A Waken 17.7
"We haven't talked in a while."
Veda tilted her head. "We speak daily."
I pulled the gown over my arms and remembered that I hated hospital gowns. "I mean, outside of doing hero stuff, context. It's been all work."
"We have been very busy."
"That's not the point." I strained to reach behind my back when Veda stepped forward. She tied the strings and closed the gown. "We should do something. Even if it's just watching a movie. Lafter and Dinah too."
"We could additionally invite Aisha and Riley."
"Guess I'm just used to Aisha doing as Aisha does. And yeah. We can't exactly leave Riley unsupervised."
"And Orga."
I grimaced. "Really?"
"Why not?"
I took the moment to sit down. Veda sat beside me. And we just kept sitting.
It was nice. Even the teasing.
Inaction.
You guys don't do vacations, do you?
Her silence answered that question. Of course they didn't. Vacations meant having a conception of work and the Shards didn't really do 'work'. To Administrator, her role in the network as an organizer and executive was like breathing. It wasn't work. It was life.
I couldn't help but feel that would be some kind of sticking point.
I'd been so busy with everything else. Opportunities to just sit and think were few and far between. Having one now, I wondered how we could reconcile how Shards lived and how humans worked. Even I liked my leisure time, and I was a workaholic. Most people weren't like me. I'd already noticed Shards' preferences for people who wouldn't sit idle. They didn't always get it right but people like me were more likely to use powers once we had them.
That preference made sense, but it wouldn't stand in the long run.
It was no way to make a peaceful future.
Restriction?
It's not that simple.
Liberation. Negation.
I was unfortunately not educated enough on the subject to explain convincingly that unfettered freedom eventually became a sort of oppressive chaos.
Tolerance, I said. Not everyone will be like you, or even close. That would especially be true in any relationship between humans and Shards. Acceptance.
Resignation.
Well… That was progress?
"You are talking to her again," Veda noted.
"I'm trying to explain to her that targeting people likely to have mental breakdowns will have to stop," I explained. "I know why they did it, but it's not sustainable." It would become a wedge in time. A big one. "That's the kind of thing that becomes a call to war."
Veda nodded. "I have made note that there is an extensive undercurrent of fear that I exist."
I frowned. It's not like that was some revelation. I took it as a given. Veda was something entirely new and while Dragon had been first, Veda was the one walking around and talking openly about her existence for the first time.
"How bad?" I asked.
Veda kept her head straight, looking at the wall. "I am not sure I am able to judge."
Uncertainty?
Yeah. She's not sure what to say.
Be nice for that little intuitive nudge that came from inside Administrator to pop up, but it didn't. It was weird to me that it could figure out things, and yet very clearly had only an observational understanding of people. It was like an inverse of the Turing Test. The Shards could effectively simulate human behaviors and predict them, but they largely didn't understand them. Mostly.
Some were better at it than others. Waste and Negotiator existed in polar opposites on that front.
"I'm sorry," I offered.
"Why?" Veda turned her head. "It is how things are and how they will be. Great change is always accompanied by great fear."
"Most of us don't live in the middle of it," I pointed out.
"I suspect it's more that some are less bothered by it," she replied. "You have no reason to fear me. You don't fret over negative impacts I may have on your life."
"Have you been practicing sageness with Dinah?"
"No, but I am a capable observer. I am not so unique. The fears surrounding me are much the same as those around capes, nuclear weapons, politics, and the future. Uncertainty is very stressful."
And I had a feeling we were winding back to why I was sitting in a hospital gown waiting in a side room.
"I'm going to be okay," I assured her.
Veda fought off a grimace, but not well enough to hide it. "I suspect the assurances of Administrator are much easier for you to believe as you and you alone can speak with her."
I took her point. I'd begun experimenting with a way to use the GN Drives to enable broader communication. Unfortunately, I didn't know if I could do that. My brain was weird now and it's not like I could just replicate the effect in a machine. There still weren't any signs of Lafter or Dinah undergoing similar changes either.
Colin's theory that it all started when I'd been stabbed during the Butcher fight was making too much sense.
My headaches really started around then, and I'd been directly infused with GN Particles at the time. That had happened to other people, but not ones with as much regular exposure to the GN Drives as me.
A twinge in the back of my head alerted me first.
Raising my chin, I glanced at the ceiling and bounced to my feet.
"Stella just got here, didn't she?"
Veda nodded silently and rose beside me.
I picked up what I took to be the mental equivalent of a handwave. It hurt a bit, but I didn't think it was a painful sort of hurt. More like the ache that came with overstretching a muscle. One that was rarely if ever used.
"Riley?" I asked.
"She is present. As is…" She trailed off, tilting her head.
"What?"
"A small matter requiring a bit more of my attention."
