Tuesday was spent on the phone, the other phone, the laptop and the desktop computer. The bank president was hesitant and needed the whole process explained to him from the beginning, with carbon-copies from all the assurances that the other parties had already offered, and he sent every question to Danny instead of asking his own subordinate who had been handling the whole process up to this point. It threatened to bog down the whole negotiation, and Danny was juggling the tax assessor and the councilwoman and the factory owners' lawyer, who also had plenty of questions. Danny was tempted to apply some leverage, but he needed this man to be one hundred percent onboard and happy to sign, with no last minute qualms or second-guessing.

These people could help each other, and help everyone else at the same time, if they would just stop quibbling over the details and trying to screw each other for the biggest profit for just themselves, Danny thought to himself. It was hard to believe that these people were each so eager to strangle the golden goose, to lose out on long-term benefits for the short-sighted interests of right-now.

Finally Danny realized how to cut through the bank president's circular questions and constant second-guessing, and he fired up some PowerPoint presentations that showed everything in neat, colorful graphs, with the numbers that go up and show that this graph is a good graph. Fifteen minutes after he sent that, the bank president was ready to sign. The lawyer signed next, and the tax assessor and the councilwoman got their signatures notarized for the deal.

"Barry," Danny said. "The deal is on. Nine new factories are going to begin production in the harbor district starting next week. We're already being asked for every single Dockworker who's available. We did it, we won. Oh, and I've finished the confetti and streamers, the banners are half-done. I'm taking a half-day."

Barry was still sitting with his mouth open when Danny walked out the door to his bike. He had a lot of preparations to make for tonight.

At four o'clock, a roll-up garage door at the border of Merchants territory and the Docks rattled its way up to the ceiling, revealing a monster. It was an ugly monster, snarling and rough-edged, drooling on the floor, with odd angles and a complete lack of grace. Its engine was massive and badly muffled, it belched smoke, it looked like a dune buggy designed by Big Daddy Kane and left in the rough-cut sketch. Too many pipes, too many tires, too many headlights, it was crammed full of stuff at every side with no smooth surfaces or blank spaces for the eye to rest on. And it raced out with a shrill shriek of vulcanized rubber and bored-out pistons, bouncing up the curb and along the sidewalk, then weaving into traffic to cut off the cars there as it raced off. It rammed several cars off the road with its big beefy spiked bumper, and it took turns at full speed by running up onto walls with its angled tires, or hauling long screeching turns that left rubber behind on the road. Skidmark sat in the passenger seat, flinging out patches of impulsion as they went.

The spaces he affected were slightly color shifted, slightly reddish on one side and slightly bluish on the other, as the light reacted to the field by dragging out its wavelength on one side and compressing the wavelength on the other hand. They created a force of motion for everything that touched them or landed on them, pushing things or people from the red side towards the blue side. When it splashed down on a pile of garbage, the can was rolled out into the street, the garbage bag spilling out. The cardboard boxes piled next to the can were pushed out just as hard but with less resistance, so they flew up into the air and fluttered down across hoods and windshields as people tried to unwedge themselves from the traffic snarls left behind by the doombuggy's antics.

Squealer's monster was big and burly, shouldering and shoving other cars out of the way, but its massive tires could just as easily travel over another car, cracking the glass and denting the roof as it rolled over. The impulsion fields slapped down on the ground at odd angles, forcing the drivers to correct their steering this way and that as the wheels tried to haul them into oncoming traffic. Cars crashed, horns blared, glass broke, and the two villains rode away laughing. The smoke that belched out the back of the car seemed to hang in the air like a ground fog, never dispersing, and anyone who was walking or biking or driving with the windows down found themselves choking harshly on the fumes, some even falling to their knees as they were overcome. The coughing started to take on a distinctive rasping sound as their lungs began to fail. And it was only taking minutes for that fog to cover whole blocks.

