Sunday dawned dank and dim, low-hanging overcast that threatened rain but never really came through. It was a great day for staying home and hanging out with his daughter. But as a precaution, Danny rode a couple miles from the house and assembled Tattletale's phone, and checked it for messages.

"Today is the day, Wharf Rat. Crusader is visiting a woman and her two children in their apartment. Do not harm the woman or children at all. Crusader will not flee the scene, he thinks you are there to assassinate the family not him, so he will stand to protect them. And if you take him out, captured or killed, our agreement is satisfied and you will have my lasting promise not to interfere in the Docks or their people in any way." And then there was an address, with an apartment number on the penthouse level, one of those high-rises that has four penthouse apartments instead of just one.

Danny sighed as he packed his things. "Sorry Taylor, I thought this was going to be our day. But I've got all this week to myself. It can be just like old times all this week, if you like."

She twisted at the soda bottle in her hand. "I think I'd like that. It's been kinda hard to get time with you lately," she said.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry this takes me away from us. I've missed you, baby."

"Missed you too," she said, hugging him. "Now, it's a promise. I get you from the time I come home from school until I go to bed, Monday through Friday. No disappearances and no patrols during those hours. Do hero stuff during the day then come home to hang out, or sleep while I'm gone and do hero stuff all night, I don't care."

"Promise," he said, and gave her a hug back. "Now then, I've gotta go beat up a white-supremacist supervillain in a downtown condo without hurting any bystanders. Wish me luck."

"Luck," she said, grinning, and he jogged out the door. A dozen juvenile rats were waiting for him at the end of the driveway, and he surreptitiously paused to let them scramble up his legs and into his cargo pockets. Ten minutes later they were loaded into the cargo hatch of the tunnel-buggy, and he was riding away.

The building was impressive. It was expensive, but tastefully understated in a way that appealed to people who had enough money that they didn't need to worry about how much things cost, but didn't want to be associated with tacky displays of wealth. It was modern, with classical elements like a doorman and a concierge. But both the doorman and the concierge were armed. And in the mechanical room, there was a technician working hard to find out why the building had lost power entirely, making little headway. Twenty stories up, Crusader was holed up with a woman, a teenager, and an infant. The apartment was virtually filled with Crusaders, his ghost duplicates with their helmets and capes, shields and spears. They marched or floated, investigating every room and every entrance. The windows were closed up tight and the blinds were shut, and the doors were well guarded. The phantom warriors floated up into the ceiling and poked their head into the vents, making sure that those entrances were empty as well.

They didn't step outside the apartment, lest the neighbors realize that notorious supervillain Crusader was on the premises, but they guarded it from the inside as much as possible. Each of the phantoms was just as solid or not as it chose, effectively invulnerable, able to stick a spear into an enemy and then turn it solid long enough to penetrate any armor and kill any foe. They could fly, even carrying Crusader himself to fly him away. They were each as intelligent as himself, and he was somewhat aware of everything they saw and heard and thought. He could address threats from any number of directions, and destroy nearly any attacker. In many ways he combined all the strengths of the Wharf Rat and Lung. If Kaiser had deliberately picked the one Empire soldier that Wharf Rat would be most hard-pressed to defeat, he would have picked Crusader.

The building was a fortress against conventional threats, and Crusader's ghosts were sticking their heads into walls to see if anything crawled through the insulation or the ceiling panels. Justin himself was in plainclothes, leaning against the kitchen counter with no regard for the phantoms packed so tightly that one could not help standing inside one of them. Kayden Anders stood in front of him, her arms crossed and her brow furrowed in a glare. The conversation was undercut by a long, constant droning of a baby's wail. "You have to give me one room, Justin. I can't stop Aster crying until she's got a room of her own without your warriors shoving themselves into everything."

Justin raised an eyebrow. "Kayden, they're coming now. I can't clear a room. I can't leave a corner. Have you read about this Wharf Rat? He beat Lung in front of his men, made him crawl away like a baby, and then after the gang fell apart he took Bakuda and Lung out at the same time, brought the building down on them. They never found Oni Lee, maybe he got away. But if something like Oni Lee runs away and doesn't come back, he knows something we don't know. Taking out the Fifth Street Merchants isn't a big deal, but he did it in five minutes during rush hour like it was nothing. This guy, he susses out weaknesses, he sees everything. If I give him one opportunity to get in, he's getting in. I have to be everywhere, and I have to watch everything. If I give you a room where Aster is comfortable, that's exactly where he's going to come in."

Kayden sighed. "It's been three hours, Justin. If not her room, can I have a room? Maybe the bathroom, it's away from the windows and exterior doors." She brushed a limp brown lock back behind her ear. Three hours without power, the apartment was getting pretty stuffy and humid.

"No way," Justin said. "Rats can swim up pipes, the bathroom is the least safe room in the apartment. Look, maybe you can put her in the middle of the room, and I'll surround the sides to keep the walls clear, and check the floor for crawlspaces. But I have to keep people on the vents. If that's good enough, I can get you a space for a while. But not much, and not long. If he gets past my perimeter, I want to guarantee I've got a shield between you and anything else."

She leaned back and grimaced. "Paranoid?"

