AN:This chapter owes a huge thank you to SlowMercury. It's not the first chapter that has been rescued (Clockblocker's was also much improved) but the subtle changes in this one really affected the tone of the story, so I wanted to express my gratitude. Thanks, SlowMercury!

Chapter Fourteen: Q&A

March 11, 2011

On Friday, Fi failed to show at school yet again, so Taylor logged onto PHO and sent a message to Contract. It took a long time to compose, especially after she remembered that outing a cape was illegal and there was a slight chance that Contract didn't know Shadow Stalker's secret identity. Taylor couldn't be sure that the Wards even unmasked to each other. So, finally she sent a cryptic PM:

Is everything okay? I've missed you at school. Even with my Stalkers gone, I find myself jumping at Shadows looking for Sophia and her gang. When are you coming back? I'd really like to talk to you about what's going on. There's no one else I can explain it all to. I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.

If Contract wasn't aware of Shadow Stalker's secret identity (or if Taylor herself was wrong, which didn't feel likely) then the message would seem a little odd. But she was hoping that Contract did know, and that she would catch the capitol "S"s on Stalkers and Shadows. Taylor couldn't bring herself to consider the Wards without first knowing what had been going on, so she had to try something. She got a reply back almost immediately.

I'm not coming back to school. We can meet up somewhere after you get out of class. I'm glad you're coming to me. You can tell me anything, and I will help however I can.

Taylor wasn't certain about the legality of exposing suspicions of a secret identity to an individual who probably already knew about it. Read a certain way, that last sentence could be an offer of amnesty regardless of the actual law. Or it could just be a reaction to Taylor's previous message. But Taylor wasn't about to back off now when her gut was urging her forward, and Contract had proven to be on her side thus far.

I think Sophia Hess might be Shadow Stalker.

The minutes before she got a reply stretched, and Taylor found herself glancing around the classroom nervously. Maybe putting that in writing, even on a private message board, had been a bad idea.

Regardless of the validity of that statement, Sophia Hess is currently being prosecuted to the full extent of the law. What difference would it make?

This is where things got even stickier. Fi hadn't out and out denied that Sophia had been a Ward, but Taylor couldn't really press the issue without exposing her own powers. It wasn't that she minded telling Fi, but telling a Ward might invoke protocols that Contract was legally obligated to obey.

How can you work with a team that ever included her?

We should have this conversation in person. Can you come down to the PRT base?

Yes.

Come after school. Contract immediately signed out of the chat.

After that, the classes dragged by. Taylor went over and over the conversation, picking apart every remembered detail. As she did so, she became more and more certain that Sophia was Shadow Stalker, and that Contract had known about it. Taylor thought back to her first interactions with Fi, and tried to figure out if there had been any sort of shift in Fi's behavior. Anything that would indicate she'd just been informed that she'd befriended the rival of a teammate. But if anything, Fi had been extremely suspicious of Sophia from the beginning and had believed Taylor's accusations without any prompting.

By the time school ended, Taylor was anxious for the meeting with Fi. She rode the bus down to the PRT stop, but realized as she was walking inside that she had no idea how to actually get ahold of Fi. Could she walk up to reception and ask to see Contract? She froze just inside the door, eyeing the gift shop, the people waiting in a small lounge area, and the unobtrusive guards. Before she could really start to evaluate a way forward, the elevator door opened, and Fi leaned out and waved to her, beckoning her to come in. Taylor crossed the lobby, feeling like everyone was watching them although no one was. She entered the elevator and watched as Fi pushed an unlabeled floor button and typed a code into a key pad before leaning in to have her retina scanned.

After this was finished, she wrapped an arm around Taylor in a loose hug. "How have you been?"

"Good. Much better. You?"

"I've had my ups and downs. Mostly ups, though." The elevator doors opened and Taylor jumped a little. She hadn't even felt them move. There was a long, pale corridor with doors on either side, spaced a good distance apart. Fi led her down the hall to one marked 405 and used a swipe badge to open the door. It was a lounge, complete with coffee bar and couch. Fi ushered her in and shut the door.

