Author's notes: I'll be releasing these as I finish editing and proofreading them. The writing process goes fast, I've already written the next fifteen chapters, but it's hard to break my pace long enough to clean them up for public consumption. I don't know if you all would want me to slow my pace or just put it alll up at once, but for now I'm going to try to find my own pace.

Sunday was a slow-starting day, coffee and newspaper while bread toasted and hard-boiled eggs boiled. Taylor was up before him, the benefits of youth, and she was on the internet perusing. "No mention," she said.

"Not surprised," he called back. "The villain wasn't caught, nobody had video of the fight, nobody died, and I didn't even give a name. All the paper mentions is that there was some vandalism, destruction of city property, and that a villain set six buildings on fire last night."

She sighed. "You fought a supervillain. To a standstill, even. You hurt him bad, embarrassed him in front of his people, thwarted his plans, and chased him off. There should be some mention of the new hero in town."

"If I'm not an active or registered member of the Protectorate, I'm a rogue not a hero," Danny said, folding the paper and setting it down. "I'm lucky they didn't put that destruction of property charge on me, I'd be a villain instead of a rogue."

She made a face at that. "That's ridiculous. He was going to kill people."

Danny shrugged. "Be that as it may. Anyhow, I was going to ride over there while the weather's still nice, and see about tracking him back to his hideout. If I can get him, and his top people at the same time, it'll be a lot easier. Tackling them one at a time would be a pain, I'd have to sweep separately, find them separately, track them separately, and fight them separately. It'll be much easier to get the whole cell at one time."

"You're nuts," she said, calmly as she stood and went to the toaster, pulling out two slices and dropping more bread in. "You'll have to fight all of them at once, there's no way that's easier."

"Have a little faith in your pop, would ya?" he chuckled. "Anyway, after that I'll be swinging by Elmer's to hang out with Kurt and Lacie and Tallboy, so you'll have the place to yourself. No parties."

"I'm not going to invite people over for a party," she said. "Maybe someone else's place."

He raised an eyebrow, she cracked a smile, and went back to buttering her toast.

After breakfast he got on the bike and took a long, lazy ride around the Docks, stirring the rats as he went. It was not a major call-out like last night, more of a rustling of senses and some small movement of the rats to positions where they could smell the choke points and common walkways that were likely to hold the smell of a barbecued Lung. He split his forces into two groups: one that checked around the sites of the fires to find a trace of Lung leaving, and the other to check out the other side of the firedoor that Lung had walked through before the meeting with his gang. The building turned out to be a franchise burger joint, a step above fast food but only one step. He jotted down the name and address on a notebook to look up later, and then followed the trail back from there. It muddled a bit, but with some luck he found that it traced the stairwell to an apartment above the restaurant, a small one-bedroom with a large bed, a large television, and a small closet with some men's and women's clothing. From the skimpiness of the women's clothing, it was clear what this apartment was for. He traced backwards from there, and found a rooftop access.

The guy's got superhuman strength and agility, Danny thought to himself. Makes sense he'd be on rooftops, leaping across the city. And so he started re-positioning rats to rooftops, looking for the trail. He found the adjacent building that Lung had leaped from, and he also found a smell on the other side of the street that he was confused and interested by. It smelled like two to three tons of raw meat, slightly rotten, had been set down for a while and then carried away again. Weird, he thought. And as more rats sniffed at rooftops, he found the smell again, and again. Another trail. Not as important as Lung, but also deserving some attention.

And then he had another surprise, another hit of Lung's scent near the fire site. Burned flesh and the trace of Lung's distinct body, down in the sewers. He followed the trail one side, and found it led to a hole in the side of a basement wall that had burned out. Danny nodded as he worked it out. Lung had moved from building to building, burning them, and then found one with a thin wall in the basement he could bash out and enter the sewers, slipping away. His stomach rumbled, he glanced at his watch, and cursed. "Dammit, six already?" he cursed, and then rode with a will back to the house. He needed to get some dinner before he headed out to Elmer's.

He got home to find that Taylor had already fed herself with some microwaved stuff from the freezer, so he warmed up a can of condensed soup on the stovetop without watering it down and boiled some rice. He mixed the two together and ate quickly, while downstairs his rats were marking the routes and paths he had made note of during the day. He used small red flags for Lung's path, with the flag pointing up for rooftops and pointing down for sewers, and he used green flags for the rotted-meat smell. Other rats jotted notes down in notebooks, recording the facts and his thoughts. He showered quickly, changed into some jeans and a short-sleeve button down shirt over a screen-printed t-shirt for the Brockton Bay Blues, with their whale-logo stylized on it. He rode at a moderate pace to Elmer's place, so as not to sweat into his clothing before he even got the night started. He carried his bike into the backyard, and there was a chorus of boozily good-natured cheers as he appeared, Kurt coming to give him a clumsy hug before he could even lock the bike up. He made a quick round of hellos and great-to-see-yous, then he headed inside to the kitchen where he found the solo cups and the keg, then came back out with a glass to make more thorough greetings and introductions.

He was in a corner chatting with Tallboy about boxing when the new girl showed up. "Hey, I know you!" the girl said. "You're the guy that hired me!"

Danny glanced over at the strongly-built teenage girl. "That's right, Sheila, wasn't it? My first interview Friday afternoon. Glad you could make it, but you shouldn't drink anything. You're underage, and the first day of a new job is a bad time for a hangover."

"No worries, Mr. H," she said. She saw the other figure, and paused. "Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Sheila," she said, extending her hand for a shake.

"I'm Tanya, they call me Tallboy," the other woman said, grasping the hand and giving it a good shake. "Kinesiologist, physical therapist, on-site emergency medical technician, workman's comp evaluator, fitness trainer and CPR instructor."

"But they call you Tallboy? Oh, because you're a short woman, like a big guy called Tiny?" Sheila asked. '

"Nah, it's because I've got a big can," Tallboy said, slapping at her own ass.

Sheila blinked. "I don't get it," she said.

"That joke isn't the same since the slang changed. Seriously, get yourself a good nickname early or you'll get a bad nickname later."