"I've been hearing tiny sneaky claws in the vents for an hour. And something metallic, I think chains. Sometimes electronic beeping. I peek out the windows and I see lasers sweeping around from the next rooftop. We're boxed in by snipers while he invades the building. Do you know how he took out the Merchants? With a bomb he stole from Bakuda. He stole bombs from Bakuda, the tinker mad-bomber. And now he's decided to cut the Empire in half. If he takes you out, Geoff and Dorothy will walk away, and that's three of the biggest hitters in the Empire gone, four including me," he said.

She looked up at the lights, still dim and dark. "Damn this power outage. He has to be behind that too," she sighed. The day was dark and overcast, no sunlight for her to charge up. She had halogen lights stored around for emergencies, but they didn't run on batteries. She was powerless right now, there was no charge left over from yesterday's sun. "He had his rats chew through the cables or something."

"Paranoid?" he mirrored back at her, smiling.

"Fine," she said. "One room, one hour. I just need to get her to stop crying so she can eat something."

Aster had finally stopped crying, five minutes later, while Justin and Theo looked at each other from opposite sides of the kitchen island. "Ice cream's gonna melt," Justin pointed out.

"I'm okay," Theo said cautiously.

"What, healthy boy like you?" Justin said, smirking at the overweight boy. "Sure you want some ice cream before it melts."

The phone rang, and Theo jumped back. Justin picked it up. "Anders residence," he said pleasantly.

"Let's speak quietly and civilly, shall we?" said the voice on the other side of the line. "Wouldn't want the baby to get upset again."

Justin snarled, and glared at Theo, jerking his thumb to tell the boy to leave. The round-faced teenager fled, and Justin turned back to the phone. The Wharf Rat had casually mentioned the baby just to prove to him that he could get close, that his rats were close already, and that Justin's precautions were useless.

"Wharf Rat?"

"The same. Crusader?"

"Indeed. What do you want?"

"I want you to go to the window, and look outside, down at the sidewalk."

Justin, the Crusader, did just that, parting the blinds an inch for a second. "Lots of people down there."

"Lots of Miss Anders' neighbors down there. We've evacuated the building, except for your building," the Wharf Rat said.

"How did you find us?" Crusader demanded.

"Every organization has a rat. I specialize in rats," the other voice said.

Crusader paused, thinking hard. "Shit, Victor," he grunted. "Fine, I'll just grab Kayden and the kids and fly right out of here," he retorted.

"Going where? Where that I won't find you? Where are you going to land without getting attention?" the Wharf Rat countered. "A safehouse? A rendezvous?"

Justin turned in place, running a hand through his hair. "I won't let you put her in jail. She needs that kid, the kid needs her. It won't happen. Even if you bomb out this whole building, I'll figure something out."

"You sound like a man with a purpose," the Wharf Rat said. "And that's a dangerous sort of man. But, maybe a reasonable sort of man?"

Justin paused, his eyes flicking from side to side. "What are you thinking, Rat?" he snarled.

"I'll give her a pass. Her and the kids. I'll back off, and never come back to this place. Not just safe today, but from this point forward."

"Why would you do that?" Crusader demanded.

"Because I won't leave here empty-handed. Because I understand mothers and children. Because men like you can face prison far more easily than she can," the Wharf Rat said, his voice even.

"I... dammit," Crusader muttered, glancing around. "If I go, there's nobody to.." he tapered off, his voice fading. He glanced around. His phantoms were watching over Kayden and Aster, even Theo. If he made the wrong move today, everything was lost. If he made the right move, there was a shot for the future. He picked up a pen and carried it to Kayden's refrigerator, adding a note to her grocery list. 'Car Batteries'. He sighed. "Okay. I'll turn myself in. And your word as a man that you won't ever come back here."

"Done," the Wharf Rat said. "Downstairs, to the PRT van, and we can talk there, face to face."

The ghostly warriors vanished, all at once. Kayden looked up from the baby, startled, and she poked her head out of the bedroom just in time to see the front door swing closed. Crusader stepped out into the hall and saw nothing out of place except for a large cardboard box on a trolley in the hallway, at the junction of the four hallways leading to the four penthouse apartments. He stared at it, wondered what sort of bomb it had in it. Then he got on the elevator and rode it down. It did not stop at all, there was nobody else in the building. He could smell wet fur in the narrow cab, as if the elevator had been used to ferry thousands of rats up and down the building all through the morning. The elevator dinged and the doors opened, he stepped out with his hands behind his head. A PRT containment team was parked at the curb with the back doors of their van standing open. They waved him through, and he stepped from the street to the step and up into the back of the van, seating himself on a bench. He cooperated as the team fitted him with a shock collar and a monitor, he would be knocked unconscious instantly if he tried to form his ghostly duplicates. Then they sprayed him with containment foam as a final measure, rather unnecessarily. He was covered to his neck with the spreading, hardening foam.

He sat in place, visions of his freedom flitting through his mind. He was going to the Birdcage, he knew it. If they only charged him with things they could prove he did, he had earned the superhuman prison four or five times over. Outside the van was a low conversation of murmurs, and then a man stepped up the back ramp and took a seat opposite Crusader. The man was tall and lean, almost lanky, with a brown featureless mask and clear lenses over the eyes. He wore a functional outfit of brown and tan, with a tan overcoat to his ankles and a loop of chain wrapped around his torso like an ammo belt. The Wharf Rat looked at Crusader, silently for a few seconds, then he spoke.

"You did a noble thing today," the Wharf Rat said.

"It's a noble intention, at least," Crusader said. "I'm trusting you to keep your word. This has to be more than a gesture, I want you to leave them alone."

