A Waken 13.8

I just wanted to nap.

"No, Lafter. We're not trusting her."

"I'm just making sure." She sat on the armrest to my right. "You have a habit of picking up stray puppies and bringing them home."

What… I sat up slow. Hair a mess. Shirt disheveled. Back a little sore from sleeping in a recliner all night. Comfy it may be, but it wasn't a bed.

I gave Lafter a dry stare.

She gave me a shrug. "I'm adorable."

"Really?"

"I deserved a good home."

"And apparently the one thing I needed and didn't have is a newspaper subscription."

When did Lafter become so concerned about my wellbeing? Seemed a bit cruel to ask, but she'd always been a very go-with-the-flow type personality until recently. I couldn't put my finger down on exactly when that changed, it was too gradual.

"You're going to be late for school," she said, looking only slightly afraid that I might actually get a newspaper. "It's almost seven-thirty."

I sighed and fell back on the recliner. "Murrue left a note from Unoa. I'm supposed to 'rest today since I have such a hard time not finding a crisis to entangle myself in.' Damn doctor is worse than the disease." I breathed in deeply, and admitted, "My head hurts."

"Worse than yesterday?"

I nodded.

Mostly. It was worse last night when I went to sleep. Talking to Noelle took a toll in a way I did not expect. I still needed time to process everything we'd gone over and the implications, something that wasn't easy with a painful stabbing that kept wandering around my skull.

I couldn't put it off for long.

While I didn't trust her—I was sleeping at the factory and made Dad do the same because I didn't trust that she wouldn't try to break into the house—I didn't think Noelle was lying. She wasn't telling me everything, but that went both ways. Couldn't blame her for that.

A day of rest worked for me at the moment.

It gave me time to recover and process. Veda was right. Between the Haros, Lafter, and Dinah, Brockton Bay wouldn't burn in a day.

Hopefully.

"What if she isn't lying?" I wondered aloud. "There's no big secret. No double cross. What then?"

Lafter frowned. "I know I said this about Orga and them and I was wrong, but there's something fishy about her. She rubs me all the wrong ways."

"How so?"

Lafter clicked her tongue and scowled. "Because she's like you, I guess."

"Might want to elaborate on that."

"What? She kind of is." Lafter raised one hand and counted with her fingers. "She ignores the rules when she thinks they're in the way. She concocts absurd schemes that shouldn't work but do. Her power is bullshit. She's on a secret vendetta against a couple conspiracy theories. And she doesn't know how to relax."

"How do you know that last one?"

"Educated guess."

Haha. "And being like me is a bad thing?"

"Well, not to offend or anything, but if I didn't know you and I knew half the shit we do, I'd think you were a psycho."

Flattering, not that I disagreed.

Something definitely rubbed me wrong about Noelle, and it wasn't any similarities. The unwritten rules were bullshit, but I didn't go walking around and flagrantly disregarding them. Breaking the rules down into something better would take time. I couldn't just explode them. I'd also never started big fights in the middle of the city to engage in a fact finding mission. I got all my goals in order before I started putting lives in danger.

She made working for her difficult by getting caught on both counts. By the unwritten rules, everyone should be coming down on the Travelers.

My problem went deeper than that though. There was something wrong with the Travelers and it wasn't just Noelle. Her team wasn't happy and they blamed her. I didn't speak to any one of them and I could tell. It wasn't a momentary frustration either.

They all seemed tired.

"We'll keep her distant," I grumbled. "Until we have a better feel on things. If nothing else, we have a description now."

"I am already searching," Veda noted. "David is a common enough name, but with the details provided I have something to work with."

And if we found him, we'd just blow his wall down and beat him into the ground.

Not that anything was ever that easy.

"So…" Lafter loomed over me. "Does this mean I can—"

"Go to school, Lafter. You might finally win that game of table football against Labyrinth."

She flinched. "You know about that?"

I opened one eye. "You need to stop forgetting YouTube and the Haros exist."

In the meantime, I'd sleep until my head hurt slightly less. Or try to. The precision noises of the workshop comforted me, but my mind wandered. Kyrios and Exia were still getting their armor replaced with almost all the Haros who weren't in Hartford working on them.

Sue me. I liked the sounds of a properly running production line in the morning.

I couldn't exactly not think about everything Noelle claimed, though.

Cauldron was old, older than the Protectorate. There had been a second 'Scion' who died and was the basis for the Cauldron vials. Drinking those gave a power to someone without needing a trigger event. How many were there? Hundreds? Thousands? If I took everything at face value, Cauldron was making heroes and villains.

