The metal lattice must have broken or Bakuda remote-triggered the charges or something, because there's a sound like the world's loudest firecracker exploding as bits of concrete fly out from the cloud of smoke. Hookwolf barely waits for the noise to end before vaulting the shoulder-high wall with a roar that's somewhere between furious and ecstatic, disappearing through the sheet of darkness and leaving a blender-man shaped gap. I follow him, forming a shield in front of me in one hand and a lance of bone in my other, ready to split flesh and spill blood.

What I expect is a mad scientist's lab, with Tesla coils and flashing lights, something straight out of a B-list science fiction movie, maybe with a bit of steampunk thrown in for good measure.

What I get instead are bare concrete walls, plastic shelves filled with partially-disassembled electronics, and folding tables sagging under the weight of the components on top of them.

Oh, and there's a short Asian woman standing next to a block of metal that comes up to her chest with a remote in one hand and the other held palm out towards Hookwolf like she's trying to tell a dog to sit. She doesn't have a mask on, and I think she could be pretty if her face wasn't twisted in anger.

"Back the fuck off!" she shouts as she waves the remote, voice ragged and high. "Anyone moves and the Eastern seaboard goes dark!"

I halt halfway across the room. Hookwolf growls, the sound more like a circular saw cutting through a chain link fence than anything that could come from an organic mouth, but he doesn't move either. Newter crouches on the ground beside me, eyes narrowed at the Asian cape.

Bakuda. The one responsible for glassing Triumph. For blasting civilians into salt. For so much more.

I want to kill her so much it hurts, standing near her and not trying to dice her fine is enough to-

I snap a rib. She has a super bomb. I can't just kill her.

Things just got complicated.

Metal clangs against metal behind me, and I turn so I can watch the entrance. Kaiser walks through it with Tattletale, Grue and Faultline following closely behind, a flashlight beam cutting through the room from the top of Faultline's helmet. I see Grue's smoke begin to roll off of him, slowly covering the floor. Then a voice starts speaking in my earpiece.

"Be very, very careful." I recognize the voice from the van. Coil. "We are executing a complicated bluff." I manage not to give away my surprise through judicious use of shattered toes, but it's close. A bluff? Against a Tinker nuke?

"Hello Bakuda," Kaiser says, "We have come to accept your surrender."

There is an audible pause. Then Bakuda starts laughing. It's an ugly sound, and I remember that she supposedly uses a voice changer when she's in costume. Now I understand why. With a laugh like that, I wouldn't want to be heard in public either. When Kaiser doesn't react, she stops and stares at him.

"You're fucking serious?" The same question runs through my mind, just with a very different tone. I joined this raid with the expectation that it would end in the violent and bloody dismemberment of the mad bomber. If Kaiser has a different plan then we need to talk.

"Yes." Kaiser extends his hand, and I'm once again thankful for the full-face mask concealing my surprise. "If you give up the remote and disrobe, we will take you to the Protectorate to be sentenced to the Birdcage." I almost interrupt when Coil's words come back to me. A bluff.

"Bitch, I'm holding part of a continent hostage and you're giving me an ultimatum?" Bakuda sounds offended at the notion. "How about you strip down, along with all your friends," she motions to the rest of us with the hand not holding the remote, "And maybe I don't use you all as test subjects?" She flicks her eyes towards Grue, who's been slowly increasing the amount of his darkness in the room. "Also, tell your lickshit to pull back his fucking smoke or we all go boom." She waves the remote threateningly. Fuck. Grue's smoke is the only way to stop the dead man's switch.

"Can't," Grue says, shrugging. "Once I go Breaker, I don't come out for hours, minimum. I'm trying to keep it away from you, okay?" He sounds almost apologetic at the end, even through the weird distortion on his voice. I don't turn towards him, but I raise an eyebrow behind my mask. I thought he was a Shaker. Another part of the bluff, or just a convenient truth?

"Then get the fuck out of the room," Bakuda hisses, swiping her hand at him.