"I can promise that easily," the Wharf Rat answered him. "I have no idea who those people are. I was just after you. I'm probably never coming back to this building."

"Just me?" Crusader said, slumping back. "You know that... that actually makes it better. Thank you."

"I'm sorry that I tricked you into thinking I was after the woman and her children," Wharf Rat said. "It was underhanded of me."

Crusader tried to shrug. "It was. But every man winds up sometime asking himself if he would sacrifice himself for others. Not even for love, but for respect. And I've got my answer: when the chips are done I do the right thing. That tells me a lot about myself."

"Philosophical," Wharf Rat said. "I don't think I will be able to visit you, nor would it be appropriate. But, maybe one day you'll get a letter when I get my own answer to that question."

"I'd shake your hand, but that's out of the question," Crusader said. "Now get out of here, right now I'm in shock but in a few minutes I'm going to be blindingly pissed off at you."

Wharf Rat stepped out of the van and watched as two of the PRT soldiers stepped into the back to guard him while the others buttoned up the back and secured it, then drove off. In his earpiece, his daughter's voice came in. "Okay, I'm curious how you pulled that off. Explain it to me."

"What is there? I spent three hours laying out psychological warfare, isolating the target and giving him noises to jump at, getting him to speculate what my plans were until he was sure I was a mastermind. The tension turned them against each other and undercut his nerve even more. Then I called him up and gave him a way out. More to the point, I gave him a brave way out. I kept emphasizing that he was a man, and should do what men do, then I gave him a way to protect the woman and kids. He's old-fashioned enough for that to work." He walked away, ducking into alleys to lose sight of anyone that may be watching.

"That's really low."

"It is. But even worse, it's the kind of trick that only works once. He'll talk to someone before his trial, he gets phone calls and all that stuff. Word will be out right away that I'm a tricky jerk who will bluff someone to get them to surrender. From here on out, I'm going to have to fight it out for real. No more easy wins for me."

"Maybe you should have held that trick in reserve then," Taylor proposed.

"Nah, this was the right time for it," he said. "I'm still a bit of a mystery figure around here, but as more information became available it would be harder to bluff someone like Crusader." He wasn't sure if he was explaining to her or convincing himself. He slipped down a manhole and into the storm drains, walking the tunnels to the spot he'd left the tunnel buggy. For two hundred yards in either direction, he could see and sense every rat as if they were extensions of his own body. Their position, their facing, everything they perceived. It gave him a mental map of the tunnels that was second to none.

He slotted himself in, and fit his feet to the pedals before he shut the door. He started pushing, his feet tracing and elliptical track that turned the crankshaft almost frictionlessly and drove the eight tires. He barely worked up a sweat, the buggy was easier to push than his bicycle. His breath came through evenly, only a bit deeper than his resting respiration. And yet he could tell that he was moving with shocking speed, enough so that he should probably be glad that he could not see for himself. The lack of a windshield may be to his advantage in the end.

Shortly before noon he was underneath the mayor's home, sending up a special cadre of rats. The juveniles whose minds he could more easily access had been brought with him, and half of them went up through the tunnels of the home. The house was large and ranging, shot through with crawlspaces and maintenance hatches and steam tunnels and and gaps between radiator pipes and the floorboards. Practically a freeway for rats. He positioned the juveniles in the house, the generation raised in his influence, and had them monitor the comings and goings below, staying out of sight but paying attention to what they saw and heard and smelled. The other rats in the region brought them food at need, and he had them lay down pheromones to reinforce that behavior. It took some doing to balance it all and double-check his results. Then he moved on to the next address on his list, the mayor's aging parents in an upscale retirement home. It took a little time to arrange the rats there, to get them to only watch over the particular residents that he was interested in. And finally the mayor's sister, living in an upper-middle-class house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with a picture of domestic bliss, one husband one daughter one dog. One of these places had the key to the mayor's secret, the mystery of the mission one-point-nine million dollars.

Then he looped himself around and headed for the business district downtown, looking for an office building with plenty of computers left logged on over the weekend. He wound up back at the engineering company he had visited before for information on Mayor Christner and Lung, but today he was researching Shadow Stalker. He ran into a lot of roadblocks, a lot of missing information. It was common for the PRT to do that for the Wards, to keep their families safe, but this seemed excessive. They were masking a lot more information than usual. That was pretty inconvenient. He turned north and pedaled off, through the tunnels to the Docks.

The district seemed more subdued than usual, people were moving along the sidewalks with their heads down, there was tense silence in their homes. Conversations were more terse and abrupt, there were more sudden silences. More of the houses smelled of fear, and he saw more people watching the dark corners suspiciously. "Shit," he sighed.

"What's up Dad?"

"It's the Docks. This place looks like Soviet Russia during the gulag years. I haven't seen or heard anyone smiling or laughing since I got here."

"What? Why?"

"Because of me, Taylor," he said sadly. "Because I arranged a police occupation yesterday. Because of two-thousand arrests. Because I violated people's privacy en masse to find the criminals among them. Right now everyone's scared of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing. They're scared they'll step out of line and I'll catch them," he rolled to a stop, and folded his arms and braced his chin on top of them. "Not everyone here had someone they know get arrested. But everyone has someone they know that knows someone who was arrested. People want the rapists and murderers busted, but I went after drunk drivers and drug dealers too, and that's just too big a job. And I went too far, I got people in their homes. I've lost their trust. They were happy when I got rid of Lung and Skidmark, but now they think I'm just as bad."

