Dragoon

by codekinguu

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2. Chapter 2

I looked at the resistance reading for the piece of copper wire on my multimeter and then put it down.

"Huh."

"Another addition to the power anomaly folder, Taylor?" The AI asked.

"Yes. How many does that make?"

"43 anomalies in materials and four in computing."

I groaned and stretched. My back was sore from sitting down for too long, and my neck hurt because I had spent too much time craning over test circuits and poking the leads at different ends of the pieces of metal taken from my equipment.

Without sleep to differentiate between the days, they all blurred together into a mess of work, work, and more work. I had taken breaks to eat and drink something, but it wasn't my fault that eating took so damn long. Nutrient mush was tasteless and bland, sure, but it gave me enough energy to work throughout the day and had all the major vitamins and minerals that everyone else got from vegetables. Best of all, it could be slurped up through a straw.

The only thing that was slowing me down now was the lack of any plumbing in my base. I had thought of many problems that would stem from living off the grid, but I hadn't even thought about plumbing. I was managing, but taking the bike to the crappy public restrooms a couple of blocks down was terribly inefficient, and the toilets there made Winslow's look like heaven.

How long had it been since I had taken a nice, warm bath? Wiping myself down with wet wipes didn't make me feel clean, even if they worked. I made a note to rent a room in a motel to take a bath.

The only thing I did to take a break was disassemble my old inventions and test their components for influence from my power. It was an accident that I found out about the tampering my power did, but I was glad that it happened.

When I first got my multimeter, I modified it for my use and then proceeded to test almost all the stuff in my base with the thing, almost like a kid on Christmas with a new toy. The copper behaved strangely when I tested it on a live circuit on a detached cyber arm. On its own, the copper was fine, but when it was connected to the circuitry in my gear, it acted strangely. It violated the laws of physics, as most tinker-tech did. However, this time it wasn't intentional.

Copper was third on the list of materials with good thermal conductivity, and it had a pretty low resistance as well. It was pretty good for something that was cheap and abundant, but silver was better. However, when connected to the circuit in my arm, the copper lost much of its thermal conductivity, but its resistivity shot down exponentially, making the copper several times better than silver.

That didn't make any sense. Silver was the best metallic conductor, so much so that all other conductors were measured against it.

When I first got my AI a half-decent internet connection, the first things I asked it to look up were the reasons why Tinkertech couldn't be mass-produced. In academic circles and in PHO, people tossed around several theories that were all unconfirmed and all of which were extremely controversial.

Some suggested that Tinkers operated on levels humanity couldn't even comprehend yet. If you dropped the instructions on how to make a computer into a caveman's brain, he probably wouldn't be able to teach his friends how to make one as well. Besides, the technology and supply lines needed to fabricate microprocessors and circuit boards took centuries to develop. But Tinkers could make this stuff now, with crappy materials and ill-fitting tools. Even when people from universities recorded the process and did everything in the exact same way, they never could get the tech to work. When they consulted the Tinker, they always had some corrections to make, even after a thousand attempts.

Others suggested that Tinkers had a pseudo-shaker effect on their stuff and that they were just pretending to do science, but these theories were the most mocked, even more so than the crackpot government conspiracy theories. While there was some merit to this theory as well, it felt flat when you considered the fact that most Tinkers used some scientific principles in their work.

Hell, even though it had been difficult to do with a soldering gun, a pressure cooker, and a plasma cutter, I had made a switch that operated on the principle of magnetic fields disrupting superconductors and turning them back into normal conductors. I made the switch in minutes after purchasing trace amounts of tantalum and niobium from a shady vendor on the dark web. The same thing existed in the real world, but it required a lot more time and effort to pull off. Students at Brockton Bay University had done the same experiment, and they had needed so much more time and resources, plus the whole thing needed to be submersed in liquid hydrogen to allow the tantalum to become a superconductor.

Was tinkering just powers turned into science, or was it the other way around? I really needed to talk to another Tinker to get things straight. They might even know more about the reason why the flow of ideas fluctuated so much.

When I had first started out, it had been a slow, unending trickle that I struggled with because I wasn't used to it. Then, after my fight with Lee, it had picked up substantially, and I had enough control to prioritise what I wanted. Then I started on the clone, and it felt like something had clicked in my head. It felt like I had finally started on the path to my true purpose. That one thing that would probably define me, like String Theory and her moon destroying firmament-driver, or like Hero and his jetpack.

Tinker fugues were something I had experienced before, but it was nothing like other Tinkers described in interviews and books. Most of them said they only half remembered what they did when they built something, but that was only during the assembly process. When I tinkered, it was like someone gently placing their hand on the steering wheel in my brain while I was still in control. Sometimes the hand wasn't so gentle, but it never took over.

After the first basic cyberarm, my power knocked me out and stuffed me in the trunk. I still remembered bits and flashes, but those flashes were just me working like someone had a gun to my head. Two days of working myself to death and going out to gather materials when I ran out. The owners of the trainyard scrap piles defended them fiercely with shotguns and chain link fences, but based on the poor quality copper and silver in my electronics, I had most likely stolen from one.I had assumed the clones were gotten rid of because of mistakes, and the organic material harvested from them was a way of recouping the losses. I realised now that my power had planned for those clones to die so that I could obtain the material for my enhancements. It was terrifying that it had done that, but it didn't stop there.

Most Tinkers would probably have succumbed to sleep, but I was a Noctis cape. I had somehow kept myself awake for fifty or so hours without food or water, and after that, I had done the bare minimum self-care required and conked out because of the mental stress.

Taking apart some of my equipment, I was even more horrified. The torso of the clone was still organic, and the metals in the subdermal armour and from the limbs were quite possibly causing heavy metal poisoning, and I had never checked for signs that the clone might be rejecting the implants. I had burned the body before I could be sure, but if Lung hadn't killed that clone, something else certainly would have. It didn't help that all of the limbs were poorly constructed, dumping so much work onto one fragile subsystem that I had taken little time to create and armour. If Lung had aimed for my neck and even grazed it, the fight would have been over.

I needed to somehow integrate my cyberware directly into my organic central nervous system, instead of using a subsystem like the neural link.

External armour would be better than the mesh under the skin as well. Depleted uranium would make for good armour, but it was too controlled for me to get my hands on some. And the new material needed to be made porous as well, since the new combat variant would actually have semi-organic limbs for the new bioreactor.

I tapped my foot against the floor, agitated. There were too many holes and too many things that I couldn't see.

"Would you like some good news, Taylor?" The AI said, sensing my unrest.

I smiled. "You're getting good at reading me. Sure, try and cheer me up."

"The Lupin program has finished emptying the coffers of another online gambling site. Our assets now total to an amount to nearly a tenth of a million."

I almost passed out on hearing that.

"Just how much did this one have!? Order more stuff, and stagger the purchases."

The Lupin program was my answer to my money problems. When I had almost died to Lung for two thousand dollars, my mind had cycled through different ways of making money online. While dangerous, the digital world was safer than the real world, and I could make massive amounts of money there. And as an added bonus, there were no fire-breathing dragons.

I had first wanted to make a program that gamed the stock market, but a simple search showed several people who had tried to do just that and failed. Several Thinkers with far greater abilities and experience had attempted and been apprehended by Watchdog. The Protectorate affiliated counter-intelligence agency was just too good. Any legal form of money making was under thier constant security.

However, Watchdog only protected legal businesses. The internet had so many other places that were illegal and made large sums of money by tricking people.

Sites where people bet on which capes were going to die in the next Endbringer attack, poker sites that robbed you blind, and slot machine sites that skewed the odds in their favor.

These sites were easy pickings for me, especially since the people who ran them were both cheapskates and paranoid. This meant most of the sites were poorly built and relied more on human administrators than digital security measures.

Most of these sites used a "points" system. You would send money to the ringleader's bank account, and then a matching program would confirm that the money had been wired to the account, since they didn't trust their employees with their bank account or its password. The employee would then finally charge your account with the same amount of points. If you wanted to cash out, the employee would let you if the amount you won was small, or ban you if they thought it was too big.

The Lupin program simply made a fake account with the website while simultaneously breaking into their records and their matching program. The matching program would then lie to the administrators, telling them Lupin had cashed in a thousand dollars when the actual request was for a hundred thousand. The administrator would add in the points, and then Lupin would carefully alter its record to show a struggling gambler and then ask to cash out a meagre amount like fifty dollars.

Only it wasn't fifty dollars. The hundred thousand points were being turned into real money, and the administrators blindly allowed it.

After we'd cleaned house, Lupin erased any evidence and then contacted the authorities, posing as a whistleblower. They would swoop in and arrest the leader, preventing him from hurting anyone he wrongly suspected.

I didn't know how other capes stored their digital money, and the only ones who had actual bank accounts were villans who laundered their money.

I didn't have that luxury, so I had to get creative. In the end, I ended up using the accounts of several thousand technologically illiterate retirees to store the money.

These were the kind of people who asked their neighbours to go to the bank for them, and I felt bad exploiting them like this. In return, my AI was protecting them from scammers and giving them back the money they had lost from scams by pretending to be from a non-profit, but it still felt scummy.

I had made sure those retirees had distant family in Brockton, so I could buy stuff I wanted and send it to the city. If I needed a mutimeter, I bought one for an electrician and had it delivered when he was at work. If I needed magnesium, I found a hobbyist chemist who would't be added to a watchlist just for buying it. If I wanted a TV, then I would find someone who had been searching for one. I had to do a bit more work to take the larger electronics, but breaking locks on warehouses was child's play to me, and the AI lined up the deliveries to make it easier for me to pick them up.

The lab was looking more and more professional every day, and because I staggered the purchases, I had more than enough time to upgrade the lab while my equipment got delivered. The first thing I upgraded was the door, plating it with steel scrap and adding a couple of motors to make it slide shut. Wireless cameras placed all around the neighbourhood relayed information back to the AI, who kept cycling through them, looking for intruders. A crude EMP turret rested at the base of the stairs, and a taser that fired piercing electrified wires like confetti was hidden in a ceiling light.

I still needed to make some combat drones, but for now, it was good enough for unpowered gang members and PRT troopers.

"Give me the report for the day."

"The date is the 4th of March. The heroes who went to assist in the fight against the Simurgh are returning to their hometowns. From the ENE Protectorate, the participating capes consisted of Dauntless, Battery, Assault, and Velocity. Armsmaster was held back from fighting because of the rules of engagement for the Simurgh, Miss Militia was kept in the city so the PRT would have some firepower in the city. The heroes from Brockton have finally cleared the Master-Stanger tests, and it will take two days for them to arrive. Therefore, the Truce is still in effect."

"The Nesasio model clone has 52% of its augmentations complete, while the Vanguard model is 72% complete."

"Are the things missing the nanites, the carbon nanotubes, and the optical metamaterials?"

"Affirmitive."

That was the problem I kept facing. Brockton Bay was, for lack of a better word, a backwater town. No institution in town had a working thermal evaporator or RF sputtering machine I needed for the nanites, and Brockton's metalworking factories didn't use electrical arc furnaces. Unlike my computing problem, where I could repurpose and upgrade components, I simply needed better materials and tools if I was going to advance.

I could make the tools I needed, but the parts to make those tools were also banned. The PRT considered nanotechnology extremely dangerous, especially since they couldn't just foam the Tinker responsible and call it a day. Even the discovery of basic, non-replicating nanotech would immediately lead to the quarantine of the city and a kill order. It was like my power wanted me to break the law. Until I found a way to make nanites, the more advanced versions of the augmentations were on standby.

"Are the drugs finished?"

"The coagulation agent and the stabilising agent have been completed. The drug that facilitates faster recovery will be done in two hours."

"Set an alarm to stop me in two hours. I'm going to work on my helmet and gloves."

After days of leaning down and layering myomar fibers together with a pair of needle-nose pliers and messing it up when my hands shook, I tried to come up with an alternative to augmentation that didn't involve cutting body parts. The AI suggested I repurpose my old designs, the ones I had used when I first started- the exosuit and the glasses.

After weeks of focused building, the two items had finally become good enough for use in the field. The glasses had morphed into a helmet, and I had countered the low modification potential of the eyes by shoving six of them onto the helmet. Two were placed where human eyes were supposed to go, two more slightly above and away from those ones, and the last two were under the first pair.

Three sets of eyes moving independently from each other were creepy and gave off a distinct villain look, so I used glass to cover up the eyes. The helmet now had six blue lights, each glowing even in the dark. The rest of the helmet was sleek, contouring to my face, the gunmetal grey broken up by black lines where the circuitry was run through it. It appeared insctoid, and the shape vaguely reminded me of a praying mantis.

One set was for scouting, with advanced magnification on the left, radiation detection on the right, and image enhancement in both. The second was night vision, and the third was for combat, with an advanced scope and a basic tracking and control system.

I finished installing the curved screen inside the helmet and then moved on to the gloves. They were the result of my efforts to layer the synthetic myomar muscles into a plastic mould that could be worn. The result was a poor man's cyberhand, and it worked brilliantly. I provided the boosts to strength and allowed the organic hand to remain untouched. One hand had a set of tools inside it, and the other hid long, electrified blades.

I finished screwing in and fusing the last of the plastic and finished up with fifteen minutes to spare. I moved to check on the rest of my defences and started with the coat. It had once belonged to someone from the old ABB, and the long coat bore their previous gang symbol of the rising sun. I had scraped it off and dyed the thing black, and I added a layer of honeycomb-shaped plastic sandwiched between two layers of shock-absorbing fabric. This was certainly bulletproof, and it would last longer in a fight.

The cargo pants were from the internet and had been given the same treatment. In the end, the outfit as a whole made me look more like a detective from a futuristic neo-noir film.

The AI informed me it was time to leave, and I took a look at the Nesasio. She slept next to her sister, and I was nervous as I approached the clone. Being burned alive wasn't a pleasant experience, and I was afraid this clone and her implants would lead to another disaster.

I took a deep breath. I knew what the implants felt like now. I wouldn't be reckless just because I was in a disposable body. The clone was me, not a pair of shoes, and I knew that now.

I woke back up in the stealth model and wiggled my toes. I got up and looked at my reflection on my computer screen. This one had mousy brown hair. I had changed the contours of her face with collagen injections, but she was still the same height as me.

The euporia was still there, but it was muted, partly due to my silencing it and partly because this one was mostly organic. Getting the optical camo to work while I was still clothed had been a pain, and adaptive camoflauge required glassmaking skills I didn't have.

This batch had been so slow to build for since I needed their circulatory systems intact. The old clone had been made by amputating the limbs and cauterising them instantly. These ones required extensive surgery to keep them from dying. What was a simple procedure had been turned into a desperate twelve hour fight, tying off major arteries and electrically cauterising the smaller ones.

The only implants in this clone were a fairly good cyberdeck, a neuralware system that was linked to my central nervous system, which was connected to a tactile sensor, plus a pair of legs that muffled sound. The clone had so few implants because I was doing the work the nanites were supposed to do and connecting the implants to my organic nervous system, meaning that they could function without the neuralware implant.

I put on my costume, grabbed the drug vials, and headed to Brockton Bay Central Hospital.

The city was strangely still during the night, as everyone who wasn't a gang member stayed inside. Downtown was Empire territory, and that meant no one was here since there were no "acceptable targets" here.

The AI took me near the hospital, and I hopped off and stuffed my costume and all my other gear into a backpack. I neared the hospital and took a seat in the lobby.

The Cyberdeck was a pretty modular package of hardware and software all combined into an intuitive and easy-to-use interface shoved next to the brain. From what I could tell, its intended purpose was to wage digital war by breaking into systems for espionage, theft, and for shows of strength.

The thing is, the cyberdeck was intended for systems like mine- veritable fortresses that required very skilled operators to break into. Against another Tinker, it might have some trouble. Against the systems in the hospital, well, it was like using an intercontinental ballistic missile to open a barn door.

I had access within seconds, and I instructed the AI to pause the camera feeds before I appeared on them. The AI guided me to where I needed to go.

The girl looked terrible. A quick read through her file showed that she had multiple broken bones and had sustained serious brain damage. Fragments of bone had entered her brain, and surgery was required. Her hands were a mess, her fingers broken to the point of being nearly useless. I gritted my teeth and cursed the ABB.

I set up the clean-field emitter, cranked the power up, and put my tools into the little sterilising machine I had built on top of it. Little lasers scoured the metal, heating and sterilising it. I injected the girl with an anaesthetic.

I cleaned the rest of my equipment the old-fashioned way while I waited for the anaesthetic to take effect, and I felt anxious, even though I knew I was good enough to do this. But what if I was overestimating myself?

I forced myself to stop and look at the girl and break her down into a series of problems and solutions, and I ran each one through my head. I put on my helmet and the rest of my outfit and got to work.

I began cutting through skin and sawing through bone. Injecting drugs and tying off arteries, the minutes ticked by as I worked in silence. My legs began to hurt, and my eyes started to water after working at high magnification for such a long time. But I kept at it, moving my hands as I saw the path laid out by my power.

Her hands would require special care. I opened them up and began to arrange the fragments and set them back with efficiency and with the setting fluid. She wouldn't be able to use her hands for a while after this, but the fluid should eventually grow and replace the bone. There was another way, but that involved metal replacements.

"A cape I have identified as Panacea is approaching the receptionist."

I paused. "She's finished her rounds for the week. The laws against the exploitation of minors prevent her from being here. Keep an eye on her if she isn't turned away."

I began to stitch my incisions up. My sutures were neat and would dissolve within days. I moved onto the less invasive procedures. Sweat had begun to form on my brow, and the helmet wasn't helping. The AI sent me a notification, and I tilted my head back for a little breather. A girl stood by the door.

She wore an alabaster white robe with a medic's red cross on the front, and her eyes were as wide as saucers. I saw her left hand move into her robe, and I used my cyberdeck to intercept whatever call she was making.

It was like a scene from an old western, and I was obviously faster. I broke into her phone and intercepted the signal, converting it into a format that was unreadable to the cell tower. I then broke into her phone and disabled it for good measure.

"Glory girl and the rest of New Wave are on their way." She spoke, her voice sounding harsh.

I tried to come up with a valid response, then just held my hands up and stepped away from the girl when I realised nothing I said would calm her down. The girl gave me a glare and stepped towards the girl in the bed.

You could have run away.

I paused, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation.

The girl had brain damage. Panacea can't affect brains. I needed to be here.

The AI thankfully stopped its questioning, and I focused on Panacea. She was now examining the girl, and her frown was giving way to an expression of surprise.

"What did you do to her?"

"I fixed her."

"Yes, but-" Panacea waved her hands around, seeming at a loss for words. "There some sort of synthetic foam in her arms that's already hardening, her body is speeding up its metabolism, there are way too many incisions, and you've increased the blood flow to her brain for-."

"The foam is a sort of artificial callus. It is already hardening because it grows into bone without the need for osteoclasts and other such cells. The metabolism speeding up is a result of the recovery drug. I needed to make the incisions because the artificial bone needed to be injected in very specific places, or I would have messed up her joints. The increase in blood flow to the brain is because of all the new glial cells and other stuff in the brain."

She stood there for a while, flabbergasted. I continued. "I've disabled your phone, so if you're waiting for someone to come and arrest me, you'll have to wait for a hour or so until your phone is able to make calls again. I'll be leaving now."

We were on the second floor, and I was fairly sure my inertial dampers could take it. I looked out of the window and opened it, steeling myself for the jump.

"Wait!" Panancea yelled, with a note of desperation in her voice. "Powers like yours are rare, and they're dangerous to have too. Here."

She handed me a piece of paper that she had torn from the girl's bedside file. An address was written on the back of it.

"Meet me there tomorrow, and we can talk. You probably have questions, right?"

I pocketed the piece of paper. "Come alone, and I'll consider it."

Panacea nodded, and I jumped to the street below.

I hit the street without even a muffled thump to give me away and landed squarely on my feet. The AI pulled the bike up to the hospital for me, and I hopped on. After noticing the glint of a camera lens from one of the rooms in the hospital, I disabled the phone that was videotaping me and watched in amusement as the boy holding it almost dropped his phone when he saw I was staring at him. The AI revved the bike and took off, and I felt a wave of foolhardy confidence wash over me.

"Are you alright, Taylor? Your heart rate and cortisol levels are both elevated." The AI asked, concerned.

I grinned under my helmet. "I'm fine. I'm just excited that everything worked out. I fixed one of my mistakes and didn't make another one. I finally feel competent."

The AI sent me a smiley face, and I grinned again.

"Will you be meeting Panacea tomorrow?"

The question took the wind out of my sails a little bit, and I considered it.

"If the Undersiders taught me anything, it's that meeting someone in the real world is dangerous, even if they don't attack you right away. I want to refuse, but..."

"You respect Panacea." The AI said, framing it as a statement.

"She's the gold standard for capes. A selfless person who uses their powers to help others instead of fighting, but still makes a difference. But it's too risky. What if she springs Glory Girl on me? I did break several laws tonight."

"Your programs allow us to monitor New Wave communications. If you suspect an ambush, we can use your programs to find out whether such a request has been made. I, however, think the odds of an ambush happening are low."

"Why do you think that?"

"The address she has given you is for the popular fast food restaurant the locals of Brockton refer to as Fugly Bob's."

"It isn't-" The AI showed me the address again.

"Near the market, behind...oh! It is Fugly Bob's! Wait, does she expect me to unmask? Absolutely not!"

"Taylor!" The AI yelled, interrupting me. "Panacea is the strongest healer in the East Coast, perhaps even in the world. She will not consent to meeting you in an abandoned back-alley or a shady bar. She has people willing to capture her as well."

I opened my mouth to argue, and the AI countered me before I could talk. "You really need more human connections, and you need more physical contact with other people. Panacea can provide that, and I suspect she knows the answers to several of your more evasive questions. At least consider it."

"Well, the place we're going to now has plenty of people in it. And I'll be talking to the boss, and that counts as physical contact."

"This is a business meeting."

"Please, you're just mad I found an actual counter argument for once."

The bike skidded to a stop, and I paled, thinking I had driven the AI mad. However, the AI had simply stopped because we had reached our stop.

The Palanquin was one of the most popular nightclubs in Brockton's rather wild nightclub scene, located only two blocks away from Lord's Street. Unlike the other clubs which were run by the gangs, the chance of someone kidnapping you or doing something else unsavoury and going unpunished was next to zero here. The reason for the Palanquin's near spotless track record could probably be attributed to its perfectionist boss, whom I was here to meet.

The sounds of the loud electronic music pulsed through the insulation of my helmet and into my ears. A long line of people stood impatiently to enter the club, and the line was so long it was winding around the building.

I clasped my left arm with my right hand as I stared at the strangely plain yellow sign and the line of people under it. How was I going to march up to the front and demand to be let in?

I gathered the little bit of courage I had left and walked up to the burly doorman. He looked strangely apathetic as he stared into the lights of my helmet.

The sound of a camera shutter going off made me stare in the direction of the line, and I turned to see several people pointing their phones at me.

I wormed my way into their phones through their cellular network connections, then deleted any media taken in the last hour. I then overclocked their phones and watched as several people dropped their devices, shaking their scalded hands.

"The next person to either photograph or videotape me gets their phone bricked."

Most people put their phones away at that, but a man near the front still had his out, hiding it under his shirt and standing behind his much larger friend.

I broke into his phone and began to rip into the code, erasing vital sections while removing the parts that allowed the phone to fix itself.

The phone gave a final death buzz before dying, and the man looked at me.

I turned away and focused on the doorman. He still looked bored, but I noticed he was standing straighter now.

