CH7 - Blowtorch

— — —

"We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine." - A Room With A View, E.M. Forster

— — —

"This is… too easy."

I looked up. Parian— Sabah, was sitting on one end of the couch, the ecto tablets scattered across it beside a bookbag. Her classes were shut down right now due to the bombings, and she had been splitting her attention between her books and doing outfit mockups for people on PHO.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It's almost easier just to make a design with your program than it is to sketch it on paper," she said. "I describe things out loud, make a few adjustments… and then it's almost done, it fills in all the details and if I wanted to it would come out of your printing machine, complete." She seemed torn between awe and frustration.

I shrugged. "Just don't tell the customer."

"Hah. But no, I feel like I'm not even doing anything."

"That's an illusion," I said. "You say a 'few adjustments'... if I used that program, I wouldn't even know what to tell it, I can't make art. Just because it is easy to get the vision in your head into the computer doesn't mean that everything you see isn't yours— all it did was make logical conclusions based on facts about the human body and cloth and so on."

She sighed. "I suppose. I think… I enjoyed the crafting as much as the design. But…"

Oh. Her powers.

Damn.

"There's a value to hand crafting," I started, thinking. "Not just in that you can honestly claim that the product is handmade. You can do amazing work on-the-fly. While my software is no doubt superior for designing protection, things like mathematical placement of nanotubes and metallics are not as important in civilian clothing. Plus, judging by your performances? I bet you're even faster than the printer at turning bolts of cloth into outfits. So you just need to print all the materials you might use as bolts…"

"Yes," Sabah said, her voice brightening a bit. "I can just use the program for bodysuits, supports, and such things, and do the rest as I have before."

I went silent, the only sound for a few minutes Sabah's voice as she instructed the tablets.

"—Henry?"

"Oh, sorry, what?"

"How do you use this program?"

I gave her a confused look.

"I mean… when you use it, you don't have to talk or gesture," Sabah clarified. "Nor anything else in here."

I thought. I could lie, but… I don't like to lie. Besides, it was Sabah.

"Mental control," I said simply. Her eyebrows went up. "I see… is it easier that way?"

"...Yes. But it involves brain implants."

"Oh."

A ping on my entoptics interrupted the conversation. "Tattletale is here, with… a new friend."

Sabah frowned. "Ah. Can you hold them up a moment?" She pulled her porcelain mask out of her bag, and a stream of cloth, thread, and needles flew out behind it. She stepped into a side room, and shut the simple sliding door.

Not a minute later, Lisa stepped inside, trailed by a figure I vaguely recognized from the storage facility.

Insect theme - Undersider - controls bugs. The girl Lisa mentioned?

"You must be the woman who defeated Lung," I said. Flattery never hurt anyone.

"Yeah." The mask made it hard to tell, but she didn't seem pleased by the recognition.

"Yep! This is Skitter," Lisa said cheerfully. "She was too shy to come with for the costume stuff last time, but she agreed to come by now."

"I don't think it's necessary," Skitter said. "I have more armor than you do, and my silk is bulletproof."

"Bulletproof silk?" I said in confusion.

"It's spider silk."

This didn't make sense— silk was certainly strong, but the impact energy…

"Well," I started, then stopped. "I'm not familiar with spider silk, but even if that armor paneling you have works, that doesn't mean there isn't anything better. There wouldn't be much point to Tinkers if they couldn't make things better."

Skitter stood silently, her expression hidden behind her mask. The armor panels she had were somewhat disturbing. Made of insect corpses? Any ablative or force distribution properties they had were unoptimized at best, the angles didn't maximize deflection and the surfaces encouraged gouging if they did…

I shook myself loose.

"I guess—"

As she started to speak, the sliding door opened, and Parian stepped back into the room.

"What, you just keep Parian in your closet?" Lisa said.

"Who else is here?" Skitter asked.

"Just me and Parian," I said.

"Hello," Sabah said delicately, stepping over and sitting back on the couch. She didn't seem as tense these days.

Lisa, on the other hand…

"...Yeah, he's got a thing going on with Parian," she said blithely, causing Sabah to go still.

"Totally professional, right, Parian?" she needled.

"Erm…"

"Tattletale?" Skitter sounded confused. Alarmed?

Lisa looked at Skitter. "Sorry, just messing around," she said quickly.

"Well," I interrupted. "If I understand correctly, Tattletale thinks you could use better armor, and you don't."

"Yes," Skitter said.

"Okay. While you've clearly put a lot of work into your costume, I think that if nothing else, you would benefit from smartmatter where you currently use, ah, insects. Think reactive armor, more flexible normally but stiffening and spreading impact forces when hit. It is smoother, so it can actually deflect projectiles without them catching on anything. This avoids the absorbing of unnecessary energy or having caught material torn loose."

She was silent for a minute.

"...That makes sense," she allowed. "So what do we need to do?"

— — —

"Hey. Hey, asshole."

"...What?" Teijo opened his eyes blearily. "The fuck you want, Song-Min?"

"The spotter didn't check in."

"...Isn't the spotter Takeo? He is just lazy, why are you—"

Noise, light, and pain blotted everything out, and Teijo opened his eyes to see clouds of dust, his ears ringing.

