposed to being antagonistic to her …
"After I got out of the locker," she said neutrally, "I went to Emma's next classroom. She was one of the two who'd put me in there, so I figured she needed to help clean up my stuff. So we went up to the bathroom and she started cleaning my clothing. Out of the goodness of her heart, of course."
Agent Saunders raised an eyebrow. "Ms Barnes claims you forced her to clean your clothing, and broke her nose when she refused."
She met his gaze with hers, and refused to back down. "Just so you know, Emma Barnes couldn't lie straight in bed. If she said the sky was blue, I'd get a second opinion."
Apparently caught on the back foot, he coughed into his fist and regained his composure. "Be that as it may, when Sophia Hess got there, they both say you attacked her and took their clothing."
"Well, that's impressive." Taylor gave him another raised-eyebrow look. "Sophia and I had a free and frank exchange of views, and we all agreed that Emma was taking far too long to clean my clothing, so we traded clothes, and I left."
"An exchange of views?" He tilted his head, as though trying to figure out what I was saying. "They say you broke Sophia's nose and knocked her out. That's some exchange of views, right there."
"Honestly?" Taylor hid a grin. "If I was capable of doing that, don't you think I would've done it back when they first started on me?"
"Well … no," he admitted with an irritated twitch. "However, if you'd triggered with powers in that locker, you might now have the ability to do that."
Silence fell as Taylor regarded him steadily. Even Agent Everett had ceased taking photos of the pages, and Danny was staring fixedly at Agent Saunders.
"And if I didn't?" Taylor asked.
"Are you saying you didn't?" he countered quickly.
Danny cleared his throat. "Are you trying to trick my daughter into admitting to having super-powers? Does the PRT have the legal right to force that sort of information from people now?"
Agent Everett swallowed heavily. Saunders glanced at her, then shook his head hastily. "No, no, of course not. It was speculation only, a hypothetical answer to the question."
"Well, your hypothesis is based on faulty data," Taylor stated with as much snark as she could pack into the sentence. "I don't have powers."
"Ah." Saunders frowned. "So how did you break Sh—Sophia's nose? And knock her out?"
Taylor considered letting the agents know that her father was already aware of Shadow Stalker's real identity, but decided it was too much fun watching Saunders tap-dance around it. "Who says I did?"
"They do," Saunders insisted. "Sophia Hess and Emma Barnes."
"And given what else they've said about me since September before last, they're hardly credible witnesses. Let's see…." Holding up a finger for each point, she said, "I'm simultaneously bulimic, anorexic, a lesbian, a man-hungry whore, too ugly to you-know-what, and a junkie. Also, to the teachers and staff, I'm a troublemaker and an attention-seeker. Of which exactly none is true. So, if they chose to give me their clothing and then turn around and claim that I beat them up and stole it … who are you going to believe?"
Agent Everett turned another page. "Uh … she's got a point. The amount of stuff they've been doing to her is frankly ridiculous. Seeing what's already in here, I honestly wouldn't put that past them."
"Actually, I'm curious about something." Danny leaned into the ongoing discussion. "Two bullies claiming to have been beaten up in a high school bathroom and their clothing stolen by their victim isn't exactly a common occurrence … but why exactly is the PRT involved in all this?"
Taylor saw both agents wince as the shot went home. Danny had struck right at the heart of the little deception that was going on, and neither one liked it. "Let me guess," she snarked. "They claimed I was a dangerous cape, and that's how I supposedly beat them up?"
"That was the gist of the claim, yes," Saunders confirmed. "You're saying that you didn't beat them up, powers or otherwise?"
"I believe my daughter's already made that clear," snapped Danny. "Are you going to keep asking her the same question in different ways, or accept that she's telling the truth?"
Taylor was impressed. Her father knew the truth; or rather, he knew what she'd told him. And yet, here he was, backing her solidly against the PRT.
"Okay, moving on," Saunders acknowledged. "Ms Hess said that after you left, both her phones were missing. She says you took them."
When Taylor gave him the speculative look, she could tell from his expression that he knew what was coming next. "What would I do that for? I'm not even allowed to own a phone."
"That's not for me to say." Saunders' tone hardened slightly. "We traced one of the phones, and determined that it was well outside the school, travelling in a vehicle of some sort. Perhaps a bus. How did you leave Winslow?"
Taylor shrugged. "Can't remember."
"Where did you go once you left Winslow?"
"I dunno."
He breathed in deeply through his nostrils. "Did you take her phones?"
"Agent Saunders." Her father held his hand up. "Back off, right now. Quick question, Taylor; do you have either one of Ms Hess' phones on you right now?"
Taylor beamed at her dad. "No, I don't."
Agent Everett cleared her throat again. "If you, uh, 'swapped clothing' with Ms Barnes and Ms Hess, where is that clothing now? Did you bring it home?"
"No, I bought new clothes and left the old stuff in a Goodwill bin," Taylor explained.
"Which one?" prompted Saunders.
Taylor shrugged. "I dunno."
He twitched again, then turned to his partner. "Everett, we need to talk. Outside. Now."