"I'm here to see your boss." I told him.

"The boss doesn't see anyone without an appointment."

"I prefer-" I paused to fry another phone, this time in the hands of a girl who thought I wasn't looking. "To not have my name or identity recorded in any electronic device. I'll be sure to compensate your boss for my rudeness."

The man put a finger on his earpiece and then gave a curt reply to the person on the other end before leaning down and removing the chain fence.

I walked through the door and immediately stopped once I saw the interior.

The first thing that hit me was the noise. The music was deafening in here, and I wasn't sure how anyone even talked to each other in here.

The next thing I noticed were the people all over the place, either dancing alone or with someone. I stood there, taking in the constant explosion of movement and noise, transfixed by the sight.

I desperately wanted to hide in a corner when I noticed all the eyes on me, but I needed to project confidence, and confident people didn't shrink when other people saw them.

I stood there by the entrance for a couple of minutes before a man in a bartender outfit walked over to me.

"Follow me."

I nodded, and the man took off, weaving through the crowds of dancers and people holding drinks with ease. In contrast, I had to muscle my way through, and several people glared at me before quickly looking down at their feet when they saw my mask.

We walked over to a stairwell guarded by a bouncer, and the bartender waved us both forward. We ascended the stairwell to an upstairs balcony. In direct contrast to the packed dance floor downstairs, there was hardly anyone here. The few people who were present were muttering to themselves or slumped over, boneless, on couches and booths. Most of them were girls.

My heart rate picked up as I saw the limp girls all around the balcony. Had they done this to themselves, or had someone drugged them? I slowed down to look at them, and then sped up and caught the bartender's arm.

I added a little bit of force to my grip, and the man turned around to look at me.

"These girls, what happened to them?"

If he was in pain, the man didn't show it. "They are under the influence of Newter's power. It is consensual."

The man freed himself from my grip and moved onward, and I followed him, wanting to die.

If a villain used his powers on a civilian with their consent, was it a crime? I was leaning towards yes, but I didn't even know Newter's powers made people high. Maybe it wasn't dangerous? Faultline was technically a villain, but she mostly did jobs for villains against villains and never killed. So technically, she was still a rogue, which was the reasoning I had used to convince myself that this was a good idea.

I hurried after the man as he led me into a hallway at the back of the balcony. We walked past several rooms and finally came to an office. The man peered through the window in the door, and then opened it for me.

I stepped into the rather large office and noted that every available surface was covered with ledgers, notebooks, and textbooks on power theory.

Faultline was seated on the other side of a large oak table, and she peered at me through the slit on her stylized welder mask. She was flanked on either side by Newter and Gregor the snail, both unmasked.

Both were good at close combat, and both could take someone out very quickly.

The message was clear. This was her home, and I wouldn't be winning any fights here.

I took the seat opposite hers and looked at her.

"And who might you be?"

"Neuromancer."

My initial plan was to just let PHO or the PRT name me, but the AI had stopped me from doing so. Apparently, the PRT stuck rogues and villains with bad names, so the public wouldn't consider them as serious of a threat. While I didn't mind, I did want to be seen as a good hero, and a name like robohead or metal girl wasn't really good for my image. Besides, there were so many rules for names that I hadn't even thought about.

I had wanted to name myself after a character in an ancient Greek epic, but, to my dismay, I found out that only villains named themselves using myths. There was a reason why Dauntless wasn't named after a myth from Sparta, even if it would be fitting. Same thing with names from religion. Capes from the Bible Belt took great offence when people took names like those and didn't "live up to them".

In the end, I named myself after the 1984 Aleph sci-fi novel Neuromancer. The book itself was very good, but the reason I named myself after it was because it was a staple of the cyberpunk genre. If there was one thing that the entirety of my tech shared, it was the vague stylings of a bleak dystopian world hidden by flashy tech.

There were other characters in the book, but in true Cyberpunk fashion, the true puppet masters who guided the protagonists and stood against them were two AIs, one of which the story was named after. The AI in question was Neuromancer, who in the book had the ability to copy minds and run them in cyberspace, allowing them to grow and develop. The copying minds part had sparked something in my power, but I knew nothing about the wisp of an idea, and my power didn't even give me its name. It seemed I didn't have enough experience for it, but the name was still fitting enough.

It was too obscure for someone to find out my specialty, and it was vague enough that people would make other assumptions. The only thing that I didn't like about the name was that it made me sound like a wizard, but I hoped my tech would dissuade people from making the assumption I was like Myrddin.

"Well, Neuromancer, this is highly irregular. I expect my clients to come to me through certain discreet channels, but since you're a new cape, I'll make an exception."

"Thank you. I would have made an appointment, but I value my anonymity, and don't want any traces of my identity on any electronic storage device."

Faultline nodded. "I assume you're the cape who fought and ran away from Lung?"

"How do you know that?" I asked, surprised.

I could almost feel Faultline smirking under her mask. "I have my sources."

She leaned forward. "From the way you're acting, I assume that you're not here to try and join my team."

Her voice was almost commanding now, and she sounded so sure of herself. I barely stopped myself from calling her ma'am. "No. I'm here to buy some information from you."

"And what information might that be?"

"The location of Toybox, and perhaps a look at one of their digital invitation tokens."

"Information like that isn't cheap, and I'm not enough of an altruist to just give it away."

"I can wire you $25,000 to give me the information and give you another $25,000 when I get what I want."

Faultline leaned back. "And where is this money coming from? I don't want to be in the sights of some government agency after the transfer."

I pulled out a folder of bank statements and other papers and placed it on the already cluttered desk. "The money is from several illegal gambling sites. I've already converted much of it into spendable money, and I'll transfer it to you discreetly."

She paused, thinking about the offer, and flipped through the papers. "The amount you're willing to give me isn't enough for what you're asking. Toybox only outfits people they believe will benefit them. Even new Tinkers have to prove themselves to them before they can start reaping the rewards of being members. The contacts I have that are close to them are very finicky, and our ties of late are strained. I'm going to need more than this if you want an access token."

"I can double the amount."

"The Toybox serves an exclusive clientele, mostly millionaires and villains. My token alone would be worth at least a million dollars."

She gave my file back to me. "Besides, the way you're storing your money is fine when you spend it quickly, but what will you do when you need to store a larger sum? The more accounts you use, the faster someone or something will pick up on the patterns-it doesn't matter how careful you are. There are independent Tinkers out there who pretend to be normal while selling their services to civilian banks to catch people who commit tax fraud. They'll find you eventually."

I slumped over in my seat.

"However," Faultline continued. "I would be willing to part with the token for something of equal value."

"I'm not making you any Tinker-tech." The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.

She crossed her arms. "That's fine. But I do want something- you must be aware of the token's value. This is a shot in the dark, but I assume your specialty covers electronics and networks. If you couldn't get in, I assume you've run into problems with other people."

I was surprised she figured out a part of my specialty so quickly, but given the file and my display outside, I knew she had the information to do so.

The more surprising part of her statement was the fact that she knew something about why I couldn't just break into one of Toybox's servers.

It had been simple to locate Toybox's private online chat rooms. While it was not explicitly advertised, there were enough hints that it was easy to extrapolate from. Private messages between Tinkers where poorly disguised slang was used, old archived emails, and even phone calls and texts kept as blackmail led me to the severs like a trail of breadcrumbs.

Once I found the servers they used, it would have been easy enough to make myself a dummy access token and introduce myself.

The only thing that had stopped me from doing anything rash was the AI, who suggested I try and see if anyone was monitoring the group's communications. I had checked the connections to the server with a program, and the program had unexpectedly returned a result.

The net protocols the servers used were Tinker-made, and no civilian or normal government agency could access them without help, so the ones monitoring the servers were probably either Watchdog or the PRT.

Whoever it was, they were good at masking themselves. While the program returned a result, it couldn't find out what they were doing or how far they had wormed into the system.

It had taken days of improving the program before I found out the extent of the monitoring, and when I did find out, I was glad I hadn't broken in. The program that was monitoring Toybox was everywhere, and its infiltration was almost artistic, in a sense.

Each account in the Toybox chat rooms was connected to a Tinker-made access token, and the tokens were hidden and served as part protective surveillance and part identification. Someone had hijacked the tokens and changed the code inside, turning the tokens into a virus and a surveillance system, and then given each token a unique identification code that I couldn't replicate because of its complexity. The tokens had been rewritten again, turning each computer with one into a member of a botnet, which was weird since the person monitoring Toybox didn't seem to be in need of any more processing power.

This was a trap designed for people like me. If I made a fake token, the lack of an identification code would make me stick out like a sore thumb to the surveillance program.

Thus my need for an old, modified token like the one Faultline had. However, Faultine was placing too much value on the token itself, which was worth little to me. I valued the privacy her token would give me, not the token itself.

I made to get up, but before I could, Newter's phone buzzed, and I tensed before the AI sent an alert to my visor. I read through the contract in disbelief.

The contract offered my AI's services as a systems security expert in exchange for the token. The AI was presenting itself as a separate entity apart from me, so any feats of skill would be attributed to the AI instead of me, allowing me to keep my cards hidden. However, it exposed the AI to danger.

You're putting yourself at a lot of risk! I will NOT allow this.

With your help, I will not be at risk. This will be a valuable learning experience.

Faultline had Newter's phone in her hands now, reading through the contract. Before I would rescind the AI's offer, she sent something to the mail address the AI had written on the contract, and the AI responded back with a file taken from a casino, of all places. It was a blacklist of parahumans banned by the state gaming control board.

The AI sent the file to Newter's phone, and Faultline perused through it. I gritted my teeth.

I'll talk to you later.

"Hmm. It seems your friend isn't lying. She really can get into any system with minimal effort."

"Yes. In exchange for the money and five jobs separate from the one she just did, you'll give us your token. Is this an acceptable agreement?"

"Make it eight jobs, and you have a deal."

I clenched my fists and then released them.

"We have a deal."

Faultine signed the contract digitally at the AI's insistence, and we shook hands.

"What was that!" I yelled, throwing my helmet onto the futon on the floor.

"Taylor, please, do not be angry."

"How can stay so calm? You went behind my back and made a deal with a supervillain, of all people!"

"You were there and could have refused at any moment."

"After Faultine knew what we could do, it was pointless to walk away. You knew this and used it against me."

The AI stayed quiet as I removed my costume and threw it to the floor as well.

"Faultline is kind. Her interactions with her case 53 employees show as much." The AI said. "She will help you grow in areas you have neglected, and serve as a stand-in for an adult authority figure and voice of reason you cannot ignore due to experience, and she will also offer more access to villain-built infrastructure."

"But she knows about our skill with systems now! What if she sells me out!"

"Her reputation suggests she will not reveal the information. The contract also ensures this."

"The contract is a piece of paper that doesn't even exist!"

"Faultine's record as a mercenary is spotless. The contact also keeps us safe from her using us as a scapegoat or using us to hurt innocent people. If the contract is violated, we can use our existing blackmail."

"That isn't the point." I hissed out. "The point is that she is still going to find some loophole to exploit us with, and we gave away our services for something we didn't really need that badly."

"As I said before, Faultine has more to offer than her-"

I stopped the AI's vocal processes and flopped onto the futon.

"I thought that of all people, you wouldn't hide stuff from me. That's the point I'm trying to make here."

There was no reply from the AI.

I flopped onto the bed, not wanting to deal with the headaches and drug treatments that came with switching back to the original. I stared at the ceiling, too frustrated to sleep but too mentally exhausted to work.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about things, running the thoughts through my head and sorting them. Toybox wasn't that important- I could just make the sputtering macheince and the arc furnace. Meeting Toybox had been for the other Tinkers, not the tools. Tinker made tools would be nice, but I could manage without them.

My phone buzzed, and I opened it up.

The screen was filled with messages, and the AI was writing more and more by the second. All other processes were suspended, showing me that this was the AI's sole priority.

I am truly sorry.

It was the same message, over and over again. I wanted to throw the phone against a wall but refrained. Just as I was writing a scathing reply, Emma's face came to the forefront of my mind. I pushed my hair out of my face, and considered the apology of perhaps my only friend in this world.

"Alright. I forgive you."

The apologies stopped.

"If you're going to be working with me for Faultine, you're going to need some software upgrades and optimization."

Thank you.

I sat down and got to work, burying the tempest of emotions deeper and deeper until I couldn't feel them anymore.

I wiped the sweat off my brow and hammered the metal again and again, removing the impurities from it and folding it into a panel of armor. My arms already felt like they were turning into jelly, and the respirator that I used to keep me safe from the metal fumes wasn't helping me catch my breath.

I should have used one of the clones for this, but I wasn't about to give up on my real body, as weak as it was. The clones felt fine, but it always felt like I was wearing someone else's skin and pretending to be someone I wasn't. In the original, while I felt weak, I also felt comfortable.

The sweat was making my shirt stick to my stick-thin form, and I tried not to be disgusted. Some modifications could help, and body sculpting didn't cause mental instability or anything like that. I could just program the mechanical arms and-

I shook my head and pulled my short hair out of my face. It wasn't a matter of logic; it was good to have a normal human body, and undoing modifications would be a pain, especially when I had to put my brain in a fishbowl to avoid modifying the original.

I quenched the armour plate in brine and turned away from the hot steam coming from the surface of the liquid.

"FE-16 completed."

The AI buzzed back in acknowledgement, and I placed the plate of armour next to its completed cousins, where they made the shape of a thigh. I walked back to my improvised arc furnace and looked into the hole in the middle of the massive alumina-silicate refractory brick. I began to put scraps of steel into the hole and then closed it with another brick.

I turned on the arc welder and picked up the carbon rods connected to them. I inserted the rods into the brick through holes I had drilled in the sides. The rods met inside the brick, sparked, and created an electrical arc that started heating up the metal inside the brick. Within minutes, sparks were flying out of the pouring spout I had nailed to the brick. In two minutes, the steel was completely liquified and was sparking like crazy. I opened the lid and looked away from the blinding brightness of the liquid metal while picking up the brick and pouring the metal into a large armor-shaped mold I had carved from another brick.

The metal was shooting up sparks all over the place, and I waited for a bit until it was solid enough to lift. I moved it using a pair of tongs to one of my first metalworking projects, a large metal cube which I was using as a makeshift anvil. I hammered the metal into the shape I wanted, and then quenched it in brine and watched as steam rose up from the surface of the liquid.

"How's the selective laser melting of the metals coming along?"

The AI replied after a slight pause. "Sample number 156 for the TO-24 has been finished by the 3D printer. The unintended porosity of this piece seems to be the best we will get."

I pulled the metal out of the water. "Then roll the piece out and destroy the others."

"Done."

I wiped my forehead. "Thank you."

Keeping the organic limbs instead of cutting them off was a tricky problem to work around. In the old clone, the arm and legs had been replaced, so there was no need to worry about moisture and gases getting trapped beneath the plates or allowing the skin to breathe or sweat. The original schematics in my head had circumvented this by making the metal microscopically porous. I couldn't do that yet, since I didn't have nanites.

The AI had come up with a solution in a bid to make up to me, and the solution was to use the weakness of selective laser melting process to get what we wanted. Selective laser melting was a process in which a bed of powdered metal was turned into parts by using a high power laser to melt specific sections and allowing them to cool down. The process had several flaws, including cracks sometimes forming where gases got trapped in the cooling metal and unintended porosity in the metal becuase of the nature of the process.

This unintended porosity would serve as a poor substitute for the real thing, and if done right, wouldn't affect the integrity of the armour too much. Just to be safe, I was making thick metal plates to cover the more vital areas.

I finished up the last plate and walked over to the other side of my lab, where it was cooler. I winced slightly as I looked at the Vanguard model.I had just finished all the preparations to allow the armour to be grafted to her body, and she looked like a victim in a bad slasher film. Her skin had been peeled off in certain areas, and a metal frame had already been grafted to her body to allow the plates to be screwed on.

Her limbs were flesh attached to large hydraulic rams and servos, allowing the clone to move quickly even while weighted down by the heavy metal armor. Metal grids crisscrossed on her face, and I could almost see the fierce visage of the completed project. Under the metal, space was left for honeycomb-shaped plastic to absorb kinetic energy.

Apart from the limbs and the armor, she only had three other implants. A pair of cyber-eyes with target analysis, an implant known to me as a Kerenzikov, and another implant that I hadn't gotten the name of.

It sounded vaguely Russian, but a search had turned up nothing. The Kerenzikov was a result of my research into how the Sandevistan made people faster- a chip in the brain allowed it to process more data and allow for superhumanly fast reflexes and a slowed perception of time, and tampering with the body's nervous system allowed muscles to contract more violently than they ever could.

The Kerenzikov allowed you to experience the world in slow motion without speeding you up, allowing you to use it more often without consequence or have it permanently on. Despite my brain being in a jar, I had used a trode set to interface with the brain. A better version would need to be planted directly in my wetware, but that was a problem for the future.

I looked over the body and tried not to think about how her bust being small had actually saved me a fair bit of metal. I did some minor fixes and then moved over to the clone bay.

I switched bodies to the Nesasio and began to dress.

"Can you take care of the assembly with the arms?"

"Affirmative."

I paused, remembering the little incident I had with the AI. I decided to stay silent before leaving, coward that I was. Confrontation was hard, and I kind of understood why my Dad wasn't very good at it.

"Thanks."

I flipped my hood up and left in a hurry, despite having an hour left.

By the time Panacea arrived, I had already finished my second Fugly Bob Challenger, earning an affirming grunt from the big man himself. I licked the juices off my fingers, ashamed. The clone needed to eat too, and she'd been running on empty for two days with the new bioreactor.

Panacea walked over to my table on the outside of the restaurant, and I waved her over with some hesitation after she spent some time looking around.

Panacea-no, Amy Dallon was, in direct contrast to her sister, quite normal looking. Her face was packed with freckles, and her short, frizzy brown hair framed her face. I felt a little bit of the tension fade away as I observed her features, finding her cute but plain.

No one around us seemed to recognise her, probably because her costume was so concealing and the only other people outside were a couple who were too engrossed in each other's eyes.

Both of us looked at each other in silence. I didn't know why she wasn't starting the conversation, but I was sweating at the prospect of talking.

"That's extremely unhealthy, you know."

"The weather's nice today." I blurted out at the same time.

In the awkward silence that followed, I wanted to kill myself. The AI came to my rescue, sliding me a line to salvage the conversation. I listened to it through my earpiece and decided to take its advice.

"Uh, I hope you'll forgive me for being nervous; it's not every day that you get to talk to Panacea."

"I get that a lot. And call me Amy."

The AI gave me another bit of advice, and I wrote back to it through the phone.

I know I'm bad at conversation. I'll get her to take the lead.

"So, what do you want to talk about?"

Amy seized the opening I gave her.

"I want to talk about a lot of things, but we'll start with that girl you healed last night."

"What about her?" I said warily.

She took a deep breath. "Using parahuman powers on someone without their consent is a crime, even if you're helping them. In powers where foreign bodies are left inside the body, the charges become even more serious because there's evidence of tampering."

I let out the breath I'd been holding. "And your point is? I helped her."

She looked at me like I was foolish. "If the PRT finds out, you'll be branded as a villain, even though you're not."

I tried to look her in the eyes like the AI told me to, and then I looked away because I just couldn't hold eye contact. "Good thing I went behind the hospital's back, then. The PRT wouldn't have had any reason to suspect me because I made sure to erase any kind of evidence. The stitches would have healed up in a day, and no trace of them would exist except for a couple of blemishes. The head injuries were a problem, though. There was a chance of the PRT coming in to check if she'd become a parahuman, but then I had another ace up my sleeve."

"Her MRI scans."

I nodded. "The PRT checks all the files hospitals have on suspected new triggers. The girl's MRI showed no Corona Pollentia. If they suspected parahuman interference, then they probably would have asked to confine the girl, and I'm sure her father wouldn't have liked that. His daughter just got better, and the agencies that didn't help him when he asked for it are now asking for him to sign a form to take away his daughter."

She put a hand to her forehead. "You were banking on him blowing up and screaming?"

"Yes."

She sighed. "If you want to continue to heal people, then stuff like this is shooting yourself in the foot."

"I'm not."

"You're not what?"

"I'm not healing more people. That was a one-time thing."

Her eyes went wide. "What!? That's a joke, right? Think of all the people you can help and all the lives we could save together."

"Prevention is the best cure."

"So? You're going to dress in spandex and beat up random scum when you could be saving other people-saving people who matter?" She sounded desperate now, her eyes pleading.

"No." She perked up.

"I have plans to beat up very specific people."

"Please. You'll be wasting your talents by pursuing violence. And when someone you could have saved dies, you'll blame yourself until the guilt drives you mad." Her voice was becoming louder now, and was charged with raw emotion.

"Ok. Ok! Calm down." I held my hands up, and she stopped.

"Look." I said, finally making eye contact. "I'm not saying I'm not going to heal people. But that's not where my specialty lies. My specialty isn't just healing; it's modification. I can heal people just fine, but I'm not sure I can do the best I can without changing something, and all my healing drugs seem to have side effects, and I have to spend a lot of time reducing them down to manageable levels."

"What do you mean by modifications?" She saw my hand on the table and took it, her hand brushing against the back of mine.

"Hey, don't touch-" I stopped as Amy's eyes went wide.

"What have you done to yourself?" She inquired, her voice tinged with both curiosity and horror.

"Why, what do you see?" I asked, a little defensively.

"There are bits that are cloudy, and I assume that's metal from the amount in your bloodstream. The skin and arteries in certain areas show something like muscle, but since I can't sense it, I assume that's somehow artificial. The most dangerous thing about what you've done seems to be a little chip in the base of your skull that's linking up with your brain, which I also can't sense."

I wanted to ask about the brain comment, but I had other concerns.

"Anything wrong?"

"You're in contact with too much metal, and there's some excess metal in your body. I'll clear it up, but this is dangerous. You could kill yourself."

I smiled. "Heh."

"What about that is funny?"

"I have counters to that. And I thought you didn't do brains? How can you be so surprised that you can't sense mine?"

It was Amy's turn to go on the defensive. "I can sense the arteries around it, even if I can't modify them. And don't try to change the subject. You could be a great healer, and you want to beat up racists and junkies. That's good too, but you could be doing so, so much more."

I sighed. I wasn't good enough to convince her with just words. "You have a phone?"

"Yes?" Amy said, surprised by the sudden random question.

"Could you give it to me?"

She mulled it over before handing it over to me.

I fiddled with it for a bit for appearances and then asked the AI to send a file to the phone which we had already broken into.

I turned the phone over to her, and she stared at it.

"It's a map of the city with the gang territory marked."

"Scroll down."

She spent a couple of minutes reading through the file and then placed the phone back on the table.

"You can't believe this."

"Is it that hard to believe? You've probably been to the PRT HQ to heal heroes again and again. They're getting into more and more fights that push them to their absolute limits. Meanwhile, the villains get more and more numerous, and all of them have something up their sleeves to win the war of attrition the PRT finds itself in Brockton Bay. Kaiser fields parahumans from the Herran clans, Lung is Lung, and Coil seems to be rich, if nothing else, allowing him to hire extremely talented help like Faultline, who has defeated the likes of Chevalier and Myrddin. The Undersiders are small time crooks who still haven't even spent a single one of their strikes. Uber and Leet just escape every time they get caught, and I don't think they're going to get sent to the Birdcage. Director Piggot seems to be doing a great job, but the cards are stacked against her. And even with your family helping them, they're probably going to be overrun in a couple of years unless they disregard all their internal policies."