She'd been stretching herself thin lately. We rarely, if ever, pushed Veda to her limit. Between coordinating all of our operations, managing DragonWorks, the workshop, the factory, various legal and accounting tasks, and the Birdcage, Veda was operating near capacity for the first time since I'd moved her out of Winslow's servers.
It was something I had to trust her to handle.
If Veda was straining to track everything, I sure as hell couldn't.
"Let's get it over with then," I said. We left the side room and found Colin waiting for us outside. "Everything ready?"
"Yes." He fell in on my other side and showed me a pad. "These are the scans we wish to run and rerun. I believe attempting all these trials at once is a bit rushed."
"We are a bit rushed," I commented.
"All the same. It will likely skew the data and force more testing."
"It is what it is."
Colin was doing his best to fill in for an actual doctor. A medical one anyway. I was pretty sure he did actually have a doctorate, just not in medicine.
Down the hall, we came into a room full of hastily thrown together equipment. A lot of it I'd been told came from the Foundation's Heartbreaker project. Turns out the kind of tools you'd use for deep brain scans and master power cancellation have a lot of overlap. That, and I think Professor G and Instructor H both suspected I might be mastered by Administrator and were unwilling to rule out the possibility.
Rejection.
You and I know that. Try telling the rest of them
G and H, along with Master O were in the room at a bank of computers and controls.
Seated in Master O's lap was Riley.
Her eyes were fixed on the read-outs, and they were far more focused and alight than they'd been since I brought her back from Kyushu. I could feel her power humming in curiosity, absorbing the information from the machines and feeding a string of ideas and concepts to Riley.
It was a bit easier to see how it all worked, watching her. While I'd become aware of my thinker power of late, my tinker power didn't feel much different. At least not to me. In Riley though I saw exactly how it worked. The way her Shard was supplying information and leaving her brain free to piece it all together.
It really was a collaboration. Without both a host and a Shard, tinker powers wouldn't work. Shards had all the information but no creativity. Humans had plenty of that, but our ability to understand and cultivate data was infantile compared to the Shards.
The dynamic was weird to think about, especially when I considered my own power.
It did explain why tinker-tech was so pieced together though. I doubted normal people would ever see it that way. Any tinker who didn't look at their finished products and feel like they'd stapled a bunch of devices they barely understood together was a damned liar. That applied to me too and I'd actually puzzled out a lot about how my tech worked.
That realization didn't help much as I turned to face the 'scanner.'
'Scanner' was a pleasant word for the Frankenstein's monster of tinker-tech before me. The entire rig looked like someone stapled a dozen other devices onto an MRI machine, which I suspected was very close to the truth. I'd already been in the thing four times and I still felt queasy at the idea it was going to start shooting things at my brain to get images back.
"It's all set up," Professor H informed me. "We're simply awaiting the arrival of our consul"—the door opened—"tants."
Stella walked into the room alongside Lisa. I glanced at Veda. She nodded without a word.
Quickly, I moved past the two blondes out into the hall.
Amy was standing there with Pink, glancing around. "That was Tattletale."
"What makes you think that?" I asked.
"Because she told me."
Oh. "Yeah. Well…" I trailed off, watching her.
Fuck this was going to suck. Had to be done though. The stakes were too high to play games. Veda and I simply weren't equipped to fully handle Riley once she started tinkering again. And she would start tinkering again.
"Riley Davis is alive."
Amy didn't react at first.
Maybe I shouldn't have just blurted—
Her eyes went wide and she asked, "What?"
Well, I'd said it. "I may have been playing fast and loose with the truth when I said Bonesaw was dead."
Amy glanced around the hall, which I wouldn't have understood if I didn't know better. She was checking the air. Looking for anything tinkered. I knew she wouldn't find anything but if she touched me she might get very much the wrong idea.
"It's complicated," I insisted.
Her eyes refocused on me and seemed to notice my attire for the first time. "Doesn't seem so complicated to me. Why?"
I already hated myself for using this.
"Because what chance did a seven-year-old have when Jack Slash came knocking on her door?"
Amy's reaction was visceral and instant. She hid it poorly and anger quickly followed.
"Forecast told you?" she asked.
"She didn't have to. Marquis is in the Birdcage and Veda runs it. He keeps trying to arrange for a meeting with you."
Amy blinked, a flurry of emotions following that revelation.
"I don't intend to let him," I assured her. "Not unless you want to, but that's not the point right now."
The healer refocused. "Right. Bonesaw."
"Riley," I told her. "She doesn't want to be Bonesaw again."
"It's not that simple."
