Finding the Way
Part Twenty-Nine: Worst of Intentions, Best of Intentions
[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
[A/N 2: I recently discovered that I'd accidentally put in a chapter of another fic as Part 23. I've fixed that, but this means we were only up to Part 28.]
[A/N 3: This means I'm free to put up 29 and 30. Which is good, because this is gonna be big.]
Birdcage
June 2, 2011
Kaiser
Max Anders awoke.
He had a splitting headache, a taste in his mouth like Skidmark himself had somehow crawled in there and died, and he was blind. A moment later, he corrected himself.
Blindfold. I'm wearing a blindfold. Why am I wearing a blindfold?
When he tried to reach up and correct the situation, he discovered the next piece of bad news: his hands were tied.
"I thought he was awake." It was a man's voice, one that sounded vaguely familiar. Not one he'd heard recently, though. "Anders, nod if you can hear me."
Max hesitated, then nodded. Defiance was pointless until he had someone to defy. "Where am I?" His voice rasped in his dry throat. "Who's there? What's going on? Why am I tied up?"
"And there we have the set." The voice sounded amused. "Rest assured, you're out of the oceanic chamber. However, you have not been rescued. Compass Rose and Pathfinder decided they'd rather not commit murder by neglect, so they brought you here instead. Also a place where you won't be able to return to spread your filth across Brockton Bay."
"Wh … what?" This wasn't making any kind of sense. "What do you mean?"
The blindfold was whisked from his face, leaving him looking at a bearded man who was observing him with both hands folded over an ornately formed walking cane. He knew that face …
"I'm Marquis." The man sighed. "The years have not been kind, I know. Before you get some idea to grow metal spikes to attack me, there are no fewer than three people out of your line of sight who will make you wish very briefly that you hadn't tried."
"Four," said a voice from right behind Max.
Marquis smiled briefly. "As you say; four." His gaze focused on Max once more. "Allow me to give you the broad strokes. You will not be treated the same as other prisoners here. In a very real way, you are our prisoner. Pathfinder would prefer that we don't kill you, but if you force our hand …" He shrugged elaborately. "These things happen."
"But why are you even doing this?" Max struggled with his bonds, and failed to loosen them even slightly. The anchor points seemed to have been padded somehow, foiling his attempts to grow a surreptitious spike anyway. "He's a hero! You're villains! I'm a villain! Why are you siding with him?"
"Because he is giving us each a day release," Marquis explained. "Not letting us out altogether, of course, but giving us the chance to walk in the sunlight, enjoy sights and smells not contained within these concrete walls, to eat fast food, to find a willing woman and spend an hour of pleasure … that is the coin he is paying us in."
Oh. Oh, shit.
All was suddenly and horribly clear to Max. He didn't know why Compass Rose and Pathfinder had changed direction so abruptly, though he could make an educated guess, given Director Piggot's response to the undersea prison. Whatever their reasons, they had allied themselves with the inmates of the Birdcage.
But giving these villains their taste of freedom, though simplicity itself to them, was still too high a price to pay merely to keep him incommunicado. "There's more to it than that, isn't there? They've got other irons in the fire." Were they building an army to overthrow the PRT?
A slight smile on his face, Marquis nodded. "They do. This is no huge secret, so you may as well know. They are on the outs with the PRT and the Protectorate, so they are using this very facility as their home base while they set about repairing the ills of the world."
"What?" Max blinked. "How is … what is … what are they doing?"
"As I said, repairing the ills of the world." Marquis shrugged elaborately. "As the saying goes, 'not my circus, not my monkeys'. If they wish to anger the world's heroes by dealing with hitherto intractable problems where others could not, then I have no problems with that. And in the meantime, they are offering us a prize worth more than gold in return for a place to rest their weary heads; we have of course agreed. With alacrity, even."
Max tilted his head in thought. "A question," he murmured. "Do you trust those you have watching me right at this moment? Trust them not to spread tales, I mean?"
Marquis chuckled warmly. "Come, now. We're in the Birdcage. We're all criminals here. Of course we trust each other. What do you take us for? Superheroes?"
There were several appreciative chuckles from behind Max, which confirmed his suspicion that Marquis had not been bluffing before. "So … this is the part I don't understand," he said, keeping his voice down. "On the first outing, why hasn't the released cape simply turned on them and killed them outright? Out of the Birdcage, free and clear."
The smile on Marquis' face was faint, but present. "And thus speaks a short-sighted fool. Of course we discussed that. Fidelis resides in Black Kaze's block. Each person selected to go out makes their declaration to her first that they won't do anything of the sort. She can literally feel a lie in her gut. And as a backup, if they did do such a thing, then subsequently got recaptured and placed back in the Birdcage … well, their reception back here would be extremely brief and particularly bloody."
"Oh." Max considered that. "Have you gone out yet?"
Marquis shook his head. "No, but I have reserved my place in line. They are letting between eight and twelve out at a time, so as you might understand, nobody will have to wait long. The trick is in spreading the picks out between the cell blocks, to prevent two or three idiots from conspiring to do that exact thing you spoke of."
"Between eight and twelve?" Max frowned. "That would be noticed … wouldn't it?"
"Not if they keep their heads down, don't cause problems, and just enjoy their day on the outside," Marquis said. "Anyone provoking a fuss is likely to get kicked out of their next place in line, so I anticipate the most well-behaved supervillains you ever saw. And of course, they can't run and they can't hide."
"Well, no." Max shuddered. Even as prepared as he'd thought he was, he'd been no match for Pathfinder and Compass Rose. They'd almost casually grabbed him and the other villains of Brockton Bay from where they felt safest—not to mention Accord, which had to have made an impression on the finicky supervillain—and laid down the ultimatum to them.
I should've said yes, cut my losses, and left the Bay.
Unfortunately, the realisation was a day late and a dollar short. He sighed, fully aware that he was in a distinctly disadvantageous position. This was not surrender—he'd dragged victory from the jaws of defeat before—but there was such a thing as a tactical retreat. And to give his new jailors the impression that he'd given up was no bad thing, either.
Pride was one thing. Sowing the seeds of an eventual win condition was quite another.
Taylor
The top of Uluru—that was a really nice name—was a nice place to be at sunrise. I leaned back in my folding chair and grinned at Lisa. "So, we did it."
"What, took over into the Birdcage? Smart move." Lisa grinned back from her own folding chair. I was pretty sure she could do 'smug' better than me, but that was because she had more practice.
Dad never paused in his study of the horizon. He was careful like that. "And we put Kaiser in there as well."
"Oh." Lisa nodded. "Probably a good idea in the long run. You don't want to get into the habit of doing that sort of thing. Once you started, you'd probably end up requiring less and less in the way of an excuse."
"Right," I said. "So, I know you haven't got much time before they start wondering where you are, and come looking."
Lisa checked her watch. "I've got about one minute. Shoot."
I nodded. "Okay, cool. So, uh … who do we hit next? We want to put bad guys out of business, permanently. The way Piggot and the others have been too scared to do all this time."
"Uh … I don't think it's fear exactly …" Lisa grimaced slightly. "I mean, can you see Miss Hardass twenty-eleven herself showing fear of any cape, anywhere? I can't. It's more—"
"We get it," Dad cut in. "It's complicated. Well, it's not that complicated for us." He turned to face us. "Who do we hit next?"
Lisa glanced from me to him, then back again. Her eyes went unfocused for a moment, then fixed on me again. "Saint and the Dragonslayers."
I blinked. "Sure, but uh … why, exactly?"
"Because Dragon's doing you a huge favour," Lisa said. "She runs the Birdcage, yeah? And she hasn't immediately dropped a dime on you; at least, I haven't picked up any hints of this. The Dragonslayers have been stealing her tech left and right. Taking them out of the picture is a good way to say 'thanks'."