A couple of hours later, Danny was sitting on a deck chair on the patio, staring out at the deep purple sky that was holding onto the last vestiges of a sunset before it gave up the show to the stars and constellations. Kurt was sitting on one side of him, his wife Lacie on the other side. And Lacie was saying "It's not like we're worried about you, Danny, because we know you're tough, and good, and don't need our worry. It's just that we're, you know..."

"Concerned," her husband supplied.

"Yeah, we're concerned," Lacie finished. "You've changed, Danny, and we're not worried about the changes, just about the fact that you changed. Okay, see my sister in law Terry, she's a grief counselor. It's like her career, all she does is help people that lost someone like you lost Annette. Honestly I always thought that was kinda ghoulish, who wants to be around the bereaved all the time? It's not like a mortician whose taking care of the dead people, being a grief counselor is just a perfect job for someone who genuinely likes watching people cry, and that's-"

"Off topic," her husband supplied.

"Right, anyway, my brother's wife Terry was over at our place for dinner a couple weeks back and we all got to talking about all kinds of stuff, and Terry was talking about the stages of grief, you know? Like there's depression, and then anger, and then some other stuff, and then bargaining, and then acceptance. And Danny, you're not at acceptance, you're hung up. You're still at the bargaining phase, friend. Like you're trying to earn your wife's life back with all this bicycling eco-friendly granola hippy stuff."

"Karma," Kurt added. He had his eyes closed and occasionally made an uncomfortable sound like he had drunk too much too fast but was too stubborn to go throw up. Still, he was doing a very good job of following the conversation.

"Right, like you're trying to earn a lot of good karma so you can get Annette back," Lacie said. "And honestly, it's kind of cool, I wish more people would take care of themselves like you've been doing, and helping others like you do, and doing right by the world like you do. But Hebert, it's not good if it's getting in the way of you getting real closure with your wife. I mean, if you have to get stuck in one of those five stages of grief, there's worse ways you could go..."

"Anger," her husband supplied.

"Like anger, yeah. Or just going despondent and never moving on from that, just closing up on yourself and pulling your wounds open again and again, shutting everyone else out. Some crying is healthy, but you gotta move forward, not backwards. I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but if this karma-bargaining Danny Granola thing is keeping you from moving on into acceptance, then it's hurting you and not helping you."

"I'll be back," Kurt said, sitting upright and getting to his feet. His stomach gurgled troublingly, but he kept his composure until the door closed behind him.

"You might be right," Danny said to Lacie, mentally casting a wish for good luck after her husband. "But what am I supposed to do? If I'm lodged at the wrong stage of grief, do I just stand on a rooftop and shout 'my wife died and I accept it'? I mean, it's good advice to tell people to process their grief in a healthy way, but if I can't, what do I do with that?"

"You drink beers with your friends who care about you," she said, so serious she was almost stern. "Got it?" She held up her glass, and he tapped his against it in a plastic-cup toast, then they both drank deeply.


Monday at noon, Danny knocked on the doorframe of Barry's office. "Yo Barry," Danny said. "I've gotten ahead of my stuff, I'm taking the rest of the day for some research."

Barry looked surprised. "Gotten ahead? What about those pamphlets? I thought we were going to have to hire a couple temps for the week to get those ready."

"Nah, got those sorted and stapled over the weekend," Danny said. "The box is down by the loading dock, ready any time."

Barry hunched his big shoulders. "You got a week's worth of copy-clerk work done over the weekend, maybe two weeks' worth, and I can't even find a decorating budget and venue for a baby shower for Wilma. You're making me look bad, Danny. Fuck you."

"Fuck you too Barry," Danny chuckled. "Incidentally, what would you need for those decorations?"

Barry paused, opened his mouth, shut it, paused, opened it again to speak. "Okay, look, there's nothing I can do here that won't look bad if we get audited, and we are going to get audited. I've got no wiggle room, no discretion here. I maybe don't need a lot. We can use the meeting hall for a venue, but we need decorations. Streamers, confetti, banners, that sort of stuff. It's just paper, but it's always so damn expensive, and we're going to need a lot or that meeting hall is going to look bare and sad. You've been working miracles these last few months, maybe I can borrow one of those miracles from you."

Danny nodded. "I can sure give it a shot. How long do I have for this?"

"Two weeks," Barry said. "Two weeks to buy or make personalized banners, thousands of streamers, about two hundred pounds of confetti. We've already got balloons and tablecloths and centerpieces, we're just pulling those out of storage."

"Let me give you one less headache," Danny said. "I'll get the banners, the confetti, the streamers. It might be close, but I can get it by weekend after next."

"Thanks," Barry said, looking genuinely relieved. "Okay, well good luck on your research trip."

After a lunch, Danny got on his bike and rode down to the Docks, to pick up the trails of Lung coming and going. The scents were starting to fade after two days, and he was only able to add a few more addresses and a little more of the path that the man had taken. But with the way that both paths were dipping around north and east, it gave Danny a point to triangulate from, like both paths were leading to the north east part of the district, just outside the downtown area. He rode that direction, to try to find the destination. He mobilized the rodents, bringing them to air vents, walkways, windows, sidewalks, restaurants, anywhere that gave him access to lots of people's scents. And just as he was getting disheartened, he picked up a whiff. He was a bit surprised at its source, which he traced to the jacket worn by a man with his arm in a sling. Danny took a minute to recognize that he was one of the four henchmen that had walked with Lung out of the burger joint, one of the four top gang members. The broken arm was new. But Lung's body scent had transferred onto him.

And then the ABB gangster did the unexpected: he looked around, down low. His eyes swept the shadows, the corners, the low spaces, and they fastened on Danny's rat that was staring right back at him. The man turned on his heel and walked out of the sandwich shop, dialing his cell phone one-handed. Busted, Danny thought ruefully. Another lead I can't follow. It was clear he needed to back off, needed to give some space, or he would bust more leads than he found. The heat was on, he needed to wait until their paranoia was died down a little. Or until they were too tired to maintain that kind of awareness. The afternoon had slipped by, and he called Taylor to let her know that he was out investigating.

"Hey baby, Daddy's out tracking gangsters. It turns out that even with access to hundreds of sets of superhuman senses, it's still kind of tough to do."

"Do you need me to run dispatch?"