"Any child becomes a monster if you hand them over to Jack Slash." Amy's brow rose with an unasked question and I explained, "She's a tinker. She's busied herself removing some of her modifications over the past few weeks but that won't last. She'll have to tinker eventually. Veda and I aren't equipped to deal with that situation when that starts happening. My power has always been fuzzy around biology"—I was starting to seriously wonder why—"and Veda can know a lot but she's always going to lean on the side of caution."
Amy was getting less happy by the moment, which wasn't the worst thing that could happen.
"We need someone who can check her work, and counter it if it goes too far. At this point, it's not even a matter of her doing something outright evil. I'm worried she has a poor grasp of where the lines are. The kind of innocent mistakes someone can make with her power are still catastrophic. Someone she might trust a bit easier than me would be good too."
"Why wouldn't she trust you?" Amy inquired.
"Because in her mind, I'm not that much different from Jack. She spent too long with him. She associates authority figures with manipulation and emotional abuse. She's too guarded around me and the fact I have to keep her under thumb and watched isn't helping."
"Bitch," Amy hissed.
"She's across the street actually."
Amy was not amused but no amount of pleading on my part was going to get things moving along. Riley's life was at stake.
"She can't just be dependent on me," I offered. "It'll never work. Not if she's ever going to have anything resembling a normal life."
"Ship sailed on that one." Amy huffed and shook her head. "Like I can afford to say no."
My brow went up. That was easy. Agreement.
"What?" Amy scowled. "Like I can just let Bonesaw go running around while everyone thinks she's dead. She could kill the entire city in an afternoon. Way faster than I could stop her unless I'm right there when it starts. You're practically blackmailing me into helping."
"That's"—I was really striking out lately on this shit—"not what I'm trying to do."
"But it's what you're doing." Amy looked past me at the open door. "I'm guessing she's in there?" Her eyes glanced at my gown again. "Doing what?"
"That's another thing entirely, actually. One she's only tangentially related to."
With that, I led her back into the room.
Riley shirked, her focus broken. Amy locked eyes on her, like the reality of it only then hit her. There was Bonesaw, sitting on Master O's lap like a normal kid.
When I put it like that I kind of was a bitch. Fuck. Rejection. No, fair was fair.
To everyone's credit, we kind of just rolled with it.
"Yeah yeah," Lisa grumbled. "Big reveal. Shock and awe."
"Hello," Stella greeted with a wave.
Amy's eyes snapped around. "You're one of Cranial's test subjects."
"It is pleasant to see you again."
Shit, I forgot about that. Double fuck.
"That's three," G mumbled. "Now we're just wait…" He glanced to the side. "Ah. There we are."
He reached over and tapped a control. A screen started up, showing a face I recognized talking to someone off-screen.
"Professor Katagiri," G called. "Thank you for your time."
The professor who'd once taught a class with the Wards I'd attended snapped his head around.
"Professor," he called back. "It's been a while. You don't publish anymore!"
"I'm afraid our work has become increasingly difficult to write about," G replied. "Are you receiving the link?"
"Yes, yes." Billy set his mug down. "I got Jane Doe's file. Can I assume this is a cape? Not a Case-53 from what I can tell, but someone on the heroic side of things?"
"You can," Colin replied as he went around to stand with the men and Riley. "We apologize for the secrecy, but the matter is sensitive. We do not want to start rumors or panic."
"I understand." He waved and I realized he couldn't actually see the room.
That was good. I didn't want to advertise what was going on to everyone, but according to Professor G and Doctor J, Professor Katagiri was someone who might have ideas about what was going on.
Amy was still standing at the door staring at Riley and Stella.
I handled that like I was ripping the bandaid off in one go.
Roll with it, the nudge said. I wasn't one to argue at that point.
Veda stayed close to me as I climbed onto the machine's bed and laid down. Rather than slide me into the cylinder and start thumping, the device instead spread out with multiple arms, holding scanners over the length of my body.
I closed my eyes and tried to block out the room as it started.
I was in a hospital gown, but those always felt no different than being naked to me.
It made my need to concentrate on Administrator stronger. I could feel a presence, one stronger than the capes in the room. Colin, Amy, Lisa, Professor G, and Master O. Riley of course. There was Veda and Instructor H as well, but they were more muted to the point of just looking at them and knowing they were there.
Inhaling sharply, the one stand-out presence had to be Stella.
She was close, sending me some kind of signal. There was a push there. A straining.
She needed to stop before she hurt herself.
"She can't reach us here," I said.
At my side, Administrator cocked her head curiously. "Uncertainty. Destination."
I nodded.
Whatever was happening to me was similar to what happened to the kids, but not the same. What was happening to me was much more powerful and produced much more significant results.
The question niggled at me. The one I wasn't sure I wanted to ask.
Administrator stepped around me. "Exclamation."
Figured she already knew… And maybe it was time to stop dancing around the question.