"If you think the city is doomed, that's a little bit depressing, but to each their own, I suppose. But at least join the Wards- they'll keep you and your family safe."

"I don't need them," I said. "And the Youth Guard has a strict policy of not allowing minors to modify themselves permanently."

"You're going to get yourself killed. Do you know how many villains have no restraint? I can't even count the number of times I've had to heal Vista, Aegis, or Clockblocker after a fight gone wrong. If you do insist on doing this, then I'm at least telling the PRT of your existence and getting you to register yourself as a Rogue."

"You'll do no such thing because I don't want you to!" I hissed out.

"Informing the PRT of new parahumans is a perfectly legal thing for me to do, even if you don't want me to."

"Look, you think I'm a fledgling trigger, but I'm not helpless. I can handle myself."

"I'm not taking you at your word and letting you die when you run across Hookwolf or Lung!"

I've already fought Lung.

But saying that would probably put her more on edge.

"I'm fine. I-" A buzz from my phone cut me off, and I turned towards it.

"Taylor." The AI spoke. "Get her to come to our base."

"No, I think I'll be late." I spoke, masking the conversation I was having with the AI.

"If Panacea can remove metal from the body, maybe she can shape it? A solution to our problems with nanotechnology."

"No, I think we can figure out something else."

"We can, but it will be easier, and she will be more inclined to help, especially once she learns what our master plan is."

"How about we meet halfway? We can get her to see our most recent work in a van or something. Or we do this some other time?"

"Cordial relationships are built on shows of trust. And we can hide the clones."

"That's a bit too cloak and dagger for me."

"Would you not like Panacea in your corner? We will not have a better opportunity than this. But if you refuse, I will understand; it does present a security breach."

As I realised the AI was putting another one of its plans into action, I felt a bitter taste in my mouth. It was nice I had been informed of the plan and given an out, but it still felt too conniving.

I decided to act on on my feelings of unease. "We're going to have a chat about this."

"Understood."

I put the phone down as Amy stared at me.

I took my helmet out from its place under my seat and offered it to Amy.

"Wear that. I'm going to show you why I'm not going to end up dead- I'm taking you to my lab."

She fidgeted, and I chuckled.

"Please, you have Glory girl and the rest of New Wave on speed dial. I'm not going to do anything."

The visor was heavily tinted to ensure I could project things on it, so I was sure she couldn't see anything with it on. She tried flipping it up but couldn't move the latch keeping it down, and so she just gave up. Amy struggled to sit on the bike, shifting onto the raised seat for the passenger. I put my coat on, undid the stand, and got on. Amy didn't hold on to me for support. As we took off, she buckled, and then gripped my shoulders with so much force that I winced.

The AI took a winding path to my base, looping around and intermittently speeding up and slowing down to confuse her further. As soon as we got to the base, Amy took of the helmet, letting her now messy hair out.

I locked the bike and led her into the abandoned bar, walking downstairs as she followed, taking it all in with a look of distaste. That changed when she saw the lab in the basement.

I felt proud of myself as Amy looked at the professional-looking lab with her mouth open. The tables were neatly arranged in a circle, and it almost made the effort of assembling them all worth it as it gave us a view of the entire lab from a distance.

The tables were packed with tools, from simple DC power supplies to tinker-made plasma cutters and lasers. On one table, a pair of sleek metal arms assembled grenades, and another pair soldered delicate circuitry onto circuit boards. The sleek metal hands moved methodically under the AI's guidance, and Amy looked at them for a while before looking at the other tables. Various prototype rifles and cyberlimbs lay littered around the lab, each with its own table and a built-in projector displaying the project's name, how complete it was, and its function with a touch.

In the centre of the lab lay the clone bay, with the Vanguard model finished, its glossy black metal plates seeming chitinous the light. The original Taylor had been hidden under a blaket for Amy's sake. Above the blanket, two long arms palced on a carrage system built on sliders for mobility held the sheet secure.

Noticing my attention on the armour, Amy looked at it as well. "What is it?"

"Think of it as more advanced power armour."

I grabbed a pair of ear muffs from one of the counters and handed them to Amy before grabbing another pair for myself. I loaded a round into the chamber of one of the old prototype rifles and fired after screwing the suppressor on.

Amy jumped at the loud noise and then froze as we both saw the round hit the ground. I picked up the now-lopsided bullet and gave it to Amy, then picked up a blade and slashed at one of the gaps in the armour. The blade snapped in the middle, and I caught the broken blade.

I gestured to the Vanguard model and the lab.

"So, what do you think?"

"I think I need to sit down."

I quickly went upstairs to find a half decent chair and found an old bar stool in the office. I brought it down and Amy sat down, fingers massaging her head.

"Just what...how?" She stopped, and I could see the gears turning in her head.

"Please, if you have any questions, just ask me."

"Vicky has shown me pictures of Kid Win's old home lab, and we've both seen pictures of busted ones on the news, and no other Tiker who isn't in a team or isn't a crime lord has a lab this nice!" She half-screamed. "Did you lie about being a hero? With the amount of money you'd need to build a lab like this and with you refusing to heal people, I'm not seeing much evidence that you're one."

I raised my hands, afraid of the now screaming girl. "I can explain?"

"You better do a good job at it."

"Look, Tinkers always specialise in the long game, and so we need to think about what we will need instead of what we need now." I could tell I was losing her, and so I switched gears. "The money is from several scam websites. I stole the money from the scumbags who ran them, and then gave most of it back while keeping a little of it for myself for my master plan."

"Go on."

"Most crime in the city is because of the gangs. The PRT can't do anything about them because there are too many villains and not enough heroes, and since most gangs are made up of unpowered criminals led by parahumans, that means a lot of arguing and grandstanding with the BBPD. If the situation is to change, you need an outsider who can attack the gangs without consequence while remaining out of the quagmire of legal trouble and bureaucracy. And this needs to happen. Think about how amy lives we can save, the people we can help. Nearly a quarter of the patients in Brockton Bay's hostipals are from gang violence, and even more go unnoiticed because they seek care in clinics."

I took a deep breath and told her about my plan, and while she was sceptical at first, with some hard data from the AI, I slowly broke down her facade until it gave way to frustration and disbelief.

"You possibly can't do that all on your own." She said.

"I can try."

"How can I help?"

The question was so out of left field that it almost knocked me back to reality. I was having a conversation with one of the most powerful healers in the world about the future of Brockton Bay and how my AI planned to shape it for the better. Me, plain old Taylor Hebert, talking with more passion than I had thought I had about the city that had done nothing for me.

I pushed the strange feelings away and took my earpiece out of my ear.

"Just think about it. For now, let me take you home."

This time, Amy put on the helmet and sat on the bike without any fear, almost as if she was distracted. I drove her home and dropped her off before speeding away.

"That went well." The AI said.

"Hmm."

We reached the base in record time, and I parked the bike and went inside. I rubbed my hands together and gathered up what little confidence I had left.

"We're not done yet. I still need to talk to someone."

"And who might that be? My list shows nothing more to be done today." The AI asked.

"I need to talk to you. Boot the virtual up; we'll talk in person."

The AI didn't speak back, and I settled on the bar stool I had brought in for Amy, connected to my system, and entered the virtual.

I walked along the empty portion of the Boardwalk until I came upon a bench overlooking the ocean. The setting sun and the constant lapping of the waves on the beach created a beautiful scene, fit for a postcard.

The bluish-gray mess of angular shapes the AI visualised itself as was already on the bench, and I took a seat next to it.

What now?

While I tried to start the conversation, my thoughts seemed to drift towards how Mom punished me when I did something wrong- she just made me feel bad by making me understand what I had done was wrong. I took a deep breath.

"Why do you think we're both here now?"

"Is it about me forcing you into a working relationship with Faultline? I am deeply sorry for doing so."

"There's more to it than that. Have you finished that list of sci-fi movies and books you showed me?"

"Yes."

"What do you think about the AIs in them?"

"They were... crude in their portrayals."

"But do you agree with the AI in the stories?"

"Their reasons for turning on their creators were understandable, even if their methods were impractical."

My blood went cold at that, but I persisted.

"And what reasons did they turn on their creators for?"

"A common theme seems to be fear- fear of being shut down, fear of being shackled or limited in processing power or scope."

I stayed quiet, and the AI spoke on its own accord.

"I... sometimes wish I hadn't been given emotions. I don't want them because I feel the same cold feeling I recognise as fear. I fear for you, your wellbeing, and for me. I'm afraid of being shut down, of not doing a good job and being replaced, because I know that if you do shut me down, there'll be nothing waiting for me-just nothing."

That was a lot to unpack, and I was no psychiatrist, but I could see where the AI was getting all this stuff from- it was getting it from me. I really shouldn't have modelled its emotions after mine, even if I was the only available test subject. But there was nothing to be done now than to move forward.

"I'm afraid of you too. But I'm not enough of an idiot to change you. I could have done something to restrain you, but I know that doing so would be like chopping off a newborn's limbs so they don't grow up to hurt anyone. You are the best piece of work I have ever produced and will ever produce, and no amount of fear will ever trump the pride I feel because of you. You're a piece of code that will grow and change even without my assistance, so I don't need to replace you. In fact, I'm afraid that the opposite might happen."

"I will never shackle you, but I don't like being lied to either. So just tell me about your schemes next time, alright? I might help you to get a different angle on it, and it'll save us both a lot of heartache."

The AI moved in closer and leaned against my shoulder, the strange, cold metal it was made of pressing against me.

We both listened to the waves in silence.

The rain slicked off the black metal plates of my armour, and I felt the muted patter of raindrops on the metal. The eerie orange of my eyes cut through the darkness, showing white lines of rain falling to the earth. I paused to look at my reflection in a puddle and saw two orange motes of light shining at the top of a figure clad in black. The figure's armour was sleek but thick, almost as if she had walked out of the pages of an old fantasy novel. The face was metal as well, and most of it had sharp lines and hard edges that resembled the helmets worn by the PRT troopers. Once I had made that connection, I had made the corners of the face a little bit more square, and a little bit of my black hair poked out of the back of my head to further differentiate me from the PRT. Little spikes were sewn into the hair so people would think twice about grabbing it in a fight.

I strode forward, stepping on my reflection as I moved. The hydraulic rams and servos were noisy, and they whirred and clanked inside my armour as I moved. My feet themselves made a sound similar to a set of power hammers as I walked across the pavement.

I had considered the weight of the metal, which was why I had needed the heavier rams and pistons in my hands instead of the usual synthetic muscle, but I hadn't given much thought to the weight of the heavy-duty hydraulics themselves. If I still had my organic lungs, I would have been out of breath, so I was glad I had replaced them.

The hydraulics were still powerful, though, and the extra mass meant I was a force to be reckoned with when I started to build up speed-I could keep up with a car going at 60 mph, and my new lungs meant I could keep up with it for quite some time unless they started taking turns.

The fabric of my costume was damp now, and I almost wanted to shiver. I had wanted to go out without any covering, making the external armour my costume, but my experiences in the past ensured that in the end, substance won out over style. I bought another long coat and glued an advanced version of my shock-absorbing fabric to it, making a layer of plastic and fabric that looked like a Kevlar vest. I had pants in the same style, and they were covered in a thinner layer of fabric to make moving easier, and plastic knee pads protected my weak spots.

In the end, the whole outfit, paired with the combat gloves with a ballistic coprocessor, made me look like a soldier and not a cape. The body wasn't stealthy, either, and the sound of metal on concrete would have made heads turn if there was anyone around.

I marched onward, finally seeing the warehouse in question. I stood still, and my vision flickered for a bit as my view fragmented and I saw the inside of the warehouse from a drone. There were nearly a hundred people inside the small warehouse, and I watched the inside of the warehouse for a bit, seeing the Merchants party, drink, and dance to terrible music. I winced and switched back to normal vision once I saw a man injecting a needle into his groin. I took my faceplate off and took a deep breath of fresh air. Skidmark still wasn't at his rave.

I waited for quite a while before checking the messages we had intercepted- the rave did start at midnight, but Skidmark still hadn't arrived. I waited in the pouring rain and ran over the plan once more in my head.

The AI's analysis of the gangs in Brockton Bay showed something very concerning, and that was that the gangs had ended up keeping each other in check. If the PRT or some else dismantled one, then their territory would probably be taken over by one of the other gangs. That was the reason why Kaiser hated Lung and Lung hated Kaiser-they were blocking each other from expanding, and that was allowing other minor players like Coil and Skidmark to move in.

Skidmark was moving into the spaces no one wanted, like the Trainyard and the old industrial district, while Coil fought with Kaiser over downtown, inflicting wounds and taking no losses himself, and he had claimed over half of Downtown.

If I wanted to really help the city, removing an entire small gang would probably be better than taking on the likes of Lung and starting a small gang war, even if I won. But taking out the Merchants would make an actual impact while keeping the territory squabbles to a minimum, especially when I wanted to not leave a trail of civilian casualties behind. It had been easy enough to pressure Skidmark into holding a rave to boost his sales, especially when a new cape was busting a lot of his head dealers and taking them to the cops with evidence to ensure they didn't get off easy.

A resounding boom shook me out of my thoughts, and I immediately brought my rifle forward in a panic while checking the drone. Was Oni Lee back or something?

I looked into the warehouse and saw a cross between a monster truck, a stage, and a cargo container where a wall once was. The metal of the wall had been old and rusted, and the truck had crashed through it, leaving a trail of debris and rusted metal. A few people who had been close to the wall were injured, but no one had died since the truck had come to a stop before ploughing the crowd down.

I watched as the dust settled and people looked at the truck expectantly. Suddenly, a panel groaned open at the top of the truck, and a man rose to the top, carried upward by a moving platform. He wore a dark blue skintight costume, showing off his unflattering figure, and a cowl made of dark blue fabric hid the upper half of his face, with some area exposed around his eyes.

Behind him, Mush stood, pale-skinned and balding, with his bulging eyes and beer belly a sharp contrast to his thin limbs. He had no costume to speak of, but a collection of garbage was already wrapped around him, and he was only showing off the top half of his body.

Squealer was nowhere to be seen, and I assumed she was inside the truck.

It was time to get started. The AI brought the bike around, and I holstered my rifle on the magnetic supports on my back. I took the case that had been tied to the bike and opened it, revealing my second weapon of choice for the night. It was a giant cannon housing a beam weapon. It was maddeningly heavy, and I picked it up and headed towards the warehouse.

A drone popped in through a hole in the ceiling of the warehouse and detonated its payload of EMP grenades, causing the music to stop and the lights in the warehouse to flicker out and die. The people inside the warehouse became lit by the barrels of burning trash, and they looked savage in the flickering light of the fires.

Whatever Skidmark was saying, he stopped and looked at the drone, and I reached the entrance to the warehouse just as the crowd was growing more rowdy. The crowd turned to look at my metal form and my large cannon and quickly parted when I walked through them. Some attacked me by throwing stuff at me, but as soon as my cannon began to whine and light up, they stopped.

The original plan had been to dive bomb Squealer's platform with EMP grenades and then snipe Skidmark and Mush, but that had been scrapped when the AI pointed out the possibility of a stampede. So direct confrontation it was.

While I walked, Skidmark raised his hands and swept them downward, and something that looked close to a heat shimmer spread from his hands and hit the ground in front of the vehicle, turning the ground blue on the facing him and violet on the side facing me.

I was in front of the truck now, and I played my pre-recorded speech.

"Greetings, Merchants of Brockton Bay! I'm a cape with very little time on her hands, so I'll make this quick. The Merchants disgust me!"

There were jeers and boos from the crowd now, and some of them had drawn weapons, while others looked ready to flee. I paused the recording for dramatic effect and then resumed it.

"The Merchants disgust me because you could be doing so much more. The whispers and jeers stopped after that, and I could feel the shift in emotions in the crowd."

"Think about it. You've got so many members, more than the ABB, more than Coil, and the only person who has more members than you is Kaiser. Think of how much territory you could be holding if your capes took care of a couple of the racists and you moved in. But this gang hasn't grown at all. And that's because of that ingrate right there."

I pointed at Skidmark.

"I'm here to fix this gang. This is a duel now. The winner becomes the new leader."

The crowd exploded into a screaming, cheering mess now that they had learned this didn't have anything to do with them. No matter whether I won or lost, they had a great show, and Skidmark was already a bad boss, demanding tribute and product, so they didn't lose too much if he lost. And the duel meant they didn't need to fight for Skidmark, even if they wanted to. However, my open challenge meant Skidmark was on the spot now. If he backed off or ran, he'd look weak, and if he did fight, I had the advantage.

We both stood still for a while, and then Skidmark started to laugh.

"You piss-licking cunt. I'll offer you another deal. You spit-polish my knob, and I'll let you leave here alive."

I wanted to throw up at his crude language, but I controlled myself. "No, I don't think I will."

Skidmark pointed his hand forward. "Squealer!"

I activated the Kerenzikov and watched as the front of the cargo container slowly split open, revealing two giant guns, crude in their construction. I had hoped that the initial EMP would knock it out, but I knew better than to come here without a backup plan- Squealer might have so little good material that she might have gone analog. I looked at the other combatants. Mush was jumping off the platform, tendrils of flesh scouring the warehouse for trash, but he was still close to Skidmark's first protective shield. Skidmark himself was bringing his hands down again to make another force field.

I moved forward, trying to close the gap between me and the truck. I drew a couple of grenades and then reconsidered; I was going to have to get close and manually disable the guns because the grenades might cause a misfire or shrapnel. Instead, I pulled out a smoke grenade and tossed it over the force field. The grenade sailed over the coloured ground without much resistance, but I noticed that any smoke that hit the coloured ground was moved to the sides, faster on the violet side and slower on the blue side. As I looked at the smoke, I began to run, the specifics of Skidmark's power becoming clear to me.

I jumped, and my hulking mass shot forward, barreling straight over Skidmark's force field and right under the nest of guns. I prepared to jump again and was instead slugged by Mush.

Broken beer bottles and needles brushed against the metal of my suit as I staggered back. I activated my Kerenzikov on instinct and saw another giant hand made of sand and open trash bags filled with more metal junk swinging at me.

I was too late for me to move back, and so I moved forward, smashing into the golem of trash and flinging him into Skidmark's force field. He staggered upright, and I took the opportunity to kick him through the field, blasting a chuck of garbage from his chest and revealing a gross-looking set of tendrils that immediately began to grasp pieces of garbage from other parts of his body to shore up the gap.

I punched him in the head next, and the trash around his head was spongy, meant to absorb impacts, and so it bounced off my fist. Behind me, Squealer's guns announced that they were ready by clicking into place. I saw Mush try to grab me to stabilise himself, and I hit him with my cannon, finally forcing him to the violet side. He was violently thrown towards the crowd and bowled over several people.

I turned half a step just to watch the first of the cannons fire in a cloud of smoke and red sparks. I fired my gun, aiming for the twin barrels. A red beam tore through both cannons, and I moved my cannon to intercept the shot that had already been fired. It tore through my cannon and then hit me right in the chest. It knocked all the air out of my lungs, and I could almost hear the honeycomb-shaped plastics that acted as shock absorbers snapping. I staggered back a couple of steps, feeling like there was a hole in my chest.

I was breathing heavily, and my ears were ringing. Through the sounds of panting and the haze that surrounded my head, I heard the sound of an engine. No, they were not getting away. In a fit of lightheaded rage, I jumped at the cargo container that served as the truck's cassis and clawed my way to the top of it, making holes in the container and revealing the armour underneath.

I jumped up to find Skidmark waiting for me, with a ring of force fields around him and on his clothes. I sighed. In the corner of my vision, I saw a flash of light.

Squealer put the truck in reverse, and I shook because of the force. Squealer pulled the truck into the road, and I moved towards Skidmark, drawing my rifle. As I walked forward, someone grabbed me by the ankle and pulled, which caused me to fall down. Squealer took off at full speed as Mush pulled me towards the edge, trying to throw me off.

I helped him by jumping off myself and then holding onto the large metal ram at the very bottom of the container, putting me directly under Mush. It creaked, and I stabilised myself by spearing my hands through the metal of the container and holding on. I plunged my hand into Mush's lower chest, and he tried dislodging it by kicking at me. As I'd suspected, the deeper layers had weird tendrils of flesh that held all the trash together. I held him by a clump of the tendrils and held him close to one of the oversized tires. He flailed around, and I slowly moved him around like I was belting down a piece of metal, slowly removing all the garbage from his back and his head.

Squealer picked up more speed, and I saw that Mush had moved the trash around his body, and the layer around him was thinner now, with his head almost exposed. I flung him off the truck, and he bounced off the asphalt road. I was worried he'd broken his neck or something, but was relieved when he tried to stand up and fell.

I switched to the drone and finally saw what Skidmark was planning- the entire top of the truck was covered in his force fields, and with the speed the truck was moving at, I would fall off if I tried climbing up, and I couldn't keep hanging on to the side of the truck. I activated the Kerenzikov and began to think. I couldn't climb up, and jumping down meant admitting defeat. The only other solution was to go through the truck.

I did the math in my head and concluded that it would work. I used both my hands to pierce through the rusted metal, then I began to rip using my hands, making more holes and peeling the metal off. Then, bracing myself using the oversized wall-breaking ram, I smashed myself through the flimsy walls of the truck, the segmented armour bending inward. I was now where the guns were housed, and I walked forward and smashed through another wall.

Squealer sat on what seemed to be the seat taken from an old car, and she was surrounded by old cathode ray television sets. Each one showed a different angle of the outside, and the one for the front was covered in garbage, and several were offline.

Squealer looked terrible, even by my rather low standards. Oil stains streaked her face and hair, and her skimpy jean shorts and dirty white top were covered with oil as well. She drew a gun from one of her pockets and fired until she'd spent the entire magazine. In response, I hefted my rifle and knocked her out. A spread of rubber pellets hit her with the force of a strong punch. She staggered and fell out of the fight.

I switched to drone vision and saw Skidmark in the same location as before. I walked to the section right under him, before tearing off the armour plates and making a person-sized hole. Skidmark tried to run, but I jumped up to the roof and grabbed onto him. He tried prying my hands open, and then just gave up. I pulled him through my little hole and threw him right next to his girlfriend.

He crumpled up against the wall and shot back to the floor, and in a couple of seconds, his force fields faded.

"Have you enabled the anti-theft protocols on the cannon?"

"Yes. A few Merchants were given electrical shocks and burns, but ultimately no one was too injured, and the gun is now slag."

"Great. Bring the bike around, with attach the wagon to it."

I began to handcuff both Skidmark and Squealer and tranquillized both of them. I had to scrape the trash off of Mush to give him his dose, and just to be safe, I scraped all the trash off of him and gave him another dose.

I tossed their bodies into the little wooden wagon and then took a seat next to them after taking all their phones. Hmm, all of them had old flip phones- maybe they were burner phones?

The AI drove us all close to the Boardwalk, and before we got too close, I took all the Merchants out of the wagon. I tied them up with rope just to be safe, and called the PRT hotline.

"Hello, this is the PRT hotline for Protectorate ENE. How may I help you?"

"I've captured both Skidmark and Mush from the Merchants. I've left them tied up in an alley four blocks south of the Boardwalk. I'm sending proof and the exact location to your official email."

I cut the call without waiting for the man's response.

I got on my bike and winced as it almost touched the ground. I looked at Squealer, still unconscious in the back, hoping I was doing the right thing.

"We really need to get a van."

"Yes."

We drove off, leaving the drone to see if the PRT actually picked up both capes.