I glanced at Dad, and he looked back at me. Even masked up, we were able to read each other on a deeper level than most people could do in a normal face to face conversation. "Yeah," I said. "That sounds good." Standing up from my folding chair, I helped Lisa to her feet then grabbed Dad by the hand; Lisa's projected minute was ticking away.
I exerted my power, searching the location we'd taken Lisa bedroom in the Wards area. She'd left her laptop in the middle of the bed, which gave me a vague view of the whole room. No human shapes loomed into my perception, so I sent Dad the location. We jumped, the purple-brown smoke dissipating immediately to show that the place was undisturbed.
There was a knock on the door. I paused in the middle of opening my mouth to say goodbye, and waved instead; an instant later, Dad teleported us away again. We arrived in the room we'd been allotted as our living area in the Birdcage, which now contained the sofa from home, as well as some of our decorations. There were soft rugs on the concrete floor, which helped a bit. His bedroom was the next cell to the left, and mine was to the right. We'd spent time moving our beds into the rooms, so we could at least sleep comfortably.
Nor were we the only ones with such trimmings. Dad and I had worked for several hours to fetch minor luxuries such as these for any of the inmates who desired them. He'd balked at supplying a personal computer to Teacher, though, citing that such an expensive item would draw jealousy from some of the other Birdcage prisoners.
I knew Dad better than that, but when I'd asked him the real reason, he just shook his head. I was pretty sure I knew anyway; the guy had been instrumental in the deaths of two heads of state, and showed no remorse for either one. Teacher was a schemer like Accord, but the whole aspect where he got a hold on the people he added abilities to left us both with a bad taste in the mouth.
"Saint and the Dragonslayers, huh?" I asked.
Absently, he reached out and retrieved the folding chairs. We weren't sure if tourists were still allowed to climb the rock, but we didn't want to give anyone ideas if they found them there. Then he sat down on the sofa.
He nodded. "Sounds like a plan. Is the camera charged?"
I went over to where our digital camera—recently acquired—was plugged into a wall outlet. "Sure is. Same as usual?"
He nodded. "Same as usual. He's known for his tech, so we'll dump him in a cell somewhere that's got jurisdiction, minus anything he's wearing. His facial tattoos should make it impossible to talk his way out of it."
This was a new technique we'd worked out. I picked up the camera and set it to a one-second timer, then sat down beside him and handed him the camera. Closing my eyes more to concentrate than anything else, I visualised 'Saint, of the Dragonslayers'. The more complete a description we had, the better. Only one man in the whole world was known by that name, so I locked in immediately. He was sitting at a computer terminal, frowning. As he turned away, I sent Dad the mental impulse: now.
He pressed the button then sent the camera to land on the desk, facing Saint. One second later, it took its photo, then he retrieved it. We studied the image on the screen; the back of Saint's head, a moderately cluttered room with some tech on a table. With that image, I knew I'd be able to put us anywhere in that room. There was also a doorway and a safe in the corner, but before I could act on either piece of knowledge, someone else entered the room.
"Are we ready to go?" asked Dad.
"No. Someone else just showed up," I said. "Gimme second."
Because my fix was on Saint, I only had details about him. I was aware of the new person, but not of anything more about them, because I didn't have a tag for them. This was something I needed to know.
The person came over to where Saint was sitting, and they both leaned in to look at something on the screen. I took the opportunity to fix one of the pieces of tech as a landing point and set up the camera again. "Go," I said, handing it to Dad.
He sent it once more, landing it on the table next to the piece of tech, and taking the photo of the two people at the computer. When he retrieved it, I looked over the image. "Okay, it's a woman. Do we know if one of the Dragonslayers is a woman?"
He frowned and seemed about to answer when I was distracted. Now I had an image for the woman, I'd fixed on her, so I could see her face and her shocked expression. Why was she shocked? She and Saint seemed to be staring at each other in consternation. What had they just learned?
"Something's up," I said. "They just found something out, that's got them both worried."
"Any idea of what it is?" he asked.
I concentrated, trying to flick from one of them to the other and back again to see if I could get the gist of what they were saying. I got no sound out of my observation link, but I thought I caught him saying something like 'ask Calon' and her replying with 'no, you idiot'. Funny how those words were really easy to pick out. But who was Calon, and why was asking them something a bad idea?
"They're arguing over something," I said. "Not sure what."
Then I took another look at the second picture, where I could see a corner of the computer screen. So I fixed on that. The woman, in the meantime, had done something with her hands—maybe placed them over her mouth? I couldn't tell—and Saint was tilting his head like he was trying to figure out what she was doing.
At that point, I was ignoring them both, because the text on the screen had captured my attention.
11:34:23Z Location 54AE: Sudden air displacement indicates teleport appearance of two individuals, 1 adult, 1 teen. Identified by voice as PATHFINDER and COMPASS ROSE.
No direct video access. Audio only.
11:34:27Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "Saint and the Dragonslayers, huh?"
11:34:39Z Location 54AE: PATHFINDER "Sounds like a plan. Is the camera charged?"
11:34:48Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "Sure is. Same as usual?"
11:34:53Z Location 54AE: PATHFINDER "Same as usual. He's known for his tech, so we'll dump him in a cell somewhere that's got jurisdiction, minus anything he's wearing. His facial tattoos should make it impossible to talk his way out of it."
11:34:58Z Location 54AE: PATHFINDER "Are we ready to go?"
11:35:04Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "No. Someone else just showed up. Gimme second."
11:35:19Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "Go."
11:35:31Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "Okay, it's a woman. Do we know if one of the Dragonslayers is a woman?"
11:35:41Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "Something's up. They just found something out, that's got them both worried."
11:35:43Z Location 54AE: PATHFINDER "Any idea of what it is?"
11:35:48Z Location 54AE: COMPASS ROSE "They're arguing over something. Not sure what."
"What's up?" asked Dad. I knew he could tell I'd just picked up on something troubling, but he didn't know what it was. A moment later, his words popped up on the screen.
Shit, I realised. They've got hooks into the Birdcage. They can read what we're saying, in real-time.
"This might be the best time, when they're distracted," Dad said. Sure enough, his words appeared on the screen a second or so later.
I flicked my focus to Saint. He had both hands over his mouth, and his jaw was moving. I held up my hand to shut Dad up. "Nah, not a great idea," I said as I dug my phone out. "They're agitated. We've never been great at dodging bullets."
He knew I was concealing something, and that it was important, so he played along. "I suppose you're right."
In the meantime, he watched as I typed into a notepad app. WERE UNDER AUDIO SURV. THEYRE READING WHAT WERE SAYING ON A SCREEN IN REAL TIME.
"Yeah," I said. "We're going to have to put them on the back burner for the time being." I hoped I sounded convincing; to my own ears, my tone was as fake as hell. But as my words came up on the screen, it went alongside the others.
He took the phone and started typing, a little more slowly than me. HOW ARE THEY GETTING AUDIO? DRAGON RUNS BCAGE, RIGHT?
"Okay," he said. "Cut the camera feed. We're done here."
"Cutting … now," I said. "Well, this was a bust. Let's get out of here." Taking the phone back from him, I typed, ISLAND. NOW.
He didn't argue, teleporting us straight to a remote Pacific island we'd located. Several of the people from the Birdcage were here; three were splashing in the surf, two were relaxing on the beach, and a couple seemed intent on building a structure of some kind up where the palm trees overhung the sand. The other three were out in the world, keeping their heads down and enjoying themselves.
I waved to indicate that we weren't there for any of them, and they relaxed and went back to what they were doing. Dad looked at me seriously. "So, what you're saying is that Saint has hooks into the Birdcage, and can listen in on what Dragon's recording."