"Maybe next time you go law-dog in a big way, you stick with violent crimes and major crimes," Taylor suggested. "If you do that a couple times, they should see that first time as an anomaly. Give them a chance to learn to trust."

"Meh. Maybe I should just quit out this entire idea of holding the Docks and protecting them. I've already got Empire promising not to move in on it, the Merchants are gone, the ABB is gone. If I just quit patrolling and join the Protectorate full time, everyone will be fine here."

"Are you sure you don't want to finish what you started with the ABB first? Or maybe take out the Undersiders or Travelers just to be on the safe side?"

"Funny."

"I know. But really though, you've had the Docks for two weeks. You worked hard up to this point, maybe you could enjoy a week's worth of patrolling a peaceful territory," Taylor said. "You've earned it. And besides, you need to put in your two-weeks notice at work before you join the Protectorate."

"Are you talking me out of it?"

"No, I'm saying that once you join you're in. You won't ever be the rogue hero, the vigilante again. Make sure you get what you want from it before you walk away from it forever."

Danny chuckled. "You've been listening to me too much."

"Maybe," his daughter retorted. "But waiting three weeks before you make a lifetime commitment is not too much to ask."

He considered it. "You're a smart kid, Taylor. Okay, I'm heading home. Let's have a chill evening together, and a normal week as a family."


Monday at noon, Danny was scowling as he let himself out of the tunnel-buggy. "This was supposed to be a quiet week," he grumbled in his mask. Taylor was at school, so there was nobody listening in on his bluetooth and he was talking to himself. He climbed a ladder to a manhole and let himself out onto the back alleyway. The far end of the alley was illuminated by strobing red and blue lights from around the corner, and he approached those lights with his hand resting on the strap of the cooler that was over his shoulder.

The scene was a mess, the Central Bank of Brockton Bay with police tape spread all around, broken glass everywhere, shattered furniture inside and a dozen officers interviewing witnesses outside. The PRT had pushed the SWAT trucks further back, and the Protectorate was on the scene. Wharf Rat walked up alongside Miss Militia, the second-in-command of the Protectorate East-North-East team. "Afternoon," he said to her, and she whirled in place with a huge nickel-plated revolver in her hand. Wharf Rat stared at her a second, then raised his hands. "Looks like a bank robbery to me," he prompted.

"You're the Wharf Rat," she said, holstering the weapon. As soon as her hand was off of it, it turned itself into a knot of green-and-black energy and swirled around, transforming briefly into a grenade pinned to her uniform and then a rifle slung across her back. When she spoke it puffed against the American-flag bandanna she wore on the bottom half of her face.

He nodded. "I am. Have you eaten? It's about lunch time and you've been busy." He opened the cooler and handed her a sandwich wrapped in clear plastic.

"Thank you," she said in her accented voice. "Armsmaster has told us about your assistance before." She unwrapped the sandwich and raised it behind her bandanna, managing to eat while masked much more efficiently than Danny had ever learned to do.

"I was surprised that he's not here," Wharf Rat said, looking around.

She snorted. "Back in his lab. We've got you to thank for that, by the way, he used to be last to leave every crime scene and now he's spending more time coordinating from the rear than leading from the front. Anyway, the Undersiders hit the bank about an hour ago, fought the Wards, escaped, and now we're left with nothing but a humiliating debacle."

"Undersiders?" Danny scowled again. "I made a promise to Tattletale that I wouldn't snoop around them or follow them to their hideout. If I'd known this was an Undersider operation I wouldn't even have come. Sorry, I can't help you with this."

"You talked to Tattletale? You could have intel we don't have, and that might not break your agreement. And," Miss Militia considered, "can you help us with Circus as well? She was with them, and if you didn't promise her anything, you may still be able to help."

"Let's walk while we talk," Wharf Rat said, patting his cooler. The two of them walked to where Assault and Battery were sorting through a huge pile of broken glass. He handed them a sandwich each, which they took after a nod from Miss Militia. "Tattletale is a thinker, definitely. I think her power is that she can guess really well. She's not entirely accurate or entirely reliable, she's slipped a few times, but she knows a hell of a lot more than she should. And she's a gifted cold-reader, she can Sherlock Holmes you right there where you stand. She's tight lipped, doesn't give up many secrets of her own. Bitch apparently turns regular dogs into giant monsters. The four of them travel by bounding on rooftops, sometimes banking off of walls and stuff like it was parkour. The dogs smell like a ton of raw meat, slightly rotten, after she's grown them."

"Bitch?" Miss Militia repeated, puzzled, before she put it together for herself. "Oh, Hellhound."

"They're kids," Wharf Rat said, handing a wrapped sandwich to Velocity and another to Dauntless. "Sixteen or so, I'd guess. They should be in schools. Bi- Hellhound has a real problem with authority, it would be easy to wedge her out of the group. I haven't met the other two. And when I was chatting with them, I asked if they reported to someone else or if they were leading themselves. Bi- Hellhound, sorry again, responded with "f you, f him, and f this" before she tore out of there. So they've got a patron, male, who is causing some friction in their group."

"We suspected there was someone else," Miss Militia said. "They are kids, like you said, and small-timers at that, but when they came together they suddenly became a lot more effective than they'd been before. And a lot of what they do seems more big-picture than we should expect from them. But what you've given us already helps us."