And then they turned down a sidestreet at a skid, and saw a young Asian man standing in the middle of the street, facing them. He was silent and still, unflinching, untroubled, staring at the car that was barreling straight towards him. "Chicken!" Squealer whooped, gunning the gas to race straight towards him. He made no move to dodge, and she made no move to spare him. And as the bumper made the first contact, he vanished in a blur of scattered light just an instant before an explosion blew the doombuggy up into the air, shredding the tires. It landed hard, the frame of the undercarriage slamming against the asphalt hard, dragging along the ground as it lost its momentum in a shower of sparks and engine oil. With a strangely restrained 'whoof', the trail of gasoline caught on fire, dancing all about, climbing up towards the engine and the gas tank. Cursing and flailing, Squealer and Skidmark unbuckled themselves and leaped out of the car, staring in awestruck horror as her car started to burn in earnest. And then a hand in a fingerless glove tapped on Skidmark's shoulder from behind. "Hey man," came a slightly muffled voice.

Skidmark turned around right into a fist. It slammed into the bridge of his nose with astounding force, knocking him back off his feet to collapse on his back on the concrete. The fist had caught him right between the eyes of his grease-stained mask. Squealer muffled a squeal of surprise or fear as she saw the tall man in the trenchcoat step forward, the light of her burning car glinting off the metal chains across his chest and the lenses of his featureless mask. It didn't look like most masks, it looked painted on but it was eerily devoid of features. No mouth, no nose, but also no zipper or closure at all. It looked to her like a faceless man with stitches running along his scalp and cheeks. And he grabbed Skidmark by the front of her partner's shirt, lifting him up off the pavement and slamming him again with another hard punch, knocking out two of the Merchant's stained, gapped teeth. The Merchant's leader was nearly as thin as Danny, but a few inches shorter, his clothes dirty in a way that only extreme apathy and laziness could create.

Danny Hebert stepped back from the dazed Skidmark and brought his right hand to his pocket, dropping the roll of quarters he'd held into his pocket. The quarters had originally been for emergencies, but Tallboy had mentioned the other day that even a small fist-load or hand-weight could make the difference against fifty pounds of muscle. It had taken her quite a few minutes to show him the right way, but now that he knew it let him hit like a larger man, a stronger man. He turned towards Squealer. She was a tinker, but hardly looked the stereotype. She was either a young woman who partied hard enough to age herself prematurely, or a middle-aged woman who worked too hard at concealing her age. Either was possible. She had big blonde bottle-dyed hair that wasn't washed enough, and way too much makeup with road grit and soot trapped in the thick layers of cosmetic products. Her body was sexy but not pretty, overdone, with artfully-arranged tanlines that were all-too-visible thanks to her shamelessly revealing clothes.

The Wharf Rat stepped in closer to her, looming over her. "I'm not gonna hit you," he said. "But you need to stay away from the Docks forever." His rats were starting to suffer, so he pulled them out of the range of the ugly cloud left behind by the buggy's exhaust.

She looked at him with huge, watery eyes. "Fuck you," she said, and swung a kick up at his balls. He turned his hip into it, catching the kick on his thigh instead of this groin, but it threw off his balance and he was knocked back onto the ground. Before he could take his feet, the ground lurched underneath him and shoved him back away from her.

"Muh'fucker knock' ou' my fuck'n feef!" Skidmark snarled through blood as he threw down another impulsion field under Danny, knocking him back as he tried to get to his feet. Squealer grabbed a burning tire and flung it down on the first field, letting the impeller take it and shove it, hitting the second one to gain speed. A burning tire the size of his whole body came flying at Danny, and he dodged to the side close enough that it ruffled the collar of his jacket. Instead of trying to get to his feet Danny rolled to his hands and feet for stability and balance, but the next impeller caught just his knees but not his hands, yanking them out from under him while Squealer advanced with a wrench in her hand and a hard look on her face.

My own fault for trying to get chivalrous with a supervillain, he thought to himself. And then a tide of rats snapped out and knocked Squealer off of her feet, collapsing next to the Wharf Rat. He knocked her wrench away and a swarm of rats rushed for Skidmark, snapping at him. He slapped down a barrier of kinetic energy, one beside the other to form a wall to keep the rats at bay, spreading it from the sides to guard his own back.