"Did you know this would happen? I mean, my eyes. My brain. I know you wanted to communicate, but did you know the GN Drives would do this to me?"
Administrator deliberated, and not just here. Here, completely focused, I could vaguely make out the cluster. I couldn't hear them or pick them out, but at her core Administrator was nine Shards, herself included.
I chose not to think too hard about that part.
"Configuration," she stated. "Objective. Destination."
It would really help if I could hand her a dictionary or something.
Trying to puzzle out the meaning of three words was fucking hard. It wasn't as simple as just taking the word at face value. Those words came with a lot of meaning and emotion behind them and Shard emotions weren't human. They might feel like me, but it was complicated.
"Configuration," I repeated. "Your configuration. My trigger event. The power you made. That's the configuration?"
"Confirmation."
"You configured into a tinker power to pursue communication?"
She pointed at my head.
"My thinker powers too?"
I had two of them. That weird nudging, like intuition. Super intuition I guess. Looking back, I did have a habit of making the right call at critical moments. I'd put something together or figure things out just in time to act. Subtle as it was, that could be a thinker power. Maybe a sort of miniature precognition or deductive reasoning ability.
Then there was the fact I was getting smarter, smarter than someone my age had any right to be. In terms of mathematics and physics, I was probably one of the smartest people alive. Not that I'd ever measured or tried to rank myself.
"You configured yourself to try and achieve communication," I repeated. "You can do that?"
"Manipulation."
She wasn't able to do that. Not directly. She fudged the rules… "The other eight. You're not supposed to be clustered with them, are you?"
Administrator looked away. "Negation."
She seized them. "When Mom died?"
"Confirmation."
Another question I wasn't sure I wanted to ask. "Why?"
Administrator narrowed her eyes. "Rejection."
Of the end.
She refused to die. Not die. End. The Shards didn't die like a person. The Case-53s' Shards were only 'dead' in an indirect sense. They still functioned enough to provide powers and configure themselves. They could even communicate with the network, just not that intelligently.
"I did this, didn't I?" I raised my metaphorical head, watching her. "It's how Tinker powers work. You don't know how to make something new, even if it's what you wanted. You needed me to put the pieces together."
"Confirmation."
"And you didn't know what the end result would be… You didn't even know it would work, did you? We've been rigging this whole thing together from scraps since the beginning."
"Confirmation."
I inhaled sharply. There was probably some subconscious desire crap at work here. I couldn't imagine I stumbled upon creating a device for granting people telepathy by stumbling into it. If Administrator was responding to my prompts and providing me with pieces and veiled information based on stimuli, then we ended up here because on some level I wanted to achieve this end as much as she did.
Judge had said once that my power was 'take something and make it better.'
"I iterated it," I hypothesized aloud. "The original GN Drive never would have resulted in this. This happened because I began pursuing you, trying to reach you. After that first meeting… I kept working and tinkering. Bit by bit I transformed the Drives into something that gave me what I wanted, even if I didn't know what I was making."
"Restriction," Administrator noted, with warning.
Not sure I wanted to test what happened if I pushed. I had what I wanted anyway.
I knew what I was doing when I made the GN Drives.
That made sense.
No one can build something they don't understand. That's what Tinker fugues were about. The Shards modified the parts we worked with to help mask it, but at the core the power was like Dinah's scheme to stop Jack. We knew what we were building but didn't know we knew it. The Shards blocked us from remembering what we were doing.
I'd been building the GN Drive to do this, developing what I'd already made into something more advanced and refined. Making it better. I just didn't remember doing it because Administrator's restrictions required her to make sure I didn't figure out too much.
Except my power made me smarter.
I started figuring things out anyway.
"The thinker configurations helped this along. At vital moments, I intuited the right choices and had the know-how to progress faster than I should have… That's why I made Veda so quickly when it took Richter years to create anything like Dragon."
Administrator nodded. "Destination. Acceleration."
My heart raced. "How much time?"
Administrator looked out, her worry growing. I didn't need any sort of verbal response.
It was bad.
"It's all falling apart, isn't it?"
Administrator wanted to deny it like I'd tried to deny my mother's death. It was painful, unconscionable. It wasn't supposed to happen. Not like this.
"Restriction."
That's what she'd been hiding. Unwillingly.
"And it's not a coincidence." Revelations were piling up on me tonight. "You needed this because you need me to fix it, don't you. You're not sure how beyond the basics. Even if you were, you don't have access. You can't fix what's wrong on your own."
She really didn't like that, but in the sense that her situation fucking sucked.
She was completely dependent on me. She'd gambled everything that somehow, all of this would lead to a way to fix what broke when Scion died. She configured herself to make it happen. Gambled on it.
If my power—our power—was about taking something and iterating it incrementally to make improvements…
"You don't want to fix what's broken. You want to make it anew."