It made a cynical sort of sense, but what about the Case-53s? Why release their test subjects?

Noelle described finding former Cauldron members like Myrddin with missing memories. If Cauldron had a memory eraser, they could have used that same power on the monster capes. Releasing them here and there fit with the 'maintain the balance' cynicism of the vials.

Some might be too far-gone or monstrous to release, but 53s like Weld were sympathetic and likable.

But where were the rest of them? Noelle described a system of thousands, but there were only a few hundred Case-53s in the US, tops; maybe a thousand worldwide. I couldn't help but notice Noelle was fuzzy when describing the Travelers' origins in terms of location.

The team first appeared in Milwaukee. If Cauldron had some operation there, wouldn't they have noticed some of their vials and a scientist going missing? How did they lose track of them in the first place?

She's hiding something.

It almost felt like a set up.

Someone just happened to have some vials. They just happened to die. Noelle and her friends just happened to be there. Then Teacher—David—appears.

Might be why Noelle was so furious. He'd played them from the start and she realized it only after one of her friends was taken away. From the worried look the others gave as she spoke, I also got the sense Francis Krouse was more than Noelle's friend.

His experiences also proved Faultline's other theory right. Teacher's Pets got their powers from vials. Maybe some of them didn't even have powers at all. The master effect he exerted on them might just be a master effect and nothing else.

Which led to the second hiccup.

Noelle didn't seem to know he was a Pet.

Perdition—Cody—was killed by the Siberian.

I looked up that fight. No one ever noted the Travelers in Springfield when the Nine hit it. They were trying to find a cape, or so they thought. I couldn't help but reflect on that event as Teacher setting them up. The Traveler's sowed chaos, intentionally. That in the midde of a fight with the Nine?

Krouse—Coil—sent them on that mission.

I asked Dinah to check. She could not see Francis Krouse who went by Coil. The wording eliminated Calvert from our results. He was definitely a Pet.

Is that why Noelle burned something down? She already hated Teacher. Did finding out he'd manipulated her and torn her boyfriend away send her off the deep end? It was basically what happened to Othala. A repeat with another, maybe even more powerful trump did not encourage me.

This relationship is a minefield.

"Morning, Taylor."

I opened my eyes and looked up at my father. "Morning, Dad."

He shifted awkwardly beside the recliner while I watched him. He avoided looking at me, instead fixing his eyes on various things round the workshop. Suppose he hadn't been in it in weeks, so a lot of the stuff looked new.

Why did trying have to be so uncomfortable? For everyone.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked. "You seemed tired when you called last night."

"I'm fine."

"Be more comfortable in bed."

"I know. The house is too vulnerable right now. Until I add the lasers."

"Please don't vaporize any of the neighborhood pets." He got a look on his face, a twist to his lips that wasn't quite a smile as he added, "No disintegrations."

I scoffed. "The pets should learn to poop in their owners' lawns."

"The Haros will dismantle it before it hurts a cat."

"The cat could be a supervillain in disguise."

"Taylor, you'd be really sad if you killed a cat and it was just a cat. No lasers."

I rolled my eyes. "Fine. Stun setting only. We'll install missiles in case a brute shows up."

Things got awkward quickly from there. We did manage for more than a few sentences. It was an improvement, however small.

"Guess, I'll get some work done," he said. "Lafter said you were resting today."

I nodded and closed my eyes. I was trying to. "Yeah."

"Why do you have a briefcase set out?"

Briefcase? "Not mine. Haros probably took it from someone." Even with Tattletale gone, they still managed to 'find' things. "Somehow."

"Oh. Okay."

"I'm not going anywhere today. I promise."

"Right. Sorry."

I frowned, remembering what Amy—the therapist—said. "I know you're worried. I…understand."

"No. I shouldn't have just assumed you were trying to hide something."

Goddamnit.

As soon as he left, I sat up. "What briefcase?"

"I hoped you might rest a while longer," Veda lamented.

I turned around, looking over the head of the chair toward the workbenches. I recognized that briefcase.

"Façade contacted me while you were asleep and agreed to hand it over to me. Pink retrieved it from a rooftop in the Trainyard. I have already checked it for surveillance equipment."

I got up, ignoring that it was cold in the workshop in nothing but a shirt and shorts. Winter was coming and all that. Didn't care.

Grabbing the case by the corners I spun it around to face me. It felt heavy. Far too heavy, given its contents. Reinforced in some way?

Popping the clasps with both thumbs, the lid swung up.

Each item became catalogued in my mind. Five cylinders of a tarnished silvery material. No apparent signs or logos on them, save an omega etched into the bottoms. The vials inside were empty and distinctly lacking in any sort of residue. Did they wash them out?