The more I thought about it, the more certain it appeared that Dad was correct. "He probably stole something off her to let him do it."
Pensively, he nodded. "And she obviously can't shut it down, and the longer she doesn't tell anyone, the easier it is just to keep the secret."
"Right." It wasn't even like I could blame her. I knew exactly how that thought process went.
The words 'So what do we do now?' hung in the air between us. Neither of us had to voice the question, because we both knew the answer.
I put the phone away, and cracked my knuckles.
Saint
Geoff pointed at the last few lines of text on the screen. "Is it just me, or does that have a totally different tone to it?"
Mags rubbed her chin as she re-read the words. She had her pistol in her hand, the muzzle pointed at the floor. "It's not just the tone, love. It's the interval between. They aren't just talking. They're doing something else at the same time."
Mischa, standing with his back to them and covering the room with an assault rifle, glanced over his shoulder. "Perhaps passing notes? If surveillance sees words on screen?"
He was right, and everyone there knew it. "Fuck it." Geoff pointed at the door. "We're suiting up. Let's see them—"
"Shit!" Mags pointed with her free hand. "The computer! It's gone!"
Geoff spun around, jaw dropping as he watched the purple-brown cloud dissipate. The entire computer system he'd built around Dragon's tech, the only one he could find that was fast enough to keep up with the AI's thought processes, the only one that contained the Ascalon failsafe … had vanished. He thought he briefly saw a human silhouette in with it all, but that was gone now too. "Fuck!"
"Safe!" Mischa aimed his rifle at where the safe had stood in the corner. "Is gone too!"
"Suit up, now!" Geoff barked the command. He'd had tracking devices built into both the computer system and the safe, and he'd be able to find them with his suit. And once he found wherever they were, he'd be able to—
The small metal sphere clinked to the ground right in between all of them. Thunder filled the room as Mags reflexively fired at it, but Geoff didn't have time to complain because right about then, the flashbang went off.
When his vision cleared and his ears stopped ringing, he was naked and lying on cold concrete. In front of him was a barred door, and a police officer peering curiously through at him.
"Well, dang," said the cop, pushing his cap to the back of his head. "I've seen plenty of things, but this is the first time I've seen a supervillain without any clothes on. Coulda done without that, too."
Geoff clenched both eyes shut tightly. "Fuck."
Teacher
Benjamin Terrell strolled out of his cell-block, glancing around to see who was paying attention to him. The power that one of his group had applied to him wouldn't make him invisible, but it would direct interest away from him. After a few moments, nobody was even looking in his direction, so he headed into another block.
Almost immediately, he could tell that the inhabitants of this block didn't care about cleanliness or neatness. Chips, scarring and almost ludicrously obscene graffiti defiled every square foot of concrete, even going up onto the ceiling. Litter covered the floor, and half the lights were out.
He wouldn't have come up this way were it not for his personal protection field, but as an old tutor of his had once said; "needs must when the Devil drives". Events were spinning out of his control; with the advent of Pathfinder and Compass Rose, the previous ever-present tension within the Birdcage had reduced dramatically. Capes that all and sundry normally trod lightly around had returned from their day in the sun with a new spring in their step and a renewed purpose in life.
He didn't like this. It went counter to his needs. He didn't want all-out fighting, but his business model required him to present himself as a viable solution to the day-in-day-out tedium within the Birdcage, and they'd scuttled it hard without ever knowing about it.
Thus, when he'd gotten the note from Tom Moss—Acidbath—he was sufficiently motivated to answer the call.
When he found the man—in the cell block leader's cell, of course—Moss was reclining at his ease and smoking a cigarette. Ben wrinkled his nose but refrained from waving away the smoke. There was no sense in alienating the already-volatile cape, after all.
"I'm here," Ben said quietly, after he'd stood there for fifteen seconds without Moss noticing him. The ignore-me field was definitely worth the time he'd spend arranging it.
"Bugger me sideways!" blurted Acidbath, sitting up and staring at Ben. "How the bloody hell did you sneak up on me like that, you arsehole?"
"Does it matter?" Ben gave him a disarming smile. "You wanted to talk about Pathfinder and Compass Rose. I'm here, and I'm listening."
"Right, right." Moss shook his head. "Those two bleeders have been gettin' all the attention, innit? But they're our way out of this shit-pit. Trick is, gettin' them to let us out, then makin' sure they can't send us back."
Ben restrained the lift of an eyebrow. It seemed Moss thought big. "That's a worthwhile plan, certainly," he admitted. "But it appears to be missing out on a few details."
He himself had applied his agile brain to the concept more than once since the heroic duo had established themselves within the Birdcage. Where he'd stalled, however, was in getting access to them without going through Lustrum and thus Fidelis. The second part of the plan—killing or otherwise disabling Pathfinder once they were outside—also promised to be tricky. Teleporters were notoriously slippery in general, and made for terrifying enemies.
"I got ideas," Moss boasted. "I got big ideas. See, that Compass Rose bint is Pathfinder's ace in the fuckin' hole. Every time they teleport anywhere, they gotta be holdin' hands. I'm thinkin' they're two halves of the same power. So if we get a knife to Compass Rose's throat, Pathfinder'll do whatever we tell him."
"Or teleport her straight out of your hands." Ben allowed his disappointment to show. "I thought you said you had ideas." He hadn't made the connection about how Compass Rose and Pathfinder apparently boosted each other's powers by touch until Moss had pointed it out, though.
Moss rolled his eyes. "Then we get another bloody hostage, don't we? Canary'll do. She's been hangin' around 'em since they showed up. You get some of your little culty-boys holding Canary hostage, we get teleported out of the Cage."
"Straight into PRT holding," Ben pointed out tiredly, not even bothering to rise to the bait. "And Pathfinder drops you there, then pulls the knife clear out of your hostage-taker's hand. You didn't know he could do that? It's one of his little tricks." He paid attention to these things. It was clear Moss didn't.
"Shitfuckballsmotherfucker." Moss said it as one word. "Fine, smart boy. You got any better ideas?"
"I do." If he hadn't, Ben wouldn't have bothered making the trip. He'd suspected Moss hadn't thought this all the way through, so he'd applied his brain to the problem before even coming. "We're going to need Kaiser, and there's one other thing you may not like."
Acidbath rolled his eyes. "We're in the cocksucking Birdcage. What part of this are you actually fuckin' enjoying? So we let Captain Nazi there go his merry way? Don't give a toss."
"No, the part you won't enjoy is where you let me enhance your power." Ben raised an eyebrow. "Or are you fine with that?"
"Fuck that!" Moss actually recoiled slightly. "I've seen your little culty-boys. There's nothing in their eyes. Zombies, every last one."
Ben smiled and shook his head, while sighing in mild exasperation. "Those are my long-term projects. They freely gave up their will to me, in exchange for improved mental acuity or other capabilities. All I'm suggesting is that you allow me to briefly enhance your powers in a way that'll get us out of here."
"How so?" Acidbath asked suspiciously. "Make it a super-acid that eats through the walls? Because I hear there's a vacuum out there. Fuck that with a ten-foot barge pole."
"No." Ben's smile widened. "I propose to alter the liquid that you become, into a skin-contact hypnotic. Once you splash someone with it, you will be able to give them orders and they'll have to obey."
Moss opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Finally, frowning, he looked at Ben. "Just like that? We get past Lustrum and Fidelis, then splash Pathfinder, and tell him to get us the fuck out of here? What do we need Kaiser for?"