"Nah. I appreciate the offer, Taylor, but you should get to your homework. I'll be checking in."

"All right Dad, but be careful, and don't stay out too late. I want to at least see you before I crash out."

Danny rode up, into the downtown district. The divide was incredibly sharp, in the space of one block the scenery changed from seedy pawn shops and closed-down laundromats to artisinal fusion restaurants and money-market brokerages. One one side of the street there were potholes and gang tags, on the other side there were freshly-painted parking lines and manicured microlawns. He rode from one side to the other, a little too clean for one then a little too scruffy for the other. He watched buildings full of executives leave for the evening, smiling at the armed doorman that watched over the premises after hours. He rode north, and stopped at City Hall. He knew the layout, there was hardly anyone in this building he had not approached with a proposal or a plan. And in many ways, this was where the real answers were, he was sure.

He sighed. The nooks and crannies of the downtown district didn't hold as many rats as the Docks, but his creatures were still here. He started pulling them together, riding a slow circuit two blocks west, two north, four east, four south, four west. The sun was setting. Blinds were being drawn. Doors were being locked. There were more vacant parking spaces than filled. The lights went out inside. The housekeepers took over, vacuuming and mopping to have everything clean for the new day tomorrow. Danny found a locked cafe with comfortable-looking seats, so he had a rodent let him in to relax while the real work began.

Thousands of rats moved in, split into two groups again. One half of the horde streamed into the city hall, staying out of sight of the janitorial staff. They flowed in through the walls, the vents, the grates, cracks, drains, even the roof, and they made their way to the records office, the mayor's office, his secretary's office, everything like that. A doze of them moved to the copy machine and swarmed up it, opened the top and readied it for use. His mind was in thousands of places at once, reading labels and scanning documents, flipping through to see what might be useful and what was just dross. When in doubt, he got a copy. Better to not make two trips. The other half of the horde stormed their way up into the executive office buildings in the area. In those buildings the rats did not search for files or disturb anything, they just checked to see which computers had been left on overnight, logged in with the screensavers running. A few here, several there, it added up. And at those stations, five rats could type as fast as his own hands and could read five times as fast. In the dozen square blocks he could perceive, there were hundreds of empty workstations. Hundreds of Internet connections, networked to printers. While the first group raided the City Hall, copying document after document, the second group was looking up anything about Lung, the burger joint, the men he worked with, the area that Lung had made his headquarters in, everything about that. Dozens of printers kicked to life, spooling out printed pages full of information. And then they moved onto the mayor, his finances, his history, his politics, his connections, his elections, his family, his vacations, his scandals, his campaign promises. Danny Hebert blitzed hard for every piece of available piece of information about the man who had run Brockton Bay for decades, winning election after election in an increasingly unpopular legacy.

Tiny rat paws stacked the pages together and dropped them into manila envelopes, and piled the envelopes into garbage bags plucked from the janitor's carts and tied them shut. And then tiny rat paws opened an upper-story window and tipped the garbage bags out to fall a dozen stories down and slam into the ally floor like informative meteors. Danny Hebert picked up those tied-shut bags of envelopes and tucked them into his backpack. By the time he was done collecting his haul from the City Hall, he looked like a crazy homeless person with filled garbage bags tied off to the straps of his backpack, the handlebars of his bike, anywhere he could attach them and still ride the bike. And then he wobbled home while rats slid down drains and out through gaps in the eaves, returning to their normal rodent business.

When he got home he stacked the envelopes high and carried them in by the armload, dropping them off at the top step of the basement for the rats to carry down and take care of. Across the basement, pages were spread out, taped down, and rats began scuttling about with highlighters and pens, making notations and unspooling yarn to connect various pages and start coordinating all the information into one cohesive piece. The envelopes were opened and emptied by quick dexterous digits that carried everything where it belonged, operating in perfect concert. Rodents worked together to hold pens and notate the margins of the pages, and assemble the picture behind the facts.

It was a depressingly prosaic picture, devoid of major scandal, Danny was discovering. No literal skeletons in the closet, no terrible crimes to confess. Danny couldn't help being disappointed, he had hoped for some proof that the reason the mayor always stymied his attempts to get the dockworkers back to work was because the mayor was being paid off by someone, or was being threatened by someone. Or that the mayor had some dark past that Danny could use to pressure him ( he didn't even think the word blackmail to himself ) to get a bit of tax money set aside to fix up the ferry and put it in operation. With the ferry working, people who lived in the Docks could apply for work in the north side, good work that could get them to move out of the Docks or fix up their own home, fix up their neighborhood, and alleviate the poverty that haunted the south side of the city.

But there was no dark hints of murdered children or massive payoffs. He had access to the mayor's bank statements going back ten years, and he was hard-pressed to find any irregularities. But at least it distracted him from Lung for the day. Tomorrow he would try again, and he had a good shot at finding the gangster's hideout. Meanwhile, he fixed dinner and talked to Taylor, learning about her day. The principal hadn't tried anything since Friday afternoon when every girl had been called out for possible dress code violations except Taylor. Monday was quiet, except for the usual shenanigans from the three girls who bullied Taylor right under the teachers' noses and the administration's blind eye.

".. and then Madeline just stole the paper for her own group and they started using those notes. I stood up and demanded they give them back, and they acted all innocent. Mr. Gladly asked me not to make a scene, and I asked him to pay attention to his own class, that they had stolen my notes. He started to say that she wouldn't do that, and I reminded him that this girl would lock someone into a pile of rotting tampons, stealing notes was nothing at all. So he made her give me back the notes, after he checked that they were in my handwriting, and then he told her not to do it again. A suspension would have been nice, or at least a write-up, but I'll take what I can get."

"We need to get you transferred to Arcadia High," he said, shaking his head. "Away from these punks and their abuse and the principal that seems to think her job is to aid and abet bullies and not stick up for the victims."

"They don't bus from here, and it's too far to ride on my own, " Taylor pointed out, sliding her glasses off to polish them.

"Well, I guess we should move closer," Danny said.

Taylor was visibly trying to repress her excitement. "Not that I wouldn't love that, but could you afford that? Could we move, start a new mortgage?"