At least the vials came with labels. Setting those aside, I moved onto the notes. Noelle left a helpful note with those, identifying which of the Travelers drank which vial.

Division to Noelle. Deus to Jessica. Vestige to Cody. Prince to Marissa. Robin to Luke.

Five vials for the five original Travelers. Noelle called the one Krouse drank 'Split.' Split, as in split the timeline?

I set that aside for later.

The notes themselves consisted of five thin files, a pair of notebooks, and about twelve sheets of loose paper. The books were quality. The kind you'd see used in a lab for officially tracking data. A quick leaf-through revealed page upon page of numbers, jargon, and metrics. The loose sheets were the same. Looked like results from some kind of measurement device or scanner.

The files drew my eye immediately; same number as the vials and marked with the same names.

"Does she want this back?" I asked.

"She did not say."

"Don't let anyone down here without warning me."

I took three of the vials and returned the others to their cylinders. "Orange." The Haro bounced over to me and saluted. "Take these to Doctor J. Tell him what it is." Time to start making use of their presence in the city, especially after I completely forgot about them with everything going on. "I don't have the equipment to scan them or any traces inside."

I left him to work that out and gathered the rest of the case's contents.

Returning to the recliner, I settled in to do some reading. That shouldn't be too strenuous.

The files came first, because I recognized the names and was curious. X0796. F1611. M0042. C2062. E0712. C0072. O0121. These ones came with names attached to them, some matching the vials and others not. C0072 appeared in multiple folders. So did T1177.

They were formulas and though none of them contained T1177, all of them referenced it for some reason.

"Orga Itsuka is upstairs," Veda warned.

"Not now."

Cauldron wasn't just selling powers. They were mixing power gunk and figuring out what different mixes did via trial and error. That tracked with the body horror from last night. Cauldron had a body. Something like what I saw Over There? What happened to it?

"He is insistent."

"Tell him to come back later."

Most of the bits in the files didn't make much sense to me. Looked like a methodology for making the formulas. Mixes. Times. Potential power outcomes. Was that based on others who consumed the same formula, or was there a system Cauldron mapped out? No mention of any equipment. Someone involved in making the vials probably just knew, so that information wasn't recorded.

"He is refusing."

I groaned and set the file down. Marching up the stairs to the door, I threw it open… and maybe snapped more than intended.

"Fine. What is it?" Orga stared. I raised my brow and glanced down at myself. Nope. Clothed. "What?"

"Did you just wake up?" he asked.

"No, but I'm kind of dealing with something." I held a hand out at him. "So?"

He raised one eyebrow at me, and I could swear he suddenly looked a little red-faced. Great. I snapped and it made him angry. Wonderful start to the conversation.

He managed to smooth over his features after a moment.

"What happened yesterday?"

"It's complicated."

"I gathered that. What happened?"

"I—" I really didn't need to be asking myself that question. Again. At that moment. "Right. Come on then."

I left the door open and descended the steps. There was too much secret keeping going on as it was. I pulled Orga and his guys into my 'conspiracy theory.' Couldn't exactly shut them out now, and he probably needed to know about Noelle to continue keeping peace in the Docks.

"The Travelers are after Teacher and the Cape Illuminati," I explained. "So they say."

"Funny way of going about it."

Orga stopped at the last step, looking back and forth through the workshop. Same look as Dad. Had I ever brought him down here before?

"Is it going to be a problem?" he inquired.

"Not sure yet. Not sure I can trust someone who sneaks into people's houses and uses her power on them while they sleep."

"Master?"

"Trump. She can copy capes she touches and gains their memories when she touches them. That's why she was with Parian yesterday. She was fishing for information."

"Broke the rules doing it."

"Hence my trepidation."

I collected the files and put all the pages back inside. Good thing they were numbered. I noticed a small note on the back of one. Mechanism for the division of agents into smaller units.

There was that word again. Agent.

I set the files back in the case and addressed Orga. Gave him the short version of what Noelle told me. Cauldron. Powers from bottles. Teacher's name is David. Et cetera. If there was one thing to appreciate about Orga, he didn't waste my time asking for clarification to a bunch of things I didn't really understand.

He'd wandered over to Exia, watching as Green guided a mechanical arm into fitting a new pauldron into place. "You think she'll try something?"

"I think she's unsure what she's going to do. She showed up thinking I was with Teacher and now has reason to think that's not the case."

"Not much we can do if she decides to cause trouble. I'll tell Mika, Shino, and Akihiro to keep an eye out. You sure her power only works on capes?"