Wharf Rat zipped his cooler shut. "What happened here? The witnesses look really, really freaked out, even for a bank robbery."

"What do you know about the Undersiders?" Dauntless asked, from Danny's other shoulder.

"Not a lot. Power breakdowns, relative timeline, I've probably forgotten some details," the taller older man said.

Dauntless shook his head and blew out a frustrated breath. "Every villain you fight will feel different, especially villain teams. Fighting the Empire Eighty-Eight, for example, feels like a car crash that keeps going on and on. Kaiser and Hookwolf put sharp metal everywhere and you have to keep moving, keep dodging to stay ahead of it. Rune throws garbage trucks at you, or chunks of building the same size, everything shakes, it's unbelievably loud, incredibly disorienting. Fenja and Menja feel like they're always right behind you, three stories tall and armed to the teeth. Othala always has Viktor on super-speed or pyrokinesis or some other power, and with Krieg everything happens too fast and you can't even draw a breath. Like a car crash, right at the moment of impact, over and over and on and on. Got it? Now, fighting the Undersiders isn't like that. It's like a nightmare, or a horror movie. What happens in a horror movie? It's dark and you can't see, there's something huge and terrible chasing you, you're in the worst possible place, and then suddenly you can't run anymore because your legs don't work. Grue, Hellhound, Tattletale and Regent. Thanks to their thinker, everything goes wrong for us and goes right for them. Thanks to their shaker, you're blind and worse than blind, also deaf and dizzy and confused. One of their masters sends a giant skinless monster after you, and the other one makes your leg go the wrong way so you fall down, or your hand opens so you drop your weapon. It doesn't feel like fighting four teenagers, it feels like your nightmares all came to life all at once," he finished, and looked around. "Fighting them is not a job for the Wards. And it certainly is too much for civilians caught in the middle of all this."

Wharf Rat considered that. "Hmm. Too bad you can't turn that on them."

Miss Militia and Dauntless shared a glance. "What do you mean?"

"Well, not the Protectorate. You guys have a speedster, two speedster-slash-scrappers, two blaster and a blaster-slash-scrapper, and a tinker who mostly acts as a scrapper. You guys are more like the car crash that just goes on and on, over and over. But the Wards? They could be a nightmare like the Undersiders. Aegis's power is basically just Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. Shadow Stalker is the enemy that is always behind you, or above you, or around the corner. Gallant literally can shoot fear at people. Vista is the hallway that never seems to end, the ground that trips you when you run. Clockblocker is every door that can't be opened and every window that can't be broken. Browbeat isn't just a hitter, he's also a biokinetic, I'm sure he can put on a very scary face. Kid Win is a tinker, and tinkers can be anything at all."

Dauntless chuckled. "It's an interesting idea. But our PR guys would ... object strenuously if we suggested terrifying villains into surrendering by emulating horror movies. And also, we'd pretty much have to get the Undersiders in a trap, and they've never fallen for anything like that before."

Danny shrugged. "Well, it was only half an idea, no worries. Sounds like a much better plan would be 'divide and conquer'. Their tactics fall apart with the loss of any one member of their group."

Miss Militia idly examined the clip of her semi-automatic handgun. "Well, you're in the best position to make that happen, since you're on speaking terms with them."

Danny barked a laugh. "I'm hardly on speaking terms. Still, maybe I could try something. Until I officially apply for the Protectorate, I've got some leeway you guys don't have."

"Careful with that leeway," Dauntless said, a bit sternly. "That leeway is the middle ground in between being an official hero and being an official villain, and it can be narrower than you think. Once you start taking unsanctioned action, your next step is unsanctionable actions. Stuff that runs against policy tends to be stuff that is against the law. It's hard to pull back once you've gone too far."

Visions of Shadow Stalker flashed through Danny's eye, but he kept his voice as level as he could when he answered. "Yeah, I get that. I'll be careful."

"Besides," Miss Militia added, "the city's going to be a bit more dangerous for a while anyway. Empire Eighty-Eight just rejoined, Purity and Night and Fog just announced to their gang that they're back on Kaiser's side. Those are some very serious heavy hitters and you should stay out of their way." She turned and walked away with Dauntless, and Danny was left on his own to come to grips with the fact that he had driven the Empire back together, jump-started their allegiance and helped Kaiser recapture some very big talents.

"Shit," he muttered, and walked away.

He got back in the tunnels and rode on, his mind working the whole situation through. He wanted to tell Miss Militia that it was his fault that Purity was back with Kaiser, but would unburdening his sins on her help them at all? It wouldn't make him feel better, it wouldn't help the Protectorate trust him. Though, if they found out later and he didn't tell them, they would trust him even less than if he volunteered the information. But could he even really be certain that it was his fault? Well, yeah, Kaiser had said almost exactly that. Though it had not been clear that the woman being schemed back into Kaiser's arms was actually Purity, he would not have agreed if he had known it was someone like that. His brain was boiling with questions, second-guessing, alternative theories. He cut off a line of circular recriminations and looked for solutions. He couldn't very well affect the situation directly. Kaiser would see it as a direct threat. And Danny had foolishly promised Crusader that he wouldn't go after the woman or her kids. So, there was no point to telling the Protectorate about his role in it, they would just want to know how to get to Purity to bring her in and he couldn't tell them that. Just like he had promised Tattletale he wouldn't snoop around the Undersiders. He needed to stop making that sort of promise, it became very limiting very quickly. He was handicapped on two sides because he was hasty making promises.