Squealer recovered her breath, and the masked man was in front of her again. She felt sharp points all over her body, pricking her skin. "There are rats poised, ready to bite," he said. "Even one on your throat, and more on your wrists. If you move, they draw blood. If you try to sit up, they take you out. Some of these are even carrying some very nasty diseases that you don't want to have to explain to anyone."

Skidmark was done dealing with the threat of rats, and took an interest in the rest of the fight again. He threw out his hands, and Wharf Rat was hauled away from Squealer, dragging against the concrete until he fetched up against the curb. Squealer sneered at him. "We know about you. You're not a killer, you're bluffing," she said, and reached up to yank away the rats at her throat, tossing them away and sitting upright.

And then two rats bit into her calves, eliciting a loud shriek from the blowzy blonde woman. "I won't kill, but you'll have a hard time telling a doctor how you got leprosy, rabies and syphilis at the same time." She winced and nursed at her bitten flesh, the wounds running deep and bleeding freely until she pressed her hands against them. "Hey, Skidmark, interesting piece of trivia. Did you know that a mouse can survive a fall of fifty feet? They just bounce and walk away. See?" A small white mouse fell past Skidmark's shoulder, landing a foot away from him. It kipped up to its feet and took off, hitting the impeller fields and zooming away. "But, you know what doesn't bounce?" Wharf Rat asked, pointing upwards. "A brick."

Skidmark leaped clear, landing on his own field and bouncing away as a massive crash sounded behind him, pelting him with chips of concrete. This time, instead of a punch the Wharf Rat grabbed him in a sleeper chokehold, his elbow cradling the man's throat with the bicep and forearm pinching at the carotid arteries, using the other arm to lock them in place against Skidmark's own head and shoulder so the hold couldn't be broken. Half a minute later, he was unconscious.

Squealer had stopped the bleeding, and looked up at him with hateful eyes as he stepped her way, weaving to avoid the red-to-blue marks all over the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of zip-tie handcuffs. "Put 'em on, or I slap your makeup one way and your face the other, then put them on for you," he said, his voice a growl.

"Holy shit, way to sound like a badass," Taylor said into his ear. "I'm a bit intimidated, and I'm your daughter and miles away." But Squealer ziptied herself, hands together, and then he stepped up close to bind her ankles, leaving her hog-tied on the sidewalk.

The EMTs were already on the scene, treating dozens of people for lung failure and massive mucosal irritations. The first cops arrived in a minute, and the PRT vans a couple minutes after that. And that was after But Danny Hebert, wearing a backpack, was well out of sight. He hung around until the rats could confirm that the Merchants were in the back of a containment vehicle before he rode away. "Did you really think it was that intimidating?" he asked into his bluetooth.

"Heck yeah. But don't overdo that sort of thing, you don't want to be the cape that threatens too much, and you want your threats to be nonverbal as much as possible," she pointed out. "But when you do threaten someone, threaten them like that. You gotta get 'em where they live. You take someone like Squealer. You could threaten to break her legs or punch her up, and she won't really get bothered. But you threaten to take her makeup off, and she's freaking out."

"Funny."

"I thought so. Anyway, where are you headed to now?"

"Backtracking the Merchant's path. I wanna see what else was in Squealer's workshop. If the cops find it, it goes to impound. If anyone else finds it, it can get used against me or innocent civilians. If I find it, then it helps us. Simple math."

"Kind of like the way you stole some of Bakuda's devices?"

"Acquired them, Taylor, I acquired them," he replied, stressing the word. "Or maybe I liberated them. Whatever. But yeah, a lot like that."

His opening gambit in this fight against the Merchants was a device he acquired from Bakuda's warehouse. An anti-personnel landmine that projected a hologram of a man, a member of the defunct ABB, and that hologram was the bait that set the trap. When something touched the hologram and broke it up, the mine went off. One of those in the road had taken the doombuggy out of commission and set him up to finish them off. Though he hadn't done as good a job of finishing them off as he would have hoped. He needed to start carrying a couple containment-foam grenades so that he could send his rats out with a grenade and wrap up villains without having to get personally involved. And he needed to start wearing a cup, he thought to himself, remembering that kick that Squealer had thrown at him.