Ben sighed. The man truly was an idiot. "Because we're going to need muscle, or at least someone who can put together nigh-impenetrable barriers at a moment's notice. Also, he's the one person who's never going to get the chance to walk outside, ever again. I doubt he'll need much in the way of persuasion."
" … oh." Moss appeared to be thinking that over, or maybe the wheel was just spinning and the hamster was stoned. "Yeah, that sounds like it could work."
Of course it'll work, you misbegotten misanthrope! I thought of it!
But he didn't feel like antagonising his newest ally just when he'd scored a victory, so he nodded. "Yes, I hope so."
"So when we gonna do it?" Despite his apparent doubts, Moss seemed to be on board.
"I'll let you know." Ben gestured with his head back toward the main area of the Birdcage. "I still have to make contact with Kaiser."
"You can't change my powers now?" Moss had a crafty look on his face. Ben hadn't trusted him an inch before, and now he was even less inclined to do so.
"No." Ben assumed a faux-regretful expression. "We don't want people getting suspicious before it happens, after all."
"Suppose not." Moss subsided, a sulky look on his face.
"I'll see you soon." Ben turned and headed back down the passageway, keeping an eye out for potential trouble. But deep down, he was exultant.
One down, one to go.
I'm getting out of here.
Taylor
"Well, that was a little unexpected," I said as we teleported back into the Birdcage. "Hey, Dragon, did you know Saint was listening in on everything you were recording?"
Dad and I waited a few moments, but it appeared that either Dragon wasn't interested in having that conversation or she didn't have any speakers in this area.
He glanced at me and shrugged. "Well, if she didn't, she does now. Let's hope there aren't any other villains tapped into this feed."
I raised my eyebrows. "I'd say, 'what are the odds', but I'm not even going to go there."
Nobody was going to get to the computer system or the safe any time soon; we'd dropped the first one off over the Marianas Trench, and Dad had 'borrowed' a space-suit from NASA so he could drop the second one off on the moon. Leviathan wasn't there anymore, which was a pity, but it was still a pretty secure place to store stuff until we needed it.
"Not even going to go where?" asked Paige, popping her head around the doorway. "Hi!" She gave us both a beaming smile and a wave. The hot shower and fast food had done a lot to restore her high spirits.
"Hi, Paige." I went over and hugged her, because she needed all the hugs. "What's up?"
She hugged me back, of course. "Uh, yeah. Lustrum sent me to get you. Apparently Gaistig Uaine has requested an interview with you."
I shared a raised-eyebrow glance with Dad. "Requested?" From what I'd ever heard of the Faerie Queen, she didn't do 'requests'. We hadn't met her yet, but that wasn't surprising. Lustrum was absolutely making the most of her control over who got to access our offer.
Paige raised her hands a little defensively. "What I was told to say. Also that she said she's heard your 'faeries' calling out to her, which is why she wants this meeting."
This time, Dad and I shared a rather more startled look. Being invited to meet the most powerful cape in the Birdcage was one thing; having her express interest in our powers when stealing powers was her thing ... that definitely got our attention.
While our linked abilities hadn't yet allowed us to develop full-on telepathy, we were definitely far more in-tune with each other than before we'd gotten the powers. A few gestures and changes of expression were all we needed to get our concepts across.
Think it's a trap? I silently asked.
Possibly, but I don't think so. He seemed cautiously optimistic.
I flicked my eyes toward the doorway. So, we should go?
Yes, but be on your guard.
Which meant to maintain physical contact at all times, and alert him if I saw anything hinky.
When we were apart from each other, it cost us that little bit of extra effort to use our powers. I had to push myself to detect things that were near the edge of my range, while he had to concentrate on where he was going before he teleported. Interestingly enough, he had no such problems when teleporting to my location, even if he didn't consciously know where I was. On the day we gained our powers, he had teleported himself and the truck halfway across town to get to me, where normally he needed my help to jump that much at once.
"Okay," said Dad. "Let's do this."
Director Emily Piggot, PRT
When Pathfinder went off the reservation and unilaterally declared war on the Empire Eighty-Eight with his little note, Emily had decided that she'd never seen such an irresponsible, utterly moronic action as that one. This was not a conclusion taken lightly; she had, after all, been Director of the East-North-East branch of the PRT for ten years.
In that time, she'd watched as new young parahumans joined the Wards and aged out into the Protectorate proper. They'd pulled some spectacular pratfalls, certainly, but none so deeply terrifying as that one. Even the advent of Assault into the local Protectorate, with his irreverent attitude, hadn't raised her blood pressure as much as Danny Hebert's stupid gauntlet-throwing stunt.
And then he'd topped it, by abducting four fucking supervillains, including Kaiser himself, and giving them the ultimatum to leave Brockton Bay forever. When Kaiser stuck by his rights, evidently assuming Emily had more power to protect him than she actually had, Pathfinder had left him under the ocean.
At this point, she'd started mainlining her blood-pressure medicine. Just thinking of the cavalier manner in which Hebert had casually left a man to die in the dark and cold made her want to scream. It didn't matter how much Kaiser deserved it, he still had the right to a trial by jury. Casual extrajudicial execution was not the way of the PRT, and it sure as hell wasn't the way of the Protectorate either. Kaiser hadn't earned a Kill Order, so at worst he would've been Birdcaged, and probably not even that.
Somewhere over the past day or so, she'd left the raging storm of pointless anger and found herself in the eye of the hurricane; chaos reigned all around her, leaving her floating in a pool of tranquil fury. Despite her pills, she could've powered Brockton Bay via her blood pressure alone, but her hands were steady and her eye didn't twitch when she thought of the errant duo.
This state of affairs held firm until Armsmaster strode into her office. She was no kind of Thinker, but something about his manner rang alarm bells loud and long in her head. Without even looking, she unscrewed the cap of the pill bottle and dry-swallowed two. "Report."
He took a deep breath. This was unusual for him; the man preferred to get right to the point. She appreciated that in a subordinate. This prevarication unsettled her; opening the bottle again, she shook two more out but didn't swallow them.
"We've found Pathfinder and Compass Rose," he said. "Or rather, Dragon found them."
He paused, eyeing her cautiously. Armsmaster. Being cautious.
The alarm bells were deafening her by now. Despite the pills she'd just swallowed, she could feel her heart rate increasing. She took the next two, then glared at Armsmaster for making her have to wait. "Where?"
"The Birdcage," he said. "They're in the Birdcage."
She blinked. That didn't make any sense. They would've had to be tried and sentenced to be sent there. There had been no public announcement of crimes, no capture, no trial—
"Oh, fuck me," she said, as the reality slammed into her. "They're in there willingly, aren't they?"
It was impossible. She'd been told it was literally impossible for even a dedicated teleporter to get into (or out of) the Birdcage, because of some kind of dimensional trickery … she wasn't certain how it worked. Just that your everyday bog-standard teleporter would stay in the Birdcage if they were sent there.
But of fucking course Pathfinder could go in there.
He'd teleported Leviathan to the moon.
There probably wasn't anywhere he couldn't go.
But why the fuck did they go there?
Several cities around the United States had been literally abandoned by the civilian government after being taken over by supervillains of one stripe or another. The official term for these locations was 'HOSV', which the public thought stood for "High Occurrence of Supervillains" but in reality was short for "Hive of Scum and Villainy". The very worst of these paled before the hellhole that was the Birdcage.
Armsmaster still hadn't answered. The set of his lips told a story, even though he wasn't talking. Emily had been a good officer in her time, and she could tell when a subordinate was holding back something. "What is it?"
"They're … letting people out," he said reluctantly. "A few at a time, under agreement to not cause trouble, for twenty-four hours at a time. Pathfinder calls it 'day release'."