But maybe he could offset the troubles he had caused. If he could disband the Undersiders, it could well cancel out the harm of having Purity rejoin the Empire. If he could convince Bitch to leave, their chemistry would fall apart and they would lose most of their effectiveness. Better even if he could get Bitch to make the others leave their patron, and go back to small-time crimes. The best of all would be if he could convince them to go straight and join the Wards. But he was hardly holding his breath for that option.

He could attend to that soon, he had something else to do first. He applied the brakes gently, and brought the buggy to a stop under the Mayor's mansion. He peeked in, and saw the place in an uproar. His wife was on the phone haranguing someone, his college-aged son was home leaning on the counter next to his mother and trying to calm her down. The young daughter would be in school right now. This was about what he had expected to find in the man's home, on the day that the central bank of the city, a foundation of the city, was robbed. He was very glad that he had been negotiating with a different bank than this for the Dockworkers deal. He would have been livid if the deal had fallen through after the papers were signed because the Undersiders robbed the place. Contracts like that tended to have "act of god" clauses that could shut the whole project down on occasions like this.

The juvenile mice he had planted here, his own generation, reported back nothing unusual. The wife had been on the phone for a long time, shouting at the bank president who was not telling her anything she wanted to hear. From what Danny was able to pull together, the Undersiders had gotten into the safe-deposit boxes, and Mrs. Christner was very very worried about what they might have found. The son had come home an hour before, in a great hurry, at her insistence, and was trying to calm her down to no avail ever since then.

Only three or four miles away, he paused again and checked in on the mayor's parents. They were both apparently blissfully unaware of current events, and were playing some sort of virtual bowling game. It looked fun. Danny moved on. When he got to the mayor's sister's house, he was shocked to find it even more disarrayed than the mayor's own home. The sister was crying uproariously, and her husband looked like he wanted to join in but he bravely held on and held her to him, stroking her back as she worked it out of her system. Danny checked in with the generation, and the smarter rats opened their memories to him, showing him men in black with guns that kicked in the door and grabbed the daughter, wrestling her out the door to a van waiting outside. The rats did not remember the license plate number, but Danny knew that would have been asking far too much.

He moved the rats back to observation mode, and he pulled out Tattletale's phone. One call to Kaiser first.

"Kaiser, this is the Wharf Rat."

"Our business should be concluded. The tinker will deliver your payment when it is ready."

"Ah, yeah, this is different. Listen, Mayor Christner's niece was just kidnapped by stormtroopers. I need to make sure it has nothing to do with you or your people before I move forward investigating this. I don't want to break my word or step on the wrong toes."

"No, it has no bearing on my business. But I appreciate your foresight and candor."

"Likewise. Sorry for interrupting your day," Wharf Rat said, hanging up the phone. Then he called over to Tattletale herself. "Hey, Tattle, it's the Rat."

"Hey, Ratman, how's it going?" There was loud music in the background, something triumphant. More like teen runaways on a good day than the stuff of nightmares.

"It's about that promise I made you, I wanna make sure I'm not breaking my word to you if I start checking out a kidnapping here in midtown. I'm pretty sure it's not related, since you guys were robbing a bank, but I'd hate to track this thing for a week and find out it was you guys all along."

"No worries, Ratman, we don't do kidnaps. You just solve that case and stay off the robbery, okay?"

"Not a problem," he said. "Congratulations on your score, and take it easy."

This was not the day to talk to Bitch about leaving the team, that was for certain. He disassembled the phone and tucked it into the buggy's cargo hold, then climbed out and found a ladder up. In this neighborhood there were no alleyways, he came up in the middle of the street and replaced the lid. He dusted himself off and walked up to the front door, ringing the doorbell. He stood back from the door, folded his hands in front of him to look nonthreatening and helpful. He made sure that no rats were visible in the area, on him or in the yard or anywhere nearby. It took a minute for Mr. Alcott to come to the door. The latch was still broken, the wood splintered around the lintels, and the man flinched as he pulled open his broken door.

"Mr. Alcott, I'm the Wharf Rat. Local hero, unaffiliated," Danny said, keeping his voice slow and soothing. "I want you to know that I'm on the case, looking for your daughter, and I'll be checking in to let you know what I've found. I don't want to make any promises, but I've got a good track record."

"Y-you're.. you're that guy from the Bust," Mr. Alcott gulped as if trying not to cry. He shot a glance over his shoulder. "Do you think you can find Dinah?"

Danny did not shift his posture, but he wanted to shrug. "I don't want to promise anything, but I want to tell you that I'm unusually well-equipped for this sort of situation. So, I want you to have more hope than you did before we spoke. Do you mind if I ask a couple questions?"

"Oh god, the police haven't even been here yet," Mr. Alcott said. "They wanted us to file a police report on their website, electronically. Apparently all their people are busy downtown."

"Bank robbery, it was a bad one," Danny nodded to commiserate. "Do you or your wife have any enemies?"

"Us? Enemies? Uh, there's a jerk at work, and she's got a feud with another member of the library committee, but that's all," Mr. Alcott said.

"What about Dinah, does she have any enemies?" Danny asked.

"Of course not, no," the man said, and Danny was surprised to find that was a lie. The rat in his jacket pocket could tell immediately.