"If it worked on anyone"—mechanism by which agents divide themselves—"she'd have started with normal people rather than capes. Safer. Less chance of being accused of breaking the rules. Why?"

"Wondering if she'll come after us. Only capes in the city you've told anything to are Laughter, Forecast, StarGazer, and Bakuda. Laughter is the only one who frequently goes out where people can see her."

"A Haro is with her for now."

"I'll have Akihiro tail her. Mika's already following you around. I'd suggest having someone watch Forecast, but she's not outed like you two are."

I raised my brow. "If Noelle goes after Lafter, there's not much he can do." Part of me twistedly hoped she would. It would make answering my questions easier. "No need to put him in danger."

That got me a grunt. "He'll manage. If she isn't bulletproof she'll have to protect herself from attack. If nothing else, it would disrupt an ambush and give Laughter a chance to find her footing and you time to respond."

I could see that, but I still didn't like it. "I'm not asking you to do that."

"Way things are now, any serious attack against you will become an attack against the city. We live here too."

"Don't be melodramatic."

He gave me that deadeye look. "The Travelers came looking for you, right?" I frowned but nodded. "Then they went after Parian because you weren't making it easy and they hoped to avoid notice. If you hadn't stumbled into them, would they have stopped?"

Okay, he had a point. Without that happenstance, Noelle probably would have moved onto New Wave or Bakuda. Yet, "I'm not asking you to fight capes for me, Orga."

"I'd refuse if you did, but even Lung needed cannon fodder."

"You're not—"

"Haven't survived this long waiting for things to happen to us." He glanced at Exia. I couldn't quite place it; it almost seemed like he was looking for something in the suit's face. "I don't see any reason for that to change just because circumstances have improved. Some people are more important than others."

No they're not.

He turned to me. "If you go, the city goes. What happens to us then? You made yourself the center. It's too late to back out now."

I started to retort…but I couldn't really reject that. A lot of the business deals Orga managed to get into hinged on my cooperation. Without me, there wouldn't be any Gunpla. No Gunpla, no shipping industry for Tekkadan to jump in on. Might be arrogant, but if I went, villains—the real kind, not the petty crooks kind—might return to the city. That would make his security business falter.

The center has to hold… Why did Lafter have to be right?

Orga looked away from me and rubbed his neck. "Sorry. That came out harsh."

"I get it. You don't want to be in this fight, but I'm here and it's coming whether you want it or not." I turned my attention back to the notes. Namely, the notebooks, which would take a couple of hours to get through. "And you're wrong. Your lives do matter and even if I go, StarGazer will continue what I started."

"You think she wants that?" Maybe not, but it's why I made her. "We're leaders. Those behind us want us to tell them what comes next. We don't get to walk out because the choices are hard."

"He has a point," Veda declared.

Orga flinched, raising his head and searching for the source of the voice.

"She's always here," I explained. Maybe I should put up a sign. AI ever-present. No, 'AI at work' would be more humorous. "No physical body, unless we count Queen."

"Right…" He kept looking around regardless, like he expected to find someone off in a corner. "Well. I'll go. Let you finish what you're doing."

"Yea—Wait."

"Hm?"

Pressing a hand to my forehead, I considered I might regret asking, but… "There's a cape. Sonic, in Hartford. She wants to join up with Celestial Being."

He cocked his head to the side. "Going to have a hard time fighting Teacher and all of Blue Cosmos with just three capes who can fight. Four if we count Bakuda. What's the issue?"

"I'm not sure how many people I want to drag into this."

Orga watched me while I flipped through the first notebook. "You want to know what I think?"

Not sure what I expected in response. I'd run myself in circles over the question the past two days. Orga was a leader. A leader who'd seen people who trusted him die. Maybe the only leader I could ask. Couldn't exactly ask Armsmaster what to do. He wouldn't be able to give an honest answer with what I couldn't tell him.

"Not many people I can ask, and out of them, you're the only one who leads."

It surprised me he didn't answer immediately. Capes aren't the only ones who wore masks. Orga normally seemed sure of himself. Being around him usually came with a sense that he knew exactly what he was doing.

I'd already started reading the fifth page of the notebook when he answered.

"It's not our choice to make," he said with a quiet finality. "A side needs to be covered. A location held. An enemy taken out. We ask others to do what we can't. We spend their lives to reach the destination. It's their choice to be in that position, not ours."

He pushed his hands in his pockets and turned toward the door.

"Tell her the truth, I guess. Let her decide if she wants you to spend her life that way or if she'd rather not. Either way, it's not your decision to make. That's what I think."