And there it was. When she thought it couldn't get any worse. This was the final insulting turd on top of the pile of shit she'd been forced to eat all these years, all the while being told to smile and ignore the taste. The last straw. She'd had enough.
Her hand clamped around the pill bottle until the lid popped off and hit the ceiling; pills fountained across her desk. She didn't care; she was swearing at a steady rate, ignoring the fact that her face was turning redder and redder, and she was starting to foam at the mouth. For the first time in a very long while, she was getting the chance to express exactly what she thought of the situation, and this job in general.
Her heartbeat thundered in her ears and her coffee cup shattered on the far wall, but she didn't care. A dam of long-pent emotion had finally burst within her, and she was letting it all out to play. Seizing the heavy computer monitor, she picked it up and brought it down to crash on the desk, still screaming profanity at the top of her voice. It felt so good to finally let it all out; she looked around for something else to break.
She never even felt the sting as Armsmaster tranquillised her.
Armsmaster
"But will she be alright?" Deputy Director Renick looked on as the paramedics rolled the Director out on the gurney. From the monitors clamped to the head of the rolling bed, Piggot's blood pressure was still unhealthily high, though her heart rate had come down considerably after he'd tranquillised her.
"I don't know, sir. Her health was bad to begin with, and they say PRT Director is a job that can be even more stressful than being an air traffic controller." Colin unracked his halberd and held it out toward Renick. "You'll need to take this, sir."
"What? Why?" The Deputy Director looked startled. "I can't take that!"
Colin forced himself to breathe deeply. "You have to, sir. I attacked my commanding officer. There needs to be an official inquiry into the incident, and you need to sequester my weapon until the result of the inquiry is handed down." It was all there in black and white. The regulations were very clear on this.
"She was having a mental break, and on track for a massive heart attack or stroke!" snapped Renick. "You probably saved her life!"
"And if that's what the inquiry shows, I'll be glad," Colin admitted. No matter the mitigating circumstances, nobody looked favourably on a cape attacking a PRT Director. "You'll need to pull the security footage too, and put it into air-gapped storage in case somebody decides to hack the main drives and corrupt the original. The last thing we need is some enterprising villain muddying the waters to keep me off the streets longer than necessary."
Renick looked troubled, but nodded. "Understood." Reluctantly, he accepted the folded halberd. "I'll put this in secure storage, then see about the rest of it."
"Good." Colin nodded, not happy about having to hand his weapon over but knowing he could teleport it back to him if the need arose.
"So, about the Pathfinder and Compass Rose situation," Renick said. "What do you suggest we do about that?"
Colin shook his head. "I'm not the one you should be asking that question, sir. If Watchdog and the Chief Director haven't already been notified, they need to be. The situation definitely requires monitoring. Beyond that … I have no idea." Turning, he moved off down the corridor toward the lift.
He'd done what he had to do, but now he had to cool his heels until he was released onto the streets of Brockton Bay again. As he headed toward his lab—Dragon would need to know what had just happened—he mulled over the news he'd passed on to the Director that had caused her mental break.
Goddamn it, Pathfinder, he silently asked—not for the first time—what the hell are you playing at?
Taylor
What are we even playing at?
It wasn't the first time I'd asked myself that question. Using the Birdcage as a hideout had seemed like a master-stroke at the time; not only could nobody look there, where could we be sent that was worse?
Except that there was a reason nobody went into the Birdcage of their own accord. Nearly everyone in there had done some horrific things to qualify for entry, and of the few who hadn't, they'd survived being in there. And here we were, willingly going to meet with the worst of them all; if Glaistig Uaine didn't possess the bloodiest hands in the Birdcage, it was only because some of the others had been working really hard at it before they were put away.
When we entered her presence, someone who wasn't paying attention could've been excused for wondering what all the fuss was about. She looked younger than me, though the funeral shroud was a little creepy. And then she spoke, and all doubt was erased. The shroud was the least creepy thing about her.
She spoke; or rather, they spoke. A dozen voices all at once, with hers still somehow audible. "Greetings, your Majesties. Finder of the Way and Forger of the Path. I am honoured to be within your presence."
I blinked; through my link with Dad, I felt his shock. I didn't know much about Glaistig Uaine, and most of that was from chatting with Paige after we'd decided to set up camp in the Birdcage. But greeting others with that level of respect and deference was not normal behaviour for her. Not as far as I'd heard, anyway.
Dad, at least, had the wherewithal to respond in kind. "I greet you also, Faerie Queen. It appears you know more about us than we do about ourselves. Would it be rude for me to ask you to explain further?"
She laughed, a sound like shattered glass chiming in a strange and noxious breeze. "Not at all, O Forger of the Path. Please, sit, and we shall converse as equals." Clapping her hands once, she raised her voice(s) slightly. "Refreshments!"
Her ghosts? Faeries? swirled around us, and I found myself holding a freshly brewed cup of tea. It smelled nice, and tasted divine. I wasn't at all sure where she was getting tea from in the Birdcage, and it felt rude to ask.
Through the shroud, I could feel her eyes looking at me and Dad, almost anxiously. I mustered a smile and nodded to her. "This tea is delicious. I wish I could make it this well."
It was the right thing to say. Her shoulders lost a little of their tension. "You are too kind. You say that you know little of your faeries? Are you not aware of your own power?"
"We know what we can do," Dad said hesitantly. "Is there more to it, O Faerie Queen?"
"Indeed." She eyed him gravely. "Your faeries do not stem from the Golden Fool, nor She Who Sleeps Beneath. They are a gift from one who passed by in the night, never to be seen again. Where most faeries are bound about by strictures from the Golden Fool, yours are untrammelled, without restriction. Your inner eye may gaze upon vistas yet unthought-of, and you may tread worlds yet undiscovered. Apart, you are powerful; together, unbeatable. Your feat of exiling the Bringer of Waters proved that."
"Wait, wait," I said. "When you say, 'Golden Fool', do you mean S—"
"On your life, do not say that name!" she hissed; at the same time, shadows overtook the room, and the temperature dropped like a stone. "He is a repository for many faerie, and will unleash them mercilessly if he perceives you as a danger. As of this moment, you are beneath his notice. Be sure to stay that way."
My hand clenched in Dad's. We wavered on the edge of teleporting away, but it didn't seem like she was about to attack us. Slowly, he breathed out a streamer of fog. "We'll … keep that in mind."
"With all respect due your station, Forger of the Path, please do that." She seemed to have calmed down, but her ghosts still fluttered anxiously about.
We stayed seated and drank more tea, and the temperature gradually crept up to normal. The talk turned away from powers and faeries and the Golden Fool, but the elephant in the room still shuffled and moved its feet occasionally.
Eventually, the tea party came to an end, and we said our goodbyes. Gaistig Uaine didn't quite warn us again not to speak Scion's name out loud, but the look in her eye said it quite clearly. We were silent as we walked back to Lustrum's cell-block.
I sat down opposite Dad, on the sofa we'd 'acquired' for use in the Birdcage. He took the armchair that had come with it. Between us was a coffee table. "Okay," I said. "She says we don't have any limits. Let's test that."
Leaning across the table, I took his hand. Mars, I thought.
Immediately, a tremendously detailed image of the red planet formed in my view. I was aware of every aspect of it, from the massive mountains to the valley cutting across the planet. I refocused, then picked a rock formation in the valley. Knowledge bloomed in my mind, and I knew everything there was to know about that rock formation. Narrowing my viewpoint down again and again, I eventually stopped when I found myself focused on a single jagged rock, about the size of my clenched fist.
Now was the moment of truth. We'd teleported Leviathan to the moon, but it had nearly killed us. Had that been because of his mass, or the distance?