"Sir?" Danny said politely. "If I know who Dinah's enemies are, I can rule out bad paths and find her faster. I've already ruled out over half the gangs and villains in the city, but you can help me if you tell me what you know."

The man paused, looked back at his wife, and lowered his voice. "She recently developed powers. She's a precog, a very good one. Good enough that I'm really surprised someone was able to grab her. She could be very valuable to the right people." He shuddered as he said it.

"Thank you Mr. Alcott," the Wharf Rat said. "I will call you when I have a lead, or news of any kind. Just wait here for the police to arrive and they'll take your statement in more detail." He turned and walked away, and Alcott watched him all the way to the manhole cover. He levered up the edge of the lid, lifted it a few inches, and the rats came pouring out. They swarmed over to where the van had been parked, sniffing and investigating for clues, and Alcott closed the door. Danny let himself down and replaced the lid while the rats started following the trail of the tires and exhaust, and other rats sniffed further up to memorize the scent of the girl and the stormtroopers who had grabbed her.

Meanwhile in the city, Coil was hanging up his phone. First Kaiser and then Tattletale had called to tell him that the Wharf Rat was investigating this case. Tattletale knew his plans, Kaiser had simply assumed Coil was behind it as he was the only local player who used paramilitary forces. Coil had given his power a workout already today, first orchestrating the bank robbery to make sure it was the biggest distraction possible, tying up the PRT for half a day and the local cops too. And immediately after that, navigating his troops to capture a particularly slippery precog who could see his moves in advance. Her power was to see all the probably outcomes, his power was to defy those very odds that she calculated. But he had forged and discarded dozens of alternate outcomes already this day, and now he found out that he had managed to leave a possibility for a local hero to expose his plans and steal his prize away. He needed to be stopped, and drastic measures were called for.

The Wharf Rat tracked faster than nearly any other, because he could mobilize his rats along both paths of a branching street or every turn of an intersection. He could approach an intersection and have three rats run to the street and smell for the particular truck he was looking for. Whichever the right answer was, he turned that direction and scouted out ahead. Every minute the trail was growing colder, picking out one truck on the streets was growing more difficult and becoming impossible. In the end he was really just trying to get a general direction so he could search more closely. If he could get a general area of the city, he could send his rats to sniff around for any trace of the girl or the men.

And he was doing particularly well here, in fact. The driver of the van had been doing everything right to deflect a tail, he had doubled back and circle around, he had pulled into parking lots for a few minutes to observe traffic and see if he was being followed. And that was the proper and professional way for black-bag operatives to drive their route from the job to the rendezvous, it was cautious and clever. But against a tracker that could identify a van by the degree of wear on the tires or the metal content of the exhaust pipe and the chemical signature of the last three fill-ups of gasoline, or the type of road grit wedged into the tread of the tires, it was really counterproductive. Especially against thousands of those trackers all networked together. Every backtrack let him catch up some more, every circle around let him cut the route short. Time they spent parked to make sure they weren't being observed was time their trail was getting warmer, not colder. And all of that was why he could tell that the trail they cut all the way down to the shantytowns at the south side of the city were just to lose a tail and secure their path before they circled back up to the northwest and headed for the west end of downtown, where he lost them eventually. Too many construction vehicles on the road, tracking chalk and gravel all over the road, covering the scent. But he had a district, he had a lead.

Now, he needed to get home to meet Taylor. He had lots of promises to keep.

When she opened the door, he was showered and in casual clothing, jeans and a button-up shirt. "Hey, Taylor," he said cheerfully. "I'm making burgers, are you going to want mushrooms on top of yours?"

"Yes please," she said, setting down her bag. "How was your day?"

"Hectic," he answered with a chuckled, shutting and locking the door. He turned back to the kitchen, to tend the burgers before they burned. He called out over his shoulder as she followed him, "but my issues can wait. Tell me about your day, first."

"Emma and Madison came back from their suspensions today," Taylor said. She sat down at the kitchen table and hooked an elbow over the chair back. "Madison looked like she spent the whole three days sunbathing. Emma acted like she spent the whole time thinking of new ways to humiliate me. She's trying to get me labeled as 'the crazy girl' and just make that my nickname and how people know me. She started leaving tampons and pads on top of my stuff, then getting rid of it and accusing me of seeing things. Lying about stuff and claiming I don't remember or that I'm hysterical. Gaslighting, basically. It's pretty insidious."

"And scummy," her father added. "Seriously, using the psychological trauma she deliberately inflicted on you as a way to discredit you, and use that to further punish you all over again? How do some people not realize that they're the bad guys? How does she justify this in her mind as being anything less than evil?"

"Relevant to issues that are close to you and your position," she pointed out. "Your current situation is pretty well fraught with moral quandaries that could have someone scratch their head and ask how you act with such moral certitude."

"Not really," Danny said easily, slicing some cheddar cheese while the meat sizzled. "I mean, I would like to bust the Undersiders for what they did at the bank today, but I did promise not to go after them. I made that promise so they would tell me how to protect the citizens of the Docks from the Merchants. I wound up reuniting Purity and her followers with Kaiser, but without Crusader they're not as strong as they would have been. And without me Kaiser might have found a way to bring her back and they would have been even stronger. I'm getting killers and poison-peddlers off the streets, and that is nothing but a net positive." He stirred the mushrooms around with the bacon, the mushrooms sweating out their moisture and absorbing the bacon fat.