"The nice thing about living in a base is that everything is soundproofed to prevent accidental eavesdropping. I could take you down to the Wards' base, but Clockblocker and Kid Win are coming in when school lets out and I sort of got the impression you needed to chat, just the two of us."

Fi sat down in an armchair across from the couch that Taylor had chosen. "Let me start by saying that it is normally illegal to confirm or deny the secret identity of any registered hero, and especially so in the case of a minor. That being said, I have convinced Armsmaster and then Legend that in your case, we need to make an exception. But before I can say anything, either way, I need you to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Technically, it covers both the information you asked about earlier today, as well as my two names."

Fi laughed as she pulled the papers out of the drawer in the coffee table. "They weren't pleased with my decision to trust you with my name without getting you cleared first. They were especially upset when they realized you'd had the information for more than two weeks and hadn't signed any papers yet. I trust you, so normally I'd tell them to take their documents and jump in a lake, but we compromised. They gave me a waiver for you to have full discloser on the situation with Sophia Hess, as long as a put a legal bow around the whole thing and threw in my name for good measure. So there you have it."

Taylor leaned forward to grab a pen out of the cup on the table, but didn't reach for the agreement right away. Things were advancing very quickly, and she wanted a moment to evaluate.

"So if I sign this, what does that mean?"

"It means that you can't tell anyone about my secret identity, or anything about your suspicions that Shadow Stalker might be Sophia Hess. You can't tell people she is. You can't tell them she isn't. You can't say you suspected it. But don't take my word for it. Read it. Never sign anything you haven't read."

Taylor picked up the document and scanned it. The language was very legal, and it seemed like each paragraph was saying the same thing over and over. She signed it. Fi grabbed a pen of her own and signed on the witness line. Then she tossed the document carelessly onto the table.

"You're completely right. How did you figure it out?"

"Mr. Barnes said that the PRT were making trouble in the investigation."

"But you knew that I had made the accusations that led to the arrest."

"It didn't seem right." Fi nodded, absorbing that, and Taylor pressed on. "When did you know?"

"From the beginning. Sophia was on probation, so her basic dossier included her secret identity."

"Yet you believed me over her."

"I know a bully when I see one. I didn't know how far she'd go, but bullies are all the same at heart. I wasn't about to trust one any further than I had to." Fi sounded disgusted, even more than Taylor was. It gave her the boldness to ask the questions she really wanted.

"What did the other Wards think of it?"

"Mostly they're shocked they didn't know what was going on. Shadow Stalker was forced to join the Wards after she was connected to the death of an Empire 88 thug. She claimed that she had been trying to interrogate him and then he'd tried to escape and she panicked. They called it accidental manslaughter. Since Monday, they've connected her with two other deaths that put that whole thing in question.

"But the bottom line is that the Wards didn't see her for what she was. They just thought she got in over her head one time. Around here, she kept her head down. She wasn't the biggest fish in the pond and she knew it. She was passive aggressive with Vista, but Vista's got a chip on her shoulder about being the youngest on the team and never told anyone about it. Sophia got on Kid Win a little too, but everyone teases him so the team wrote it off.

"Shadow Stalker was good in the field, very focused and professional. All the incidents at school were supposed to be reported to a social worker, but there was an honest miscommunication. That worker never received the majority of the reports from the principal's secretary, and Blackwell, who did get the reports, assumed that the PRT was handling it. Everyone agrees it was a massive screw up, which is how I leveraged permission to tell you and explain all of this."

"So the past two years were just an oversight?" Taylor demanded, upset. Fi shrugged, but maintained eye contact.

"Sophia's only been on their radar for six months. And in that time, yeah, she kept her head down. She knew how to duck out of trouble."

"You spotted it," Taylor protested, but she felt a little more settled and it didn't come out as acidly as it might have. Fi was taking her concerns seriously and addressing them honestly, but it was also clear that she felt the situation had been handled. From anyone else, the casualness would have mad Taylor madder, but every time she wanted to get upset, she remembered the Fi was the one person who had helped her.