I sent the image to Dad, along with the ongoing coordinates. He concentrated for a second; with a puff of purple-brown fog, the rock fell from his gloved hand to clatter on the coffee table. I stared as frost began to form on it, then raised my eyes to meet Dad's.
Despite the immense distance, I could feel that it hadn't taken him any effort at all.
We both spoke at the same time.
"Well, fuck."
After a while, Dad took up the rock and sat back in the armchair, slowly turning it over in his hands. It wasn't cold anymore—I didn't know the temperature range on Mars, but it had to be freezing—and in fact it looked like any other piece of stone I could pick up, out in the woods. Except that it wasn't. It was from Mars. I'd located it, and Dad had just reached out and grabbed it.
Did this mean we could go to Mars, Dad and me? Could we just step there? Was that even a possibility?
I knew we'd need space suits, if we were to do it safely. I also knew where we could find some.
"Stop it," I mumbled to myself, irritated. Getting distracted would be a bad idea.
Dad looked up. "Stop what?"
I rolled my eyes. "I was just thinking about how we could go be tourists on Mars, if we could just get some space suits. And I should stop thinking about stuff like that. We've got more important issues to deal with."
His expression was speculative as he held up the chunk of rock. "That's all true, but you have to admit, this changes everything we thought we knew about our powers."
"Yeah, it does," I admitted. "But can we address that later? Like, the, uh, the Golden Fool thing. How Glaistig Uaine straight-out told us that powers usually come from him, or from the one she called She Who Sleeps Below. If powers come from him, or them, it means that he's not just another cape. He's a lot more than that. Especially if he's been weakening powers before giving them to people." That was my interpretation of what she'd told us, anyway.
It was absurdly difficult, having to monitor and censor my own speech to avoid saying Scion's name. It was like the prank where you told someone that their nose wasn't itchy, and watch them fight not to scratch. I was just glad I hadn't thought about him since getting my powers.
"Worse than that," Dad said soberly, putting the rock down on the coffee table and focusing on the matter at hand. "The fact that she believes he'll attack us out of hand simply for having powers that he hasn't toned down? Why would she say that? What does she know about him?"
"And that, I suspect, is where I come in."
Dad and I both looked around in surprise. Lustrum had designated Paige to be our official liaison, mainly because she was as harmless as Birdcage attendees got, but partly because we knew her and liked her. Neither one of us was even slightly surprised at how far the cell block leader was willing to go to keep us happy with her hospitality.
Which made the new intrusion all the more unusual, especially since the woman who stood in the doorway to our 'living room' wasn't someone we'd met yet. Neither was she dressed in the standard Birdcage uniform, however readjusted. A smart business suit and a stylish fedora was not something readily available within those grim concrete walls, and I was pretty sure Dad and I hadn't fetched them in for anyone yet.
"And who might you be?" Dad stood, and I followed suit; not so much out of politeness, but to be ready to do whatever we needed to defend ourselves.
She had to be at least partly aware of this, because she held out her empty hands disarmingly. "You don't know me, so I can't claim to be a friend. But we're on the same side against the same foe, or we will be shortly, so you can call me an ally." A self-deprecating grin curved on her face, somehow endearing her to me. "Trust me, I'm usually much less talkative. But in this instance, it seems talk is better. Yes, I'm a cape. No, I'm not a hero. My name is Contessa, and I want to see how you feel about helping me save the world."
I blinked as she answered my unasked questions, but I had some more. "If you're not a hero, why do you want to save the world? Don't villains usually want to steal or break stuff?"
Stepping into the room, she snorted and rolled her eyes. "Do you? Believe me, you're right there on the PRT's secret list of villains. No, I'm technically a villain because I've done many bad things for a good cause. I want to save the world, as the saying goes, because it's where I keep my things. Also, because I'd like for all the evil I've committed to count for something."
"And who or what do you intend to get us to help you save the world from?" asked Dad pragmatically. "The Golden Fool? He's been nothing but a hero so far. Or is it the Endbringers? I'm sorry, but even if I felt like teleporting Behemoth to the Moon like we did Leviathan, we're missing several important parts to that plan. And there's no guarantee he won't just come back, like Leviathan did."
"The Golden Fool?" she repeated with a delighted smile. "Oh, I like that one. Where did you get it from?"
"Uh … Glaistig Uaine?" I said carefully. "We were just talking to her. I thought that was why you showed up now."
"I'm here now because you teleported a rock from Mars to Earth," she said crisply. "Up until now, we've just been keeping an eye on you, to make sure you didn't go too far off the reservation. But this show of power puts you into an entirely new bracket, which is why I'm making contact now."
"So … how exactly are we supposed to help you save the world?" asked Dad. "Taylor locates things, and I can teleport. I'm pretty sure sending the golden guy to Mars wouldn't solve our problems."
"And who's 'She Who Sleeps Below', anyway?" I asked.
She blinked in surprise that was either genuine or well-simulated. "Where did you hear th … never mind. Currently, it's not an issue. We can't guarantee that remaining the case. So, back to the situation at hand. How much mass can you teleport at once?"
"I don't know," Dad said promptly. "How heavy is Leviathan?"
I opened my mouth, about to correct him, then closed it again. The ship we'd dropped on Lung that time had to have been heavier than Leviathan … or did it?
Shit, what if the strain we had going to the moon really wasn't about the distance, but the weight we were trying to move? Dad had zero problem pulling a rock in from Mars, and that's gotta be fifty million miles away.
"We don't know how heavy Leviathan is," Contessa said. "What we do know is that he should be immune to teleportation. Eidolon has tried just that, several times, and failed. When you succeeded, that was the first warning that we should be watching you. Pulling a rock from Mars was our second; therefore, here I am."
"But what's the big deal about teleporting a rock from Mars?" I asked. "I mean, sure, it's damn impressive, but we already took Leviathan to the moon. Wouldn't that be more impressive?"
"That depends on your definition of the word." She gave me a penetrating gaze. "Up until now, Lunar orbit has been the limit any of our powers could reach. Reaching Mars on your first try gives you a range two hundred times greater than that. This suggests to me that you can look, and your father can teleport, into places normally unreachable by any normal level of power."
"That still doesn't actually make us able to save the world," Dad observed. "In any case, you seem to have the teleportation trick down pat yourself. To misquote the movie, one does not merely walk into the Birdcage."
"Saving the world could have a different meaning, depending on context," she noted. "Ignoring Leviathan, what's the heaviest thing you ever teleported, and how far did you take it?"
Dad glanced at me. "The ship?"
I nodded. "The ship. Mid-sized cargo hauler, maybe fifty thousand tons. We teleported it a little over six miles, and dropped it on Lung's head. When we put it back in the water, it was a bit lighter."
It had basically burst at the seams, and spilled the water with which it was ninety percent full. We hadn't taken the water back to the Boat Graveyard. Lung, I knew, was also in the Birdcage. We hadn't met again yet, but hopefully he'd be able to avoid doing something irreparably stupid out of wounded pride or something like that.
Contessa sounded more and more interested by the second. "Taylor—may I call you Taylor?—how many things can you focus on at once?"
I shrugged. "On my own, one thing at a time. When I'm in contact with Dad, lots of things, but they've all got to have the same descriptor. Like 'people on day release from the Birdcage'." Almost instinctively, I checked on them. The beach hut was getting along well, a sandcastle was on the way to completion, and the three who were out and about in the world were being smart and keeping their heads down.
"One last question." She looked at the both of us. "Compass Rose, if you were fixing on several items at once, what would happen if Pathfinder teleported just one of them?"
It wasn't even something I'd considered before. Dad met my eyes. "They … all go … at once …?" he hazarded. "Maybe? Taylor?"