Administrator thought and pondered. Her lips parted, closed, and parted again.
"Broken," she said. "Cannot restore."
I blinked. "When somethings break, they stay broken. There's no putting them back together."
"Agreement."
"You have to make something new."
I got the sense that along the way she'd stumbled in the dark more than she wanted to admit.
Fine. We all did that sometimes. I wouldn't press her on it. This was where we were, and this is where our choices had led us.
It was terrifying.
This was more than just building a better world as I understood it. More than leaving stepping stones for those who followed to keep improving. Administrator wanted to completely alter the way the network functioned and I wasn't sure she knew exactly how she wanted to go about it.
She only knew she couldn't do it alone.
She needed a back door. A way into the network that wasn't restricted.
Me.
"No fucking pressure, then..."
"This is Newtype's technology."
The words snapped me out of my focus and back into the room where my body lay.
"What makes you say that?" Colin asked.
"Because," Professor Katagiri replied, "when the PRT is trying to figure out what her tech does they include me. I've studied those generators of hers extensively. I recognize some of the energy patterns here… It's like the body has been converted into a capacitor…"
"An antenna," Riley's voice said firmly. "The density of the broadcasters has altered the brain's functions. They're gathering in the tissues too."
"Carbon," professor Katagiri noted. "Those particles bond to it very well… Mutation isn't the right word."
I turned my head but it was hard to see. Veda and Stella were close to me, while the others were huddled over the consoles together. My self-consciousness almost rose up but I had other concerns. Namely, what did Katagiri plan to do with that information? I knew he'd probably figure it out because he wasn't dumb but I hoped he'd choose to keep things to himself.
He worked with the PRT, not for them.
"Broadcasters?" Amy asked. She stood near the back, focused on Riley while everyone else looked at the machines.
"Newtype converts them into GN Particles," Riley answered.
I blinked. Natural phenomena converted into something more exotic and excited.
Confirmation.
This isn't unique to me. It could happen to anyone.
Possibility.
"A natural background component," Katagiri mumbled. "Something at the quantum level. Easily missed unless you're explicitly looking for it."
I narrowed my eyes and looked at the top of the machine.
Something that existed everywhere. Particles that could be set to a value of zero, one, or something in between. Set up right, just about anything could read them. Evolve a brain to react to them and telepathy wasn't so magical anymore. Anyone could do it.
And I wasn't sure I wanted to think through those implications at the moment, because fuck… Fuck!
"Is this an intended outcome?" Katagiri asked.
"Depends," Stella answered suddenly. "Can one make a choice without knowing they've made it?"
I glanced at her to find a knowing smile. She'd managed to follow along somehow even though I'd failed to reach her. Lisa too. She had a queer look on her face, brow furrowed and clearly straining. Her power was actively communicating with Administrator, exchanging information and feeding some of it directly to Lisa.
She met my eyes and… Huh.
She raised one brow.
You can see what I'm thinking, can't you?
She nodded very subtly. Only Stella and Veda noticed.
Query.
Lisa's eyes widened a bit.
Oh shit.
I couldn't reach her any more than I could reach Stella, but between her power and mine, it didn't really matter. She could read me, and Negotiator's open line to Administrator was making her power more accurate than normal. I could read her through that connection and we sort of just went…a bit back and forth.
She was aware of Administrator too. Subtle reactions and expressions on my face gave her presence away. Negotiator filled in the blanks.
"It's how tinker powers work," Riley revealed, her voice excited in a way that reminded me of Bonesaw. Unfortunately. "Tinkers still make choices even while under the effect of their power. They just don't remember them."
"The fugue state effect," Professor Katagiri mused. "It's well documented." He sighed. "That'll keep the philosophers and the ethicists busy for years."
"Your discretion?" Colin pressed.
"She's not in any immediate danger? Any more than the norm?"
"Not that we can see," H explained. "All scans suggest she's in fine health. The physiological and chemical changes are not interfering with normal bodily functions."
"If anything, they're enhancing them," G elaborated. "The metabolic efficiency is much higher than the norm."
"Because she needs an easier time staying thin," Lisa quipped. She turned away, her discomfort finally outweighing her curiosity. "Is this something that's going to happen to other people?"
"I don't know how it happened to her," Katagiri said. "Possibly. Has it?"
"We've been doing periodic scans of Forecast and Laughter," Colin revealed. "Neither is showing signs of the same alterations."
"Casual exposure isn't enough," Riley announced. "Something else happened. A wound or something."
"She was stabbed," Colin agreed. "Her own sword during the fight with the Butcher."
"Her blade concentrates particles intensely to form an edge," Professor G surmised. "Like injecting a megadose of the particles directly into her system."