The rats could tell him easily which way the doombuggy had come from, there was nothing in the world easier to track than Squealer's creation. He pulled up outside the garage in Merchants' territory, and a rat from inside pushed the button to roll the gate open. The neighborhood here was even worse than the rest of the Docks, whole blocks of buildings with condemned notifications on them, every corner had evidence of a recent trash fire or one ongoing right then. It was the sort of neighborhood where methheads got together to sell their bodies for a fix, and bathtub chemists sold their toxic products to children. Given enough time, meth-lab accidents and ether explosions would level the entire district.

The garage itself was small, but the back wall of it was punched out and led to a larger space, the worst kind of showroom and the worst kind of workshop. Every tool was dirty, every set of sockets was out of order, grease and oil stained everything, half-empty cans of gasoline were spread all around with dirty rags. His skin itched just being inside this place, and he put on his latex gloves almost as a defense mechanism. He shuddered to think what the Merchants would have accomplished if they'd been able to set themselves up as a major force in the city. The creations themselves were rude and ugly, sloppy and overdone like Squealer herself. But unlike her, he could feel a palpable sense of power coming from them, their hunkered posture and broad frames hinting at the sheer torque and hitting power they packed. A massive helicopter with six propellers, all small to make it easier to fly in a city, was also covered in weapons ports and tow ropes and amplifiers and other accessories. A muscle car that was more engine than frame, a vast truck that looked like it could haul away the whole building, even a digging machine with a giant drill, all spread about lovingly in a tasteless display of decadent horsepower.

He walked past that, and over to the worktables themselves. Drawings and sketches and inspirations were written down. He could see the successive generations of each idea as she wrote them in, then modified them, rearranged them, and then finally started work. He picked up the plans for the vast truck in the front, and looked at the exploded diagrams of the massive monster. Then he flipped a page to see the version before, and saw it smaller, more compact, with a levered frame that would dig in for better traction depending on how much weight was on the tow hooks mounted front and back. Four small engines powered each wheel, with a pair of opposed flywheels that could build up immense torque or immense momentum as need be. The generation before was an elegantly sloped vehicle with carefully-perfected architecture that let it balance massive weights in a way that seemed to defy gravity itself.

All of the plans looked like that: the first inspiration was a marvel of simplicity and engineering that worked marvels of output from input, that were then "improved" with new ideas that ruined the original concept and needed to be compensated with more power, more devices, more accessories. Every page had doodles in the margins that could revolutionize the automotive industry, and the original sketches themselves could change the face of human civilization itself. He wasn't sure if Squealer didn't deserve her talents, or if Skidmark didn't deserve someone of her abilities. But whatever it meant, he took every piece of paper and rolled them carefully, tucking them into his backpack alongside his mask and jacket and chains and gloves. Then he took the keys off the pegboard, one for each of these monsters, and he tucked them into his pockets and had Taylor alert the PRT to the location of the workshop and its contents.

Now he had a very hard question for himself: was he going to absorb the Merchants territory into the Docks and defend them both, or let the other factions of the city move into that area without challenge? Would it provoke a gang war? Would he particularly care if it did? Would it be worth it? At this point, the only villain factions in the city were Empire Eighty-Eight, the Travelers, the Undersiders, Coil, and Faultline's mercenaries. The Undersiders and Faultline seemed mostly unconcerned with holding territory or expanding territory, just staking out enough space that they didn't intrude on anyone else's concerns, rather than collecting protection money or running real estate deals or running drugs or prostitutes. So that left the Travelers, Coil, and the Empire. Both Coil and the Empire tended to be more upscale than to take a dilapidated hellhole like the space the Merchants had claimed of their own, and while he didn't know much about the Travelers there was not much mention of them craving territory. Which meant that Skidmark's turf could sit empty and unclaimed, leaving the power balance unchanged. And without them jockeying for position, more stable all around.