Taylor toyed with a seam of her shirt, absently rolling it in between her fingers. "But for someone who is not trying to justify your actions, it looks different. You gave four villains immunity to take down two. You gave other villains immunity to take down one. You're making decisions about which villains are okay to be on the streets, and that's pretty close to condoning what they do."

"If I can weed the numbers down, it's easier for the other heroes to finish what I start," Danny pointed out. "I'm not actually responsible for the actions of every cape in the city."

"You're a little responsible for everyone that you interact with," she countered. "If you change their path, butterfly-effect, you've got a degree of culpability for what they do."

"And who could ever say what that is or is not?" Danny shrugged. "It's a cool philosophical point, but it really doesn't affect us in any meaningful way until we finally find the thinker that can calculate butterfly effect outcomes. So, what was Sophia doing during all this?"

"Well, she wasn't stealing my phone, so that's something," Taylor said with a shrug. "I think she's biding her time."

"I hope she bides for a long time," Danny said. "Hey, get out some plates and toast us some buns, this just has a few more minutes."

They were watching television together, munching pickles on her burger and black olives on his, a topping that always made her make a face, with mashed potatoes on the side. The show went to commercial, and was cut off with a breaking bulletin from the station's news program. "This just in, minutes ago this station received an email that details the private identities of every member of the Empire Eighty-Eight, the infamous white-supremacist villain gang here in Brockton Bay. This email was received by dozens of sources both local and national from an anonymous source. It lists Max Anders, president of the Medhall company, as being the infamous gang leader Kaiser, and his estranged wife Kayden as being Purity, the supervillain. This breaking story is crucial not only for its nearly-unprecedented breach of the unwritten rules of the parahuman world, but also for the revelation that such a powerful and influential businessman is also a crime lord and a neo-Nazi. Please stay tuned to this station for updates."

Taylor snuck a sideways glance at him. "Do you need to check your phone for messages?" she asked.

"It can wait," he said stoically. "I made you a promise, and I intend to keep it."

"Okay," she said, turning back to the television. Things were tense and weird, she declared that she was going to bed early, and went to brush her teeth. This was surely to relieve him of his promise so he could go engage in Wharf Rat activity, but he tried not to think about that as he got dressed and headed for the buggy. He was deep in the Docks when he assembled the Tattletale phone and listened to his messages.

"Wharf Rat, this is Kaiser. As a courtesy I am calling to tell you that there is to be a meeting of the various leading villains and gang leaders of the city, tomorrow night. You may call for a location if you choose to." His voice was icy and left a lot unsaid in the tone. He went to the next message.

"Ratman, it's Tattle. I don't know why you did this, but you shouldn't have. There's only two people in this city that could have pulled this information together, and I know it wasn't me. More to the point, everyone knows you're the one bucking for a job as a hero. They're having a meeting tomorrow at Somer's Rock, and if you know what's good for you, you'll stay the hell away from it. Tradition holds these things as meeting grounds, but those are the same traditions that you screwed the hell out of with this stunt, and they may think it's worth it to tear you apart." Her voice was rushed to get the whole message into the alloted time, but she made it.

He sighed, and dialed a number.

"Armsmaster."

"Hey friend, it's Wharf Rat."

"Jesus, man, what were you thinking? This is suicide!"

"Why does everyone assume it was me?" Danny protested. "It wasn't me, and I'll take your lie detector to prove it. But tonight the villains are having a big meetup to-"

"Don't tell me about it," Colin cut him off. "I don't want to know anything about it, I can't know anything about it. If any of us go anywhere near it, the villains will come after our families. This is one of the big taboos of the cape community, and you don't screw with those. Neutral ground at a conclave, don't reveal the secret identity, and don't go after people's families. They're all on the same page."

"So if people think that I sent that list of names to the news stations, they'll decide it's appropriate to go after my family?" he asked.

"Yes, yes they would," Armsmaster said.

"Shit. So, hey, how about some protective custody? My daughter and I, until this thing blows over."

"Wharf Rat, if you sent that list, you'll need protective custody from my teammates. This is dead serious, man, this is up there with the Endbringer truce. If someone set you up, they did not pull any punches at all. Look, either stay undercover, out of costume, don't use your powers... or find some way to prove your innocence. I can't bring you in until you do. This situation is radioactive, anyone involved is untouchable."

Danny sighed long and loud. "Okay, I'll resolve this. I'll be back with you guys shortly, don't worry." He hung up, dialed the first number back. "Kaiser, it's Wharf Rat."

"Ah. The rat. The sniveling, scheming, sneaking rat. To what do I owe the sublime pleasure?"

"I just wanted you to know that I will be in attendance tomorrow night. Somer's Rock, tomorrow."

"Excellent. We meet at noon."

"High noon, the duelist's hour?"

"This won't be a duel. It's just an hour that everyone has agreed upon. Now then, I have something important to do," and the line disconnected.

Danny started disassembling the phone. "Well, damn," he said, shaking his head. "This just keeps looking worse and worse."

He mapped out his path back home, and rode home with his thoughts in a whirl.


Author's note: I'll likely be crossposting this to sufficient velocity and spacebattles once it's compete, but until the last chapter is in it's only here. And thanks to the reviewer Lex Lurker who pointed out to me that FF was cutting out my formatting so my section breaks got lost, I've fixed it now. If anyone spots any more issues please let me know so I can fix them.