"There's only one way to find out." Pulling off the gloves I was wearing, I dropped them on the table, side by side. Then I took Dad's hand and focused. My gloves.
I'd done this sort of thing before, bringing up multiple things in my mind's eye before discarding all but the one I was looking for. Now … I didn't discard either one. Keeping them both in focus, I fed Dad the coordinates of the one to the right. He exerted his power.
Both gloves puffed out of existence on the table; one ended up in Dad's hand while the other appeared in midair, the same distance away from its mate as it had been before. It fell with a plop onto the table again, while Dad stared at the one in his hand.
"Oh, now that's interesting," he murmured. "We can work with this."
"We sure can," I agreed.
"Good." Contessa gave us both a satisfied smile. "I'll be in touch. Oh, and one other thing. Teacher and Acidbath are conspiring to free Kaiser, force you to get them out of the Birdcage, and then murder you. I'll leave you to deal with that as you see fit."
"Wait, what?" I asked, but she was already stepping back out of the doorway. A moment later, she was out of sight.
"Hey!" Dad clearly wanted more answers, and so did I. We teleported out into the corridor … and she was gone.
"Really …" I murmured. "Gloves?" A second later, Dad handed them to me. "Thank you."
"How did she get away so fast?" asked Dad. "Teleport or invisibility?"
I focused on 'woman in fedora, called Contessa'. She'd definitely gone somewhere else; from the distance and direction, I estimated she was somewhere in Europe. "Teleport," I said. "She's not even in America anymore."
Then she stopped and turned toward where my current point of view was coming from, and raised her hand in a tiny wave. "Correct," she said. "I know you can see me, Compass Rose."
"Shit!" I blurted. "She knows when I can see her!"
"I do indeed." She said it as though talking about how the sky was blue and water was wet. "I'll be in touch. In the meantime, I suggest you deal with your own problems."
I pulled my focus away from her and stared at Dad. "She does this better than I do. She even knew which 'direction' I was looking at her from, and she could hear what I was saying."
"Jesus." He pulled his helmet off and ran his hand through his hair. "Okay, until we know more, we don't mess with her."
"Yeah, no, that's a given." Up until then I'd felt secure in focusing on people wherever they were, because they didn't know I was there and couldn't hurt me. Having Saint read our conversation about him in real-time was bad enough, but then to see her wave at my imaginary viewpoint had badly shaken my sense of security. If she ever took offense at me peeking at her, I didn't know if Dad was fast enough to stop her retaliating.
"Okay, then." He breathed in and out three times, deeply, as though clearing his mind. "She gave us other stuff to worry about, though. Things we really need to look into."
"She mentioned that, yeah." I rubbed my knuckle across my lips. "So, do we deal with Acidbath and Teacher first, or should we find out our limitations with the multi-teleport trick?"
He frowned. "I don't want to condemn someone before knowing for a fact that they're guilty. Check on them and see if they're talking about anything like that. If they're not, then we can check out the teleport thing."
"Right." I grabbed his hand so anyone I listened in on would have movement and sound rather than a static image, and focused first on Acidbath.
He was in his cellblock, talking with some of his henchmen (or so I assumed). But, to my obscure disappointment, they weren't so much colluding or conspiring as just … talking. The conversation was mainly about women, ranging from conquests they'd had on the outside to which members of the Birdcage they'd like to bang. Acidbath's speech was remarkably obscene, but I'd grown up among Dockworkers, so that didn't bother me a lot. I was actually more bothered by his attitudes where it came to women. While talking about it wasn't a crime, I still felt like I needed a long, hot shower after listening to him.
When I'd heard all I cared to, none of which was incriminating, I switched my focus to Teacher.
My first impression of the sweaty, red-faced man was that his name was extremely apt. He could've passed for a teacher at Winslow very easily, and probably would've been vastly overqualified for the job. He was moving from one of his cell-block members to another, offering a few words here and there. Whereas the topic of Acidbath's conversation had been all too transparent (and sleazy), with Teacher I wasn't getting enough information to figure out what was going on.
But again, there was nothing I could use to verify Contessa's allegations. In any case, they were still where they were supposed to be, and Kaiser was also in his own locked-off area (I checked) so there was no cause for alarm … yet.
Which meant Dad and I had time to figure out our other stuff.
He pulled on his helmet, then I checked on what was happening in Brockton Bay. My first subject was Director Piggot; with a shock, I saw her lying in a hospital bed, apparently unconscious.
"Shit!" I said out loud.
"What?" Dad knew what I'd seen wasn't life-threatening; our link was good in that way.
"Piggot's in the hospital. She doesn't look injured, but she's out to it."
He pressed his lips together. "Not a huge problem for us, but now I'm wondering who got to her, and how."
I wonder. For the most part, I'd been going with definitive labels, but more abstract descriptors had seemed to work, so I focused on 'whoever's responsible for her being hurt'.
I got back three images in my head; me, Dad, and Armsmaster.
"What the fuck?" Stumbling back into the room, I sat down heavily on the sofa. "My power's saying that we're responsible for her being in that hospital bed. Us and Armsmaster." I didn't like that idea, not in the slightest. "Did we cause a villain to attack her?"
"If we did, there'd be a villain in the picture, too." Dad was right there beside me. "Is there one?"
"No." I shook my head numbly. "Just us."
"Can you see her medical chart?"
"Not yet." I refocused on 'Emily Piggot's medical chart'. The folder hanging off the end of the bed suddenly jumped into sharp detail. I sent the image to Dad; a second later, he had it in his hand.
We puzzled over the medical jargon, but nothing said 'heart attack' or 'stroke'. It seemed to indicate that she'd had some sort of mental break, and she was under sedation and observation until she recovered from it.
Dad sent the folder back, and we stared at each other. Neither of us wanted to say it first, but I eventually gave in, because I wanted to know. "Did we cause that?"
"That's what your power seems to think." And it had never been wrong before.
"Shit." I pushed my helmet up and off, and put my face in my hands. "I never wanted to hurt her. She was a hardass bi-uh, woman, but she was only doing what she thought was right."
"There's been a lot of atrocities committed by a lot of people through history, doing what they thought was right," Dad observed. "But yes, in this situation, it's a pity. I suspect she got the news that we were using the Birdcage as a base, and it all got too much for her."
I had a sinking feeling in my gut. "I think I know what sent her over the edge."
"The day releases." Dad and I were definitely on the same page now. "The PRT exists to keep villain capes off the front page and to put them in the Birdcage if they decide they belong here. Finding out we're letting them out to enjoy themselves every now and again had to come as a shock to the system."
"Even though at least some of them don't belong here. Paige, for one."
His demeanour, inside and out, was bleak. "Canary's not the first person who's ever been railroaded into an unjust prison sentence, and certainly won't be the last."
"We need to change that." I didn't even think of the words before I said them. But once I had, I knew that I meant them.
"And maybe we will." He put his hand on my shoulder. "But first, maybe we should see if we've got the chops to do it. Ready to go test some powers?"
I certainly needed a pick-me-up. "How are we going to do that?"
"Didn't we have a chess set at home?"
I frowned. "I … think so?" Taking his hand, I concentrated on 'our chess set'.
The image popped up in my head, of a box shoved right to the back of a cupboard, half-squashed by another board game. I passed it on to Dad, and he pulled it right into his hand. Opening the box, he dumped it out onto the table.
We spent the next thirty seconds arranging the pieces in a basic chess array, then I focused on 'our chess pieces'. They all showed up in my head. Dad held out his hand, palm up, and I picked one of the pawns for him. All the pieces teleported upward, but only the pawn ended up in his hand. The rest fell and clattered onto the table again.
"Well," he observed, turning the pawn over in his fingers, "that definitely works with more than two."