"I knew coming in that there was something rotten in Brockton Bay. I didn't know what, exactly, but there were a lot of signs that things weren't right here. Additionally, I'm suspicious of large organized forces in general. To me, a governmental hero credential does not automatically make someone good. But my insight is unique. Most of the Wards are just kids, really. They're not jaded yet, and you can't blame a person for ignorance."

"They worked with her for six months." Taylor wanted to hang onto a reason to be upset with the Wards. She knew her dad wanted her to join, and right now the only real defense she was the Sophia mess. If that was cleaned up and the other Wards were good people, she knew that she'd end up a Ward pretty quickly.

It wasn't that she hated the idea of being a Ward, precisely. There were a lot of potential advantages, working with Fi the biggest among them, and she knew that she'd agree in the end. She just wasn't sure was ready yet. Fi responded gently, but firmly.

"And during that time she saved some if not all of their lives. That's the nature of being on a cape team. I won't defend what she did or even defend her as a person, but the remaining Wards are good people, and them I will defend." Fi's quiet assurance eased something in Taylor, and she realized that she actually trusted Fi and her judgment. It had been a long time since Taylor had trusted someone other than herself, but it felt good.

Maybe she was ready to join a team. Particularly one that Fi was so willing to defend. "Can I tell you a secret, as my friend?"

"Yes. I promise."

Taylor took a deep breath, then took the plunge. "I'm a cape."

Fi nodded calmly, not at all phased. "Yeah, I thought you might be. What can you do, specifically?"

Taylor wanted to groan that it wasn't fair, she'd wanted more of a reaction from her big reveal, but instead she tugged on the ants that were currently looking for the sugar bowl and started to direct them over to the table. "I control bugs."

"Wait, what?" Now, Fi looked surprised. She sat up quickly and leaned forward. This was the reaction that Taylor had expected from the beginning.

"You said you knew," Taylor shot back, wondering what the problem was.

"I guessed that you were a thinker. The way you put together the Sophia thing was the biggest clue, but you're also very resourceful. And a psychotic break after a traumatic experience is not uncommon for newly triggered thinkers suffering information overload. I did not see bug master coming. Uh, congratulations." Fi sank back, and Taylor felt herself relaxing too. They made eye contact, and Taylor found herself laughing while Fi started giggling in a way that was, itself, pretty funny. Taylor relaxed more, and then Fi, who had managed to stop giggling, took a deep breath and started again, and soon they were both breathless.

After several minutes of this, Fi finally managed to regain enough breath to speak. "Seriously, you're not a thinker?"

"No."

"But that break down?" Fi insisted, lounging back in her chair, flipping a pen between her fingers.

Taylor shrugged. "Oh, well, I was overwhelmed at first. Bugs don't see or hear like we do, and I had no idea what was going on, so it took a while to figure it all out and adjust."

"So you get information from the bugs you control?"

"Well, they feed me information whether I'm controlling them or not. But mostly only the sense of touch translates well. That, and their positions."

The pen Fi was flipping had fallen into a mesmerizing rhythm, which didn't miss a beat as she shifted her weight forward again. "What's your radius?"

"A little over a block, maybe?"

Fi let out a low whistle of appreciation, which was not what Taylor was expecting. Fi looked eager, now. "With practice, you could be pretty awesome. As a thinker, you would be way more effective in a team, so I thought you might be coming in to join the Wards." Fi looked eager, even hopeful. "With a power like this, you'd be an amazing field asset. We could really use you, though you'd need practice obviously."

Suddenly, Fi stopped the flipping pen and sank back just a little. "Unless you're not here for the Wards. With your power, you wouldn't necessarily need a team." She was trying to school her features, but Taylor was pretty sure she was disappointed in the idea. That made her feel good, to be wanted, and she tried to reassure her new friend.

"Bug control really isn't a big deal." It was even the truth. Bugs were inconvenient to an enemy, but they weren't powerful. Not unless Taylor was willing to risk using poisons, but with black widows, even a single bite could be deadly.