"Okay, okay," Grue says, backing up slowly with his arms raised appeasingly. "I'm going." He backs through the curtain of smoke over the entrance. The rest of the smoke doesn't disappear, but its spread does slow down. Kaiser starts talking again.

"In case you didn't realize, there is an expectation that no one acts too violently in Brockton Bay. Otherwise, the authorities will suddenly develop a spine and come after all of us. Such things are bad for everyone involved. Hence our movement against you," he says, nodding towards the bomb Tinker. "That doesn't mean I'm actually enjoying this."

Bakuda snorts. "You want to talk about going too fucking far?" She jabs a finger at me without taking her eyes off Kaiser. "That bitch started this whole thing!"

Bakuda then looks at me, condescending and furious, while the echoes of her scream die away in the small room. I fracture my armor plates. All of them.

"You're putting this on me?" I ask, forcibly keeping my voice down.

"Keep her talking," Coil says in my ear. The signal must be being disrupted by Grue's darkness because I can barely make him out. "When you only hear static, Kaiser will move."

Move. I'll show these bastards moving. I keep rippling the bone plates, a click-click-click to drown out my nervousness. What are they planning?

"I defended myself," I say quietly. "Lung was trying to kill me. He. Escalated. First." Bakuda barks out a laugh.

"Kill you?" she asks incredulously before laughing again. I'm starting to get real sick of that sound. "Bitch, if he wanted you dead he'd have torched you inside out and eaten your corpse! Lung wanted to maim you. He was going to teach you a lesson about not fucking with dragons, and you offed him! I've just been replying in kind," she adds, a manic gleam in her eyes. "Thanks for that, by the way! Made taking over the gang a lot easier."

"As much as I enjoy this posturing, I have better ways to spend my evening than trying to play pin-the-blame-on-the-murderer," Faultline interrupts, crossing her arms. "So if you all could stop measuring your dicks and actually-"

"Two feet down and six inches to the left!" Tattletale yells and Kaiser's hands whips out, a blur of silver steel. The box Bakuda's standing next to warps, crumpling near a corner. She yelps, jumping back from it and pressing down a button. I hold my breath.

Nothing happens.

Bakuda's face pales as I feel a smile crawl across mine. With that, Tattletale just made it off my shit list. I start moving forwards with Hookwolf, a knight of bone and a hound of steel cornering a monster. Bakuda backs up against a shelf, one hand scrabbling for something, anything, while the other keeps trying the remote, hoping against hope that it will work.

"Fuck fuck fuck," she whispers. "Dead man's switch! I have another dead man's switch!" she shouts, pointing to her head. "I die, so does everyone else in the ABB! Including the civvies!" She smiles at that last part. I pause momentarily.

Then Grue comes back through the clouded entrance and another wave of smoke pours off of him. The floor and ceiling are covered, the walls look like empty night, and the corridor behind him is just gone. "Finished blocking off the radio waves." Faultline's flashlight is the only remaining source of illumination, and it's focused directly on the bomber. The only target left.

Bakuda's face falls one last time. I charge forward, but my earlier hesitation was enough to allow Hookwolf to beat me to her. One of his limbs flies up to her head and there's a sound like an orange in a blender. Blood and gore fly everywhere, shining a brilliant ruby red in the beam of light.

Her corpse stays upright for a moment, pinned against the wall. Then Hookwolf pulls his leg back and all that's left of the Cornell Bomber is a stain on the wall and a cadaver with a shredded neck.

"And that's," Hookwolf says, satisfaction dripping from his voice as he flicks his leg back and forth, splattering blood along the floor, "the fuckin' end of that." He shakes his head, still a writhing mass of blades. "Fuckin' hate Tinkers."

I look at the corpse. Once a parahuman that could kill anyone in the city given enough prep time. Now just meat and bone. Bits of spine protrude from the stump of its neck, and I can feel them sing to me.

Bakuda's corpse isn't useless. A message. An effigy. Peel back the muscle, expose the rest of the skeleton, and it's a puppet. More than a warning, more than terror, visceral proof that anyone who starts a war in Brockton Bay is going to-

I push down the thought easily enough, the mixture of relief and glee running through me making it easy. This whole fucking debacle is finally over. No more worrying about ambushes, no more wondering when I'm going to see a green flash and then nothing else, no more fucking fights. My last enemy is dead.