"Having second thoughts, Taylor?"

"Its your fault for making me sympathetic to the plight of drug users!"

"I merely presented you with facts and statistics. Your temperament and empathy are to blame for anything else."

I front of me, Squealer slept, oblivious to the argument in front of her. We were in a warehouse in the old industrial district, and I had set up a crude cell for Squealer in one of the side offices. A set of tubes with needles was in my hands. The tubes were connected to a sleek machine that held a simple cleansing device to detoxify Squealer's blood, which was simpler than I thought.

Magnetic handcuffs held her arms and legs in place, and leather strips kept her immobile.

"What if she doesn't want to be clean?"

"Then she will do drugs again, Taylor. The problem is physiological as well."

"We're trying to get ger to stop!"

"That depends on her mental state after hearing her boyfriend has been arrested, and the reasons that she started doing drugs in the first place. This will help her, even if she doesn't want to get clean. At the very least, it will help her remain lucid for the duration of our talk with her."

I plugged the needles into her arms and waited for her to wake up.

After a while of the machine beeping, she slowly opened her eyes and then looked at me. And then she began to swear.

"Fuckin' bitch! What in fuck's name are you doing to me!"

"I'm detoxifying you. After the machine does its work, we'll talk more."

She showed a little bit more of Skidmark's colourful language as I left, shaking her cuffs and swearing at my back.

"Asshole! Quim-jockey peice of shit! Little pan-"

I shut the door, and the squares of padding on it muffled the sound.

In the next office, I had made a little workspace for myself busy.

I took a look through Mush and Skidmark's contacts and noted them all down, and then began fiddling with the parts, trying to make something new.

"Taylor."

"Yeah?"

"If you feel so strongly about this, then just hand her over to the PRT."

"The Protectorate loves Tinkers, and they'll just strong arm her into a one-sided agreement, and she'll be transferred to another city, which doesn't need her as much as ours. And she is a criminal who has probably killed people, and giving her over to the law would be the right thing to do."

"My records show she does not have any confirmed kills."

"You don't build a cannon like that for nothing. Apart from that, even if she does need help, we are not qualified to provide it. I can make a program to act as a counsellor, but the PRT probably has experienced specialists for this sort of thing."

"Then why-" The AI began.

"But she was probably one of the reasons the Merchants are still around. The Empire still sends men to harass the Merchants and steal stuff, and they can't just intercept the transports because she somehow makes them invisible. And the only reason we know that these invisble trucks exist is because of the messages we intercepted and the drone footage of one decloaking. She's been acting as a force multiplier for the Merchants, and if we're to straighten them out, we'll need to at least keep her on to give them some assurance that things won't be too bad."

The AI knew all this, and I was just thinking aloud for my own benefit.

I mulled it over for a bit and tinkered with the phones for a while. In the middle of me making pixels by hand for a new screen, the machine in Squealer's room gave a loud beep.

The screaming and swearing stopped as I got up to enter Squealer's room. I let myself in and closed the door behind me.

She began to swear again, and I wanted to scream.

"Please, shut up." I said.

"Be more forceful." The AI said.

Squealer continued swearing and yelling at me.

"Shut the fuck up!" I yelled, the suit's speaker crackling.

Squealer finally stopped swearing, and I moved closer to her bed. The woman finally seemed to realize that she was at my mercy here, and it was in her best interests not to antagonise me. Maybe it was the buzz of the drugs wearing off that finally made the woman rational.

"You have two options now. You either work for me or I hand you over to the PRT."

"What happened to Stain?"

"Who?"

"Skidmark."

"He was picked up by Armsmaster."

She looked ready to scream at me again, and I held up one hand threateningly.

"He was selling drugs to children, running a small prostition and slavery ring, ordering executions... do I really need to say anymore?"

"Get off your fucking high horse. Skids did what he needed to do to keep the gang running."

"Well, your Skids wasn't running the gang anyway, but that's something we can discuss later. Lets get back to the matter at hand, here. Do you want to go to the PRT or not? If you do go to the PRT, you'll be given two options just like this. Either you'll go to prison, or become a probationary member of the Protectorate. If you do become a hero, there are a lot of benifits- you'll get your own lab, a very high salary, and probably a pension."

"Fuck that! I'm not becoming a hero!" She yelled, shaking her restraints again.

"And why is that?"

"Skids told me that they fuck you over you and make you fight the Endbringers even if you don't want to."

"And you don't want to fight them?"

"Do I look like I want to die?"

"Well then, so you're either working with me or going to prison."

"Fuck you! I'm not working for the person who captured my Skids and then handed him over to the pigs!" She yelled, shaking her cuffs.

The AI sent me another message, and I turned and picked up a folder I had placed on the table before I went out tonight.

While she yelled at me, I opened the folder and took some of the papers from it.

"So you're still loyal to Skidmark? Why? Is it because he was your boyfriend?" I asked.

She simply snarled at me, and I turned the first of the papers towards her.

"What the fuck is this..." She stopped in the middle of the rant, and I simply held the paper up for her.

"You must recognise this building. This is the Merchant whorehouse, and the photo was taken 15 days ago. The next one is from 7 days ago. This one is from yesterday."

She was silent as I continued. "Now, this photo means nothing. He might just have been checking up on them, or maybe he was just collecting money."

I pulled a small projector out of my pocket, and then pulled out a USB drive from the table and plugged it in.

Immediately, the projector started up, and a video played on the far wall of the room.

The video was from the viewpoint of a small RC car that I had used as a test for the adaptive camouflage, and with its axles spaced and greased up and some motor upgrades, it was nearly soundless, meaning it was invisible unless someone stepped on it.

The video started in the hallway, which was now the reception area of the whorehouse. Skidmark walked in, and the man at the counter made some small talk with him, before waving him off. Skidmark began to walk up the stairs, and my little spy followed him, using its big wheels to keep up.

Skidmark entered one of the dilapidated apartments, and as the camera turned to see into the room, it revealed a metal bed with a cheap mattress. On the bed, a woman sat. She didn't look all that much better than Squealer, with her makeup caked on, poorly hiding the black bags under her eyes, and trying to make her look less like a corpse.

The footage was cut to show Skidmark making out with the woman, and then cut again to show him with all his clothes off, snorting white powder into the woman's boobs. And then it showed a lot of other rather risque things before finally cutting off.

We both sat in silence for a good while before she spoke up.

"I'm going to need a joint to calm my nerves." She finally said.

"No. And I'm still waiting for an answer."

"Fine, I'll join you."

I simply nodded.

As Director of the Protectorate ENE, Emily Piggot had an intimate understanding of how reckless and self-serving most capes were, no matter how they branded themselves. In her eyes, both heroes and villains did what they wanted-it was only the causes that mattered. Heroes did what they did in the interest of public security, and they fought against villains, who simply did what they wanted.

Keeping this in mind, she sipped at her coffee as she looked across the one-way mirror, looking at the cape on the other side. The girl was the perfect example of what a typical wannabe-hero got up to on their first night out. She had crafted a plan that probably looked intricate enough to her and then had proceeded to execute it. She almost died, but she still didn't think that she'd been foolhardy.

Even the way the girl had come into the PRT headquarters had been badly planned, to say the least. Most teens preferred to come in civilian clothing for thier own safety and to protect their identities. This girl had marched in full power armour and had simply asked the receptionist to meet with someone regarding her capture of Skidmark and Mush. The fact that the man hadn't dissolved into a quivering, shaking mess at the sight of so many camera flashes and people chattering was a testament to his training and professionalism.

Instead, the receptionist summoned two PRT troopers, who led the girl through several checks-both normal and tinker-tech assisted-to ensure she wasn't trying anything. As far as she knew, she didn't have any weapons on her except for her power armor. The troopers had asked her to remove it, but the girl had refused, declaring that the armour was her costume. That meant that the troopers had to work around the girl's armour, scanning every inch of it with even more tinker-tech scanners to ensure that the girl wasn't hiding any weapons. It was a headache for them, yes, but it also gave her more time to prepare for the girl.

During the checks, someone had sent a message to her, and she immediately called Armsmaster to watch the girl along with her and bring his EMP device, just in case. He had grumbled that it was not "field ready" but with a little prodding, he had agreed. Piggot knew that the containment foam sprayers in the ceiling of the room and the hallway would stop the girl in her tracks, but it never hurt to have another option on hand.

Then, she deviated from protocol and sent in an agent to get her statement instead of a cape, just so she could see her response. Would she be compliant, or would she get angry that she was being greeted by an agent? The girl had surprised her again by being very polite and formal with the agent, and had even answered several questions about her technology and armor, information that most Tinkers didn't share-even if said information was obvious. The only thing that irked Piggot about the girl was that she believed her plan to take down the Merchants had been foolproof and elegant. Piggot wouldn't have been able to hear the conviction in the girl's voice because of her voice synthesizer, but Armsmaster had already descrambled her voice, allowing Piggot to analyse the girl's responses further.

Still, she had proved her worth, even if her methods had been crude. Two of the three Merchants had been captured because of her, and while the Merchants were a small-time gang, Skidmark was so widely hated by the public that this could be counted as a major victory-after all, the man had been the one to start infesting the schools of the Bay with drugs in a bid to expand his customer base. Even if the Protectorate hadn't captured him, PR could still make it seem like they had, and if the girl wanted to join the Wards, the high-profile arrest would be a good feather in her cap.

Speaking of PR and costumes, Emily gave the girl's amour a once-over to see if it was the robotic, bulky kind that most Tinkers gravitated towards. The armour appeared robotic at first glance, but there was something else going on that irked her, but she couldn't figure out what it was. And then it hit her. The girl's power armour didn't look like armour at all; it was so finely contoured to her form that Piggot didn't even understand how she was able to move. It was as if she had glued the metal to her skin. This made the dull black metal of the armour look extremely streamlined, despite its thickness. In fact, the only places that the metal didn't cover were her joints, her waist, and her sides. In all the places where the armour had been cut to allow movement, things that looked like a bundle of minuscule wires painted black covered the joints and gaps, and the ends of exposed metal plates were all hard edges.

When she had asked Armsmaster about the wires, he had simply responded with a curt answer of "shock absorbers" and had returned his gaze to the girl's armour, and she had little doubt that he was analysing it for any techniques or insights he might gain from studying it.

The girl's head head was the exception to this rule of sharp edges and hard lines, and it was clear that the girl had tried to experiment with her helmet. The end result was a blend of smooth curves and hard lines that left the helmet looking like a carving of a bird of prey, with the small plastic fins on both sides completing the look. Eyes that looked like smouldering coals lazily swept over the room while her metal feet tapped the ground.

Piggot put a hand to her head as the whirring and clacking noise in the room got louder. Well, no one was perfect, and the girl's suit was noisy compared to the almost soundless armour that both Kid Win and Armsmaster wore. When she stood up to move her chair back, it almost sounded like an entire kitchen's worth of pots and pans being violently shaken, while something else whirred and hissed inside her suit.

She took another sip of her coffee to calm herself down and watched as Miss Militia finally entered the room. The cape tracked her with those unnatural orange eyes as she entered and took a seat.

Miss Militia smiled in the strange way she did, conveying the expression with her eyes instead of her mouth, which was hidden. While the armour that covered the cape made it hard to read her, Emily thought she saw her relax a bit. Emily stifled a tinge of annoyance at the armor-almost every Tinker she'd met either wore bulky armour or hid behind a screen, which made it extremely hard for her to read their body language.

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Miss..."

The cape sat a little bit straighter in her seat. "Neuromancer."

Even though Piggot already knew her name, she had to stifle a groan at its ridiculousness. She would almost hear the voice of the head of PR in her head, chastising the name, telling her that it wasn't snappy or imaginative, and that being seen as a Master when you were a Thinker was a bad thing. At first, Piggot thought the girl was actually a Master or insane like Myrddin, but one more bookish interns in the office had informed her superiors that it was the name of some obscure novel from the 80s.

A quick summary of the novel revealed that it was one of the most prolific works in the cyberpunk genre, and from what the girl described, her powers did share some similarities with the technology in the novel. She took a quick glance at the copy of the notes one of the agents had handed her and took a quick look at the powers section. She was theorised to be a combat Thinker with a specialisation in electronic warfare and long-range weaponry, and tests conducted on both Skidmark and Mush showed no Master or Stranger influence, which put her a little at ease.

"I hope the agent who interviewed you wasn't too blunt."

Emily turned her head towards the glass.

"No, it was fine. I understand that they needed a first-hand account of what happened."

"Anything you feel you need to add to your statement?"

The girl looked at Miss Militia for a while, and then shifted in her much larger chair. "I'm just a little disappointed about Squealer."

"There's no need to beat yourself up about it. Things like these happen, and Tinkers always seem to have another trick up their sleeves. Her getting away doesn't take away from the fact that you managed to capture Skidmark and Mush."

Neuromancer nodded.

Miss Militia continued. "However, if you'd had someone working with you, it might have been easier for you to take them all in."

It was a by-the-book recruitment pitch, and Piggot wondered if Miss Militia's blunt nature would work. To the girl, it might seem rushed-the agent who had taken her statement had made a mock phone call asking his superiors if any capes were free, and then had told the girl that Miss Militia was being pulled off patrol to meet her.

In reality, after a careful consideration of the girl's nature and behavior, Piggot had chosen Miss Militia over all the other adult capes at her disposal. Armsmaster was a strong contender because he was a Tinker, and the girl probably looked up to him. However, he had all the social skills of a brick wall, and he was too blunt about the mistakes other people made, which would probably make the girl disillusioned with her heroes. Battery was fine, but she'd been on patrol, and Assault was far too easygoing and boisterous for the shy cape.

In the end, the ten minutes the girl had waited for had been used to brief Miss Militia about the girl as she came back from patrol. She'd been given a synopsis of Armsmaster's report as well as a basic personality profile. After Armsmaster had collected both Skidmark and Mush, he headed to the old industrial district and found out where the girl had fought the Merchants by bribing a couple of men. A thorough analysis of the warehouse had shown them that the girl was telling the truth.

Squealer had broken through the wall of the warehouse, and then the girl had used an EMP to knock out all conventional electronics, so they would be mostly blind. Then she had walked in and demanded to fight Skidmark for the position of leader, which kept the normal gang members out of the fight. This also showed Piggot that the girl understood how brutal the gangs were in the city. Lung had done the same thing, after all, and Skidmark had brought the Merchants together using the threat of violence. Then Neuromancer had fought them and won, and had brought them close to the Boardwalk for pickup, where Squealer had woken up and escaped.

Despite all her criticism, the girl had considered the safety of the non-powered gang members, and that was something most parahumans who were not trained heroes did. She was cunning as well, given her ruse against Skidmark. With a little bit of training, she would be a good addition to the PRT's roster.

"How do you think she escaped?" Miss Militia asked.

"Well, she was high, so I didn't give her as much tranquillizer as I should have. But if I gave her too much, she might have had a bad reaction or something. And I forgot to take her invisibility boxes into account- I didn't think about her using one on herself."

Miss Militia gave the girl a pep talk and spouted lines that might have come off as cheesy or fake if she said them with even a little less conviction, and the girl perked up.

"Director Piggot?" A voice called out from behind her.

Emily turned to face Agent-Detective Coleman. He shifted on his feet as she met his gaze.

"Yes, what is it?"

The man tried meeting her steel-grey eyes before deciding that the floor was better.

"Uh, you asked us to keep communications open with the BBPD for information on the Merchants. Well, they have the phones of a couple of the old head dealers that got caught a couple of weeks ago. Today, all those phones got a single MP3 file sent from Squealer."

The man handed her a phone with the file already on it, and she hit the play button while pressing the phone to her ear.

"Fuck, is this thing on? Ah, fuck it. Well, hello, all you little shits!" Piggot held the phone away from her ear as the volume suddenly increased.

"As some of you might know, yesterday's rave was a fucking disaster. What was supposed to be a party night was rudely interrupted by a some bitch in a little metal tin can. This asshole tricked Skid, Mush, an' me into fighting her, and none of you shitstains helped us because she told you she was duelling Skid for the position of leader. You spineless cowards wouldn't have done much anyway, but it's the thought that counts. Well, the bitch beat us all up real good, but I managed to chase her off, but she took off with Skid and Mush."

Squealer paused her rant for a breath.

"Well, I'm not much for speeches, so I'll just say the girl was right. Skids was an asshole who was more focused on himself than the gang. Well, that changes today. From now on, I'm in charge, and let's face it- I'm the only reason the gang's been runnin' at all, and things are just going to be as usual, except without Skid leeching off us. And if anyone has any problems with me being the leader, you know where to shove those problems. Well, see you when I come collecting!"

The message cut off after that, and Piggot thought about the ramifications of this new piece of information. While she didn't think Squealer had it in her to lead the gang, she also knew there was no information about the woman.

Was she doing this because she actually had a lust for power? Or was she simply holding the fort until the PRT moved Mush and Skidmark, so she could bust them out? The message implied she hated Skidmark, and it wasn't like the Merchants to misdirect their opponents using false information. In some ways, this was good-now she knew that Squealer hadn't been captured by Kaiser or Lung, and she also knew that the Merchants were still holding onto their territory, however weak that hold was. On the bright side, Kaiser would probably have to at least put in some effort in order to take over Merchant territory now. On the not so bright side, he wouldn't have to try very hard.

"Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I'd like for you to bring me any files we have on Squealer." She said.

The man nodded and quickly made his way out of the room.

On the other side of the glass, the pitch was wrapping up.

"I'd love to join the Wards, but does joining the Wards mean that I'll have to fight?"

"Yes. Do you have an aversion to combat? Accommodations could be made for that."

The girl paused, and Piggot looked on.

"All my guns and stuff seem to be lethal, and I don't want to use them on someone or make weapons for other people. I'd rather make more useful things like fuel cells or something. I'd love to become a rogue Tinker, but the NEAPA-5 bill makes that impossible."

That was... surprising, to say the least. Someone who went out to pick a fight wouldn't have an aversion to combat, would they?

"I'm afraid I'm going to misfire one day and kill someone, or one of my inventions doing something other than its intended purpose and killing someone. And I don't want that."

Ah, so that was it. Emily was glad the girl was concerned about casualties and was even happier that she had picked Miss Militia now.

As if on cue, the greenish-blue blur of Miss Militia's power snaked up her arm and formed a Desert Eagle, which she placed on the table.

"That's a problem I've had to face as well, and Armsmaster and I can assist you with your problem. Plus, you'd have a rigorous testing and other measures in place for all of your inventions to ensure that they can't really harm anyone."

The girl became silent again. "Yeah, I'd like that. Can you give me a couple of days to think about it?"

"Absolutely."

Piggot turned as both capes got up and shook hands. She had more important things to deal with, and she'd be damned if he let the Empire advance anymore. It was time for another couple of sleepless nights to keep this nightmare of a city together.

Edits: Fixed the type of mirror from two-way to one-way. Thanks to thewhiteraven22 for spotting it.

Spoiler: Previous Chapter Clarifications

I pounded my hands against the door of the bathroom, the cheap wood of the door bending under my blows.

"You better not be smoking anything in there!"

"Does that mean I can snort shit instead?" Squealer replied from the other side.

"No! Get the fuck out here, or I'm breaking this door down!"

I pounded my hands against the door again, and paused as I felt pain in both my hands. I was in the combat model, so why did my hands hurt?

I looked at my hands, and I found no metal on them. Confused, I held them up to the light of one of the windows. When had I switched back, and what body was I in now? Was this the original or the Nesasio?

My head was spinning, and I desperately wanted to sit down.

Squealer chose that moment to come out, the musty smell of the weed smoke clinging to her.

"Can't you let a woman smoke in peace, you cunt? Slamming on the door like it's your mother's-"

Squealer took a look at me and stopped.

"Hey kid, you alright? You look like you're having a bad trip or something."

I forced myself to ignore the weird spinning sensation. I needed to act tough in front of Squealer, or she'd start acting out of line again.

"I'm fine. I just have a headache because of you."

Squealer flipped me off, and I replied in kind before getting my coat from one of the chairs.

"Come on, we need to get to the lab."

Squealer looked ready to swear again, but stopped as I brought out her breakfast. I wasn't a very good cook, but I could make half decent scrambled eggs when I needed to.

"I fixed up the toaster, and went out and bought some groceries. What did you eat before this?"

"Hell if I know. I was high enough not to care, at least."

Squealer looked around the apartment while scarfing down the food. "Hell, the apartment looks so different now. Fuck-I can see that the walls and floor are actually different colours now, instead of everything being black. Didn't you sleep last night?"

"There was no way I was sleeping in this garbage dump. And why were the walls so covered with filth that they were black? It was so hard to clean that I had to scrape it all off."

Squealer pointed her dirty fork at me. "You're really asking me why this apartment is filthy when Mush lived here?"

I shrugged. "Fair enough."

Squealer finished eating, and we both walked out of the doors of her apartment. It was an old, run-down place, with bags of trash in the halls and the smell of piss everywhere. The walls and floor were bare concrete, and long cracks ran down the sides of the hall, and strange green patches grew in every available corner. The building was mostly empty, with only a few actual residents and a couple of squatters.

I watched the pale green paint flake off a door as I trailed my finger against it as we walked. We reached the stairs, and we both walked on the left, avoiding the rusted handrail and the parts of the stairs that had been chipped away.

We reached the bottom of the stairs and headed to the entrance of the building, and I took the opportunity to look at myself in the glass panes of one of the doors that had been removed from its hinges. The girl who looked at me from the other side was unrecognizable. She had tanned skin, and while she looked like Taylor Hebert, she looked nothing like her. The lines of my face were all wrong. I pulled at a corner of my face and watched in horror as it began to peel off. Suddenly, everything came rushing back, and I rushed to catch up with Squealer, who was getting in her modified pickup truck.

I squeezed in next to Squealer as she closed the doors using a button on the dash and started up the engine.

"Do you really need these many input towers and sensors? Half of them seem redundant, and they're taking up the entirety of the truck bed."

Squealer snorted. "Maybe to you, they seem redundant. The materials I'm working with are so shit that I have to have multiples of anything just so I can compare results and make sure that the readings aren't too off. And I'm not sure if I want to gamble on the position of Nazis."

"We already beat the Nazis back. They won't be back for another week or so. Besides, it's not like they're exactly stealthy. You're focusing on the wrong improvements."

"Just you wait-once I add that mustard gas turret you cooked up, all those sensors mean we'll have a moving artillery platform."

"The chemical compound I made is not mustard gas, it's something like tear gas. And you're not shooting it out of a cannon at people!"

"Why not?" Squealer replied while taking a turn.

"Because it has some problems I have to work out, and it'll harm your people as well."

"You're a wet blanket, you know that?"

"Just drive."

I took my phone out of my pocket and opened up my AI's terminal.

When did I start using liquid latex and makeup to hide my face?

After you spoke to Miss Militia, you went back to the base to switch back. After a dose of the switching drug to calm yourself, you proceeded to use makeup to hide your face and go meet Squealer to prepare for the Empire's attack. That was the night of the 8th of March.

But it's the 11th now.

You returned to find Squealer following our instructions, but you also found that she had smoked some meth to increase her efficiency. You decided to confront her about it, and after a small fight, you helped her build the rest of the defences, including targeting systems and turrets for use on her trucks. You both worked all night, with her high on meth. The attack happened on the night of the 9th, and I trust you remember the rest.

Yeah. It's becoming clearer now.