Fi waved her concern away. "Is your control pretty precise?"

"I guess."

"Then it's a big deal." Taylor opened her mouth to object, and Fi cut her off. "What's in the room next to us?"

"It's, a, ah, conference room," Taylor answered, surprised to realize that she already knew the answer. There was a pair of flies in the room that had been buzzing around since they arrived, and Taylor had been subconsciously paying attention and gathering data until she could guess that it was a long room with a long center table and a number of chairs and computer screens on the wall.

"And is anyone there?" Fi asked, still acting more casual than Taylor thought she really felt.

"No."

"If there was, you could land a fly on them?"

"Yes."

She waved her hand as though to say "I've made my point." When Taylor didn't react, Fi elaborated. "You're effectively a thinker because of the little details you don't even realize that you're noticing. And you could become an effective stranger, shifter, blaster, or shaker depending on how you practiced and developed your resources. Not that I'm saying you should, mind you. You might want to graduate high school and get your own bank account before you turn the world on its head. But you could be incredibly diverse, given enough time."

Taylor was floored. She'd spent months thinking about her power, but she had never envisioned the type of ability that Fi was discussing. She could control bugs. Give her enemies lice, maybe blind or irritate them, or help keep bugs out of her allies' food. But that was all irrelevant, really, because they'd gotten side tracked.

Taylor took a deep breath, and said what she should have said when Fi brought up the idea. "I don't really want to go out as an independent. I mean, I was going to, but now my dad knows and he hates the idea. He's right about how dangerous it is. He wanted me to join the Wards, and I was considering it. That's why I wanted to know about Shadow Stalker. And I wanted to get your thoughts too."

"He'd right. Statistically, the odds are dramatically better for young heroes who join the Wards." Fi smiled in a way that seemed a little forced, before it transformed into the real thing. "And we'd be teammates. Do you have a costume?"

"Not yet. I'm weaving one out of spider silk, but it's not ready yet."

"Spider silk." Fi was looking eager again. "Damn, I forgot about that. Someday you might be able to leverage that into a Tinker classification, if you care. I bet there's tons of wickedness you could do with spider silk." She shook herself, refocusing again, grinning conspiratorially. "So you want to join the Wards?"

"Yes," Taylor said, and then realized that she was grinning. Making the decision had removed a weight she didn't know she was carrying.

"So, the question is, do you want to wait until you've finished your suit or do you want to go meet Armsmaster right now?"

Taylor blinked. "Unmasked?"

"Well, for legal reasons the head of the local Protectorate team and the PRT have to know who we are so they can pull us from situations where we have a conflict of interest. It is possible to get a waiver, but it's messy." Fi must have read Taylor's uneasiness, because she leaned forward and continued. "Don't worry. They're both decent people, and I've unmasked to both."

Taylor raised both eyebrows. "You unmasked to me on, like, the third day you met me."

Fi leaned back again with a chuckle and shrugged. "So I don't care about some fake government issued name. Sue me." They laughed, and Taylor decided that she wanted to be teammates sooner rather than later.

"Then I guess we can go meet Armsmaster now?"

"This is going to be awesome." Fi said as she bounced to her feet, gathering the non-disclosure agreement as she went. Suddenly, she stopped and turned back to Taylor, completely serious and maybe even a hint nervous. "As long as you're sure. This is a big step, and it's not something you can take back. Do you want to sleep on it?"

"No." Taylor wanted to move forward with her life. Emma and Sophia had held her back for two years, and she didn't want to wait another day to start putting them behind her and focusing on the good in her life. Fi grinned again, then lead the way out of the lounge and into the PRT base, resuming her verbal examination of Taylor's powers.

As they left, Taylor directed the ants into the sink and down the drain. They'd been too slow as they walked across the carpet to demonstrate her control to Fi, and her friend hadn't needed the proof anyway. When they passed the conference room, Taylor purposefully reached out and controlled the three flies to direct them to slip under the door and join her in the elevator. She wasn't going to be unprepared again.