"I have a question," I said slowly. "What happens if you deliberately teleport one thing into another? Is it just merged, does the other thing teleport back in its place, does it get shoved aside, does it refuse to go, or do you get a ginormous explosion?"
"I was about to try just that until you asked the question," he said dryly. "We might need to go outside to for this."
"There's a lot of places we could call 'outside'." I raised my eyebrows. "Got a preference?"
He thought for a moment. "How about Death Valley?"
I nodded, and concentrated. We came out in an area that was so arid even the cacti had deserted it (see what I did there?) for a friendlier climate. Almost immediately, the heat hit me.
"Whoof," grunted Dad. "Let's get this done. Find me two rocks, smallish ones. Why'd you pick this spot?"
"It's the area with the least amount of life in it, just in case we do any significant damage," I said. "The closest people are more than ten miles away, behind a couple of ranges of hills." I concentrated on 'closest rock, half the size of my fist' … and my power located it behind me, about three yards away. With a huff, I picked it up. The next one was over a hundred yards away, so I grabbed Dad's hand and he retrieved it. "Two rocks," I said, holding up the one I'd picked up. "What now?"
He bounced his rock in his palm. "We're going to need to write on one of these."
"That's easy." I focused on Mr. Gladly, and found him writing on the board. It may have been mean and petty for me to get Dad to whip the chalk out from between his fingers, but he'd allowed them to bully me so many times it wasn't funny. Fuck Gladly, and fuck that place. I took the chalk from Dad and wrote, "TAYLOR" on the smoothest of the two rocks. "Next?"
"We need to put them down, a set distance apart." He looked at the ground and scuffed an area clear with his heel.
"That's easy." Taking both rocks, I concentrated on 'rocks I am holding' and put them on the ground in the cleared area. With me fixating on them, I could define the distance between them to the fraction of an inch; thus, I placed them exactly one foot apart, centre to centre. "Now what?"
He looked at the arrangement of rocks, then pointed back down the valley. "We go that way, maybe five miles, then find another rock you can write on."
I had an idea what he was doing now, and I was impressed. "When did you figure all this out?"
"About five seconds after you asked that question," he said with a grin. "Got me a location?"
"Sure do." We jumped straight to 'rock closest to that size, five miles away' and I picked up the rock in question. Taking the chalk, I scrawled my name on this one, too. "This is to tell just these two rocks apart from every other rock here, right?"
"Got it in one." He accepted the rock from me, and took my hand. "Now, I want you to tell me exactly what happens when I do this, okay?"
"Okay." I focused on 'rock with my name on it'. Two instances popped up; one was the rock in his hand, while the other one was five miles away. I searched my mind's eye to make sure those were the only two, then nodded to Dad. "We're set."
His lips set as he shaded his eyes, looking into the distance, then turned around and secured his mouthguard. "Turn your back, Taylor," he advised quietly. "If worst comes to worst, there might be a flash, and I don't want you being blinded."
Obediently, I turned my back. This didn't stop me from keeping my mind's eye on both rocks. Carefully, I kept track of them. I knew exactly how far the other one had to travel to intersect its companion, and I fed Dad the correct coordinates.
When he triggered the teleport, I could feel his power asking him if he really wanted to merge those two masses. Up until now, we'd been unconsciously careful not to do this, but now things were different. He pushed it through, effectively telling it to go ahead.
The rock in his hand puffed smoke and vanished, then reappeared exactly one foot to the left. It fell to the ground at our feet, which was basically what we'd expected it to do. At the same time, the other one just disappeared from my perception, which I hadn't expected.
A tremendous flash lit up the valley behind us, reflecting off the walls far out in front. I blinked to get rid of the spots in my vision. "The other one's just gone," I said blankly. "What—"
Abruptly, we were in the Birdcage. "—happened?"
"What happened?" He barked a harsh laugh that had more than a little shock in it. "We just set off the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuke, and got away about half a second before the ground shock would've broken our legs. We nearly killed ourselves about three times over, just then. It's a good thing those stones were on the ground, or we might've been caught in the flash itself."
I blinked. "Let's … uh, let's not do that again, okay?"
"Yeah." He nodded. "At least now we know what happens when we actually do it."
I focused my attention on 'Death Valley'. It swam into view, and immediately I knew I wouldn't have to focus down. The crater where we'd been was probably visible from space, and it had a classic mushroom cloud forming over it. "So does half the west coast."
Alexandria
Rebecca stepped out of the Doorway into Cauldron base. "Contessa!" she shouted. "What the hell was that? Who just set off a nuke in Death Valley?"
"That, uh …" Contessa stepped out of the room they'd decided was her office. "That would've been Pathfinder and Compass Rose, exploring a certain aspect of their powers. Matter overlapping, to be exact."
Rebecca's eyebrows rose in the general direction of the ceiling. "So … when they do it, objects don't merge or perform a castling effect."
"Full mutual annihilation and conversion to energy," confirmed Contessa. "Fortunately, the stones they chose were only about five ounces apiece."
"Jesus," Rebecca muttered, delving back into the math formulae she'd learned once on the off-chance she'd need to know that sort of thing. "That's three megatons, at least. Any casualties?"
"A park ranger, ten miles away, ran his vehicle off the road and soiled himself," Contessa reported, deadpan. "He is bruised and slightly embarrassed but otherwise unharmed. Nobody within line of sight was close enough to damage their eyes, and there's no noticeable fallout. Some animal and plant life was destroyed, but Compass Rose picked the spot for minimal effect."
"Well, at least there's that," Rebecca murmured. "What do you suggest we do with them?"
"Do?" Contessa spread her hands. "We leave them be. They're already suspicious of authority. If I reveal that I'm linked in with you, or even let them know about the existence of Cauldron, they would turn against us, and we'd have to neutralise them in such a way that we could bring them back for the next Endbringer attack. I don't even want to think about the number of steps that would entail."
"Just so long as they don't do it again," grumbled Rebecca. "And what's going on in Brockton Bay, anyway? I've got a request for a new Director. Did Piggot finally have a heart attack?"
"No, a mental breakdown." Contessa sighed. "She found out what they were doing in the Birdcage. I would advise replacing her with a moderate, not a hard-charger. And I happen to know Renick would refuse a direct promotion."
Rebecca tilted her head slightly. "I was thinking of Tagg—"
"Which is why I said not to," Contessa said patiently. "Pathfinder and Compass Rose single-handedly squashed all parahuman crime in Brockton Bay, in a matter of weeks. They dropped a fifty-thousand-ton derelict freighter on Lung. Things are starting to pick up there, which is exactly why they don't need someone like Tagg going in there and throwing his weight around. If he oversteps the mark, and we both know he will, Pathfinder is likely to go back and explain matters to him."
"Which Tagg will take as a direct provocation," Rebecca agreed. She knew the man well enough to know that. "He'll escalate."
"And they can escalate much, much harder." Contessa shook her head. "Leave Tagg where he can do the most good. Put someone else in Piggot's place. A details person, not a warhawk. We can make use of Tagg elsewhere."
"Pity Calvert got outed," Rebecca muttered. "He would've been perfect."
Again, Contessa shook her head. "That man could never give up poking and prodding. He would've gotten their attention. Find someone who can work with the status quo, not against it."
Rebecca considered her options. "How about Seneca? He's FBI, but he's shown willingness to take on a Directorship if offered."
This time, Contessa nodded. "He'd work out. He's flexible, but he's also willing to put his foot down when he needs to."
"Good." Rebecca dusted her hands off. "So, how do you rate their chances against an Endbringer?"
Contessa raised her eyebrows. "With or without destroying the city they're in at the time?"
Rebecca gave her a dirty look.
End of Part Twenty-Nine