On Wednesday morning Taylor showed him the front page of the Brockton Bay Gazette, the city's "other newspaper", which mostly ran personal ads and restaurant reviews, but sometimes also published stories that were either too sensational for the Times or were too upsetting to the Times' advertisers. And the headline was "Villains Apprehended, Local Hero Defeats Fifth Street Merchants".

"Local hero," Taylor said with a grin. "How about that? Some recognition. It mentions that you are affiliated with the Protectorate, but that your name is not officially on record yet."

Danny found himself grinning despite himself. "I like it. But I need to go on record with a name or the media will choose one for me, if this goes on much longer. Right now they're happy having a mysterious protector that beats up drug peddlers, but the next time they get a story on me they'll need a name."

"Probably," she said, and handed him his toast. "Anyway, I hear the rats going crazy down there, what happened?"

The knife scraped loudly over the toast as he buttered it. "So, you know who Squealer is, right?"

"Trashy tinker, does trashy cars."

Danny chuckled. "You're not wrong. Anyway, here's the big secret: she's a genius. Like, a very powerful tinker. Like Sphere before he went Mannequin. Squealer could probably boost Dragon herself ahead by twenty years. Not kidding. The thing is, she can't get out of her own way. The more she tinkers with an idea, the more 'her' it becomes. But her first drafts? They are marvelous. Simple, efficient, balanced, sturdy. So, I'm gonna build one of her first-draft vehicles."

"And that's what the rats are working on."

The toast crunched loudly as he chewed, chewed, chewed, and finally swallowed. "Yeah, that's what the rats are up to. I promised to drop investigations on the Undersiders, and my project with the mayor hit a brick wall in the biggest way, so there's not much going on besides Wilma's baby shower banners." He took another bite of toast and chewed.

His daughter shrugged. "Okay, you're building a tinker-designed super-car in the basement. Good luck getting it up the stairs. I think I'm going to ask for a tinker-designed supercar of my own for a graduation present."

Danny stood, and the chair scraped on the linoleum. "I'm actually thinking about handing these plans over to the Protectorate. They'll either design super-vehicles for themselves, or they'll loan out the plans to the car companies to work from, and we'll all have better cars and trucks than we have now. If the Protectorate makes a profit, then Squealer will sue for intellectual property and win, and she'll make enough money that she never needs crime or gangs or anything like that ever again."

"Why would she win?" Taylor asked, her forehead creased with confusion.

He returned her confusion. "Because I'd testify on her behalf, of course."

"Oh, of course. Get out of here and go to work," she said, slapping his shoulder.

"Not yet. I heard that there was an incident at school."

"There was," she said airily. "But I recorded it with my phone and took it to the principal. Emma and Madeline got suspended for three days, and I think Sophia got a talking-to since she's not approaching me directly anymore."

"Directly?" he asked, seizing on the operative word.

"Well, she tried to get some of the other girls to push me around, but again I just recorded what happened and they backed off. As soon as they recognize that they will face consequences for their actions, they leave me alone. All copacetic."

He sighed, and shook his head. "I'm worried they'll escalate."

"So am I," she replied. "But if that happens, we deal with the escalation. Now get out of here, you've got a job to get to, and it's a big job."

It was too, Danny had to put together a schedule of interviews for the next few days. Yesterday afternoon the chapter president had authorized a series of want ads in the local papers, and those ads had gone out in the next morning. Now their switchboard was lighting up with people wanting to schedule interviews, and Danny Hebert was kept busy setting up those appointments. A couple of his coworkers were getting roped in to help with the interview process so they could process the workload and get people into the system when the new jobs kicked in on Monday.

He spent the morning answering his phone and filling out four schedules for himself and the other interviewers, at the same time as he put together an email that would serve as a crash-course in how to handle the interview process for his co-workers. He kept both computers busy and moved from one phone call to the next as fast as he could, while one rat on his desk occasionally sent a text to Taylor during her breaks between classes, just touching base. And at lunch, she stopped replying. He tried not to get concerned, because he could not afford to leave early and go check on her, so he just had to trust that the school would call him if something had happened. He told himself that she had just turned her phone off for whatever reason, and that was that.