Food for thought.

"You're still unsure?" Veda asked after he left.

"She's not a Pet." We checked. "She's terrible as a spy."

Her father was in Blue Cosmos, but the information wasn't hard to find. Surprising, but not hard to find. Digging through old newspapers came up with a scandal in the late 90s. Xavier Londo's wife left him over an affair with his secretary. No accusations of rape or anything, but the man was sixty-two, forty years older than his daughter's mother.

Must be a nightmare being a cape when your own father was some kind of lecher and in an anti-cape group. There didn't seem to be a close family bond. He never married the woman and didn't seem involved in Sonic's life. It explained why she acted so cold toward him. I was a bit unsure of why he didn't seem to be so cold toward her, but maybe the nightmare went both ways.

But her family wasn't strictly my business.

"You still think I should tell her, Veda?"

"We should consider the possibility we started too late and that his plans to cripple the PRT are no longer in our power to stop. In that eventuality, we'll need more capes. Celestial Being may need to take up the cause of fighting the Endbringers and Blue Cosmos when the Protectorate becomes too crippled to do so."

Spoken with a sense of inevitability. That had to be the worst case scenario, or close to it. That it might be the one we were already facing was…hard. And time wasn't on our side.

I turned the page, squinting at the author's horrible handwriting.

The notes weren't encoded exactly, but the author clearly had a shorthand. They referenced combinations of letters and numbers that made no sense to me but probably came naturally to them. A few names came up, mentions of specific subjects, tests, or results. Got a good shock when I noticed 'Manton' mentioned as though the man had been in the room.

Manton worked with Cauldron.

Of course he did. That made too much sense.

I did manage to piece some of the more esoteric bits together, but it was hard to describe. English is an imprecise language.

"Like cells," I whispered. "A whole body made of cells, each with their own brains and able to divide off into a new cell with its own brain, but all connected in a chain to the top."

System collapse, Cranial said.

That's what she meant. The Case-66s—broken triggers. The network connecting all the cells was breaking down. Scion died. All the other cells were still thinking and going about their normal functions, but without the primary nervous system to direct them.

That's why people kept triggering, even though the reason for powers to do that was dead.

Even without him, each cell of his body was its own entity, capable of its own thoughts and communications. But they weren't free. They remained constrained by their normal functions and limits. The war Lalah mentioned was a war to take over the whole. Who would become the new cell atop all the others. Top of the pyramid.

Administrator. Maybe I should take the name literally. If the agents were a hierarchy, then how high up was mine? Close enough to have a shot at claiming that spot and uniting the rest of them into a new whole?

"Dragon is calling."

I straightened my back, realizing that this was going to be the pattern of the day.

My hand waved permissively. "Hello, Dragon."

Her voice kicked in over the speakers. "Hello Taylor."

"Hello Dragon," Veda replied.

"Veda. I presume you can guess why I'm calling."

"Because Tagg is whining like a baby?"

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"I don't think there's much to say. Walking into that ambush was stupid even before we knew Façade could produce clones of Strider. She's going to be harder to take down than driving up the street in her general direction."

"You can't go into the field and encourage Protectorate members to ignore a PRT director."

I could and I did. "We're lucky nobody died."

"Taylor, you know how precarious your position is."

"Yeah. The PRT plays nice with me because I have good PR, and even if I never join the Protectorate, they can still benefit from working with a tinker who is a few days away from announcing the first true case of mass-produced tinker-tech."

"Th—Wait, a few days?"

"There's a doctor at Brockton Bay General," Veda explained. "I've requested he provide us an opportunity to test the Helpers. We have an appointment on Sunday."

It came together rather easily. The hardest part was getting someone in a hospital to take up the paperwork. Theo's suggestion worked pretty well.

"You've solved the issue with the batteries melting?"

"Trevor figured it out," I noted.

"Impre—This is not the point and you're attempting to distract me."

"It was good while it lasted."

"I don't think you fully understand just how difficult your life could become if the PRT decided to be against you. It's one thing to play loose with the 'rules of cape life,' but flagrantly getting in the way of Protectorate and PRT operations is asking to have all the paperwork and inspections you've skirted by on brought up."

Rules. Restrictions.

"You've never had your workshop inspected by the Protectorate. They can compel you legally. Never mind that they could make getting basic materials difficult by subjecting you to numerous regulations that at the moment, everyone is content to hand-wave away."

Administrator mentioned restrictions too.

Sue me, my mind wandered.