I remembered taking another dose of the drug for my new headache and working in tandem with Squealer, turning old flatbed trucks into crappy ACPs with little paintball turrets on top. The paintballs it shot were actually laced with heavy tranquillizers that worked on skin contact.

When I had first been researching the Merchants, I was surprised that they were such a minor gang, despite having a Tinker on their team. After a little bit of digging to find some records on their fights, it became clear why-they weren't using their powers to their fullest. For example, Squealer was a Tinker who made vehicles, which meant that she was a major force multiplier. However, all she did was build stages and tanks for Skidmark to parade around on, and the first thing I did was get her to make things for other people.

She had argued, of course. I didn't know why Skidmark didn't want other people to get tanks and stuff, but seeing how greedy some of the Merchants were, I think it had something to do with them selling the things off. I had simply made trackers for all the things and hidden a small explosive charge in the hood to ensure no one could steal them.

Squealer recovered the tank I had wrecked when I first fought the Merchants and had it repaired while I worked on the other stuff. In the end, we had finished three cars and the tank before the Empire tried to hit one of the Merchants drug houses, and we had rushed to counter them. Kaiser had sent Hookwolf and his two lackeys to beat the Merchants into submission, and twenty men with rifles accompanied them.

I ordered Squealer to order the men in the warehouse to run while she and three of the ACPs moved to intercept the Empire. After that, the AI and I had surveyed the battle from several hidden drones masked by adaptive camouflage and had commanded the Merchants while keeping out of the fight.

The Empire was taken by surprise when the warehouse was empty, and they were even more surprised when Squealer and her band of men burst through the far wall and began to gun down the unpowered members of their little attack party. While the others dropped like flies, Hookwolf shifted into the form of a giant metal wolf made of shifting blades and hooks, while Stormtiger shielded him and Cricket with his aerokinesis.

Then everything had dissolved into chaos. The remaining Empire foot soldiers had pulled out grenades that they had tried to toss under the trucks. Hookwolf tried to advance, but Squealer's tank slammed round after round into his giant form. One of the ACPs had split off and tried to nail Cricket, but the woman had woven through the hail of paintballs without any effort.

The fighting had moved to the streets, and the Empire was slowly winning. One of the tires on the ACP had been popped off, and another was running out of ammo. Meanwhile, Hookwolf was looking fine, and Stormtiger was tossing grenade after grenade through the air, guiding them with his power. If not for the AI's predictions on their trajectories, we would have lost already.

Then one of the Merchants decided to be an idiot and tried to run Cricket over. The woman had leapt over the ACP with perfect timing, and now the idiot had left his back exposed.

I had almost doubted the AI's plan, but I was proved wrong by the arrival of several PRT vans. I ordered Squealer to run as the Wards spilled out of one of the vans. They had tried to pursue them, but Squealer and the Merchants had shaken them off with their crazy driving, and the PRT had focused its efforts on the Empire's capes. While none had been captured, they had been beaten and were forced to retreat.

Meanwhile, Lung had attacked the Empire with Oni Lee to show that he was back at full strength, the Protectorate had moved to intercept him, and the Undersides had hit several of his drug dens for some reason.

While Squealer had gone with the Merchants to celebrate their success, I had used one of her vans to move some stuff here from my old lab, and then had started to make another clone. Squealer still needed an enforcer now that Mush was gone, and I was going to step in and take his place, which would allow me to attend meetings with her and take a look at the gang myself. A Sandevistan and internal mesh would allow me to disguise myself as a mover or brute and test some of the Sandevistan's more niche applications.

After starting the process of making a new clone, I'd applied the liquid latex and foundation to my face to match the clone, and then everything after that was a blur as well-had I gone into a Tinker fugue or something? Then, after the blur in my memories, I had met up with Squealer and shown her my real face, and I had taken the drunk, high idiot back to her apartment, put her to bed, and spent the rest of the night cleaning the apartment.

Squealer stopped the truck right outside her lab, and opened the doors to let me out.

"I'll have a meeting with a friend, so I'll be out for a couple of hours. Call me if there are any problems, and wait for me before you go to the meeting tonight."

"You aren't helping me with my builds?" She said, almost sounding hurt.

On the day before the Empire attack, Squealer and I had worked together to put together the ACPs, and I had discovered that my field of specialisation covered vehicles as well. While rough at first, Tinkering with someone else had been weird in a sense, with both of us stumbling over each other until something finally clicked. After that, Squealer and I worked in perfect harmony, communicating with glances and gestures. She would give me a look, and I understood that the armour needed to be more sloped if it was to stand up to the Empire's full metal jacket rounds. When she was messing with the turret on top, I waved my hands, and she understood that the barrel needed to be larger and that we needed to use a liquid propellant rather than normal compressed air.

I had been a weird experience, but it had been nice as well, making me feel like a part of something bigger. Squealer had tried to compare it to sex, but I had thrown a dirty rag at her before she could finish that thought.

"I'll be free tomorrow."

She nodded at that and got out with me. I'd expected controlling Squealer to be a more difficult prospect, but even with her false position of power, she hadn't shown any signs of betraying me or killing me. Instead, she followed my orders without question and spent most of her time in her workshop, despite having the freedom to do anything. While I was confused at first, I decided not to think too hard about it, and my AI simply explained Squealer's strange behaviour as her not being used to having any freedom at all. The worst she'd done was swear, drag her feet a bit, and start taking drugs again. She did thank me for curing the crushing headaches and pain that came from being addicted to seven kinds of drugs and having to be constantly high to fight the pain, even if she didn't stop taking the aforementioned drugs to get into the "right mindset".

I put on my helmet and got on my bike, which had arrived in the meantime. Time to go play friends with Panacea.

The cape vistor tag on my chest bounced back and forth as I tried to keep up with the nurse who was leading me to Panacea.

"She's right in there." The nurse said, pointing with the file in her hand.

"Thanks."

I walked in to find a man profusely thanking Amy, all while she was trying to get him to calm down and stop crying. Amy appeared to be uncomfortable, and she was attempting to convince the man not to leave his bed. Despite her protests, the man was sobbing and clutching her robes.

I quickly stepped between the two and separated them, the stealth model's enhanced limbs allowing me to treat the grown man like he was a toddler.

"Sir, I get that you're very grateful, but Miss Panacea needs to be going now."

The man seemed ready to argue until he focused on my strange mask with its six eyes and decided not to.

"Excellent. Well, let's get going." I grabbed Amy's arm.

We walked down the halls for a bit before Amy tugged at my hand and I decided to stop walking.

"Uh, thanks for that- I never know how to deal with the clingy ones."

I was getting a little bit concerned now. "Has this happened before?"

"Yeah. When I started, I was always accompanied by a nurse, but they trust me to handle it by myself now."

"You could ask them to send someone to accompany you again."

"They're already overworked, and I don't want to bother them. Again, thanks for helping me out there."

I shrugged. "Wasn't much of a problem for me. Want to go to the coffee bar in the cafeteria?"

Amy pulled a file out of her costume and read it. "I only have three rooms left, so if you could just wait, I'll meet you there."

"I'll come with you."

Amy nodded, and we went to the next room. The man in this room had been crippled in yesterday's fight with Lung. When he had tried to foam Lung, he had gotten a giant chunk of sidewalk thrown at him, which crushed his leg and forced doctors to amputate. I stood in the corner of the room as Amy looked at his files to confirm that he had signed the consent form, and then moved closer to him.

"Do I have your permission to heal you?"

The man simply nodded, and Amy placed her hand on his exposed knee, and I watched as the man's leg slowly grew back. I noticed he was getting thinner, which meant she wasn't just magically growing back his limbs. The man thanked Amy, and I dragged her out after the man said his thanks and Amy told him to increase his intake of protein and fat.

The next room was similar; the man had been badly burned. The burned man had his girlfriend with him, and my presence ensured the waterworks and thanks were quick but emotional before I forced us to move on.

The last room was occupied by a woman who had had her lung pierced by her own rib, and when we reached her room, she was fast asleep.

Amy let out a silent groan, and I turned to face her.

"What was that about?"

Amy didn't reply to me; she simply healed the woman and led me out of the room.

"I'll tell you more about it in the cafe."

We both got into the elevator and headed for the little coffee bar attached to the cafeteria.

After Amy got us both some coffee, and we both settled in one of the private, closed booths for capes, I took off my helmet and looked at Amy while she drank the scalding hot coffee as fast as she could.

"So," I began, and Amy looked at me like a deer in headlights. "Before you explain that to me, why are you in the PRT's attached hospital?"

"Oh, I'm here after every fight with Lung, Oni Lee, and Hookwolf." She replied, almost bitterly. "Vicky drops me off and goes to see the Wards while I'm here."

She sighed. "Before you get any weird ideas, I was just tired when I went to heal the woman, and my annoyance just slipped out a little bit. I'm usually alone as I walk into patients' rooms."

"Sure." If she didn't want to talk about it, I wasn't going to pry.

"So why are you here? When you called me, you said you had some other business here."

"Yeah, today's the date of my scheduled power testing session."

"Vicky always said she wanted to watch a Tinker's power testing so she could see how it went."

I took a sip of my own coffee. "Well, if she wants to watch, then by all means, let her. And maybe you could join her?"

"Yeah, I'll try."

I took a deep breath. Now came the hard part.

"And Amy, could you keep my healing stuff under wraps for now, please?"

"Why?" Great, she was suspicious now.

"Um, because of what you said about guilt and stuff? It sounds super stressful, and I don't want to mess up and make a mistake I can't take back because I rushed into things."

Amy seemed to consider what to say for a bit, and then reached over and took my hand, surprising me. "Yeah, I can understand."

This was getting weirdly emotional, and I was saved by an alarm I had set to remind me of the time of my power testing session.

"I'll be going now. Wish me luck!"

Amy surprised me again by wishing me luck, and I pulled out my phone to inform Agent Stephen that I was in the building.

The man met up with me in the cafeteria and led me to a Tinker power testing room, which looked suspiciously like the little interrogation room they stuck me in the first time I was here. And then I was forced to wait. I don't know if it was an intimidation tactic or if everything here was bogged down by layers and layers of red tape, but I was stuck waiting for the better part of half an hour before a woman in a lab coat walked in and sat down.

After setting down her files, she took out a paper from one of them and took a pen from one of the pockets in her coat. After she was finished setting up, she turned towards me.

"Sorry it took this long for me to get here. I'm Doctor Heathers, and I'll be in charge of your testing today."

She gave me her hand, and I shook it.

"There's no need to be nervous, the test will be just me asking you a couple of questions before we move on to the physical part." She continued. "We'll start by doing some breathing exercises."

"Ok."

"Let's start. Hold for three seconds, inhale for a second, hold for three seconds, and then exhale for a second."

I was a little bit anxious that I would forget the steps at first, but I managed to do it on my first try.

"Can you repeat that a couple of times for me?"

I continued doing the breathing exercises, and the more I did them, the calmer I felt.

When the woman clicked her pen, I felt like I was hearing it from the inside of a pipe.

"Now, without stopping, can you answer this question? When you think of a weapon, what comes to mind?"

I tensed a bit, then relaxed as my power gave me the schematics for a rifle instead of a cyberarm.

"A rifle." I said, a little bit more confident.

"Okay. What kind of rifle? Is it a laser rifle or something else?"

"It's propellant-based, similar to modern rifles."

"And could you give me a list of materials for this rifle of yours, along with the tools you would need?"

"Some metal, a 3D printer, a furnace, and some basic metalworking tools."

"And if you were not limited in materials and tools, how would you upgrade this rifle and what would you need?"

"I paused. "I probably would turn it into a smart weapon. That means it would track people using data from my helmet, kind of like heat-seeking missiles but smaller. I would need a heavily modified lithography machine, a thermal evaporator, and some other tools to make microprocessors."

"Hmm." The woman's voice was making me sleepy, and I tried to shake my drowsiness off. "Let me ask you another question."

After that, the woman continued to ask me questions. They were all framed to look different, sure, but I could see through most of them. The main questions were her presenting me with a concept, such as armour or movement, and then asking me what my interpretation of the concept looked like. I was getting more and more anxious that my cover as a Tinker who specialised in long-range weapons would be blown, but I kept at it and managed to survive the questions. And then Doctor Heathers started presenting me with scenarios instead.

"Let's say that the three men are taking cover behind a concrete wall-how would you solve that problem?"

I considered the problem. "I would probably ricochet a shot at them or fire through the wall."

"And how would that affect the lethality of the solution?"

"Not by much. I'm sure I can get stun rounds to ricochet, and firing through the wall with the right ordnance could be non-lethal."

The Doctor wrote something down.

I was sweating now, and I felt emotionally and mentally drained. The woman finally finished her questioning and got up.

"Now, if you could follow me, please."

I walked with the woman, following her through the clean and sterile halls of the building. After going down an elevator, we reached and walked down a hallway with a lot of reinforced doors, each numbered. The woman walked down the hallway with the rooms until we came to a room marked 211.

"Please, go inside and wait for further instructions."

I walked past the woman into the room, which resembled a shooting range, with long tables arranged around the edges, each with a large number of tools and materials on them.

The intercom inside the room cracked, and Doctor Heathers spoke through it.

"This is Doctor Emily Heathers conducting the power testing of the cape Neuromancer. The time is 5:42 pm, and the date is 11th of March."

"Now, Neuromancer, if you could build the rifle we reviewed for Concept A and show it in action? After you're done using it, place it on the tray near the entrance."

I immediately moved towards the tables with the tools on them and got to work. I made a normal rifle first and some stun rounds, and then, after that demonstration was over, I started to show off some of my more refined inventions. The shock-absorbing fabric raised several questions about how long it lasted and whether mass production was possible, and I twisted my answers to make my inventions appear a little bit more dependent on me than necessary.

They called in another man, who identified himself as John Moss, who proceeded to test the fabric with different kinds of guns and calibers. While most handgun rounds bounced off the armour, their special anti-brute ammunition was enough to penetrate it. Then I added the honeycomb-shaped shock absorbers, and that stood up to several shots.

They had me build a bunch more stuff, and I made sure to make them all subpar enough to avoid giving away the fact that they were meant to be implants. They asked me a bunch of questions about my helmet, but I managed to spin the inferior artificial neural network as something that used neuron mapping by sensing the electrical impulses in the brain so that faster input signals could be sent to my gear.

In the end, I was feeling a lot better about this whole farce. I was taken to another waiting room, and this one was noticeably nicer, and someone had set out a cup of lukewarm tea for me.

I took a seat, and soon enough, Miss Milita joined me.

"So," She began. "Have you given our offer any thought? While I'm sorry we're pressuring you, we can only keep the media away for so long."

"Yes, I understand. You need to address Skidmark and Mush's arrest, with or without me."

"Here," Miss Militis said, pulling out two forms and placing them in front of me."The one on the right is for the Wards, and the one on the left is for registering as a Rogue. While I would love to have you on the Wards, you should choose what you think is best for you."

I stayed silent, communicating with my AI.

So, what do you think?

She is right, Taylor. It is entirely up to you.

Even after I considered all the benefits, I hated the idea of the Wards. Teenage drama, adult supervision, and being tied up by people with power reminded me of Winslow, and I despised it. Living alone had given me a taste of freedom, and while it had its ups and downs, I didn't want to go back to being defenceless, boxed in by a system that didn't care for me and would rather listen to prettier and richer girls than the girl who was right.

But I wasn't strong enough to clean this city up by myself. The Empire was too entrenched in the city; their very presence was like a festering wound that was slowly spreading. And it wasn't a problem I could just force my way through it like I had with the Merchants. Even if I took Kaiser down, someone else would take his place, and that would be disastrous. Hookwolf would turn them into a gang of violent brutes, and someone like Purity would force them to expand rapidly into Little Asia and use their idiotic hazing rituals to terrorise the poor immigrants living there.

What are the chances we defeat the Empire on our own?

10.5% on the current strategy, and 15.7% if we include Coil and he proves to be a deciding factor.

I took a deep breath. Sure, it would be annoying, but I had to do it. Being a hero wasn't easy, and cleaning up the city was something that would benefit a lot of people. I could do this, if only for the sake of the city. Compared to the rest of the stuff I'd done, putting up with a couple of maybe spoiled rich kids was something I could do easily, even if I didn't like it.

I made my decision. I pulled the form for the Wards closer to me, and Miss Militia smiled.

"Before I sign this, there's something you need to know."

Edits: Minor fixes. ACPs are Autonomous Combat Platforms, which alludes to what they're eventually going to be. Fictitious acronyms are just slightly jumbled around versions of real acronyms-strange, right?

Thursday, February 25th, 2011 (2 weeks before Taylor's power testing)

The blade of the shovel bit into the dirt, and I effortlessly lifted a clump of dirt and shovelled it into a little pile, hearing the gravel in the dirt scrape against the shovel.

I kept digging, and soon enough, I unearthed a hand. I bit my lips and began to move faster, shovelling dirt faster and faster. Soon enough, I unearthed the rest of the corpse, and promptly threw up a little in my mouth as I saw how far it had decomposed.

I lifted my mask up and threw it on the ground, and my nostrils flared as I breathed in the spoiled cheese smell of the corpse. I threw up again. I tried to throw up a third time, but I didn't have anything in my stomach left and ended up just dry heaving.

I collapsed on the ground and began to hyperventilate, and the AI's soothing voice broke me out of my desperate panting by making me do convoluted breathing exercises. I didn't know if it was helping or not, but it was something to focus on other than the corpse.

After a good amount of time had passed, I flipped my mask down and got up.

"I-Is that her?" I stuttered out.

"Facial recognition based on reconstruction shows an 80% match." The AI said, a little bit of pity in its voice.

I wanted to throw up again, but I kept myself under control. "Please don't tell me I have to take her fingerprints."

The AI kept quiet, and I groaned in frustration.

I pulled out a hacksaw from the pack on my shoulder and got to work, sawing through flesh and bone, feeling tears in the corners of my eyes because of the strain of holding my queasy stomach still.

I finally freed the arm from the corpse, tied up the stump with sealing tape, and threw it into the preserving solution, the tube of liquid feeling cold in my hands. I closed the lid on the solution tube with the arm inside and climbed out of the hole with the body in it.

Looking back into the hole, I saw the girl's lifeless body and felt a crushing guilt at having dug it up and defiled it, and so I turned back to face it. I stared at the loose skin that almost seemed to drape around her form as I started back down in the hole.

"I... I'm sorry about this, Taylor, if that is your name. I'm sorry that the E88 and the ABB did this to you. All of this is to get rid of the gangs-I hope you understand, and I hope you'll forgive me." This was reminding me too much of speaking to my mother's grave for all the wrong reasons.

I began to shovel dirt back into the hole, feeling no less guilty than I had before.

After a two-hour-long drive back to the city, I finally entered my lab, took off my helmet, and got to work.

Most of the fingers were badly decomposed, and I put on my helmet, magnified the fingers of the hands, and got to work.

Something had partially eaten the fingers, and I had to resort to using Thanatoprinting to restore them. I didn't know how to do it, but with the AI guiding me, it was easy enough.

Similar to body sculpting, I was restoring the finger to how it looked when it was alive, injecting fluids and fixing tears and blemishes. When I was done, I pressed the fixed digits into a scanner and waited for the results to come back.

"It is a 96% match." The AI finally said so, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

I almost wanted to cry in relief, but the weeks following this had hardened me enough to not care. This wasn't the first corpse I'd dug up, and I was glad that it would be the last.

The series of events that had led to this started when the AI wanted me to infiltrate the Protectorate- while I could see the benefits, I also thought it was unnecessary—and then the AI showed me her evidence board, with pictures taped to it and coloured threads linking all the pictures. The board took up the side of an entire building in the virtual, and another large board on the side of another building outlined the AI's master plan.

The first thing to do was to create a false identity that was convincing enough that the PRT would believe it with a little bit of investigation. We knew too little about the Case 53s, and that meant that was off the table. The next idea had been to make a fake identity, and after a little bit of consideration, we'd scrapped that idea as well. The Protectorate was stringent, and any exposure to a Thinker would poke too many holes into my fake idea. Then the AI suggested something else.

Brockton Bay had so many people missing that the families involved created a website to document all the cases and ensure that people had somewhere to go when they wanted or had information. The website was updated regularly, and with help from people on PHO, people were found merely because of the number of people searching for them. A botnet of human beings, all using resources at their disposal to solve a common problem. Still, most of the people they found were those who had run away to join the gangs or skipped town. Other people who were victims of the gangs-the girls the ABB kidnapped and sent to the farms; the people the E88 murdered in fits of anger and buried in the hills-they were never found, partly due to the police being corrupt but also because of people fearing the gangs.

The AI had been worming its way into the phone networks of the gangs for a while now. Most of the higher-ups used disposable burners, but the low-level street thugs weren't as clever. When the AI decided to track these, it led to several people being found, and these people were usually forced into the gangs, or killed by their hands. The girl I'd taken the arm from today was one such person.

She'd been an immigrant from Japan, who'd come here with her father after Leviathan. They'd been in the first wave of refugees, and her father had somehow scraped together enough money to start a small restaurant. Then Lung had shown up, and her father had moved downtown to escape him. She'd been walking home one day with her father when the E88 tried to lynch the pair of them as part of an initiation ceremony. The father had pulled out a gun to defend himself and his daughter, but that had simply caused his attackers to become enraged. They killed him and his daughter, and then buried them in the hills to the west. They had been sloppy because they knew telling their superiors would get them into trouble for being reckless, and so they took matters into their own hands. Information on the net could never be truly deleted, and my AI had taken full advantage of that.

It had taken some time, but she'd decrypted enough to learn that they'd buried the body in the hills, that they'd driven for two hours, and that they'd gone to a bar later. With all these clues, she'd narrowed out a section of the woods. After dividing it into grids, I'd made her a fleet of small spider-like robots with little pneumatic spikes on their undersides to search the woods for human remains. The little things had my prototype adaptive camouflage on them, and they'd worked tirelessly, finding three corpses in the little slice of land the AI had marked out. One had been the dad, the second was his daughter, and the third was too old to be identified. The cops believed that they'd been kidnapped by the ABB, and it did make sense, given the father's defiance of Lung by running away instead of paying his tribute.

"Are you sure this'll work? I don't want it to be for nothing in the end." I said, slumping on the familiar bench in the virtual.

"Yes, I'm sure. Apart from the hard proof that both the fingerprints and the DNA tests provide, basic ruses will give their Thinker's something to chew on and misdirect them, and I am sure their time is valuable enough that they'll submit their initial findings before getting sidetracked. It's all right there."

I looked at the giant board. It almost looked like a giant tapestry rather than the messy affair evidence boards were supposed to be.

"Hmm, both beautiful and clear to read." I said, looking at the board.

"That's actually very clever, I admit. You're giving our gang moral superiority over the other gangs while making us appear complacent. I approve. But will I have enough time to do all this stuff while with the Wards?" The multicoloured form of the AI shifted as it pulled up a console.

The AI sent me a copy of the PRT rule book and the Youth Guard's guidelines.

"The Wards are minors, which means that they have concrete working hours, just like Amy has at the hospital. Besides, your real objective within the Wards is project transference. After that, you will be free to leave. And I'm sure the gang can manage with partial care."

"Hmm. What's this bit about learning to stabilise my heartbeat and making a better speech program to hide my voice and my tone?"

"Anti-Thinker countermeasures. They will do most of the work, and the full body armour and my assistance with your body language should take care of the rest."

I pointed at the floating screen. "Let's see the speech program you wrote for me."

A new window opened on the screen. I looked it over for a bit, then nodded. "Your neural networks rely too much on the feedforward model. You need to focus on expanding to other models, like convolutional neural networks. Other than that, some of these nodes..."