His sigh was soft but drawn out long. "No, not right now. Maybe I could make some extra money, start phoning in that tip line that gives rewards for information that leads to arrests. I could find murder victims, weapons, evidence, bail jumpers, stuff like that. Maybe a few hundred extra bucks a week, you know? It wouldn't take long to save up for a new home closer to Arcadia."

"And further from your work," Taylor pointed out. "You'd need a new job to afford it."

He picked up his plate and carried it to the sink. He turned on the water with a hard twist of his wrist, and washed the last crumbs down the drain. "Maybe I should join the Protectorate. There's a paycheck there, better than what I earn now. I'd bunk down in the Tower, you could live nearby or maybe stay in the Wards dorms or something. And you'd got to Arcadia High with the Wards."

Taylor handed him her plate to rinse while she took his plate and slotted it into the dishwasher. "It does sound like a pretty awesome plan. But I heard what you said to Armsmaster. Most people who were trying to defend the need for a secret identity would mention their job, their friends, their job, how much those people need them, need you. But you told Armsmaster that you need your job, need your friends, need your daughter and your double life. I don't wanna get Freudian here, but I think that means something. I think you still need to be independent of the Protectorate, still need Kurt and Lacie and the union hall. My stuff at school sucks. But I can wait a few weeks, a few months even, if that's what you need. If you need to not be a Protectorate hero yet, then I'm okay. Just.. don't wait too long, okay?"

"It's March now, school year's just got a couple months to go.. I promise I'll wrap up what I need by the start of next school year," he said. "August."

"Promise," she repeated back, and stuck out a soapy hand for him to shake. They shook on suds and dishwater and teamwork. And in the basement, one rat was drawing a long black piece of yarn from one entry in the mayor's bank statement, carrying it around, trying to find the other paper it would attach to, and finding nothing.


Tuesday Danny arrived to work with a large catalog box, big and black with a leather-bound handle that rattled when he dropped the case on the top of his desk. He opened a vent to let five rats into the bottom drawer of his desk where they could operate the laptop stashed in there, and then several more to grab thumbtacks and pushpins and started decorating his big corkboard with paperwork from last night, starting with the bank statement and then other relevant pages stacked up alongside it, pinned in place. The rats rushed out before he unlocked his door and got on the phone. He started with the mayor's secretary, arranging an appointment for him to meet with the man. He had to throw in the name of the Dockworker's Association to get enough credibility to schedule even a short meeting, ten minutes between a conference call and a lunch appointment, with the understanding that the conference call might run late and the lunch might start early.

Barry swung by before lunch, and paused when he saw that the big corkboard had been redone. Instead of a dozen odd-angled post-it notes, there was now over a dozen pages lined up neatly, with highlighter and handwritten notes. "Yo, what's this?"

"Results of yesterday's research," Danny said. "It turns out that the mayor spent one-point-nine million dollars three years back on a real estate deal that didn't happen. The seller is a fake, the address is a fake, the account he sent the money to closed that day after sending him a receipt. It's not a scam, it's not legit, so what is it?"

"Could be a lot of things, but none of them are good," Barry said. "That's not a charitable donation. That's not a gift to your kids' school. It's not discrete plastic surgery for his wife, or a retainer for a lawyer. That's not a nest egg or an escape plan. Hmm. Could be a hit? A bribe? Laundering? A payoff? Insurance? Whatever it is, it's crooked and it stinks. Good catch, let's get lunch."

Lunch was standing in the park a block away eating hot dogs from a food truck, leaning against a park bench with too much hobo pee on it to sit down. Barry used his finger to even out the relish on his dog before he took a bite. "So," he said after he swallowed. "Whatcha gonna do with that information on the mayor?"

"Gonna confront him, ask for answers," Danny said, and took a bite of his own. Too much mustard, it felt like the dog was biting back.

Barry nodded. "Not bad. But be careful. You know what they say about a cornered rat."

"Yeah I know," Danny replied. "I'm gonna try to let him know how easy it would be to buy my silence: just fix the ferry, put it in operation again. That by itself would help our people more than anything he's done in his entire tenure. The idea is to put the pressure on him from one side but at the same time to offer him a way out, a nice credible answer to the problem I'm posing. That way he shouldn't get too defensive or resistant."

Barry nodded. "You really do learn a lot, sitting in on those deals and those contract negotiations, right? I feel like I could teach a class in conflict resolution just from my observations and experience, never having touched a book."

"Union work," Danny shrugged. "It's all about handling people, finding what they can give and what they need to get."

Barry nodded. "True dat. But I need to get another dog, and I can give legal tender for it. I'm going back to the food truck, do you need anything?"

"A few napkins," Danny said, nodding his thanks to the other man. He faced out onto the park, which was a bit dingy now and a bit past its prime. The city didn't spend much on its upkeep anymore, and the grass had grown long and dried out, the tree branches sunk down heavy with dead twigs. It was a good place for rats to hide, the sort of place that nobody bothered to exterminate. Which was good for him, if the supervillains he was after started hiring exterminators it would...

He paused, rolling that thought around. .. it would lead him right to their hideout. He needed to start checking buildings in that region that had been aggressively exterminated in the past couple of days. If Lung's lieutenant was watching for rats when he went out to get a sandwich, then Lung had to know well enough to keep rats out of wherever he was living or hiding or working from.

That afternoon, Danny phoned Taylor to let her know he would be late home for dinner. He rode north, and he swept the area. The rats knew the smell of poison and traps, and he started noting the buildings that had been aggressively bombed with rat poison or traps. They investigated doorways, crawlspaces, drains, kitchens. There were a variety of places that had traps and poison, he started making a list. He ruled out any that were using human live-capture traps, that didn't seem appropriate to Lung's style. He had to pull back a few times, nearly stumbling his rats into well-hidden stashes of poison. It was easy to avoid normally, but when he was aggressively seeking it out it was a different matter.

And then he ran across a warehouse that had steel grates bolted to the floor drains in the past couple days. And layers of steel mesh worked into the plumbing pipes when he sent a rat to swim up through the water line. There was no poison to be smelled, but he could smell that there were dead rats inside. Some burned to death, others raw and rotting. Danny pulled the rats back from attempting entry, and moved them up to windows, skylights, doorways, and found that all openings were blacked out, painted over, and sealed tight. Danny wrote down that address, underlined it twice, and then rode home.