Those were in the notes. Mentions of limiters and safeties build into the entity's constituent parts. C0072, balance. It appeared in all the formulas and the notes regarded it as a stabilizing factor. It made the vials less likely to mutate those who drank them but generated weaker powers.

The component that defined restrictions, laws maybe. To them.

"The Dockworkers and this security company you're working with—Tekkadan—also become subject to inspection. Ex-ABB and law enforcement is asking for your name to be run through the mud for facilitating criminals to evade the law."

Administrator was breaking the rules.

It was hard to envision. That powers—agents—were individually living things, but they were also one big living thing. Yet, they seemed to function almost like a computer. Permissions and connections. The notes contained those words a lot and it seemed an oddly deliberate choice.

"And that's before I get to Bakuda. Don't think no one has noticed, Taylor. No one is that stupid and you haven't hidden your association with her nearly well enough to avoid thinkers noticing. Least, I mention Schwartz Bruder. Everyone in the Think Tank knows that's you, even if they know they could never prove it."

Had Cauldron communicated with powers at some point?

"If an inspection team searches your factory, you won't able to tell them where they can and can't go. Trying will get you arrested. If they find Veda's processors and realize what she is, you instantly go on the S-Class threat list. Both of you."

Was that what scared them about Cranial, and now me?

"I'm getting the impression you're not listening to me."

"I'm listening," I replied distractedly.

I closed the notebook because I reached the end of it. The notes clearly weren't a first draft, but a compilation of other research. The kind of thing someone might put together to consolidate a large body of information and make referencing easier.

Something you'd grab in an emergency if you had to leave everything else behind.

"Well?" Dragon asked. "Is any of this leaving an impression?"

It did. I knew all those things. "It's just that the PRT and I have always been on this course. There was no possibility where we'd be friends forever."

"That's not—"

"Does it strike you as strange that Tagg is the one they assigned to manage Brockton Bay while deciding whether or not to axe the department?"

Dragon didn't give an immediate response, which I took as a 'yes.'

"It is curious," Veda went on. "I can understand his place in New York. Legend's reputation is the heart and soul of the Protectorate. He prefers to talk than fight." Publically, at least. "Tagg is a natural counterbalance. An aggressive and rigid mentality to even out Legend's more flexible and empathetic persona."

"That would be accurate," Dragon agreed. "I would think Tagg's disposition is more to your liking."

"Tagg has a soldier's mentality. What war is there in Brockton Bay to fight?"

I'd thought about it a bit last night, and it didn't make sense. Tagg had no place being in charge of Brockton Bay, especially not when New York had over one hundred different capes and a constant stream of parahuman incidents daily. It was a busy city. What time did Tagg really have for another, even a quiet one?

Veda piped in, clarifying, "Unless one were to consider Celestial Being an enemy."

"An enemy with unclear limits," I added. "One that could afford being tested to see where those limits are." I tapped my finger against the surface of the next notebook. Communications? "It's not like Tagg is going to stick around. He can piss me off, and it won't matter in the long run."

I flipped the notebook open. What did it mean by communications?

"You can't fight the PRT." Dragon spoke in a forlorn tone, like she knew her words wouldn't get her anywhere. "It'll be infinitely harder to affect the changes you want as an outcast."

"I don't want to fight the PRT." I really didn't. "But…" The PRT was corrupt and broken, but the world wouldn't end because of them. "There's a point where it's not about what I want anymore."

How long could I play nice with Cauldron? The Case-53s alone. Shit, how did I look Weld in the eye now? Gregor. Newter. They had lives and Cauldron took them for… cannon fodder. That's why Cauldron released some of them. They could fill out the ranks. Maintain the balance. Keep the machine of parahumanity running in easily manageable and predictable ways.

Feed for the meat grinder.

"All the best intentions in the world can't fix a corrupt system designed to fail."

Mouse Protector. Kid Win and the Wards. Armsmaster. Murrue. Dragon. Noa. They weren't enough to save the PRT. Not from this… I raised my head as the chill came over me.

This is how he's going to do it.

Teacher would blow the whistle on Cauldron. He was a member. He knew things and no doubt he could prove enough to make any accusation credible enough. Capes like Mouse Protector would quit. The Case-53s would riot. The PRT would tear itself apart in investigations and finger-pointing.

Then Blue Cosmos and Phantom Pain would swoop in.

This is Operation British.

They were going to turn everyone against the PRT, and they wouldn't have to tell a single lie.

"Dragon." Not sure why I whispered the name. "What would happen if the PRT suddenly collapsed?"

"You know what would happen," she answered. "Without the PRT, the Protectorate will collapse. Without the Protectorate, it will be hard to coordinate against S-Class threats and the Endbringers."