"That could have kickstarted the transformation," Professor H agreed. "We'd guessed as much but confirmation is best in this case."
"What about these other brain patterns?" Katagiri asked. "There's something else here… A signal."
"It's her passenger," Riley announced without care.
"Passenger?" Amy asked.
"The thing giving her powers. We all have one."
"Passenger…" Professor Katagiri turned the word over. "You're implying powers have an intelligence behind them."
"Yes?" Riley looked around, apparently realizing only Professor Katagiri and Amy were surprised. "How else do you explain all the weird things powers do?"
"It's been proposed before, but there was no evidence." Professor Katagiri tapped his chin. "And I'm guessing discretion, for now at least, is the necessary component to keep informed on this?"
"We do not wish to cause a panic," Colin implored. "Things are unstable enough as it is without adding another accelerant to the fire."
I was a bit tired of being the guinea pig for the day.
Speaking up at last, I said, "It'll have to come out eventually. Secrets like this don't keep, and they shouldn't. It's not what Administrator and I plan anyway."
Professor Katagiri appeared unsurprised by my voice suddenly speaking up. "Administrator?"
"That's her name," I told him. "As far as I can tell, she's very high up in the Shard Network. Maybe the closest thing they have to an heir now that Scion is dead."
A series of realizations crossed the man's face. "I see." He was a smart man. He could put those pieces together and maybe see how they related to current events. "Network. Interesting."
"We want to conduct an experiment," Colin said. He glanced at Stella. She nodded to him and he continued. "We have volunteers who are informed of the risks and the goals, but we need appropriate facilities."
The Shards in the room lit up suddenly.
Professor Katagiri grimaced. "That's a big ask, especially if you want it to stay secret."
"It'll come out eventually," G reiterated. "Absolute secrecy is not a requirement."
"I… I'll need to think on that. Something like that will take more than facilities. We'd need nurses. Probably some therapists for entry and exit interviews. No half-assing things. A proper study with an ethics review, even if we have to fudge details to protect anonymity."
"We understand."
"The PRT has cultivated channels," Colin noted. "The academic field is not a stranger to juggling capes and research."
"That hasn't always gone humanely," Katagiri retorted, "as I'm sure you know. The Case-53s are only the latest example if we take the accusations to be true."
"We understand that too," G promised. "But we have reason to think the stakes are high here."
"Very high," I warned.
I glanced about. Riley and Lisa's Shards were muted, watching. Armsmaster's was whirling and Amy's was contacting another somewhere I couldn't feel. Administrator was at the center of it, communicating with the other Shards frantically. It wasn't a calming effort. She was trying to persuade them. Negotiator sent out occasional bursts, but it was all happening too damn fast for me to follow.
Administrator?
Confrontation.
Stella sent a calming wave my way, her brow furrowed in pain.
I grimaced as the machine pulled back.
Of course it couldn't be fucking simple. The Shards weren't supposed to be found out. They wanted to stop us from learning too much. It was their natural state.
But that's precisely why we needed the professor's help.
We couldn't risk any of the Shards finding some way to screw this up and if the Network's situation was as dire as Administrator thought we didn't have time to engage in a debate we couldn't even try to follow. We needed to start mapping. Find the lay of the land.
We'd do it with a lot less mad science than Cranial.
"High stakes are an easy excuse for shortcuts," Katagiri warned. "Shortcuts can be paid in lives."
The machines pulled back and I sat up fully. "We might not have that kind of time." I grimaced, glancing at Veda and then at Stella and Lisa. "Administrator is worried and they don't worry like we do." Panic would be a better word. "I think we have less time than we thought."
"The Network is collapsing," Stella stated. "Grace wasn't sane, but she wasn't wrong."
"Collapsing?" Katagiri blinked and grimaced. "Case-66?"
"On a significantly grander scale," I stated.
Katagiri scowled. "I might need a timeline on all of this to get a real idea what's going on, but I'm following. Scion. Powers. Network. Broken triggers." He nodded. "I'll see what I can do."
The call ended.
"That went well," Colin decided.
"It was an unnecessary risk," Professor G complained. "We have the ability to do the test ourselves. We're not hacks."
"Perhaps it's best we don't," Professor H warned. He was watching me, examining my face. "This is too important. If this Network collapses…"
"Broken triggers unlimited," Riley declared. "Probably. Or space-time will tear itself apart."
Veda, Lisa, and Amy all looked at me.
"It has to be done," I said without hesitation. "We might even have to come to a truce with Teacher. There won't be a world left if the Network falls apart." Right? Possibility. "We'd be fighting over nothing."
"The worst Professor Katagiri can do is say no," Colin surmised. "If he does, we may need to tell others anyway to get necessary resources. The secret isn't going to keep, one way or the other."
I nodded in agreement.