Wednesday Danny worked his shift and rode home, met Taylor when she walked in the door, and they stayed home, did homework, and played some board games and watched a show until it was time to crash out. And down in the basement, rats parsed through the paperwork, setting aside a growing pile of false leads. And more rats took that stack of useless papers and started cutting them into confetti, using incredibly precise incisors wielded with the exactitude of a pair of scissors.

On Thursday he left the office early to swing past the warehouse, and began a patient assault upon it. Rats gnawed away mortar from around a brick hidden by the untrimmed grass by the parking lot. When the mortar was gone, the rats pried out the brick, and made sure it was well-loosened. They pushed back the fiberglass insulation to make a smooth path to follow, and mentally mapped out the place, finding studs and scantlings, and then gnawing a hole in the air-conditioning duct. Then they pulled back, replaced the brick, and started investigating the area around. He checked rooftops and sewers, and was able to faintly pick up signs of Lung in both places when he looked hard and paid close attention. And he was able to find much more recent traces in the parking lot, it seemed he was traveling more by car. But other traces could be picked up, and they were not nearly as careful about being followed. And on a whim, he started tracing one of those.

The trail winded down alleys and across streets, often losing the scent in the roadway only to pick it up at the other side. The path was entirely direct, and had been reinforced by repeated trips. The trail ended in an courtyard made of a widened alleyway, garbage cans ringing the place, with no direct line of sight to the street. He swarmed the rats, and was able to pick up the smell of the man on the fire escape on one side, six floors up, but not the first five floors. Danny was puzzled, but he had the rats look in through the windows, and spotted Oni Lee.

The assassin for the Azn Bad Boys was sitting in a chair, freshly showered, wearing clean plain clothes, with a briefcase open on the desk that held his white demon mask and his costume, as well as his cruelly sharp knives and a bandoleer of hand grenades. The bed was made, the floor was swept, and Oni Lee was sitting in a chair staring at the opposite wall with a cell phone in his hand. No television, no radio, no magazines or books. The rats watched, and he did not move. He breathed rhythmically, blinked regularly, and did not move at all aside from that. Danny waited ten minutes, with no reaction. Then another twenty, and in that half-hour Oni Lee did not move except to breathe and blink. Danny pulled the rats back, and went back home.

On Friday, he took the day off, having already finished all his duties for the week. He saw his daughter off to school, then he rode out. First to the warehouse to make sure his trick brick was still as it should be, then checking in on Oni Lee. The bed was still made, and the man and his briefcase were missing. The rats forced the window open and streamed in, investigated every corner, sniffed at every seam. It became more and more clear that Oni Lee spent all of his downtime here, exactly as Danny had witnessed, and that was probably the weirdest thing that Danny had ever heard of.

He returned to the warehouse and set up watch, keeping an eye on all the doors and windows, as well as the rooftop and the neighboring buildings, and the storm drains that ran underneath the building. He found a neighboring office building that let out early on Fridays, an engineering company, and he let himself in there to use their computers and a comfortable seat. He started multiple lines of investigation, sending emails inquiring about the bank account that had received the mayor's one-point-nine-million-dollar transfer, checking all available information on Oni Lee and Bakuda on the search engines, looking for news articles about the warehouse that he was watching remotely, even getting on the phone to make calls to the leasing company that had sold the warehouse, to see if they could tell him anything. Of all his investigations that afternoon, the most fruitful was the rats in the back of the building that found a giant roll of butcher's paper being thrown out, and he had them haul it out and set it up off to the side. After the evening started fading, a truck came by with a delivery that came around to the warehouse's loading dock.

Danny was not at all surprised to see a young Asian woman open the loading dock shutters and sign the paperwork to receive shipment, and then yell at the delivery men that brought the boxes in. Large boxes with complicated labels, and her voice rose from a surly mutter to a wild shriek with each bump and slip. That would be Bakuda, the mad-bomber tinker woman who had held her university hostage last year. Even if she had a full machine shop on the premises, she would need regular supplies of raw materials, probably made to exacting specifications.

And one rat, moving carefully, stealthily, made its way through the shadows while she berated the man with the handtruck, and sniffed at the woman's pantleg. It smelled Lung, and Oni Lee, on her clothing. The rat slipped back, melted into the shadows, and retreated to a safe distance. Danny went to the back of the building and grabbed the butcher's paper, balanced it across his handlebars.

Then he disbanded the swarm, sent the rats back to their homes, and rode home. At this point it was second nature for him to direct the rats to good food and away from danger, collecting a half-dozen together to lift garbage can lids. Sometimes he would find a good enough stash of food to justify sending a female into early heat, to breed an extra litter of rats here and there. They helped him, he helped them. Rats in Brockton Bay could thrive without hurting anyone or stealing any food that would have been eaten.

At home, he showered and changed, called a few friends over to hang out and drink beer and laugh together. Taylor stayed up with them well past midnight, laughing at Kurt's crude jokes and Lacie's crude impressions, just friends having fun.


Saturday he woke up late, deliberately so, in order to stay up late that night. He had his breakfast around noon, scrambled eggs and sausage with Taylor. Then he started the hard part of his day.

"No, the armor pinched at my waist and my throat. It was way too uncomfortable, and I could only get half my usual speed like that. The helmet doesn't breathe at all, it just doesn't work. Honestly, my best protection is going to be distance and speed, and I can't get those with the armor and helmet," Danny said firmly.

"But it looks cool!" Taylor protested. "What else are you going to wear, cargo shorts and a tank-top with a bandanna on your face?"

"Would it be a problem if I did?" he asked pointedly. "Last week I was overprepared and underplanned. This week I know what I need and what I don't need, so I can bring exactly that and nothing else. That means no backpack, no carrying case, and no trenchcoat. It's too hot when I'm riding, though I might go back to that look next winter."

She rolled her eyes. "It's bad enough you won't even wear a bike helmet when you ride. Now you want to fight supervillains from a bicycle without a helmet."