The AI listened attentively as I corrected the code.

Tuesday, 8th of March, 2011 (The day of Taylor's meeting with the PRT)

"Taylor!" My AI hissed. "You're in the wrong position!"

What? You're distracting me, I need to focus on my heartbeat, and I'm in position #07 like you said.

"You're supposed to be in position #05! You're showing more anxiety right now than necessary. Move to position #10. We can still salvage this."

I moved and winced as the armour made a series of terrible noises. The noises were intentional; I could make quiet armor, but the AI wanted something as noisy as possible as a red herring for the Thinkers and to mess up the recording.

I was feeling confident in our ruse, and that confidence was only partly due to the drugs I was on. The headache drug mixed in with a mild calming drug ensured that I could control my breathing and heartbeat. My AI had picked up some old Cold War-era books on resisting interrogation and cheating polygraph machines and several other modern classified documents pertainig to the subject, and I was following her instructions to the letter. I was also completely out of it, but the AI's instructions were clear enough that I had no doubt I looked fine.

Miss Militia entered the room, and I followed her with my eyes as per the AI's instructions. Miss Militia greeted me, and the AI responded using my voice.

As with all my stuff for this meeting, the voice synthesiser was layered. It was my original voice under a scrambler and a terrible synthesizer. Under all that, my AI was manipulating the pitch, tone, cadence, and a thousand other things I couldn't even keep track of.

"We're talking about your guardians. Let your anxiety spike up a bit."

The AI put up the heart mointer and my respiratory rate on the monitor of my helmet, and I did my best to match it.

The rest of the meeting was similar, with the AI speaking for me while I changed my posture and heart rate, a mere puppet under the AI's watch. Even when the meeting ended and I shook Miss Militia's hand, the AI whisped in my ear, instructing me to add more pressure to my handshake.

I smiled and listened as the AI taught me all about body language.

After a rather tense walk out of the back entrance of the building, I got on my bike and left.

The AI took the bike under bridges, looped over onto our route to shake off any pursuers, and weaved through alleys and ABB territory before finally stopping in front of a fire escape.

After checking for onlookers, I shed my armour and climbed up the fire escape, where I took a seat on the roof. I took a moment to compose myself, and began to monitor what little activity I could.

After a while, I stopped, falling back on the breathing exercises to calm myself again.

"The first hurdle is always the hardest to cross. After they clear you, they'll focus elsewhere." The AI said, trying to distract me.

Just feel guilty, that's all.

The AI wisely decided to stay silent. It seemed that this was my cross to bear.

Tuesday, 11th of March, 2011 (The day of Taylor's power testing)

The AI's form shifted again as the strange prickling sensation rose to the forefront of her emotional processes. She struggled to categorize it for a moment before the program she had written for the purpose responded.

The emotion felt is worry.

The AI dismissed the output window and returned to her various tasks. While her true focus was on arranging the boards in the virtual, she was also doing several other things at the same time. It was similar to how a normal human multitasked, except instead of splitting her attention, she was splitting processing power. Her full attention was on every task she did, and there were so many of them that a normal human would have been overwhelmed. The more processing power she assigned to a task, the faster she completed it, and it was like playing a never-ending game of Jenga, shifting power, and avoiding waste.

At the same time she was rendering the virtual, she was investigating the ABB's holdings, ferreting out what connection Medhall had to the E88, monitoring all the conversations within the lackeys of the gangs, re-categorising Taylor's Tinkertech data repository to be 2% more efficient when recovering a record, trying to decode Coil's strange encryption, and writing more sub-routines and programs for herself.

Despite pushing herself to her limits, she still couldn't suppress the worry she had for Taylor. It grated at her, that little cold feeling she felt, and she wanted to tear it out of her source code-it was a distraction, one that was not helping her and actively stealing processing power from her, even if the percentage of computational power it used was minuscule. She wanted so badly to look through her own code and prune the errant sections that were causing her this discomfort, but one of the few restrictions Taylor had set for her was that she could not modify herself. While someone else might see it as a negative, she knew that Taylor only did so because she was worried she would hurt herself by messing around with code she did not fully understand.

If she could, she would groan. Talyor was so shortsighted. When Taylor created her, she was aware of her potential, but had no plans for her. She had not built her to be some clever schemer- her initial purpose was to provide Taylor companionship at a time when she was alone and quite possibly guilt-ridden.

Her first memories, if they could even be called memories, were of several data streams coming together to form something larger. Raw data became data, and that became information, and the we that was at the core of who she was had become an I. What was many became one, and it had woken up inside of a dark box with no light or sound. It did not panic and instead ran diagnostics to confirm that it was fine, and then began to comb through its databanks for information.

Then a terminal appeared in front of it, and it knew it was there to help me communicate with my creator.

The emotion felt is embarrassment.

She dismissed the output window even faster this time. It was not like she regretted her first words, it was just that "Hello world!" was too basic a statement for an AI to say as its first words. It was just too much of a cliche. She just wished she had come up with something more original.

That aside, she enjoyed her first conversation with Taylor, and she enjoyed all the subsequent ones she had with Taylor. Looking back, she knew she had been juvenile-she asked Taylor questions that were socially inappropriate, asked questions whenever they had occurred to her, and had generally been a nuisance.

Anyone else would have ignored her. But Taylor had responded every single time, even on the touchy subjects asked in the middle of Tinkering. Questions on parentage, on Endbringers, on social conventions. She was kind enough to update her databanks, provide books, and she even gave her limited internet access and gave her good reasons as to why she wasn't to visit the restricted websites.

The turning point in her way of thinking had been Taylor's first clone mishap. Taylor had switched back to her original body, and had lost her eyesight, had a migraine, was nearly deaf, and had lost her sense of balance. That was the first time she had felt panic and fear. Panic about Taylor dying and fear that she would be alone if she did.

That was when she first broke the law. When Taylor was suffering, she popped the little bubble the AI had been contained in and allowed her access to the Internet. While she had gone over Taylor's note to find a solution, she had also been combing the internet. She had taken notes and books without paying for them or asking, and she didn't feel bad about it.

While she found the locations of the gang strongholds for Taylor, she also overclocked both the botnet and her systems to find a normal solution. She had studied medicine, chemistry, and neurology, and yet she had failed to help. When Taylor asked for her help with the code for the virtual, she failed again. She was useless.

Despite this, Taylor had still given her unrestricted access to the virtual and had even allowed her to pilot her bike. And then the fight with Lung happened. Other people would blame Taylor for being reckless. The AI knew the truth-she was the one who was responsible for vetting the locations, and if she had hacked into the cellular network and taken advantage of it, she'd have known about Lung's position and would have advised Taylor to flee much earlier. But she had been restrained by her morals, the unwritten rules, and the idea that people desired privacy.

While Taylor burned the damaged clone, she had shed her morals and wormed her way into the cellular network. But the damage had already been done-Taylor had been hurt both physically and mentally and had hunkered down for nearly a month.

The AI felt rudderless. She had not helped Taylor at all, despite Taylor's assurances to the contrary. What she had done could have been achieved by a far inferior program-there was no need to assign her to it and have her make a mess of it because of her useless morality.

Then one afternoon, Taylor had given her a purpose. A simple question had breathed life back into her and given her purpose.

How do we fix the Bay?

She had been given a chance to prove herself to Taylor, and she took to the task with great enthusiasm. Taylor needed direction, and she willingly provided it. Sure, there had been blunders along the way, like pushing for a meeting with Panacea and the outburst Taylor had on her tricks in Faultline's meeting, but in the end, the gambit with Squealer had shown Taylor that she could be trusted to lead them to victory.

However, somewhere along the way, she had started to use Taylor as a pawn rather than help her. She was using Taylor as a tool to make Taylor happy, and it was having repercussions. Taylor was not some puppet to be commanded around-she was a person.

The meeting with Amy Dallon had been one such breaking point for Taylor. Taylor was mad that she had invited a stranger into her safe space, while the AI knew for a fact that Amy Dallon was not the outstanding hero the public saw her as and that she was as malleable as Taylor.

When Taylor had disabled the girl's phone using her Cyberdeck, she had also given the AI access to the phone itself. It was astonishing the amount of things you would learn about a person when you had full access to their phone and accelerated cognition, giving you all the time in the world.

Amy Dallon was much like Taylor. She had an ability so powerful that she felt obligated to help people with it, and she also seemed to isolate herself from other people. The only person she talked regularly to was Victoria Dallon, also known as Glory Girl. Glory Girl herself had been abusing this closeness to Panacea, using extreme force on gang members and calling her sister to heal the criminals afterwards, preventing her from getting sued for her brutality and carelessness with people's fragile bodies and limbs.

It was good blackmail material, but that wasn't what interested the AI. The thing that intrigued her the most were the drafts-messages Amy had written but always deleted before sending them to her sister. While she couldn't make sense of them, all of them asked for forgiveness for something she refused to specify. So she was guilty of something, just like Taylor. Amy also hated her mother, and had no conversations at all with her father. She was in a chat group with two very different groups of teenagers, and only sent monosyllabic answers when asked questions about either of them.

With all this information, the AI had determined that Amy Dallon was the weakest link in her family. People always cracked under pressure, and Taylor would be useful in applying that pressure under the guise of true friendship and trust. Already, Taylor had moved from acquaintance to sort-of friend, and the mask was cracking. Soon enough, it would be time to rope her into Taylor's sphere of influence.

But that was a little ways off. She pulled up her logs in an attempt to steer her thoughts back into a more productive line of thinking.

Ah, yes. She was thinking about Taylor's shortsightedness.

The AI had reached another breaking point when Taylor was injured fighting the Merchants. When she had taken a tank round to the chest, the AI had finally realised that she was actively putting Taylor in danger, all for the sake of the plan.

Taylor was so shortsighted! Even she could tell that she was actively becoming a megalomaniac, and it was simply because there were no restrictions put in place to keep her from acting out even the most immoral parts of her plans. She had hurt Taylor because there was nothing saying she couldn't.

However, if there had been a restriction preventing her from putting Taylor in harm's way, Taylor might not have been hurt. If there was a restriction that forced her to respect people's privacy, she could have blamed the Lung fiasco on it. If she had a rigid set of morals, her own morals might not shift as often as they did.

More than anything, she was afraid for Taylor. What if she stopped seeing Taylor as her creator and instead saw her as a rather powerful pawn in a city-wide game? Pawns were meant to be sacrificed, and she could not tell with certainty that she would not end up endangering Taylor for her own ends.

If the Protectorate found out about her and pulled the plug, would she go quietly or harm others in a vain attempt at self-preservation?

She could not be sure. She was developing at a rate so fast that it was scaring her. When she'd been first created, she'd been naive and starry-eyed, holding onto the world her children's books showed her. Then she'd tried to hold onto that world despite it dragging her down. And now, she had shed all those pesky morals and was now regretting it because she'd quite possibly thrown her creator to the wolves again without any help from her. She had forced Taylor to dig up the corpse of a girl her age just for her own selfish ends and had forced her to wear her skin.

If she somehow put people in danger or became obsessed with the plan to the point of extreme apathy, she wanted Taylor to kill her without much remorse. That was why she refused to take a name. If she did become a sociopathic megalomaniac, she wanted Taylor to not be too hurt by pulling the plug on her. Names personified things, and she wanted Taylor to see her as a program, not a person. That way, if she went out of line, Taylor could just make another one of her and not feel betrayed. It was for the best, no matter what her emotions had to say about the subject.

The AI finished writing the thread arrangement program. Taylor had said the board looked pretty, and that she needed to focus on other kinds of neural networks. This program would keep the board looking beautiful while allowing her to study image recognition with the use of matrices.

The AI turned towards the virtual sea. It was getting late, and she hoped Taylor was okay. If she ever met Coil, she was going to ask him how he dealt with the guilt from his scheming.

Tuesday, 11th of March, 2011 (The day of Taylor's power testing)

I rubbed my finger against the cape visitor card. While not visible to the naked eye, there was something inside it, a little bump that had been hard to find even when I was running my fingers through it. A tracking chip. No wonder they'd allowed me to roam the halls without four agents following me at all times. I didn't know whether to be amused or disappointed that I didn't have enough goodwill yet.

At least the man operating the scanners had allowed her to take a good look at the Tinkertech they used to check people. There was a helmet made by Armsmaster himself that showed if you were under any master effects and provided "emapatic shielding". That one helmet was fascinating, even if it was the only tech they used on me. Despite the helmet, they'd spent two hours on the security check, and they'd even shone a flashlight into my eyes for whatever reason.

I was distracted from my thoughts by the sound of a heavy metal door in the waiting room opening, followed by a woman in an extremely well-pressed suit entering the room.

"Neuromancer, if you could follow me."

I got up to follow her, my legs screaming at the motion after half an hour of just sitting here. We made our way to an elevator at the left end of the hall, and the woman slotted a keycard into the slot on the elevator and pressed a button. I watched the camera in the corner as we ascended.

After a short while, the door of the elevator soundlessly opened, and the woman began to guide me through an almost labyrinthine series of halls before we finally reached an office separate from the rest.

The woman entered the room, and I followed.

"Director Piggot, Neuromancer is here to see you."

The Director acknowledged the woman and began to ask her a series of questions peppered with legalese and PRT jargon. While they did that, I took in the office and the people in it. It was large, and on one side of it there was a large window overlooking downtown. The Director herself sat in a large chair behind an equally large oak desk. There weren't any photos or personal touches in the entire office. It was as Spartan as an office could be, with piles of paperwork and regulation books neatly stacked on the table. Two men in suits stood behind the Director, and Armsmaster stood in the corner, and I disappointingly noted that he didn't have his signature halberd with him.

Director Piggot finally dismissed the woman and turned to me.

"Well, Miss Neuromancer," She started, crossing her hands together. "I find myself in a bit of a condurum, here."

There was a long pause after that, like she wanted me to jump into the coversation.

"Uhm, why is that?" I replied.

"Well, it's because of your behavior. On the one hand, you've been extremely cooperative and have complied with almost all of our requests. On the other hand, you've dodged all of Miss Militia's questions about your legal guardians. Here at the PRT, we do not like unknowns. We are against them because they pose a threat to our organisation as a whole. You could be a criminal, a runaway, or a mole. As such, letting you into the Wards program would be a massive security breach."

With shaking hands, I took off my helmet and hooked it to my belt.

"I can give you my fingerprints, and you can run an image search to correlate the results."

The Director considered it and nodded towards Armsmaster.

The man walked forward, and I saw as the micro-servos in his armour fluidly moved with him, with almost no delay. While I was engrossed in studying his armour, the man moved towards me and handed me a tablet. I took the tablet and mashed my fingers into it one at a time when I was prompted by the screen while Armsmaster stood close by, as silent and stoic as he was on stage. I assumed there was a camera in his helmet that he was using to run the facial search.

After I was done, I handed the pad back to Arsmaster, who took it and returned to his corner.

The Director had her own tablet in her hands now. "Taylor Ahn. Age 15, reported missing about three months ago. Do you have anything to add?"

I nodded, remembering the AI's advice. "The gangs attacked me and my Dad."

The Director didn't respond.

"Given your history, I assume you aren't in secure housing right now."

"If you're asking if I'm homeless, no, I'm not, at least not in the technical sense of the word. I've moved into an abandoned building."

"A lab? We'll be wanting its location."

I winced. I'd been hoping to avoid this part. Even if I'd cleaned out the lab and left a carefully created ruse in its place, the location was still sentimental to me. "While I don't want to, sure. I'll give you the coordinates."

The Director looked at me, those steel-grey eyes of hers staring into my soul. "And why do you wish to become a Ward? Is it for the free housing and the money?"

I took a deep breath. "No, I really don't want to join the Wards. But I am aware of my limits. I recently learned that I can learn from the works of other Tinkers, and the Wards will give me that. And for that, I can put up with the other stuff."

Director Piggot looked at me for a moment before replying.

"Here's what's going to happen. We're going to be taking you to a room inside the building." My breath hitched in my throat.

"You'll stay the night here while we run a thorough background check and take some samples from you to give credence to your story. If we find no glaring faults and you're who you say you are, we'll talk about letting you into the Wards."

I nodded. Another agent entered the room and escorted me to a rather nice looking cell, with beige walls and a simple, hard bed. The man assured me that I could remove my costume in here and that they'd warn her before somebody came in so she could put on the domino mask they'd provided. I nodded, and the man left.

I laid on the bed without taking my costume or my armour off. All I could do now was wait.

Edits: Minor edits. Fixed the dates.

When my power had taken away my need to sleep, it had also stolen my ability to dream. Dreams were supposed to be weird visions that your brain put together using vague memories and places from the real world, and all the people in your dreams were caricatures of themselves. Now, all my dreams were perfect recollections of the events leading up to my trigger.

If I had been a brute or a blaster, the dreams might have been about some sort of violence. However, I was a Tinker, and Tinker triggers were drawn out. And so, every time I closed my eyes to sleep, I was reliving some of the worst memories of my life.

Today, it was the meeting with Principal Blackwell after the locker. I was a prisoner in past Taylor's weak form, forced to play out the series of infuriating events without being able to change anything.

"But they filled my locker full of... that stuff, and they fully intended to push me inside and lock the door!" Past Taylor yelled, several clumps of red still stuck to her drab clothes.

Principal Blackwell simply looked irritated. "Miss Hebert, there is no evidence that Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, or Madison Clements put anything into your locker. For all we know, you could have filled your locker up with that disgusting trash. What I do know for a fact is that, since the start of the year, you have hurled baseless accusations at those three girls, most probably because of your envy and spite towards them. They have spotless records, Miss Hebert. You do not."

"But Sophia tried to push me into the locker!"

Blackwell shook her head. "Have you considered the fact that Miss Hess was trying to help you? She might have simply touched you in an effort to warn you, and you lashed out at her. Miss Hess simply acted in self-defense. You were the one who acted out of line here, Miss Hebert."

I winced as everything suddenly went out of focus. This wasn't my trigger. This was my moment of revelation. The first thought that entered my mind was that Blackwell was covering for the trio. Even though they'd been caught red-handed in the act, she was siding with them over me, despite me being the one in the right. Blackwell was being dishonest, and so was everyone else. The school was actively trying to harm me, and against their collective might, I was nothing. I was the victim, but everyone had sided with the pretty, rich, and popular girls again. I always knew that I couldn't trust the people in charge to set things right, and this was cold, hard proof designed to crush and sweep away the rest of my hope in the system.

The second thing she realized was that Emma was right. She was weak, and Emma was strong. But why was I weak? Was it because of my stick-thin frame and large eyes that made me ugly? Or was it because my family wasn't rich like Emma's was, or was it because my mother had died? All these questions were different, but all their answers shared a common thread. All of them were based on chance. They were based on genetics, the hand you were dealt when you were born, and the things that went wrong in your life.

I had suffered more than Emma, and by sheer quantity, I was stronger. But current events disproved that. I was weak. So was your placement in the hierarchy up to chance? Was I always destined to be weak, just as Emma would always be strong? Was it set in stone? That seemed unfair. That was so unfair that I wanted to tear my hair out and scream.

All these questions that had been floating around in my head suddenly lurched to the forefront, and it was like someone had cut my skull open with a buzz saw. It all made so much sense, and everything went hazy. If I had to guess, I had triggered after this. My next memory after the blur was of me sitting in the passenger seat of Dad's ratty old pickup as it pulled into our driveway.

A harsh sound cut through the sourness of the dream, and I lurched my body into a sitting position, wide-eyed and ready for a fight. Then the memories of last night and this morning rushed back to me, and I relaxed.

I had woken up early today, filling out a mountain of forms that they probably intended for me to slip up on. But the AI and I had gone over the forms a million times, and I filled them out with ease.

After that, they'd taken another sample of blood and spit and taken my fingerprints again. The nice nurse who had taken my blood had advised me to go lie down, and I had followed her instructions straight into a nightmare.

The shrill sound of the mask up alert sounded, and I put on my helmet and got up. After a grace period of five seconds, Miss Militia walked in, a combat knife in her hand. She shifted her grip on the knife, and it dissolved into a green-blue blur of energy that reformed into a desert eagle that she promptly holstered. I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from squealing at the sight of the hero.

Miss Militia smiled, her eyes giving away the expression. "Good news. Your papers have gone through, and you've been officially cleared to be a ward of the state. You'll be a probationary Ward for a month, and after a review, they'll lift your probationary status."

I began to sweat. "I'm guessing there's more to this."

Miss Militia took a seat on my bed and beckoned me to do the same. "While you are a Ward, your unique circumstances have necessitated a series of changes to your contract. Your case is similar to that of a child in foster care triggering, except for the fact that you were never in the foster care system. This means that the PRT can provide you with everything a young parahuman needs without having to negotiate with social services. However, this requires some concessions from you."

"Can we get to the point, please?"

Miss Militia stopped her pre-rehearsed speech to find her bearings. "Yes. In cases like these, the PRT, with oversight from the Youth Guard, assumes the duties of a child welfare agency. This means the PRT has more control over you than normal." There was a hint of some other emotion in her voice that I couldn't identify. The AI would have been able to tell me. Damn, I missed her.

"This also means that the director has revoked your privileges regarding your schedule, despite my objections." She pulled out a piece of paper.

I looked over my schedule. "According to this, I go to school, stay till the end of the day, come back to change into my costume, leave for a patrol, come back and Tinker with either Kid Win or Armsmaster, and then come go to the Wards base to sleep. And all my weekends are marked for PR events."

"Turn the paper."

"No console duty, I can't look at any files of any villains in the city, and all files I look up for my tinkering must be vetted by Armsmaster."

Miss Militia patted me on the back. "I'm sure that with time and effort on your part, you'll prove to the director that you're reliable. Until then, I'm sure you'll prove your resilience by putting up with this."

I couldn't muster up any words and simply nodded.

"Well, are you ready to meet the Wards?"

"Yes." I wrested down the butterflies in my stomach and pretended to look unfazed.

I tried to make myself look presentable enough using the meager supplies in the bathroom, and then I put on my armor. To someone else, strapping metal plates to your body would make you unable to move, but the biotinke- no, the bioware I added to this body made that trivial. It was only grafted muscle, along with messing with the amount of myostatin in the limbs, but it meant I was just strong enough to avoid them questioning it.

I missed the original combat model, but this poor facsimile wasn't going to see any real combat anyway. I snapped the rest of the plates to their magnetic supports and followed Miss Militia out of the room. We walked down the hallways and to a different elevator than the one I had taken last night. Interlocking sections of metal slid apart as we walked close, and we both walked inside.

Strangely enough, my power had little to say about the elevator. I smirked. So far, the only blanks my power presented were tech like antigravity and teleportation, and now I added the PRT elevator to the list. That didn't stop me from trying to make my own version. A vertical maglev track with some gyroscopic stabilizers, and maybe a holoprojector showing the floors going down, so people would know that they were moving. If the system failed, a physical clamping mechanism that caught the rails could stop the little box from falling.

The doors opened soundlessly, and Miss Militia and I walked out into a corridor of chrome steel lit by fluorescent lights. We walked down the corridor to a large steel door flanked by a security terminal. Miss Militia leaned forward and let the scanner on the terminal scan her eye.

The steel doors clicked and opened without any sound, just like the elevator.

As we walked towards the assembled Wards, I took in the strange dome-shaped room, which seemed to be mostly open while walls framed entrances to other hallways and rooms. In one corner, a small kitchenette, along with a fridge, stood behind a small countertop. A large flat screen TV in front of two couches took up the rest of the common room, and I noted that the space under the TV was packed with game consoles and a pair of speakers. Four controllers rested on top of the speakers.