"Alright." She weighted down the pages with salt and pepper shakers and gave Taylor an engaging grin. "Don't want to lose my place."
"Probably not a bad idea," Taylor agreed. She watched as the two went to the back door and let themselves out. The door closed behind them and they walked a little way out into the yard. Facing away from the house, the two agents began to converse.
"Come on," said Danny quietly. He led the way into the living room and used the remote to turn the TV on. "I don't know that they've bugged the place, but I'm not going to trust them until I see a reason to."
"Okay, yeah, I didn't even think of that," Taylor admitted. Leaving the room to allow the suspects to converse in 'private' had to be one of the number one tricks in law enforcement. "What did you want to talk about?"
He put his hands on his hips and looked her in the eye. "I can tell when someone's pulling a line of bullshit. And you and Agent Saunders are both trying to bullshit each other. And you're not fooling anyone with your stonewall act. Neither is he, but he's slightly better at it."
"What's that line Emma's dad always uses?" Taylor asked rhetorically. "'Never admit to anything they can't prove?' He might suspect stuff, but so long as I don't actually agree that I did something, he can't prove it. And until I know why he's trying to get me to admit I took Sophia's phone on the bus, fuck him. He can whistle in the wind."
"He also wants you to admit to being a cape," Danny pointed out. "Which reminds me; are you?"
"Sorry, Dad," she said without a quiver of remorse. "The answer's gonna be 'no' whether I am or not. Plausible deniability, you know."
He didn't like it, she could tell, but neither was he going to push the matter. "That's fair, I guess. Just tell me you're not going to become a villain. I'm not sure my heart could take it."
"Zero plans to rob banks and plot world domination while cackling menacingly," she reassured him.
"Oh, good." The moment of levity over, his serious demeanour returned. "Just remember, I am not going to stand by and let anyone steamroll—"
"Coming back in," she warned him quietly, just as the back door latch clicked open.
In the Back Yard
Assault
Ethan ground his teeth. "Jesus Christ, and I thought I was good with teenagers. That kid's harder to deal with than Shadow Stalker at her pissiest."
"Calm down," Jess advised him. "You think she's a cape?"
"Don't you?" he retorted. "She's hiding something, and that's the most obvious thing it could be."
"Well, you going at her like a bull at a gate isn't helping, you know."
Closing his eyes, he breathed deeply, letting the tension dissipate from his shoulders. "The craziest thing here is that we're not even trying to protect Stalker. She's going down. They haven't finished going through the Barnes girl's phone and we know she's going down."
"You just want to know how that girl in there broke a six-digit PIN on her first try, don't you?" Her grin was almost impish.
"Of course I damn well do." He shook his head. "The techs are adamant it can't be done. She did it, or whoever she gave the phone to. But we can't ask her outright without explaining how a high school student had a special phone with that level of PIN, and how we know it was broken into."
She frowned. "What's the possibility that she knows Hess is Stalker?"
"Shit." He rubbed his lower lip with his thumbnail. "If Hess showed her powers during the fight, one hundred percent. But if she beat Hess with her powers—that she's just gotten—while Hess was using her abilities, she must be pretty damn good. Because Hess is almost as good as she thinks she is."
"And if Hess didn't show off her powers? What's the chances of Hebert finding out from the phone? What was accessed?"
He looked unhappy. "Not sure. Damn it. We're going to have to read them both in, aren't we?"
"Can't see any way out of it." She brightened. "But like you said, Stalker's not going to be a Ward much longer anyway."
"Not after this fuckup, no." He turned and gestured toward the house. "I'll get the forms from the car. You go in and keep them talking."
"Copy that."
Taylor
Danny turned the TV off as Agent Everett came in through the back door. "We've come to a decision," she said. "It requires just a little bit of paperwork, which Agent Saunders is fetching from the car."
"Paperwork?" he asked as he and Taylor sat down at the table again. "I'm not signing Taylor up for anything without a damn good reason."
"Wouldn't expect you to," she agreed. "Though, just saying, if Taylor did happen to have powers, she could do a lot worse than going into the Wards."
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Still don't have powers, over here. Just saying."
"Understood." Agent Everett took out her phone and started to photograph the pages again.
Dad glanced at his watch. "The ten minutes I gave you is nearly up. I've still got to get Taylor to school. You don't want her to be late, on top of missing all her classes yesterday, do you?"
"—yeah, thanks, I'll keep you posted." The back door opened again, and Agent Saunders entered, with his phone to his ear. He seemed to be his chipper self once more, and he was carrying a Manila folder in his free hand. Ending the call, he slid the phone into his pocket, then dropped the folder on the table. "If I can get you two to sign these, we can be a little more open about what's going on here."
"Oh, good." Danny took the folder, opened it, and started reading the forms within. About halfway through, he looked over at Agent Saunders, who had seated himself. "These are non-disclosures. Why do we need these?"
"As I said." Agent Saunders seemed to have recovered from going head-to-head with me. "Once you've signed those, there's a lot more we can tell you about the situation."
Taylor figured she could guess what it was—Sophia Hess' status as a cape, among other things—but she couldn't see why they'd be telling her that. "I'll sign only if Dad says it's okay."