"—It's an attack! An atta—"

A brief, deep vibration was the only warning, followed by a loud explosion, splintered wood shooting through the air silently as Teijo shimmied backwards across the floor.

Fuck, what, fuck. He should… he should play dead. Just… until he saw the enemy.

He went limp, eyes straining to see between his lashes.

Thump. Thump.

Around the corner it came, a figure. Metal. Armor?

It had no face.

Without even pausing, its left arm snapped up, pointing a pistol at him.

The last thing he saw was a flash of light.

— — —

It wouldn't be long now.

Coil's proposal, according to Lisa, was to mix up the members of each strike group, thus preventing a betrayal through 'hostages'. Not that he reached out to me, and not that it would help me at all.

I'd help mop this mess up as I saw fit.

Not out of any sense of moral superiority— although the bombings offended me simply for being a pointless terror attack— but because of what I had seen.

I'd walked through town, witnessed the bubbles of distorted time, firestorms, glassified buildings…

Bakuda was bullshit. Useful bullshit. By any measure, she deserved whatever she got. If my drones managed to find her…

I was curious to see how the neurology and ego of parahumans diverged from that of a normal human. The exsurgent virus was nearly impossible to separate from a mind, more blind editing and luck than a reliable process, and even if you succeeded you wouldn't understand: why those parts? You definitely wouldn't have the slightest explanations as to how.

The literature of Earth Bet suggested a much greater understanding of parahuman brain structures, while simultaneously explaining nothing. It was probably deception, but I could hope.

And, well, over-the-top physics-breaking bombs. You couldn't buy that kind of tinkertech. I'd tried.

My squad of Steel-lite drones was smashing ABB safehouses, locations courtesy of Lisa. Not that I trusted her to deliver the 'good' targets, but that was okay. The dead-man's switch meant that no one should kill Bakuda.

In the meantime, I had another problem.

The Number Man had accounts in place for me, but I still needed to find a supplier. Right now, if I used up the stocks from Coil, I would be placed in a very awkward position. Rare earth elements didn't grow on trees.

I'd reached out to the Toybox, but they were leery. Something had them spooked, and they were only interested in cash, nothing I could fab. They weren't interested in playing middleman and they didn't trust me with the identities of their suppliers— understandable, but…

Annoying.

I'd sent inquiries out to commercial suppliers, but those responses would take longer. I'd been digging out blueprints of fluid mining systems in the meantime. They should work on seawater just as well.

Everything came back to time, and how there wasn't enough.

— — —

"Thanks to a concerted effort by members of Brockton Bay's Wards and Protectorate teams, the local gang, the 'ABB', or Azn Bad Boys, has fallen."

"The heroes of the hour are the young members of the Wards, Clockblocker and Vista, who played a pivotal role in managing a crisis with a superbomb…"

I listened to the news channel with a mild sense of disbelief. Nine thousand kilotons, in a bomb made from household materials?

And, of course, that put Bakuda in the hands of the Protectorate. Bad and good: she wouldn't be executed by a gung-ho gang leader, but she was beyond my reach… unless…

"Sometimes I wish my family had settled in a different city," Sabah said. She was the reason for the news channel playing here in the first place; if it was just me, I'd be reading a condensed list compiled by Sia every morning, or in the case of something like this would be notified by her at an appropriate moment.

She had acted strangely awkward after Lisa's comment, but it went away soon enough. Coming here to study and work became a regular thing for her. I suspected she didn't have a good social circle. Perhaps her classmates didn't agree with her serious attitude and dedication to things that actually mattered. That, and she really didn't deal well with stress. I imagined the social gymnastics of college girls had plenty of that.

Fortunately, Lisa was either busy, didn't want to be around Sabah, or she was still having some mysterious teenage tiff about how I ought to be calling her. I was being charitable and assuming she was busy.

"Why?" I asked.

"This isn't a good time for Brockton Bay, but it has not been good for a long time," she said. "Perhaps they could not have known, and did not have unlimited choice in any case— we immigrated— but I wonder sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up in New York, or Boston…"

"Feeling a bit lost without your classes?"

"Not so much, thanks to our business," she said, giving me a brief smile. "I wouldn't have wanted to do performances, so I would have been stewing in my room… I didn't have an online business set up like this. Nor, I think, would my work have been as popular alone. The exotic materials make it something more than just excellent sewing done by a parahuman."

"The materials might attract the shallow, but it wouldn't work without your skills," I said simply. She smiled, and turned back to her textbook.

[Opening cellular communication with contact: Lisa… Ringing… Connected.]

"What's up," Lisa said.

"I need a favor," I transmitted.

"Oh?" she said with a lilt. "What does the obnoxiously overpowered tinker need from me? The ABB is done, and you pretty much destroyed all the little safehouses already…"

"What's going to happen to Bakuda?"

"Heh. They're going to drive a truck at 90 miles an hour right through all the red tape and straight to the Birdcage," she said. "No delays, triple guard, triple everything… the PRT is not going to have any more egg on their face. Same for Lung, hell, they'll probably be on the same bus."

I frowned.

"How much detail can you get me?"

"...Please tell me you're joking."

— — —