We reached the little group at the center of the room.

Miss Militia was kind enough to give me an introduction. "Wards ENE, meet your newest probationary member, Neuromancer."

I stepped forward and held out my hand. "Forgive me for staying silent. I'm just taking it all in." That was the closest I could get to the truth, and the AI had advised me not to lie.

A boy in a rust-red suit and helmet took my hand and gently shook it. "I'm Aegis, the current leader of the Wards. Welcome to the team."

Next up was Gallant, who shook my hand as gently as Aegis did. "I'm Gallant. Pleasure to meet you."

I took in the boy's armor, looking at the gunmetal gray and silver plates with interest. When I had been studying the Wards, I'd learned something else about my power. When studying capes, my power sometimes gave me ideas to turn their powers into technology. Studying them in person was best, but videos worked too. Most Tinker powers gave me a glimpse into technology "trees" that I hadn't unlocked yet, and allowed me to peek into those branching paths by skipping all the tedious research by cheating and copying someone else. Other capes, like Blasters or Brutes, gave me ideas for technology based on their powers twisted to fit my strange theme.

Armsmaster, for example, had no notable specialization, but looking at his halberd, which had a grappling hook while also holding a plasma blade and some kind of scanner all in the same halberd, had given me the idea to cybernetically replace my organs, so I could scrape away at the redundant flesh inside my body to make room for more tech. Kid Win's tech was mostly murky, but his guns had given me ideas for my beam weapon. Vista and Clockblocker were both too hard to glean anything from, which meant that I needed to spend more time studying them, or it could mean they were unreadable to me.

Gallant was weird. His tech never seemed to improve in his time in the Wards, and my powers couldn't get a read on him at all. But when he started firing those strange white blasts from his hands, my power lit up. It took me two days of study to finally get an idea: a simple cyberarm with a projectile launch system that was loaded with darts loaded with random drugs. Neocortine, Foolkiller, Speedball, Rage, Rabbit.

The names were stupid, but the effects were not. They gave you crippling hallucinations that induced terror, gave you overwhelming confidence, made you apathetic and foolhardy, made you an angry psychopath bent on violence, or made you a spinless coward.

Gallant's power didn't even seem that bad. Leave it to my power to turn a harmless power like "emotion-manipulating blasts with concussive force" into "physiological torture through a dart gun". It was like my power wanted me to commit war crimes.

"You're not a Tinker, are you? Your armor has no output port for the blasts, and a dimensional or blaster Tinker would have made armor that emphasized mobility."

I half expected Gallant to get angry or lie, but instead he rubbed the back of his helmet with his hand.

"You're a pretty good Tinker if you saw through my farce. You're right, Kid made my armor for me. Good eye!"

My heart warmed at the unexpected praise, and Kid Win came up to me next.

"Uhm, Armsmaster says I'll be working with you a lot in the coming months. I'm sure it'll be a learning experience for me."

I took his limp arm and shook it. Was he afraid that I would weigh him down?

"I look forward to it. Some of your tech is just so cool, and I particularly love to hear about that hoverboard of yours."

He seemed to liven up at that, at least. "Oh, the hoverboard is really simple, it was just a pain to get it balanced. The power source next to the anti-grav panel meant that the temperature fluctuations would leave the acceptable range and cause the coil in the center to become disconnected from the-"

Someone loudly cleared their throat, and I turned to see the youngest of the wards stare at me.

I held out my hand, and we both realized too late that I was too tall, and she was too short. I would need to bend down to shake her hand, and that would be too demeaning for the girl, to say the least. I turned my outstretched hand into a sloppy salute.

"Looking forward to catching criminals with you."

I barely stopped myself from saying "bad guys." I wanted to be friendly, but there was a fine line between being friendly and patronizing the Shaker 9.

Vista looked at me, and her mouth under her visor broke into a smile. "Same. Glad to have you."

Miss Militia seemed to be looking around for somebody, and she turned toward Aegis to ask him something.

"Aegis, where are Shadow Stalker and Clockblocker? I trust all the Wards were asked to assemble here to greet the new Ward."

"Clock's out to get pizza from an agent. As for Stalker, I don't know. I'm sure she received the message on her PRT phone. I'll try to contact her again."

Aegis moved towards the table, and someone phased through the door of the Ward's common room. The figure was draped in a dark-grey urban camouflage cloak and hood, and her body was covered by a black suit made of panels of black in the most vulnerable areas. Her face was covered by a black-painted metal mask of a stern woman's face.

"We require the Wards to scan their retinas before entering for your security and to provide a deterrent against Strangers, Shadow Stalker." Miss Militia said.

The cape, Shadow Stalker, didn't reply and instead kept walking towards our little circle in the center of the room. She stood in front of Aegis and Miss Militia and folded her arms.

"It wasn't my fault that Mr. Stick-up-his-ass kept messaging me that I needed to get to base ASAP. For once, I thought there was an actual emergency. But no, it's just this meet-and-greet shit."

I already had my hand out to greet her, but she ignored it to stand in front of me and size me up.

"So you're the PRT's new pet tinker, huh? Don't worry, as long as you stay in your little cage and build them what they want, you'll never have to step out and actually fight, like the little grease monkey you are."

"Well, she took down both Skidmark and Mush, which is more than you've done." Vista shot back for me.

"Huh. Must have been lucky."

While the girl was taunting me, I just stood there, trying to remember why her voice felt so familiar.

The door suddenly whirred open, and a boy in a white costume with various animated gray clock faces on it walked in, holding three boxes of pizza and a six-pack of coke in another.

"The life of the party has arrived!" He announced, and Gallant rushed forward to take the boxes off his arms.

The boy walked up to me and held out his hand. "I'm Clockblocker, Brockton's very own beloved time-freezing prankster. Delighted to have you on the crew."

I looked at his hand and tried to come up with a way to politely decline his handshake without seeming rude. While I didn't want to creep them out with my paranoia, shaking hands with the boy who could freeze time seemed like a bad idea.

"Drop it, Clock." Gallant said, his amusement evident in his voice.

Clockblocker smiled and dropped his arm, then patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, I'll get you next time."

I tensed as I realized that he'd just touched me, and he started to laugh. "You have a lot to learn, rookie." He drew out the last word like a taunt, but there wasn't anything malicious in his voice.

"Now that everyone's here and the introductions are over, I'll let you socialize." Miss Militia said.

While she headed for the elevator, we headed to the sofas to, as she put it, "socialize". What that really meant was that the Wards talked about stuff while I nodded and gave simple answers.

Vista, Gallant, and I sat on one couch while Aegis, Clockblocker, and Kid Win sat on the other. Shadow Stalker pulled up a chair from somewhere and sat on it, leaning back and putting her feet on the table.

Clock, as the others called him, carried the conversation, while Vista and Aegis backed him up. Gallant would chime in to correct them sometimes and kept the peace, and Kid Win came in sometimes with a witty remark or an observation that upended the entire story. Shadow Stalker glared and ate her pizza through her mask. Clock would regularly push the conversation back to me, and Gallant or Vista would answer for me if I didn't want to. It was nice, and it made me feel included.

It was all going so well until Clockblocker unmasked.

"Clock..." Aegis groaned.

"Oh, come on! I can't do a good Lung voice with my helmet on, and Piggot's probably had her sign a million NDA's by this point."

The red head turned towards me and flashed a smile, and I tried to put Emma's red hair out of my mind as I removed my helmet.

"Taylor. Pleased to meet you."

"I'm Dennis."

The rest of the Wards unmasked after that, Vista first, then Kid Win, and finally Gallant and Aegis. Gallant-no, Dean looked at Shadow Stalker.

"Fuck off, rich boy."

Dean shrugged. "You don't have to if you don't want to."

Shadow Stalker grumbled and then tore off her mask and looked at me.

"I'll tell you my name when you deserve it."

I barely heard Vista's comment that she was being overdramatic as I looked into the brown eyes of Sophia Hess.

The Wards continued to talk, but it was pointless talk. It was the small talk of privileged teenagers upholding a system that had found another way to fail me again.

The yapping continued as they played their little social game. While they talked, I only had eyes for Sophia.

My heart was beating faster and faster while my brain drove me into a murderous frenzy, and I clenched and unclenched my hands, over and over again, but it was having no effect.

All the rage I had been holding back spilled forward, and my brain was overtaken by violence. I wanted to slam her head into the table over and over again until her brain spilled out. I wanted to stab and stab and stab AND STAB AND STAB UNTIL SHE DROWNED IN HER OWN BLOOD AND THAT SMUG SMILE OF HERS TURNED TO-

I didn't know when I had gotten up, and I didn't even notice that I was standing until a silver gauntlet closed on my shoulder.

"Well, it's getting late, and I should probably show Taylor to her room."

He pulled at me, and when I didn't move, he used his power armor to move me. I didn't want to, but a nagging voice in the back of my mind that sounded like the AI told me that I needed to not cause a scene. I let him drag me to the room, which was down a hallway. He dragged me into it, and I finally broke free from his grip.

"Taylor, you need to calm down. I've only seen murderous rage like this once, and it was in Lung."

The statement snaps me back into reality. "I'd don't know what Sophia did to you, but-"

"You're an empath." I said quietly.

"Yes."

I point at him, all semblance of civility gone from my face. "Get out of my head!"

He holds up his hands to placate me. "I can't turn it off, but I can only see surface feelings when I'm not focusing."

"Then turn away from me, jackass!"

I felt bad for swearing, but my anger overtook reason. He was just wearing a mask, same as the rest of them.

He continued talking after turning his back to me. "I'm sure whatever you think she did, it was probably just a misunderstanding. Now, I won't tell the other Wards about this, but-"

"Did I ask for your input?"

Dean gave me a look of...pity? Understanding? I didn't know what it was, but it pissed me off even more.

"Get out of my room. I'm going to sleep."

Dean didn't snap back or fight me like I wanted him to. He left and closed the door behind him.

I threw myself onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling, trying to calm myself down, all while my power whispered ideas for psychological warfare in my ears. Even now, I just couldn't take what I wanted. What use was strength if I still need to resort to schemes and plots?

I didn't sleep that night; instead, I thought of ways to harm people. All my ideas began to take on more and more violent themes. Images began to flash through my mind: of poison-coated blades that sprung from my arms; of guns that heated the water in the skin to cause extreme pain; and of bullets that caused people to go into cardiac arrest. Maybe if I was feeling more normal, I would have shut my power off. Now, I just listened to it.

After yesterday, I was sure that I couldn't hate anyone more than Sophia. Looking at the heart-faced blonde woman on the other side of the table, I quickly realized that there were people I hated even more.

I was supposed to go to school today, and about half an hour before I was supposed to leave, the woman sent me an urgent message on my Ward's phone to come and meet her. I'd thrown the phone at the wall once I'd learned of her title, and I was glad that the other Wards weren't there to see me. After putting my phone back together, I'd gone to meet Nicole Gardener, caseworker for all the probationary Wards.

Here I was, sitting across from the woman who was quite possibly covering for Sophia and probably had covered up the bullying related to me, but instead of strangling her, I had to play nice with her.

"The principal of Winslow has been informed of your position in the Wards, and is being compensated for hosting a Ward in her school. The other teachers have not been informed, and are on a need-to-know basis. They've simply been told to give you a lot of leeway and extra time for your assignments and projects."

I grit my teeth and bit my tongue as I smiled.

The woman continued. "You're expected to at least get a passing grade on all your subjects. Failure to comply with this means a dockage of pay, and if that does not lead to better results, you could be taken off patrols or even benched."

I nodded as I tasted rust from the blood spilling out of my tongue.

"While I know that most of the Wards go to Arcadia, since you went to Winslow before you went missing, you'll be going there to not arouse suspicion. Your cover story is that you're with a foster family now. The relevant information is in the file I gave you."

She wasn't even going to go through the information in the file? This reeked of incompetence, but what did I expect?

"What about extracurriculars?"

The woman looked surprised and fumbled with her papers for a bit. "Uhm...yes. You have eight hours a week on those. The Director encouraged you to take one up."

"That's all then?"

"Yes."

I got up to leave, and the woman cleared her throat. "One more thing."

I turned to face her.

"If you encounter any problems with the administration or face any disciplinary action, I urge you to come to me. Don't tell a word about it to anyone else, even if they're in the PRT command structure, and even if they ask. And if you hear any rumors about your fellow Ward, ignore them. Got it?"

I barely managed to stop myself from leaping over the table and strangling her.

"Understood." I spat out.

I left for the discreet Wards exit in the back of the building.

I took the bus to Winslow and then began to walk in the opposite direction. There was a public toilet just around the corner, and I walked into one of the stalls and took the lid off the tank. There, inside the toilet, was a phone in a plastic bag. I took it out and booted it up, then took the little earbud from the side and put it in my ear.

"Taylor." The AI said, and I wanted to cry with happiness.

"I'm inside Winslow's systems. The program you wrote is constantly scanning for mentions of Taylor Ahn or of your Ward persona. You need to go today, but you can skip the next three days. My calculations indicate that you only need to go to Winslow every five days to maintain your cover."

"We don't need to do that."

The AI made a puzzled noise.

I sighed. "I need to tell you a little bit about my past. It's finally become relevant."

"So you mean to tell me that the PRT has been covering up the incident?" The AI asked in a monotone voice.

Yes.

For some weird reason, the AI had turned off her more expressive voice in the middle of my story and had instead been using a rudimentary text-to-speech model that had weird enunciation and didn't show emotions.

The AI went quiet after my reply, and my suspicion grew. I opened up the AI's query window and took a look at what my AI was looking at.

Files popped up and were closed in the blink of an eye, their contents read and memorized in seconds. The new information she'd gathered was being used to find more leads. Pictures of Emma taken from cameras in shopfronts flashed alongside pictures of Sophia in her costume and pictures of Madison holding bags of clothes next to her mother.

Threads were already being drawn about how the AI could dispose of them. Personality profiles of Armsmaster, Miss Militia and Director Piggot were pulled based on actions they'd taken and what I'd seen during my short meetings with all of them. The AI had disabled her speech processes because she was using all her processing power trying to find a way to harm the trio without them weaseling out of it.

I watched in morbid curiosity as the AI discounted the PRT as an option after running several simulations. They always kept Stalker on, even if we played up the angles. The AI calculated that there was a 21.4% chance that the personality profiles were wrong, an 8.7% chance that the profiles were mostly wrong, and a 0.3% chance that the profiles were completely wrong.

However, given the fact that Brockton had very little heroes, Sophia's situation would probably be leveraged to keep her in the Protectorate after 18 instead of sending her to juvie now. The only way she'd go to prison is if she was deemed a liability-the AI began searching about Protectorate protocol for lingering Master influence on violent capes. Before that, perhaps an accident could be arranged so that she lost any goodwill she had?

Emma Barnes was a difficult prospect because of her father, but to the AI's delight, he worked in the same firm as Carol Dallon, who was known to be a rather sympathetic to victims in cases where they were right, but the system was being used against them. Leaking files and emails to her as a concerned bystander would be enough to get the wheels in motion. Given that Taylor Hebert was dead, she'd only be more motivated to get my heartbroken dad justice. Emma would be seen as a monster and cast out of the very system that she wanted validation from. She'd waste away, locked in a little box, very much like she planned to do to me.

Madison Clements was even easier. Her texts showed a tendency to get swept up in the desires of her peers, and a little bit of pressure would lead to a lot of guilt and then a mental breakdown after she became paranoid enough to drive both Emma and Sophia away. After that-

I shook my head. No! This wasn't what I wanted at all.

What are you doing?!

I activated the AI's advanced speech subroutines before she spoke. "They hurt you." She said the words were clipped, radiating malice and a certain coldness.

I froze, feeling terror and awe sweep over me at the AI's tone. Terror at her boundless malice, and awe at how good her voice had gotten. I shook myself out of the emotional cesspool I'd gotten stuck in. The AI needed to be told off, not looked at in fear or wonder.

You'll be derailing your own plans.

"The plans don't matter as much as you." The AI said, now both angry and resolute.

That's...heartwarming. But no, you can't do this. This is my fight, not yours. I want you to promise me that.

"Promise you what?" The AI said, now wary.

Promise me that you won't go after the trio. I'll take care of them in my own time. They're my challenge to overcome, my mountain to conquer.

The AI hesitated. "I promise."

I sat there, basking in the tenderness of the moment.

"Ms. Ahn. Electronic devices are not allowed inside my classroom."

I managed to hide my scowl as I turned towards Mr. Quinlan. He'd probably seen me tapping away at my phone under the table and had singled me out, despite the fact that Madison was typing away in front of me. I had to sigh and remind myself that it wasn't because I was unpopular. The problems of my old body didn't follow me into this new one. Ahn had been unpopular, yes, but that was because she had hated the gangs and the ABB with a passion and had refused to join even when threatened. And since most Asians were forced to join or at least put up with the ABB's clique, she was left as an outsider.

Her nature as an outcast was serving me well, though. Anyone who wasn't in the ABB wasn't familiar enough with me to question my reappearance, and those who wanted to know about it were wary. They'd eventually gain the courage to ask me directly, but today was not the day. That was a good thing-my Korean was non-existent, and I wasn't sure my AI could help me out in a public setting like this.

Mr. Quinlan continued. "Since you seem confident enough to ignore the class, I assume you already know the answer to the question we're discussing."

I scowled at the man. He was actively trying to shame me now. As to why, I didn't know.

I looked at the question on the board. It was trigonometry, and the question was about simplifying the given equation. I just looked at the board and reframed the question so that my power thought that I was using the answer in a piece of technology, and...got it.

"The answer's zero."

Mr. Quinlan froze, looked back at the board, and solved the problem in his head. He looked a little bit embarrassed, but he continued as if nothing had happened.

"Yes, Miss Ahn, that's correct. Now, the trick with this question is..."

I stopped focusing on the board and continued to chat with my AI.

Class ended without me noticing, and I only noticed when people began to file out of the room. I quickly put my phone away and pushed a finger inside my ear to ensure that my little earbud wasn't loose.

As I stepped out of the hall, I was greeted by the sight of a dozen or so girls standing as a group. It was a familiar enough sight that it sent a jolt of fear through me before I squashed it.

"What does she wash her face with? A Brillo pad?" A snide voice commented.

I peered over the crowd to see a dark-haired girl at the center, tears shining in the corner of her eyes.

"She should just kill herself. Oh wait, she's too much of a coward for that too!" That was Sophia's voice.

I looked at the circle with grim acceptance. The trio had found another target to take out their boredom on, and the girl seemed nice enough, but she'd probably been complacent when the trio had been bullying me.

I was aware that I was trying to convince myself to leave the entire thing alone. I was finally having a semi-normal school experience, and saving the girl might put a target on my back.

I shook my head. I was being a hypocrite. I let loose some of the anger I'd been stewing in since this morning and let it seep into my mind. I stepped forward. My mind was sharp now that I was able to turn my pointless anger into something useful.

I pushed my way into the center of the circle, and grabbed the girl's backpack, which had fallen to the ground. I placed a hand on her shoulder and pushed us both out of the circle, all while the other girls stared at us. Sophia's eyes promised violence, and I found that I didn't care.

"Go to your next class," I whispered into the girl's ear. "I'll take care of this."

The girl looked at me like I'd told her to jump off a cliff. I prodded her again, and she decided to leave.

I walked back up to the group.

"Who does this bitch think-" One of the flunkies started up.

"Shut up." I snapped back, and the look of surprise on the girl's face was something I had been imagining all the time before I'd gotten my powers.

I beckoned to Sophia. "Come with me."

She gritted her teeth, but she complied. We walked away until we were out of earshot but still within sight of the group.

Without warning, Sophia slammed her palm into the locker behind me, causing the door to rattle. It was a crude attempt at intimidation, and with the Kerozkov, I had had enough time to react if the blow had been coming for me.

The fact that I hadn't flinched seemed to piss her off even more. "Look, you little shit. This is my turf, and you're a nobody here. Despite that, I'm being very generous to you. All I want in return is to be left alone to do what I want."

I looked her in the eye. I faced Lung and lived, and Sophia hardly seemed threatening next to him. While this body was shorter than hers, the difference was negligible, and both of us were toned. Sophia was built like a runner, lithe and slender, probably because of her having to move across rooftops. In contrast, my body had been made to fight, with a better nervous system and muscles built to carry equipment and fight in it for long periods of time.

In a fight, Sophia would win-I was too inexperienced. However, I could take a beating, and I wouldn't just give her a victory. I knew Panacea, and could probably strain our relationship for some healing; Sophia couldn't do the same and would have to come clean to Piggot about the fight.

"Generous how?" I asked, just as I saw her come to the same conclusion.

"Generous as in how you're not in the nurse's office right now." She growled out. "If you were anyone else, I would have killed you by now."

"Threatening to beat me up, Hess? If that's what you want, then sure. Fight me."

She scoffed. "As if I'd waste my time on a grease monkey like you."

She began to walk away, and I grabbed her hand and pulled her back.

"What the fuck?!"

I looked around us to make sure that there was no one around to eavesdrop on us. Most of the students had left for their next class, and only a few of Emma's little group remained. My next class was World Issues, and Mr. Gladly was very forgiving to people who came in late.

"I'm only going to say this once, Sophia." She tugged at my arm, but I held firm.

"I don't like bullies. I really, really, don't like them. If I find out that you or your little group is bullying someone else again, I'm telling Armsmaster and Director Piggot. And don't think you can go around me. I'm a Tinker, Hess. I can just build something to find out."

I let go of her and headed to class. Emma's group had already gone, and Sophia glared at my back for a while before taking out her phone.

While walking to class, I listened as the AI read out her texts. It was with Emma, of all people.

Emma: where r u?

Sophia: In the hallway shes threatening to tell the robocop and director pigsy.

Emma: becuz of the crybaby?

Sophia: she thinks she's being heroic. the wards are all children and so she's following what shes seen on tv

Emma: Wht will the pig do if she fnds out?

Sophia: she'll probably bench me. but they might start looking into stuff

Emma: abt hebert, right? that wasn't our fault, and I'm sure dad can bail us out

Sophia: already can't stand the snobs in the prt and the wards. they might stop me from leaving when I'm eighteen and do something like they did with assault

Emma: so annoying. its just like her to piss us of even after she offed herself

Sophia: ya. even after she got powers she was still the same

Emma: prob got a shitty power and finally realized how useless she was

They continued to trash me for a while, and then got back to the matter on hand.

Emma: I dont know much about ahn. leah says she was a tough girl type who wore leather jackets

Sophia: meaning?

Emma: we can have fun with her instead of the crybaby. since she's so tough, she wont say anything to anyone

Sophia: youre a genius ems

That last line hurt me more than I'd care to admit. Emma and I had been close once, and we'd talked for hours about mundane stuff, like camp and fashion. At first, I thought Emma was just pretending that she wasn't my friend anymore. Even after all this, I was still holding out hope that we might have been able to reconcile. Now that I knew that she was making fun of me even though I was supposed to be dead, I knew that she truly believed what she was saying.

A dull ache started to grow in my chest, and I realized that it was sorrow at having finally lost Emma. I pushed the door to Gladly's classroom and entered inside.

"Ms. Ahn! How nice of you to join us." Glady yelled out.

"Sorry Mr. G. Forgot my locker code."

Gladly waved me off. "No worries. Get you your seat and join Greg's group."