"Just give me a moment and I'll let you know." Danny kept reading through the documents, checking every line. While Taylor didn't think they'd sneak in a stealthy Wards membership in the fine print, she definitely figured it was worth doing.
Eventually, he sat back and passed one of the documents over to Taylor. "It all seems above board to me. I'll have to co-sign yours, to make it binding."
That followed, given that Taylor was a minor. "Sure, okay. Got a pen?"
Agent Everett loaned Taylor her pen. She filled in her details and scribbled her signature, then passed it and the form to her father, who filled out his own form then signed both. Handing back the pen to Everett, he raised his eyebrows. "Okay, the t's are crossed and the i's dotted. Can we stop tap-dancing now?"
"Sure." Agent Saunders gathered up the non-disclosure forms and stashed them back in the folder. "Fact number one, that I'm reasonably sure you already knew. Sophia Hess is the Ward known as Shadow Stalker."
Taylor shared a glance with her father, then they both looked back at the PRT agents. "I am shocked," Danny said, deadpan.
"Surprised," echoed Taylor.
"Flabbergasted," Danny added helpfully.
Taylor leaned forward. "Which leaves me wondering, how long have you guys known about this, and covered it up?"
Agent Everett winced. "We didn't know. We're currently unraveling the cover-up. And Stalker is going to be an ex-Ward by the end of the day. That's the second fact."
Now that, Taylor hadn't known. "Really." It wasn't a question.
"Really." Saunders had a grin on his face that was more teeth than humour. Interestingly enough, it looked more genuine than when he'd been talking to Taylor before. "Your little clash with her in the bathroom opened a whole can of worms. We were unable to access her phones, because some unknown person made off with them—" He paused to give Taylor an extremely dry look, "—but fortunately we were able to get a warrant for Ms Barnes' phone. And it's proven to be an absolute trove of incriminating texts. So yes, Sophia Hess is going to be punted out of the Wards in a high ballistic arc that ends up in secure juvey holding. Any questions?"
"Yeah," said Danny. "As satisfying as this is, why are you telling us?"
"Because Sophia had two phones, not one," Agent Everett explained. "One was personally owned, and the other was Wards issued. We have no idea what happened to the personal one—though it would be nice to get our hands on it, to absolutely seal the deal—but the Wards one was electronically pinged as riding in a vehicle, probably a bus, around the time that someone used the six-digit PIN to open it up, on the first try."
Taylor leaned back in her chair, feigning unconcern. "Good trick, but what's that got to do with me?"
Agent Saunders took up the ball. "Because we found the phone, and lifted fingerprints off it. I was in contact with the lab, just now. The prints don't match Sophia Hess, who we had on file, or Emma Barnes, who got printed just today. They do match the most recent prints on your school locker combination lock. Which, I've got to say, the tech who lifted those prints? Deserves a medal. So yeah, they're your prints."
"You're not in trouble," Agent Everett hastened to say. "We just want to know how you cracked a six-digit PIN in one try. As you might imagine, right now it's a bit of a security issue for us."
Taylor shrugged. "Lucky guess. I was just fiddling and got it right first go. But when there wasn't anything incriminating about Sophia on it, I tossed it."
The two agents glanced at each other, then Saunders shook his head. "Come on now, you've got to be able to do better than that. 'Lucky guess'? Nobody's that lucky."
"And now you're calling my daughter a liar." Danny stood up. "We've listened to what you have to say, we've signed your NDAs, and now we'd like you to leave."
To their credit, they didn't argue. Agent Everett looked at the portion of the pages she hadn't photographed. "I'd like to get the rest of these, sometime. Also, you should really think about the Wards."
Taylor smiled at her. At the very least, she'd been polite about it. "We can make an appointment. And you enabled Shadow Stalker for years, so that'd be a hard pass even if I did have powers."
After a round of hand-shaking, the two PRT agents left the house and went out to the car. Watching through the blinds, Taylor was puzzled when Agent Saunders paused and saluted in her general direction. Then they got in the car and drove away.
Assault
Jess looked askance at Ethan as they pulled out onto the road. "What was that for?"
"It's a long time since anyone's done passive-aggressive better than me," he said with a sigh, relaxing back into the seat. "Part of me wants to get her into the Wards, just to see the look on Piggot's face when she realises what she's gotten herself into."
Jess shook her head. "You're mean."
"But I'm not wrong."
Morrigan
Loki shakes his head. "Well, I'll be damned. Are you sure this isn't a two-way link, Captain? Because that's something Momo here would pull."
"I'm quite aware of Morrigan's arguing techniques, thank you very much," Captain Hornblower retorts. "This is a new technique, yes. It's not impossible that a little leakage might occur. But it's not problematic enough to justify pulling the plug."
That's all I need to hear. I finish removing the restraints and get up from the chair. "I'm going to hit the head then stack a few more zee's," I announce. "Call me if anything actually important happens."
Trudging out of Operations, I yawn. Beauty sleep awaits.
And tonight … another deep dive into the Brockton Bay underworld.
End of Part Eleven