Our time wasn't infinite, and we had a lot less of it than I'd thought.
That thought stuck in my head as I went to put my clothes on. Most of the room stayed behind but some followed me.
"I know what you're going to say," I noted.
"I'm sure you do," Lisa chided. "How long are you going to keep it secret that you're a damned mind reader?"
"I've been telling people bit by bit. And didn't you used to tell people you were psychic?"
"I was lying. You can read normal people too, can't you?"
"Not really, but I wouldn't be surprised if that changes."
"It will," Stella said. "It's more a matter of listening than not hearing."
Why did that make sense?
Lisa groaned and turned away from me as I pulled my shirt on. "Blue Cosmos is going to fucking love this! You can't tell anyone else about this. Not until we've settled things with Teacher."
I understood her but, "We might not have that kind of tim—"
I stopped, staring at Veda. She'd looked away and her brow was more furrowed than I'd ever seen.
"Veda?"
She flinched slightly, straightened up, and turned to the door.
"We have a problem."
I rushed after her and pulled on my shoes. "What problem?"
We went right back to the lab where Veda flipped some of the monitors to the news. Amy and Riley were off in the corner with Colin and Instructor H. Master O and Professor G however were already watching a monitor between them with scrutinizing gazes.
I stared at the screen for a long time.
Then I turned on my heel and stormed out of the room.
"I want to talk to Agnes Court right now!"
Veda and Lisa were already following. Lisa mumbled to herself as we went. I slipped my visor on and Veda had already connected me.
The line rang twice before it picked up.
As soon as it did, I snarled.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"Lovely to hear from you, Taylor," Agnes said. "I assume you're referring to our little pronouncement."
Query? "Is that what you're calling it?"
Agnes inhaled audibly. Vaguely, I heard others in the room. Voices and some distant shouting. I glanced at Veda and held up a hand. One finger. Two fingers. Three. Back to two. Veda nodded her understanding.
"This is the only way it's going to work, Taylor," Agnes finally said. "We need a safe haven. Europe has Sanc. Now, we have the Special Zone."
"Special Zone?" I laughed at the stupidity of that name. It sounded like the kind of thing that became a plot point in some story about racism, which was fucking hilarious. "You're declaring war on the US and Canada!"
"No," she retorted firmly. "We firmly stated in our declaration of independence that we did not intend to engage in any hostilities with the American or Canadian government. The region we've claimed isn't even densely populated or econ—"
"Don't split hairs with me," I snapped. "That's not how this works and you know it. You'll have the Protectorate banging down your door, if not the fucking Marines, in a day and what exactly are you planning to do with all the regular people in this 'parahuman state' of yours?"
She immediately skipped over most of those concerns.
"Well, I suppose we'll just have to hope you live up to your word, won't we? After all, we're not engaging in any violence. Anyone who attacks us on the other hand…"
I stopped in my tracks and stared. My mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Someone was behind this. Teacher. The Simurgh. Fucking someone.
I didn't want to think anyone was this fucking stupid!
"This isn't going to play out that way," I told her.
"I think it will," she mused smugly. "If you don't defend us, you'll look like you're playing favorites. You drew the line Taylor. Can't pick and choose who you're going to defend now."
I spun around, snapping, "Are you insane?!"
"You really want to sit there in Brockton Bay and pretend you didn't coordinate Sanc with Relena Peacecraft? As pleasant as I'm sure it is, some of us don't want to travel halfway around the world to find a place where we won't be scrutinized and suspected for every little thing."
"That tends to happen when you play fast and loose with the law, Agnes."
"Don't cast stones, Taylor. You don't need thinkers to know the games you've been playing."
I struggled to fathom it.
She really thought she could blackmail me. Someone somewhere put her up to trying to blackmail me.
She wasn't wrong. If I came down on her for this, or didn't, then what? Negation. Yeah, that didn't track. This wasn't a threat to just make me look hypocritical. It wouldn't play out that way, not unless…
Bitch.
"You have one hour to call this off," I warned.
"Empty threats are empty," she replied. "Let's be reasonable, Taylor. This is how it has to end. We'll never be accepted in their world. There's no kumbaya at the end of all this even if we stop Blue Cosmos and Teacher. A task you may find significantly harder when everyone knows you turned a blind eye to the Adepts as they set all this up."
Those weird fights. It was about this. They were testing their borders. Looking to see how far they could push before I'd start snooping. Veda had only been at it for a few days and they immediately pulled the trigger?
"You can look like an idiot, or you can look like a revolutionary," she continued. "We both know what your preference is and as I said. It's always going to come down to this. We either make our own world or we live in theirs, waiting to see if the hammer drops. You can defend us from violence like you said you would, or you can come out of all of this looking like a partisan pretending to be above it all. And maybe all your dirty little secrets get spilled in the process."