I inhaled and hung my head. "Yeah."

"The Guild could probably manage somewhat," Veda proposed. "You and I alone could coordinate hundreds of capes each while still operating ourselves. Organization may not be the real problem."

"The problem would be mustering manpower," Dragon agreed. "You're right."

Unless someone steps up.

I wasn't going to save the PRT. I couldn't. "I'm not picking a fight with the PRT, Dragon. It's not in the general interest, or mine, no matter how flawed it is. But I won't save them from themselves."

I could—I will—save those who didn't deserve to burn with them. Making my own side wasn't good enough. It needed to be a side for everyone.

Simple choice, when I put it like that.

Reaching for my phone, I sent a message to Veda confirming the choice and the responsibility that came with it.

We need Dragon.

Well, Orange got back from his little mission yesterday. I just needed to pose the questions to Dinah. Saint was finished.

"Forecast has arrived," Veda noted.

Think of the oracle and she appears. Wait. Was it that late already?

Dragon pleaded. "It's going to be hard enough when we reveal what Veda and I are. We don't need the PRT as our enemy."

"They're not my enemy," I replied. Those words were weird to hear from my own mouth. "I'm sure that whatever is wrong, the PRT meant to make things better. The intention was good." Intention isn't good enough. "But their mess isn't my responsibility. Tagg screwed up. I won't apologize for stepping in and giving Stratos the cover to make the right choice."

Dinah descended the stairs with White peeking out from her backpack. She instantly noticed the notebooks and the briefcase, but I raised a finger to my lips. Best not to let Dragon know about that. I couldn't tell her everything now. We needed to free her first, so Cauldron couldn't ask questions and compel her to answer honestly. I'd apologize then for the deception.

She nodded, and said, "Headaches suck."

"Headaches?" Dragon asked. "The medical report said there was nothing wrong."

"The crazy doctor thinks it's stress," I mumbled. "I'm having a lazy day because of it."

"I hope you feel better."

"I'm fine. Everyone is overreacting."

"Well, I'll let you rest. But please, I know it can be hard, but sometimes the right thing to do is to let some things go. Tagg has calmed down since yesterday but he can still make your life difficult if pushed. Don't discount him as a temporary inconvenience to your own detriment."

"Okay, Dragon."

She was right. Sometimes, the right thing to do was let things go. Unfortunately, what I was letting go was any notion of keeping the PRT afloat.

I would have thought that a harder decision to make, but it came easily.

It went beyond Cauldron and the Case-53s. There was Dragon too, the way they used her. The twisted perspectives on how to deal with capes and cape-related crime. The violations of civil rights and convoluted laws. The PRT was a dead man walking. Teacher already had them in the coffin. When he pulled the trigger and the whole organization imploded, we needed to be ready for those who found themselves with nowhere to go.

The Case-53s. The good capes who just wanted to help. The support personnel and the troopers who faced long odds and walked into them willingly. None of them deserved to share Cauldron's fate as the PRT crumbled into the same grave.

A shame I didn't have many ideas on how to best help them. We'd have to deal with Teacher and Blue Cosmos in the aftermath, and they would all need to be brought in on what was happening. Could I even screen that many capes for Pets or double agents?

"Light reading," Dinah muttered with a nod to the notes. She set her bag down and White jumped out to join the other Haros. "Those are the notes Façade mentioned?"

"Yeah. She handed them over to Veda last night. I've been going over them."

"I can tell it's going well."

"It's infuriating."

"I don't think we should trust Noelle."

"I don't."

"She's hiding something."

"So are we. The difference is I know what we're doing." I lifted one of the cylinders and turned it in my palm. "Her story for how she got these doesn't add up."

"They're too valuable to have gone missing unnoticed."

"And the notes are strange." I held up the first notebook. "A lot of it doesn't make any sense. I don't think these were meant to be used on their own. They're more like reference guides, pointing to other materials or subjects. Whoever wrote them probably understood it all, but no one else would. These are probably what someone could grab on their way out the door."

"It could be Teacher."

"I don't think Noelle is lying about that part. She's furious at him and she wants him to pay." I would not, however, discount that she wanted us to pay too. We were the ones who actually busted Francis Krouse. "But maybe things started out more cordially than she's implying and she's afraid to say it."

"I can answer questions in a little while," Dinah responded.

"I'm not sure what I'd ask just yet. I want to finish going through these."

"Alright. Veda's got a game set up, so I came by to play from here."

I nodded and left her to do that.

Finally alone, I cracked the second notebook open.