He found himself resenting the need to patrol the Docks border before he got home, but there were a lot of people counting on him and the school hadn't called to tell him that Taylor was in trouble. He squashed the urge to panic, the memories of the call he'd gotten when her mother had her accident. At a simple sweep, everything was fine in the Docks, but he knew he should do a more thorough sweep and also address the Merchants' turf, they were leaderless and that could blow up. But he just made the fastest circuit he could and then raced home.

As soon as he was two hundred yards from the house a small field mouse squirmed itself under the back door and scampered from room to room, following Taylor's scent until it spotted her in her room, doing homework at her desk. It gave a small squeak to get her attention, then waved its paw back and forth.

"Hi Dad," she said in the mouse's direction. "Are you on your way home?"

The mouse nodded.

"All right then, I'll see you in a few. We'll talk about dinner, okay?"

The mouse nodded, and then turned and left, squeezing under her doorframe and then down to the basement to join the others that were beginning their work. Wilma's banner was nearly done, the wall-map was getting a lot more complicated by the day, and rats were gnawing struts and joints and panels out of the scrap wood left over from the armor project. They were taking a lot of measurements, because a lot of the pieces they were making had extremely specific tolerances. Some of the wood needed to be a bit springier or lighter, so he was scouring the area for scrap wood or deadfall that would suit his purposes. He pulled up outside the house and unlocked the garage with his key, parked the bike and closed up behind him, letting himself into the house.

Taylor met him in the kitchen; she went in for a hug but stopped halfway. "God, you're dripping and you stink. Hugs after shower. What do you want for dinner?"

"Wanna make some hot dogs on the countertop grill?" he asked, still catching his breath.

She nodded. "That's fine, good, I'll get it started. You shower," she said, ushering him out of the kitchen. He kicked off his shoes into the living room and went to wash himself down in cool water, and he was still sweating lightly when he got dressed after.

His daughter looked him over and pronounced him acceptable for a hug, and then they embraced. He stood at the stove and put together some macaroni and cheese from roux and boxed pasta with a mix of sharp cheddar and jalapeno-jack cheese, while she stood a few feet away grilling hot dogs on a low heat. "So," he said to open conversation. "You stopped answering your phone."

Taylor's shoulders tensed, but she controlled her voice. "Sophia stole it just before lunch. She said I was using it as a crutch, and crutches make people weak."

"She has no idea what crutches are for then, because that is just stupid. And she's one to talk, she assaults people and steals their property to make herself feel better about her life." He set down the ladle and turned in place, hugging her from behind and kissing the top of her head. He squeezed her one last time then stepped back to his own station. "So, what are your feelings on this? Any ideas how you would prefer to proceed?"

"Can we get me another phone?"

"Easily and immediately," he said. "You'd rather not address this? Getting another phone won't do anything to keep her from stealing it too." He folded the cheese blend into the hot pasta with the roux, letting the steam-heat from the pasta melt the cheese in place to a perfectly gooey consistency.

Taylor sighed, her shoulders still tense enough to sing like a plucked guitar string. "Maybe I should bring a roll of quarters to school."

"My best case scenario is that you don't get in fights," Danny said over his shoulder. "My second-best-case scenario is that you win. If this girl won't lay off you, and the administration isn't doing anything, maybe you need to just lay her out. We can weather the fallout if they want to suspend you. Hell, if they expel you that'll just expedite your transfer to Arcadia High."

Hot dogs started to hiss and sizzle, the skin blackening just enough for flavor before she pulled them off onto a serving plate. "I've thought about it. But I'm on a psych profile already, I'm on record as being the poor little traumatized girl who had a nervous breakdown. If I showed violent tendencies, even one time, even in the face of outrageous provocation, they could claim that I'm a danger to the other students and that I shouldn't be in Winslow or Arcadia, or that I should be drugged up."

Danny paused, turning the heat down. "Crap. I want to say that's ridiculous, but you know these people and this situation better than I do. You really think they'd go to those kind of lengths just to keep from admitting that they've got a bullying problem with these girls?"