He raised a finger, waggled it. "Hang on, you know the statistics that helmets don't make you any safer. There's-"

"I've seen them, but even Alexandria wears a helmet, Dad," she pointed out. "And if you're a superhero, you should look the part."

"If I look the part, bad guys know who to shoot," he retorted. "If I'm just some guy in the neighborhood, I'm safe."

"And if other folks get shot because the bad guys are looking for you and you're not in costume?" she asked.

"Then that would run counter to your wishes that I don't get shot," he said. "You just reversed your argument. Look, you spend some time working on a costume and I'll look into it. Something with a look that you like, that is comfortable enough, and I'll help you out from there. But the wooden armor just needs to go back to the drawing board and the drawing board needs to go back to the store."

"That's ridiculous," she moaned.

"It is, but humor me. You pitch me some ideas for a costume, and I'll give them a shot. But for tonight, it's the bike and bandanna."

He wore the cargo pants from last week, with the tabi sock-slippers, and a nice lightweight t-shirt. No jacket, no hoodie, no gloves, but a brown stocking cap on his head, his biking goggles, and a bandanna in his pocket as he pulled out of the driveway. The rats confirmed that nobody was watching, but they were much better at seeing human observers than they were cameras. He had to be conscious that cameras were everywhere these days. He rode west, then cut north when he was well away from his own neighborhood, and took a winding path to the warehouse. He paused to pull his bandanna up over his mouth, cinching it behind his head, and then he started heading east, several blocks over, stopping when he was within range of Oni Lee's apartment. One rat ran on ahead to see if the man was in place, and several more rats waited while Danny reached into his cargo pocket and brought out the pair of walkie-talkies he had bought. The rats took one, running ahead, while he directed them.

Oni Lee was sitting in his chair, staring at his wall, when the rat peeked over the windowsill. He was still and silent, with his briefcase sitting open nearby. There was a clunk as the walkie-talkie was pushed up onto the windowsill, the rats were a bit clumsy when the angle was that bad and they had to do the best they could. The man did not turn at the sound, just breathed and blinked.

"Oni Lee," the walkie talkie said, with only a little electronic crackle. The man turned slowly, his sharp cheekbones catching the light. "Oni Lee, open the window and take the walkie-talkie," Danny said. Oni Lee stood abruptly, walked to the window, opened it and took the walkie talkie.

"Good," Danny said. "Now, turn off your phone, this is going to be your phone from now on, understood?"

Oni Lee's thumb moved, pressing the power button for the cell phone, but he did not respond further, just stared blankly at the radio in his hand. "Tell me if you understand, Oni Lee," he said. The man's jaw moved somewhat, and his breathing sped up, but he did not speak.

Holy cow, Danny thought to himself. This guy is pretty messed up. What is that, brainwashing?

"Put your phone on the windowsill," Danny said, and Oni Lee did not hesitate. "Thank you," he said through the radio. "Now, sit down in your chair, and wait for me to speak to you again. And don't use your powers until I tell you to," Danny added while the rats dragged away Oni Lee's cell phone.

Then he put down the radio, and picked up his own phone, and called Taylor and put his Bluetooth in place. "Dispatch, this is patrol," he said by way of greeting.

"Dispatch here, patrol," she replied, still playing along.

"Dispatch, can you email the Protectorate again and give them the address for Oni Lee's hideout? He doesn't have his phone, so Lung won't be able to call him. He's got a caretaker here, an old woman that brings him food a few times a day. She may be involved in the ABB, or she may just think she's got a handicapped lodger here, I don't know. She should be interrogated though, and not allowed to call Lung and let him know that the jig is up."

"The jig?" she repeated, amused.

"Yeah, the jig. Tell them that Oni Lee is catatonic unless he gets orders, they should go easy and treat him like a psych patient and not a supervillain. I'm going after Lung and Bakuda now, let them know that I'll be messaging them so Armsmaster can meet me there."

He mustered rats from these tenement buildings, and all the way back to the warehouse he zigzagged from block to block to cover more area and slow down his progress so the rats could keep up. By the time he got to the warehouse he was in control of nearly ten thousand rats, and he had them pry loose the trick brick and stream inside the building, hiding themselves in the walls anywhere they could. With that many ears and noses, he could get a sense for everything inside the building. The sharp rodent ears, taking in sounds from different sides, with slight delays for distance, almost gave him a sonar sense for what was inside the building. Bakuda's boots thudding along the cement floor here, the sound bouncing up against metal shelves full of cardboard boxes. She paused, and a click of a utility knife opening as she ripped open some tape and rustled inside for some cellophane-wrapped components. Lung in an upstairs office, pacing while he spoke on the phone. Four more men in the outer office, one wearing a sling on his arm. They sat away from the windows overlooking the warehouse floor, as if they were staying as far from Bakuda's work space as possible. There was a back office with mattresses thrown down on the floor, a concession to the living needs of the hideout. The back office smelled musty and all too lived-in.

Bakuda was the first target, because she was unsupervised. Rats peeled back the sheetrock of the walls in a corner and streamed out, spreading across the floor and lining up, with the shelves between them and her, keeping to her back. He arranged them into the right order, and then they rushed. A swift tide of dark-furred bodies slammed into her feet from behind, knocking her legs up into the air. A half-second later she slammed to the floor hard, no time to catch herself or soften the blow. One damp rat leaped up onto her chest and wedged itself into her mouth, gagging her from screaming, its fur stinking of an acrid chemical smell. She flailed, bringing her hands up to yank it loose, and two rats came up with her sleeves, each working their end of a set of zip-tie plastic handcuffs. She yanked at them, tried to free herself, and only dug them into her skin. She made a muffled scream and bit down on the rat's body, its bones crunching as she fought back, thrashing and struggling. He winced, shot through with guilt as the animal suffered. Her legs kicked, but they were tethered with zip ties as well. She dug her hands into her pockets, but sharp teeth nipped at her fingertips hard and she pulled back, bleeding, the jerking recoil of her hands more a reflex than anything else. And by the time she recovered from the reflexive withdrawal, the rats had opened her pockets and carried away the contents. She thrashed over onto her front and crawled awkwardly, hands and ankles bound, and she spat the dead rat out of her mouth. The floor in front of her tilted, receded, and she finally recognized the taste of the chloroform that the rat had been soaked in. She dropped in place, sprawled on the floor, and the rats began hauling her back out of sight somewhere safe.