'Communications' was a weird title and the first few pages made no sense. Might as well be gibberish with all the references to various 'test number' and 'subject number.' I noticed Hero came up a few times, and something called 'the dead agent' hypothesis. It took a few pages to get into whatever that meant.

They were talking about the first entity, the one they killed before Scion.

It died, and the corpse became the basis for all their research. I understood that part already. What I didn't get is all the talk about connections and data sharing. If powers functioned like a big body, they would talk, right? No real mystery there. It even extended into parahumans. Someone like me was just an extension of that network. Another cell with its own brain, doing my own thinking, and…

Data.

Why involve me at all? Why operate parasitically? What's the point?

"They're collecting and sharing data..."

Cauldron didn't come up with the idea of testing powers on people. They just took it from the entities' rulebook. What was the point though? From what I could tell, the effective technological ability of powers went vastly beyond human understanding. Everything I did and made came to me from Administrator in some form. She fed me the knowledge and I built it.

Except I chose what to build, didn't I?

Back on the mind control horror.

I didn't feel mind controlled, so how did that relationship work?

After that thought, the notebook made more sense. Cauldron was trying to figure it out too. Stabilize their formulas maybe, or gain a better understanding of how the agents functioned. They focused on how the agents talked to one another and…noted that the ones they worked with weren't doing it right?

Must have compared their own research to scans of naturally triggering parahumans and noticed a discrepancy.

I turned my attention back to the loose sheets of paper that didn't make much sense before. Looking them over, I realized they were readouts. Cauldron had plenty of test subjects. Probably kept some of them comatose or under lock and key for constant scanning. Point some tinker device at a Gemma and—

I read the data again.

I recognize this.

"Where…"

I dropped the notebook and rose from the recliner. My hands shifted the sheets back and forth, looking at some of the charts and readouts. I needed to look at it kind of diagonally, but if I did the pattern stood out.

I knew that pattern.

I rushed to the elevator and let it lower me down into the sub-basement. Once there, I walked past the rooms containing Trevor's teleporter, Veda's almost complete server bunker, and the Tierens I'd finished in my free time.

Throwing open the door to the room far across from the elevator, I ignored my reflection in the suit's unblemished armor.

"Taylor?" Veda asked.

"I know this."

I pulled down one of the monitors in the room and started tapping at a keyboard. My head pounded, but I ignored the pain. It didn't seem to matter in the moment.

Pulling up the data from our last test, I compared it to the sheets of paper.

My jaw slackened.

You were already on the path to this place.

I thought she was referring to quantum teleportation, but it was deeper than that.

"They're the same as GN Particles. This is the same wavelength produced by GN Particles colliding from two separate GN Drives."

I double and triple-checked, but I wasn't imagining it. The pattern Cauldron identified in the connection between Parahumans and Agents was the same one produced by the GN Drives working in tandem. Their data was junk, littered and crummy. Not their fault. They didn't know what they were looking for and probably collected all kinds of errant readings.

It was there though, and I recognized it in the mess.

"That… One moment." The monitor flashed, and Veda brought up something else.

"What?" I looked at the graph she displayed on the screen. It wasn't quite right, but—I turned the sheets another way, which fucking hurt to think about and I needed to keep looking back and forth. "That's the same pattern, but with interference?"

"The PRT's equipment is insufficient to gain accurate measurements."

"Where is this from?"

"You." What… "These are the scans of your brain Dr. Unoa conducted yesterday. The coincidentally similar pattern seemed fanciful. I didn't think they were connected."

Communication.

That didn't make sense. If it were that obvious how could Cauldron miss it… Except most parahumans didn't have nine Gemmas.

"Wait. Where's the data we got on Dragon when her power is in use? Bring that up."

Veda did, and I started looking through the code. Veda figured it out first, breaking bits of the code off and running them through a few algorithms my brain needed time to catch up on. The pattern was there again. It was different, but that might just be down to how we recorded it.

"Taylor, what does that mean?"

I turned, looking at the suit where it sat on its knees.

It wasn't meant to be practical. The whole thing was the tinker equivalent of screwing around in the chemistry lab, seeing what happened if I threw two things into the same flask. Despite what Dinah said, I still didn't think it could work. The multiplicative qualities of GN Particles from different Drives was fanciful but too chaotic to make practical use of.

No.

Administrator was the source. My power gave me my knowledge. I grabbed the GN Particle as a wonder particle, something that could negate mass among numerous other uses.

Maybe Administrator had a specific one in mind when she gave it to me.

"This is the key," I declared. "Get two GN Drives down here. We need 00."