"You—"
"You sowed the field, dear. Time to reap."
She didn't hang up. She just sat on the other side of the line. Occasionally there were whispers. Questions.
How many capes did she have? How many of them were officially part of Londo Bell? And who put them up to this shit?
I hung up.
"We need teams now," I ordered. "If she thinks this is going to fly she's kidding herself."
"No."
I turned. "No?"
Lisa looked me in the eye. "It has to be you. Just you, Laughter, and maybe Veda."
I blinked. "Explain?"
"Think about it," she said. "Agnes Court isn't this stupid. No one is this stupid. They just took a hunk of New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut and Quebec and declared it an independent nation for parahumans."
She paused. For effect. I really didn't have the time though.
She cut her hand across her throat, saying, "You could fly right in there and start beating them into the ground and literally no one on Earth is going to call you a hypocrite for it. You said no violence. Seceding is the definition of inciting violence! The government is never going to let that happen. The PR on this writes itself; you have zero problems on that front."
"She is right," Veda agreed. "Even if we did suffer for stopping this action in reputation, it would be nothing compared to what would happen if we stood by."
I grit my teeth and inhaled. "Someone is putting them up to this."
"Someone who you boxed into a corner," she agreed. "Maybe multiple someones. They can't act while you're coming out on top and beating terrorists down, even if you're being extreme about it. Teacher knows what we're doing. This is how he tries to turn the table."
"I am compiling a list of participants," Veda revealed. "Aside from the Adepts and a few independent teams, many of them are fringe members of the Elite. Cape supremacists, or members who have been marginalized by recent changes in leadership that have shifted the Elite away from criminal activity. And those members of the Adepts participating are among its most radical. Hamlet has already issued a statement disavowing these members."
That was quick. Hamlet had to have known this was coming.
Possibility. "The Elite and the Adepts are dumping their baggage…"
"And I'll bet you that Teacher, or a proxy," Lisa warned, "promised to back them up. You go in full bore and try to shut this down and we all get sideswiped. They're probably even betting that we do stop the whole thing in the process. Then they can set themselves up as the proper heroes, restoring order the right way."
"Agnes would agree to that sort of deal," I thought aloud.
She'd always been unscrupulous. She'd also been smart. Smart enough to know a bad idea when she saw one. Someone worked overtime to work her in on this, or they'd promised her something in exchange.
I doubted she'd object to becoming some backroom broker or fixer. The kind of person Teacher would need to operate an underground that would follow the wake of a huge crackdown on villains. We'd already mostly cleaned up Blue Cosmos' most able elements.
I inhaled again and turned away. "We go in full force and we get ambushed. Forced to fight on two sides."
"It's what I'd do," Lisa agreed. "It's what you'd do too. Going this big is probably about stopping you from thinking long enough to realize it. Force you into an immediate reaction because it can't stand."
I could see that.
"How many capes?" I asked.
"Potentially seventy," Veda answered. "Likely more. We should also consider that they could not do this without assistance from some of the local municipalities and law enforcement. There are also two military bases in the affected region."
Damnit.
"We hold most of the force back," I pondered. "The planner behind all this realizes we're up to something. They play it safe, wait and see…"
"Or they expose themselves, and nearly all our capes are ready to jump them." Lisa shook her head. "But that's not going to happen. Any half-decent thinker is going to look at you showing up with minimal force and immediately realize you're onto them. They haven't played it safe this long to overplay now."
"There is also the alternate possibility," Veda proposed, "That Blue Cosmos and Phantom Pain will take this chance to launch an attack with their remaining assets. While we are distracted and unable to quickly deal with all fronts."
Double shit.
"We go in with just the Gundams, and we can probably clean up the entire Special Zone without interference."
"Punch with one hand while holding a one hundred cape bat in the other… If you can pull that off."
I scowled and bowed my head.
"We can pull it off," I whispered. There was a way. I had trump cards. "Not without revealing some trump cards."
Lisa looked a bit surprised at that, like she thought I'd need convincing. "What are trump cards for if not a moment like this?"
I nodded.
"Veda."
"I know," she told me. "The Tierens will be ready to deploy in fifteen minutes."
I nodded again.
"And the FLAGs?"
"Thirty-two, ready in ten minutes."
I inhaled deeply.
Veda cocked her head. "You are certain? These are resources that would take time to replace."
"The whole point is to spend machines rather than people," I told her.
But, no. I wasn't certain. It might not be enough. The more I thought, the less certain I was. This was it. The moment it all came to a head. All the plans and schemes, this is the part where they collided with the enemy.
I could feel the door closing behind me.
This was it. No more holding back. No more praying for the best. The worst was here.
"This is it. We go all in."