Taylor snorted. "The administration has never taken anyone's side but theirs until we had a court order, and even then they've tried to circumvent it. Yeah."

Silence reigned for a minute while Danny started ladeling the macaroni and cheese onto a couple of plates and she pulled out mustard and relish and ketchup. He sighed again, and said "If I wasn't completely booked up these next two days I'd come sniffing around to see if I can find anything weird. Maybe something I could overhear at the school, or something in the records I could find."

"I appreciate the sentiment that you want to help," Taylor said. "But it is a little creepy that your Plan A is to bug my school with rats." She laid out slices of sandwich bread and he put a couple on his plate, using them in place of buns and started dressing them with ketchup and mustard.

He dished her some macaroni while she held her own plate out, then covered the dish and turned the heat off. "Maybe it is a bit creepy," he admitted. "Okay, tomorrow I'll get you a new phone and I'll hand that off to you this time tomorrow. Hopefully Sophia will back off of you for a couple of days, she'll be satisfied with taking your phone and leave well enough alone until I can help out."

"Maybe," Taylor said mildly. "Okay, but enough about that, there's been a question burning on my mind all day now. Why the heck did you back off of the mayor's case? You said this morning that you hit an enormous brick wall." She took a bite and carried her plate to the table.

"He looked me right in the eye and told me that he would give up his job and everything he had before he would answer even one question about that money," Danny said. "Even go to prison. The guy was really, really adamant that there was nothing as important to him as not answering that question. And since all I have is a suspicious paper trail, I don't have any leads unless he gives me a lead."

Her eyes were wide as she stared at him. "Okay, yeah, that's a big damn brick wall. What the hell?"

"Barry thinks it's got something to do with his family. The mayor is power-hungry and corrupt, but the single most important thing with him, at all ever, is his family. It's like the only virtue the man has, he puts his family first in everything."

His daughter's stare had turned incredulous. "So, you know that the issue has something to do with his family, and you think that's a brick wall? That sounds to me like it's your next lead."

"What?" Danny said. "I can't bring the man's family into this. It's indecent. What would I do, how would I feel if someone involved you in Wharf Rat business?"

She scoffed aloud. "First of all, if his family is the lead then he brought them into this, not you. They are the issue, not the exception to the issue. And secondly, you getting into their business does not make it any more or less likely that someone would involve me. That's not sensible. Now, leaning on the mayor is the best way to help the whole city. You have a lead, something that doesn't match, and you know that it has to do with his family that is more important to him than anything. This is major leverage, this is the sort of thing you can use to move the whole city. You have to keep going."

"Damn, you're right," he said, holding a forkful of macaroni up with a thoughtful look on his face. "Okay, I wish I'd recognized this sooner, it might have made this factory deal go through easier."

Taylor shook her head. "Maybe, but it might have cheapened the accomplishment. You made a huge difference, all by yourself, with no leverage and no tricks." She took a bite, and so did he, and they chewed in silence for a while.

He cleared up after dinner while she crashed on the couch, turned on the television. With all the dishes in the dishwasher and the machine running, he went to the basement to get his costume. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and took a look at the current project. The plans he had acquired from Squealer's workshop were for something called a 'tunnel buggy', and it had been the original inspiration for the doombuggy that she and Skidmark had used to terrorize the Docks before he stopped them. It had eight tires, canted at angles inward and outward alternating. The body of it was jointed and segmented, flexing with the turn of the tires and balanced to bank into turns on a spindly network of straps and cords that put the vehicle's weight where it provided the best traction, capable of reaching freeway speeds and making hairpin turns. For best results he should be using hollow titanium rods with machined bevels, but oak and maple and balsa were acceptable substitutes and Danny had no intention of cannibalizing his bike for parts. The car was designed to run on a two-stroke motor the size of a suitcase with no emissions that was estimated to travel ten thousand miles between maintenance trips, but Danny did not have the machine shop he would need to make such a thing. Fortunately, he had the doodles in Squealer's margins, which included a pedal assembly for a bicycle or something similar that used a combination worm-screw/driveshaft to transfer the force of the pedals. The careless notes on it showed that it would let a cyclist reach speeds of about eighty miles per hour, but Danny knew that speeds that fast on a bike were stupidly unsafe. One small slip would kill the passenger. But it was a great replacement for the tunnel-buggy's superscience microengine. His rats were building all the components and laying them out in order. And this was his first time looking at the thing with his own eyes, his first time seeing it from a human perspective instead of a rat's eye view.