And after that, they had the run of the showroom floor. They read labels, notes, journals, outlines, blueprints, and made their pick. The equipment Danny chose was surprisingly small, about the size of a softball, but flattened and black with a plastic housing. The rats dragged it into the right spot, then started swarming up the walls to take their places. They worked quietly, patiently, careful not to make noise that Lung might hear with his supersenses, but not so slow that he might move or leave before they were done. Beams were gnawed at, gnawed through, wooden supports weakened, load-bearing struts severed.

"Dispatch, this is patrol."

"Go for dispatch."

"Call 'em in."

The floor under Lung's feet groaned, rumbled, groaned again, and tilted. He dropped the phone and had time to yell for his lieutenants before the floor tilted and became a wall, and the whole room dropped out from under his feet, the desk slamming against his arm as the whole office dropped in place and shattered on the warehouse floor, leaving only rubble and wreckage. Lung flung himself out of the debris, roaring his anger as he glared around, and then the bomb went off. All the oxygen in a twenty-foot radius was replaced by carbon monoxide, and in ten seconds later the big bare-chested gangster was unconscious where he lay, the bad air dissipating around him. One of the four henchmen threw a mattress out the window and leapt for safety, but he bounced once on the mattress and then didn't get up again, clutching at his broken leg.

Armsmaster arrived with a contingent of PRT personnel, a big van full of restraints and sedatives to keep the prisoners under wraps until they could be given trial. He oversaw as the villains were fitted with heavy steel cuffs and IVs of anesthetic to put them into an induced coma. And an ambulance for the henchmen with the broken femur. The PRT squad leader called for backup when he saw the warehouse, all available personnel to help with cataloging and containment of this arsenal. Armsmaster was browsing over the notes when he saw a quartet of rats sitting on their hind legs, staring straight at him. He quirked a half-smile and approached, and they led him out of the warehouse and around the corner, to where a thin figure of a man was sitting on the curb next to a bike up on its kickstand. The thin man wore a stocking cap and a bandanna over his mouth, but the same pants and slippers from the previous week.

"Druid?" Armsmaster asked.

"I don't actually control nature," the thin man said. "Just rats. The costume was my daughter's idea." He reached into the backpack at his feet and pulled out a small cooler bag, then unzipped it and handed Armsmaster a beer.

"I'm on the job," the hero said.

The thin man shrugged. "So am I, I guess. C'mon, get some curb," he slapped at the concrete at his side, and Armsmaster awkwardly sat down on the roadside curb. "Did you guys get Oni Lee?"

"He cooperated immediately. He said he wasn't supposed to use his powers until the radio told him to."

Danny heaved a sigh. "Thank goodness. I was pretty sure about him, but it feels good to have it confirmed. Listen, I think he's brain-damaged or something, he's got no willpower of his own and he just follows orders. I think we can get him an insanity plea or something, right? I figure with a couple of earplugs and a radio connection to a dispatcher, we could make him one of the heroes in short order. Kit him out with a baton instead of knives, containment-foam grenades, he should be fine."

"Still ready to tell us how to do our jobs," Armsmaster said, popping the top on his beer. He lifted it to his mouth and took a cautious sip. "You brought in the entire leadership of the ABB tonight. Lung, Bakuda, Oni Lee, Johnny Cheng, Ho-wan Ho, Steve Nguyen, and Peter Pan. All that's left is a bunch of knucklehead gangbangers with graffiti and smash-and-grab burglaries."

"Please tell me that Peter Pan is the guy that threw himself out the window and broke his leg," Danny chuckled, lifting his own beer. He lifted the bottom of his bandanna out of the way and took a long drink.

"I could lie because that'd be better," Colin the Armsmaster said. "But no, Peter Pan isn't the one that tried to fly out the window."

"Nuts," Danny said, leaning back a bit. "Hey, last week when I asked you about why you go on patrols, I hope that didn't come off as pushy or condescending or anything."

Armsmaster shrugged. "Not very."

"It's just that it seemed like a second-best use of your time, is all. I mean, if you could get Miss Militia in some armor like yours, or Triumph. Or heck, Vista with the Wards. That's an eleven-year-old girl who goes looking for armed criminals, and she's wearing a fabric costume instead of hardened armor. One bad night, one good shot, and you've lost a hero before her prime."

Armsmaster paused. "It's hard to keep a suit of armor like this going. There's repairs, maintenance, calibrations, updates, adjustments. Every time you gain a pound or lose a pound, the armor needs to be adjusted. Every time it gets dinged, it needs to be fixed up. Sweat throws off the heads-up interface. It's a high-tech performance machine made with the intention of getting struck and damaged."

"And I'm sure your teammates would appreciate all that, every time they wear it, and especially when it saves their lives," Danny said gently. "Besides, the more you work at it, the easier it's bound to get, right?"

The senior hero took another swig of beer. "It's not just that, man. My power, it's not just a tinker power. My creations work better in proximity to me. The efficiency, the effectiveness, the power output, it only works when it's actually near me. That's how I manage to get so many weapons built into the Halberd. But I can't do that for the others."

Danny craned his head around to stare at the hero, his brow furrowed deeply and his bandanna askew where his mouth was pulled into an incredulous expression.

Colin looked at the man, and blinked at his reaction. "What? What's with that face?"

"Your power works best when it's in your proximity, and you think the smart answer here is to build hight-tech weapons and carry them into battle yourself?" Danny said, his voice full of disbelief. "My god man, your powers were built for full-time lab work. You're trying to overcome the limitations of what you can carry with you, and you should be solving the limitations of how much you can fit into your workshop. You could either have the most effective, efficient workshop of any tinker, or you could have the most effective efficient weapons of any tinker. I'm not a tinker, or an expert on tinkers, but I have no doubt that the first option is orders of magnitude preferable to the second."

Armsmaster finished drinking, and crushed the can between his palm and the curb. "Thanks for the beer. I've got to get back to this crime scene."