I almost laugh before I realize what I'd be laughing at.

My last enemy is dead. Something warm and bubbly flushes in my chest and I shut it down as hard as I can.

I didn't like this. It was necessary, it was a net positive, but only crazy people actually get a kick out of murder. Only crazy people.

I try to push the feeling down farther. Again, it keeps coming up.

I turn away from the body and head towards the exit, moving as fast as I can without looking like I'm hurrying. Tattletale sends a glance my way that tells me she knows that I'm feeling way too good about being an accessory to premeditated murder, but she doesn't say anything. Grue just looks at me silently.

Kaiser nods agreeably as I pass him, and I sense the invitation to talk. No. I'm not talking to the king Nazi right now.

I exit the building ahead of everyone else then turn to watch them leave. To figure out how to respond to this. Faultline comes out holding a phone to her ear and muttering into it, with Newter looking shaken but functional. The Undersiders leave without ceremony. I hear howls in the distance. Purity nods at the Valkyries before flying off.

Not one of them said anything to each other. And now I'm standing in an abandoned street with a bunch of Nazis.

I grit my teeth and start walking in the direction of home, trying to get my head together, trying to think about anything other than the rush that came with seeing Bakuda's blood spread all over the wall and how it was just fucking comeuppance for the crazy bitch-

I clench my hands into fists. It doesn't feel like anything other than bone scraping against bone.

I hear the sound of metal on pavement behind me and I let out a short breath.

"So-"

"No." I shake my head, turning around. Hookwolf is bipedal again, and looks surprised at being cut off. Good. I want him gone. "Whatever you're thinking, you're wrong. It's just," I fumble for the words, "Bakuda needed to die. That is all. There is nothing," I enunciate carefully, making sure there is no room for interpretation, "between us. Between me and the Empire. This was an alliance of necessity."

"Wasn't gonna mention that," he says, raising an eyebrow and giving me a smile that's all blades. I feel a spike of irritation. "Was just going to ask you if you wanted to join us for the afterparty."

"No," I say.

"Why?" he asks. "Kaiser likes you. I like you-"

"Pedophile," I shoot back. He laughs, short and sharp.

"See, he likes you for the class. Huge fan of what you did with the park. Me? I like you for the sass." I feel a bit of amusement rise up at the rhyme. Then I shut it down. Nazi murderer, Taylor. Either would be enough reason to avoid him. Both means I should be getting gone. "Seriously though," he says, suddenly serious, "you don't want to just see what it's like? It's just going to be drinks and talkin'."

"I need to get home," I answer, turning around. "Goodbye."

"Suit yourself," he says behind me. "Empire's always willing to take you in!"

I keep moving, taking rights and lefts at random down alleys, streets, and paths that don't fit into nice little categories until I'm not sure where I am. Once I feel like I'm far enough away from the warehouse, I slow down, then stop and take in my surroundings.

I'm alone. This time completely.

I grow some stilts and head to the rooftops. I orient myself against the skyline, figure out which direction home is, and start the long journey back.


The headlines in the morning don't say who's responsible for the headless corpse delivered to the PRT HQ with Bakuda's mask nailed to the neck stump. They do say that the state of emergency is officially over and that school's starting up again next week. For everyone else, at least. I've looked through the GED stuff and it's nothing I haven't seen before.

I take the time to call Mr. Doe and tell him my business is finished. I also tell him that I saw a dog bite a rabid bitch, and that I didn't have anything to do with it. He says that it's a damn shame that animal control couldn't handle it, but hopes that in the future the people he pays to handle out-of-control beasts will move a little faster.

We decide to open the shop on the eleventh. A Wednesday. Not exactly a good day to open the business, but we're losing money every hour the property is rented and we aren't making any sales. Better to have an unspectacular opening than remain closed until the weekend.

Only three days left until I'm finally a Rogue.

I can barely wait.