And he found himself very surprised by how small the thing was. It was three feet tall, most of that wheels, and only about nine feet long. It was big for a coffin but tiny for a car, even those Smart cars had more mass than the tunnel-buggy. The driver would lay flat on his belly like a sled, working a pair of control yokes like an aircraft. He was leaving out most of the electrical portions, his would not need a starter or even headlights. There was no trunk, but the underside of the cab had a cargo hold like a plane's, essentially dead space in the design that was needed for the balance and leverage to work, that could be made to hold a significant amount of whatever one could want. Like a dozen rats with a dozen cell phones, Danny thought to himself. As small as it was, it was perfect for riding on sidewalks and through alleyways. Or, he considered, through the storm drains.

He picked up his backpack, folded the mask and trenchcoat into it, and headed upstairs to his current bike, his mind buzzing with the possibilities.

First order of business for the Wharf Rat was to patrol the Docks thoroughly, hitting the entire border and not just the contested border. He spotted two fights and he sent a handful of rats to make a show of strength, to remind the fighters to back off. He spotted a young man on the side of the road, his car stalled out. He was dressed too well for this neighborhood and he was cursing as he tried to get his cell phone to work. He was surprised to see a pair of rats trotting down the sidewalk towards him, carrying a pair of quarters. A minute later he was at the payphone, calling a tow truck. He stopped at a copy place, and slipped into costume.

The clerk at the copy shop was surprised to see a superhero in full regalia walk through the door, moreso to see the hero set down a twenty-dollar bill. "I need some flyers," the hero said. His mouth didn't seem to move as he spoke, his face was immobile under the mask but his eyes were big and brown and expressive. "Or maybe business cards. Something cheap, I'm looking to cover a lot of distance. What's easier, a dozen pieces of paper or a dozen cards from cardstock?"

They went with the paper flyers, since cardstock was surprisingly expensive. They put together a simple message and laid out the pages, printed out eighty pages, and then cut them into quarters. Three-hundred and twenty slips of paper that reach read "If you see members of a gang or if they approach you, please call the Wharf Rat and leave a message. Keep the Docks safe, be the first line of defense," and underneath that was the phone number to the burner that Tattletale had given him. When he rode past the blocks that bordered against Empire Eighty-Eight territory and Coil's holdings, he sent out rats with those flyers and pushed them through mailslots and under doorframes, leaving the messages for shop owners and residents who were most likely to see something that he didn't.

After that, he stopped by a city-sponsored drug clinic. The place was rundown and in a bad neighborhood, but it was close by and it was better than nothing. He walked in, and again the receptionist at the front jumped at the sight of him. "Afternoon," he said. "I was hoping you guys had flyers, brochures, something like that. A lot of them."

The next hour he spent in the Merchants' territory, cleaning the place out. The supervillains were locked up, all that was left was the junkies and indigents that had hung onto them and comprised their gang. These were the people that poverty hit hardest, the ones that lost themselves to drugs entirely or who spent so much time on the streets that they went feral. In large numbers they could be dangerous with the sort of savagery that only desperation can give someone. The ones that were armed got disarmed, the ones with contraband had it stolen away. There was nowhere they could hide or stash their drugs that he wouldn't find in minutes. Baggies were torn open and flushed away, but he did not mess with any of their other possessions. He simply left a brochure for the rehab clinic with each nest of struggling junkies in place of their poison, and he moved on. He could easily sink the rest of his life into trying to help just a few of these people, and he needed to budget his time and attention better than that, so he moved on.

He got home late, and had just enough time to see Taylor off to bed before he crashed out himself.