Danny stood with the other man, but held up a hand to forestall him leaving right away. "Look, Armsmaster, I've got another question for you. Or favor, whatever. You mentioned power vacuums, how the fall of the ABB could upset things here. I'm looking for some suggestions."

"Hmm," the hero said, scratching at his chin with armored fingers and thumb. "Well, there's basically three feasible options in front of us. Either the various factions of villains in this city start moving into the ABB's turf to expand their holdings, run into each other, and start fighting for the pie and break out into open gang warfare, or one gang moves in fast and hard and takes all the land by themselves, and then either the others look to challenge and you get a long, simmering gang war, or for some reason nobody moves in on the open territory."

"For example, if it wasn't really open," Danny followed along. "If they thought someone was already holding and controlling it."

"They might challenge the borders, but whoever was holding the ABB turf would be dealing with them separately. It wouldn't be a six-way war."

"Six?"

"Six or seven, depending on how the alliances shake out," Armsmaster said. "With the ABB gone, there's just the Empire Eighty-Eight, Faultline's mercenaries, the Travelers, the Undersiders, the Fifth Street Merchants, and Coil, plus about a half-dozen to a dozen independent operators."

Danny cursed under his breath. "It would only take a few weeks though, right? Take the turf, hold it, then hand it off to one of the other groups so they can take it and establish themselves without opening a gang war on all sides."

"In theory, maybe," the Armsmaster said. "But in theory, everything is easy."

"I promised my daughter I'd enlist with the Protectorate by August," Danny said. "But I've got an opportunity here. I can stop a gang war before it starts, if I just wait a little bit. The hard part is that I either need to devote myself full time to holding the borders like a supervillain, or I need to pick a supervillain faction to hand it off to. That's way too much like condoning them, or even encouraging them."

"This life is about the tough calls," the hero said.

Danny sighed. "I guess it is. How much help can I expect to get from the Protectorate while I'm working this strategy?"

Armsmaster winced. "I'm on a limb just giving advice or tacit approval to this plan. You're a rogue, technically any actions you take need to be entirely legal or you're acting as a villain. I can arrange a bit of a blind eye, but that's just me and my people, and we take our marching orders from the PRT. If Parahuman Response comes after you, or orders us against you, my hands are very tied."

"But if we do this the hero way, gang war breaks out and hundreds of people die," Danny pointed out.

"This life is about tough calls," the hero said, his voice a bit more somber this time.

Danny mulled on that. "It seems like most of those tough calls are being made by other people, or the consequences of those tough calls are borne by other people."

"Well, there's- hang on," Armsmaster said, raising a hand to the side of his helmet. He paused, listened, and then quirked a half-smile and turned towards Danny Hebert. "Hey, guy, my people doing inventory just found out that an entire shelf of finished product that was listed in the notes isn't where it should be, and doesn't seem to be anywhere. The place they were stored is right next to a big hole in the wall with a lot of teeth-marks on it. Now, that many tinker-made bombs could be a real problem if they got loose. So, since you're the only person that saw this place before we got here, I need you to tell me: do I need to worry about finding those bombs?"

"If I was making the tough call, I'd ask you not to look for those," Danny said. The mask made it easier to hold a straight face.

Armsmaster nodded, and may even have winked behind his visor. "Thanks for your advice. And... thanks for the assist." He watched the thin man get onto his bicycle and ride away, disappearing down the street. The world seemed to rustle as hundreds of unseen rats slid back a little further out of sight, leaving the warehouse to the PRT.

Soon Danny was three blocks away, being scolded by his daughter. "He thanked you for the assist, dad. Not the way you beat the ABB singlehanded, he called it an assist. He's gonna take credit for this, and the leverage you wanted in the Protectorate is gone."

"The leverage I lose against the Protectorate is leverage I gain on Armsmaster," he pointed out. "And I've got a chance to earn more, too. It's not like the ABB was my only chance to hand over some supervillains."

"If you'd had the costume, you could have posed for pictures and been Brockton's savior," she said. "But you're playing it safe and working hard for nothing."

"Taylor, if I was responsible for a gang war breaking out with all those villains trying to claim a piece of the Docks, it'd do more harm than any ferry could make up for," he pointed out. "I have to keep the area stable, and then work on improvements."

"Taking out Lung and the Azn Bad Boys was supposed to be an improvement, it was supposed to be helping the people. If you have to work twice as hard to make up the difference now that they're gone, it sounds like you're saying we were better off with them."

He shook his head, then reminded himself again that she couldn't see. "It's not like that Taylor, it's just about timing. The city will be better off without Lung, without him recruiting kids and demanding tributes and planning assassinations against other gangs. The city will be better off without his people trafficking drugs and people. But they'll also be better off if the people that take over this area are not as bad as Lung is."

"Well, that'll take some consideration. Who would you put in? Surely not the Empire."

"Nah, white supremacists are never the best option," Danny said ruefully. "But certainly not the Merchants either. They just ruin everything they touch. Maybe Faultline?"

Taylor considered that while she typed. "It's not a bad idea, but the problem there is that there's no record of her mercs working particularly hard to hold territory. Then again, neither do the Undersiders, so they may not be a possibility either."

"That may leave it to the Travelers then," he said. "Unless you think Coil would be interested?"

"Coil's all about downtown, but he's ambitious and always jockeying for turf. He might work out," Taylor said.

"Any word on how he treats the areas he's holding?"

"Nothing conclusive. He seems like a very hands-off kinda guy. Anyway, he's gotta be better than the Empire or the Merchants, and those are gonna be the big contenders for the territory," she said. "C'mon home, we can worry about this tomorrow."


Author's notes: I don't write this story in first person because that's Taylor's thing and I thought it might be confusing to do so. Canon Skitter and my Danny Hebert have some strong parallels but distinct differences. If Danny seems a bit over-powered at this stage and the next few chapters, I think it's due partly to the fact that Danny is a college-educated adult with lots of practice in problem-solving and not a teenager, partly due to the fact that his trigger trauma manifests less personally than hers did, and partly because rats are a more effective weapon than bugs are. And also this chapter foreshadows his biggest liability compared to Skitter, that he is not willing to sacrifice his rats the way she is with her bugs. Feedback and critique is valued, as are any questions that anyone has about the story