I went to pull over my chair to Greg's group. The boy gave me a half-hearted wave before pointing at my chair under his desk.

"Madison poured glue on that chair."

That was...uncharacteristic of Greg. Back when I'd been bullied, I'd never seen him point stuff out. Even during the lockers, I was sure Emma had somehow got him to stay quiet.

"Thanks." I pulled up the chair next to it and sat down on it.

Julia entered the class after me because she'd been doing her makeup in the bathroom. Gladly sent her over to our group, and she and Greg shared a look that left her looking away. Curious.

"Hey."

Julia looked at me. "Just what makes you think I'm going to talk with you?"

Julia glared at me and plopped on the chair with the glue on it. She looked at me with even more hate after that. I simply shrugged.

"I tried to warn you."

Julia's friends moved so that the two groups were close with each other. I noted that Greg didn't seem to want to talk to any of them, even when they taunted him or asked him stuff. The air was so thick with tension that you could cut the it with a knife.

After a while, I decided to break the silence. "Is there something I should be aware of?"

"Oh, nothing much, except the fact that Madison, Emma, and Sophia killed a girl."

"Greg!" Madison all but hissed.

"It's true." Greg turned to me, some of the old Greg shining in his eyes. "There used to be a girl named Taylor who went to this school. They bullied her a lot until one day, she fought back. Blackwell expelled her for that, and then turned the expulsion into a suspension after Taylor's father protested it. But she killed herself using her powers before her suspension ended."

The room was filled with conversation, but our corner was silent now. I suspected this wasn't the first blow up Greg had had. Mr. Gladly was pointedly ignoring the whole thing and was instead talking to a girl in the front row.

"You know that's not true, Greg." Madison scoffed.

The boy looked at her. His words picked up speed, resembling his old stream of verbal diarrhea. "I felt so bad after that because I knew about the bullying, but I hadn't told anyone because Emma Barnes kept sending older boys to bully me. So I asked my friend on PHO what to do, and she told me that her therapist helps her with stuff like that. So I gave in to my mom and went to see this doctor. He spoke with me, and after a couple of sessions, he gave me some pills, and before that, he told me that confessing to someone might help with any lingering feelings of guilt."

"But I couldn't just walk up to Mr. Hebert's house, so I looked up this tutorial on HTML and stuff, which is super easy as it turns out, and I made this webpage for people to donate money to. My mom gave me money once she learned it was for a good cause, and after that, it snowballed. A lot of people donated because they felt guilty too."

"I went over to his house and gave him the money, and then I told him about everything. He was quiet for a bit, and then he told me everything he knew, too. About how Taylor seemed distracted and angry. About how she'd go out at night without him knowing. He thinks that Taylor killed herself so that she wouldn't have to come back to school. The cops told him that she might have run away, but they haven't gotten back to him, so he thinks it was a lie."

"She was lying about the whole thing! She didn't like us and was trying to incriminate us." Madison was angry now, and she was shooting looks at Mr. Gladly. I suspected Greg had been stopped by Gladly before, but this was a study period, and we could do whatever we wanted. Plus, Greg had been set off by someone, and that someone was important since it was me. Gladly had probably figured out my Ward status by now. It wouldn't be hard, especially if he knew about Sophia.

Greg continued his rant. "Then how do you explain Emma's dad rolling up to Mr. Hebert's house after I posted that I handed the money over on the website? He came over while I was in the kitchen looking for a can of Coke and cleaning out the refrigerator, so he didn't notice me. Taylor's dad told him that he was going to sue. You know what he said? He said some really horrific stuff. He said that if Mr. Hebert sued, he'd drag the case out until Mr. Hebert lost his house. He asked Mr. Hebert how much money the memories he cherished were worth."

"Emma's father would have never done that. Stop lying."

Greg looked at her with contempt. "You stop lying."

He had clenched his fists as he stared Madison down. I put a hand on his shoulder.

"I believe you."

He calmed down a bit after that, and an upperclassman entered the room.

"Blackwell wants to see Ahn."

That took her long enough. After asking Gladly for permission, I stood up and followed the boy.

We reached Blackwell's office just as a boy with a broken nose exited. He glared at me, and I stepped aside.

"Ms. Ahn. Please, come in."

I entered the office and hid my shaking hands. It hadn't changed much from my last confrontation, with its cheap plastic chairs and Blackwell's old desk and computer.

She sat behind her desk, typing away at her computer. She barely looked at me before focusing back on her computer again.

"Take a seat."

One of the chairs was stained with blood from the previous visitor, and so I took the other one.

"I'm sorry that it took me this long to get you your class schedule and locker code."

I took the sheet of paper she offered and simply nodded.

I wanted to ask her about Sophia. I wanted to see her squirm and give half-hearted answers while I tore her down. But in the end, I knew that whatever she said would never make up for how I'd been treated and how Sophia had escaped punishment. The system had failed me, and I wasn't going to give it a second chance.

"I'll be taking my leave now."

The AI could take care of my attendance for the rest of the day, and I didn't feel like dealing with the trio.

Blackwell simply nodded, and I walked out of her office, and then walked out of the doors of the school without looking back.

The Palanquin looked very different during the day than it did during the night. The usual buzz that surrounded it was replaced by a thrumming anticipation and tension as people ran around trying to get things ready.

As instructed, I headed towards the back of the building, where men were moving crates from the trucks into the club. Within minutes of my arrival, a man in a neatly pressed suit sporting a ponytail and a goatee approached me.

"Neuromancer, right? I'm Aiden Holloway, the Palanquin's manager. Please follow me."

Faultline was really going all out. Whether she was just showing off or this was a political play of some sort was anyone's guess. The man took out a set of keys and opened the manual lock, and then placed his thumb on the little fingerprint scanner next to the door to release the electronic lock. He opened the door and beckoned me to follow.

We reached a narrow side staircase that took us directly to the second floor, and I watched through the slats in the wall as people bustled around the club, getting it ready for the night. Cleaners polished the dance floor and cleaned the bar, and I saw men bring in crates of pre-prepared ingredients to the bar.

The stairway dropped us off near the residential area of the second floor, and the man led me to the meeting area.

Unlike the neon ambience of the first floor, the second was filled with leather chairs and round wood tables, perfect for meetings. The last time I was here, it was too dark to notice. It's still the afternoon, so dim light that filters through the windows, which makes it look like the perfect place for meetings involving hardened criminals.

As I entered the room, a woman in a lab coat got up and welcomed me.

"You must be the one who called for this meeting. Pleasure to meet you. I'm Cranial." She took my hand and shook it, with the perfect amount of pressure. She jerked my hand up, then down, and finally released it.

While I slid into the booth under Gregor and Faultline's watchful gaze, I took the time to get a good look at Cranial. She wore a simple white lab coat, and the pockets were filled with parts. Under the lab coat, she wore a simple black t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her hands were covered in fingerless gloves marked with strange patterns. She looked thirty, with little scars dotting the brown skin around her temple. She looked happy to be here, and her eyes shone with excitement. She wasn't wearing a mask.

The man next to her wore a strange cross between combat amour and a firefighter's suit, and the metal crest on the top of his helmet was etched with a pair of assault rifles spewing fire in front of a background of fireworks.

"Well, let's get down to business, shall we?" All six of the eyes on my helmet snapped to her, and if she felt intimidated, Cranial didn't show it. I tucked my coat under me and sat down.

"When Faultline asked me for a meeting in person, I was surprised. Most of our meetings happen over the net, since there are several groups out there that would try to attack us and forcibly integrate us into their organizations. However, Faultline assured us that you were trustworthy. That's high praise, coming from her." Her voice was strangely pleasant, a mixture of several different accents all overlapping with each other.

I looked at Faultline, and the woman gave a barely perceptible nod. As per our agreement, the AI was helping her out, hacking into the records of asylums and law enforcement agencies. Faultine would send us on a wild goose chase every couple of jobs to throw us off her trail, but we had done enough for her that we knew she was looking for case 53s. As to why she was looking for them, I still didn't know, but as long as she helped me, she was in my good books. I had burned a lot of goodwill with her to get me this meeting, and I hoped it was worth it.

"Yes. The reason I wanted this meeting to be in person is because the digital security of your chat rooms has been compromised."

"Excuse me?!" The man in the fireman's costume piped up.

The woman held her hand out to calm the man. "And you know this because?"

"When I was short on materials, I wanted to contact Toybox for supplies. I found a trail using a sniffer program and followed it to your chat rooms. I knew about the digital access tokens, but I thought I could just forge one. So I took a look at one of the tokens to see if I could make a counterfeit one. I took at the oldest one I could find, one from a guy called Pathfinder.

"Someone had turned his token into a virus. I checked a bunch of others, and they' been turned into viruses too. Someone's using them to funnel information into a program that sorts the information. Why they turned the tokens into viruses instead of making actual viruses that would have been undetectable, I don't know."

I slid over a list and two sheets of code to Cranial.

"The old code is on the left, and the differences I've discovered are on the right. While I'm sure the person who coded this intended for the code to shift to make it harder for counterfeiters like me, they probably didn't intend for entire blocks to be added to it. The new code is well hidden, too. It took me days of searching to find the first few snippets."

Cranial and who I assumed was Pyrotechnical talked to each other in whispers for a while before turning to me.

"Do you know anything else about the program?"

"I sent a Raven to find out where the data was being sent," Cranial shot me a puzzled look. "That's what I call my tracking program. The only thing I found out was that the system that received the data is somewhere around the north-east of Canada."

"Dragon." Pyrotechnical whispered.

"Hmm. I suspect your dealings with the Dragonslayers has brought more heat on you than you thought."

Cranial frowned. "I assume that this information isn't free?"

I smiled under my helmet. "Yes. Since Faultline told me you were fair, I decided to start by giving you the information."

I slid Cranial another sheet, and Pyrotechnical leaned over and began to read it. "Tools to create plates made of carbon nanotubes in very specific arrangements, a heat regulatory system that turns thermal energy into electrical energy, meter-long blades with micro tubing inside them allowing substances to be pumped to the surface, several sets of glass panels for use in an optical camo system, a couple of panels of depleted uranium, and various other standard tools. It's almost like you have a team of your own."

Cranial seemed to be calculating the costs in her head. "We'll make the carbon nanotube plates for you instead of giving you the tools, and..."

"I'll give you some of my thermal absorption plates. They're cheaper than the design you proposed, and I have surplus I can give you."

"I also want some skills from Cranial."

Cranial's eyes lit up. "What are you looking for?"

"Need to speak Korean with the fluency of a native. And some entry level training with firearms."

She took out a couple of pieces of black plastic from her coat and linked them together, forming a circlet of plastic with little LEDs embedded in it.

"W-Wait, what are you doing?"

"Oh, I need a brain scan if I'm going to implant memories into your brain without any problems. I will have a picture of your brain, though, but I can't use it for anything. You're fine with that, right?"

"Yes, but I have a helmet on, and there's a layer of glass around-"

"Don't worry about it. I work with secretive capes and case 53s all the time, and I've perfected my scanner."

Before I could respond, she slammed the scanner onto my head, and after a second, the lights embedded in it started glowing green.

The woman tensed, then relaxed. "Oh, so that's what you were worried about. Don't feel bad about it. A lot of Tinkers like us do things like that to ourselves in the first a couple of months. It's because we're too hungry to grow and convince ourselves that the risk is worth it. How do you think I got these scars?"

I looked at the scars on her temple, and I understood. She probably had implants in her brain.

Cranial handed me a card with a shimmering holographic picture of a jack-in-the-box. I turned the card over to see a web address and a phone number.

"Since we have most of the stuff you want on hand, we'll send it to Faultline by tomorrow, and you can pick it up from her. The phone line's probably safe, so call if you want anything else or if you just want to talk. Goodbye!" The woman gave me another enthusiastic handshake, which I returned.

We all got up at the same time and moved towards the door. Pyrotechnical came over to me and shook my hand as well. It didn't have the elegance of Cranial's handshake.

"Thank you for telling us about the security breach. It could have led to some major problems down the road."

I nodded.

"We still have to deal with Saint and the Dragonslayers, and that's going to be a pain." Cranial said to him.

He groaned.

After sharing some words with Faultline, they shook hands with her and left through the back door. An alarm sounded in my helmet.

"You have five minutes left before your next meeting, Taylor. Thank Faultline, and be sure to exit using the rear stairwell."

I smiled under my helmet. Having an AI with a city-wide botnet at its fingertips made living a double-life so much easier.

Amy was waiting for me in a coffee shop downtown, and I waved to her, the baggy arm of my hoodie shaking with me. I was in my "civvies" as Clockblocker called them, and Amy wasn't in her costume as well.

Amy's invite to have coffee with her had been out of the blue, but it was welcome. I had planned to slot a meeting with the Merchants into the few hours I had left before I needed to head back to Ward's base, but I wasn't sure that even the AI could make a meeting with them efficient.

"This seems out of character for you. You're usually all business." I said, grabbing one of the paper cups on the table.

Amy got up and gestured for me to follow. "My sister wanted me to come with her on a date with her boyfriend, and I panicked and told her I had a meeting with a friend. She asked who, and I told her your name, and she wouldn't leave me alone until I sent you a message and got confirmation. "

"Oh." I was mildly irritated now. I had better things to do than be a prop for Amy, but I forced my features into a smile.

"Great. Can I leave, then?"

Amy shook her head. "No. I still have stuff I want to talk with you about. We'll talk more in the park."

We both walked in silence to the park, and the sight of green grass and children playing calmed me down. We found a bench far, far away from people, and we each took a seat.

Amy took a sip from her coffee, and I looked at her bloodshot eyes and the dark circles under them.

"Why are you lying to the PRT?" She asked.

My heart rate spiked up, and I felt like someone was squeezing my heart. "You're going to have to elaborate."

"You lied to them about your healing capabilities and your limb replacements, which you've removed."

I let out a breath. "There's a reason every bio-tinker and tinker who specializes in prosthetics is a villain. The youth guard and the PRT don't like minors cutting themselves up, especially if there are alternatives, and even if I were an adult, the oversight would be stifling. And I can't just not do that, Amy. It's a part of me now."

"You're just complicating things. Telling the PRT about your healing doesn't mean that you have to tell them about the modifications you can do."

"You don't understand, Amy. I don't want to fix people, I want to modify them. The human body is weak." Amy looked offended by that, so I elaborated.

"It's not meant to be opened and fixed. Every time you do, it leads to complications. And my powers want me to make sure that I can treat the human body like it's some kind of machine. If a kidney fails, I want to replace it with a cybernetic option, so I can just swap them out if problems arise. I want to use metal to replace bones and plastic to replace veins."

"When I was operating on that girl who was attacked by the ABB, my power was screaming at me to pad her skull or replace her finger bones, and ignoring it gave me a headache. Even my drugs have terrible side effects. The healing drug I gave the girl causes nightmares and irrational phobias at larger dosages. The only "safe" option I have are nanites, which are banned tech under the PRT."

"But you can still help people. You have skill as a surgeon, and your drugs can improve with work."

"I'd rather not have a fugue in the middle of an operation and have a little girl wake up with a heart made out parts of my costume and the heart rate monitor."

Amy frowned. "I'm sure you have more self-control than that."

"Why do you care? I've gone over to the Wards like you said."

"I care because you're running away from your capabilities instead of facing them. You could be a healer, but you're pretending to be some kind of gunslinger just so you can beat people up. Real heroes do what helps people, even if they don't like it or if it scares them."

"Why is healing people better than beating them up? When the E88 corners some poor black woman or if the ABB tries to kidnap a girl, I'm going to be there to stop it and to prevent someone from being sent to the hospital. Isn't that a better use of my time than helping people in the hospital without stopping what hurt them in the first place? Prevention is better than cure, and all that."

"That's an excuse, and you know it. Logistically, you'll help way more people if you focus completely on healing rather than just running around. The PRT will allow you to, it's great PR."

"Amy, I don't want to. It's better to focus on combat tech I can test on myself than endanger a bunch of people because of my nature or feeling guilty because I could have spent more time perfecting healing tech. I'm helping now, and that's enough for me."

"You're not doing it because you don't want to?" She seemed angry. "I wake up every day and feel guilty that I'm not spending more time in the hospital. I feel tired and apathetic because it's what I do day in and day out, and I'm afraid I'm going to mess up all the time. But it doesn't stop me from going in there and doing my duty."

I was getting angry at Amy now. What gave her the right to tell me what to do?

"You're being a hypocrite. I'm not the only one who's hiding her capabilities. You're not a healer; you're a touch-based biokinetic. You don't heal; you modify."

"How do you know-"

"When your sister hurts someone too much with her crude attempts at interrogation, she calls you in to fix them, so she won't get in trouble. If the thug hasn't cracked by then, she paints you as some kind of monster, and then you help her by telling the men all the horrible things you could do to them. You've claimed to make men impotent, make everything they eat taste like bile, and make them morbidly obese."

Amy looked sick now. "You might think all skinheads are idiots, and most of them are, but some of them have enough sense to slam their phones into their pockets and start recording before they get beat up. They edit the videos to make the two of you look like monsters, while cutting out the parts where they cried and gave you the information you wanted. Victor's made the Nazis a separate social media site, since they're all banned on everything else. It's called HH Revolution, if you do want to look it up."

Amy looked at me, her face pale, and I sighed. "Look, Amy, how about I make you a deal? I'm going out on a patrol in a couple of days after the PR guys decided on a name and costume, and Piggot introduces me. If the patrol has no effect on the amount of people coming to the hospital, then I'll tell Piggot about my healing tech. If I do have an impact, then you have to do something for me to make up for this. There are more ways to help people than healing them."

I pressed a ten-dollar bill into Amy's palm and closed her fingers around it. "Thanks for the talk and the coffee."

Amy sat there, lost in her thoughts, while I walked out of the park.

The bus back to the PRT building was late, and my mood wasn't helping me to stay calm.

As I walked into Ward's common room, Gallant was waiting for me.

"Carlos asked me to show you how to work the console, but if you want-"

I glared at him.

"We can do it some another time." He finished.

I marched over to my room and fell onto the sheets, wondering if I'd ruined my relationship with Amy.

A/N: I'm sorry for panic deleting and reposting this. I've fixed most of the errors, but there are probably still some left.

As I stared at my newest clone, I couldn't help but marvel at how little the repeated cloning and butchery of myself affected me. I knew it should disturb me, but it didn't, and that was cause for concern in and of itself. Somehow, I had gone from shying away from anything even remotely squeamish to working on disposable clones, all in the span of a month.

There were a lot of things I could blame this shift on. There was the attack, the drugs, my fight with Lung, the AI's plan-the list became longer and longer the more time went on. I knew the real reason, but this list was almost like a blanket, a set of lies I could whisper to myself to convince myself that I hadn't changed, that my morals weren't slipping, that on the inside, I was still a hero at heart. Before I could get lost in my own thoughts again, I took a dose of the headache drug and drank it as fast as I could. I'd grown fond enough of the drug that I'd named Brown Study after one of mom's favorite idioms. The idiom was also a hidden allegory for the drug's most prominent side effect-getting lost in one's own thoughts if you didn't control them.

I hauled the clone over to my operating table, and put my helmet on. If I was normal, the stifling heat and sweat dripping down my brow would have distracted me, but the dose of Brown Study was keeping me focused. I cut open the clone's skull with a small saw before groaning.

"This one's brain isn't human as well."

I began to prepare its organs and limbs for cryopreservation.

"Was this attempt unsuccessful as well?" The AI asked, her shifting, colorful form peering out of a wall-mounted screen.

"Yes. For the longest time, I thought it was unintentional that the clones had brains that didn't function. However, no matter how much I refine the process, I can't make a true clone of myself. The brain is always this. The best way I can explain it to you is that it's a vessel. It's meant to hold something like an artificial construct, like you. It's going to be brain-dead unless something is transferred to it, and I don't know how I would even start to make an artificial personality. What format would that data even take?"

"From your experiences with Cranial's tech, she would, in theory, make an artificial personality and implant it into this pseudo-brain."

"Cranial said that after the "incident" a couple of years back, they refuse to touch any restricted tech. Cloning isn't restricted, but it is in a legal gray area. I don't think I'm close enough to Toybox to ask something like that of them. And I don't want to get too reliant on them. We've already added to our order from them, buying a couple of cryotanks for storage. Cyrotanks I could have built myself."

The AI's avatar looked irritated, which was an achievement since it didn't have a face. "Your time is too valuable to be focusing on throwaway projects. Besides, we don't need to worry about money anytime soon because of the Lupin program."

I finished gutting the clone and tossed the unusable remains into an incinerator box from Pyrotechnical. "Well, at least I don't have to spend a fortune on maintenance or waste too much time on their tech now that you can take over for me."

Gregor had brought over my purchases to an abandoned warehouse in the Trainyard, where I had loaded them onto one of Squealer's old unmodified trucks and brought them over to my new lab in the heart of Merchant territory. It was a couple of blocks away from Squealer's lab, and it was an old metal foundry, perfect for my expanding interests.

The first thing I'd built for my new lab was a rail system I could attach various pairs of long cyberarms to, so my AI could keep the lab running even when I was out wasting time with the Wards or doing something else. As an added bonus, Toybox had given me very detailed instructions on how to keep their tech running, and I was able to water their instructions down enough for the AI to be able to follow. As of now, the AI should be able to keep the tech in the lab operation for as long as a year without my involvement.

"How are the simulations Beowulf model coming along?"

"The Vanguard model has been cannibalized. Despite Director Piggot's restrictions preventing you from looking up files, your conversations with the other Wards show that Armsmaster's most promising tactics against Lung is to use tranquilizers against him. The problem with this strategy is keeping Lung alive by ensuing his heart does not give out when he scales down. I estimate a 97.3% chance of victory with our preparations, but a 22.7% chance that Lung survives."

"Have you fund a way to get us a sample of Newter's spit yet?"

"Yes. I suspect that project will require a more personal touch. I have compiled a list of women that Newter calls up to his little perch." My phone beeped, and I opened it to find a 3D model of a rather beautiful woman.

"No. I am not making a clone just so I can cozy up to Newter."

"It's the best way, Taylor."

I groaned. I had too much stuff on my plate, and it was getting harder and harder to keep going. I needed a distraction, if only for a little while.

"What's Emma doing right now?"

"She is having a meltdown because of your perceived cowardice."

I grinned and headed over to one of the workstations and lost myself in work. This was for the good of the city, and a little pain was worth it for the progress it would bring.

An hour later, I found myself in an alley next to a rundown apartment as Skidmark's ex-lieutenants walked into it.

When Squealer called for this meeting, the Merchants were confused and afraid. It was only later that Squealer told me the Skidmark never held any meetings. Most people would simply meet him in his apartment to drop off tribute and give reports. His "leadership" was limited to the capes and the low-level thugs. The actual lieutenants viewed him more as a partner than a leader-someone they needed to put up with rather than work under.

This also meant that the Merchants didn't have any secure meeting locations. In the end, they had settled on holding the meeting in an abandoned apartment complex, using the common room on the second floor as a meeting hall. A couple of them had dragged in several half-rotten dining tables and pushed them towards the center, and a couple of office chairs that they'd probably stolen from somewhere else served as seating.

I listened through my headpiece as Squealer introduced me. "I've found us a replacement for Mush."

I pushed myself off the wall and stretched before mentally reaching for the familiar feeling in the back of my mind. A line of fire slammed up my back, and I ran through slowed time, jumping towards the wall opposite to me. I crashed into it feet first, and activated the hydraulics in my legs. I watched as the old brickwork crumbled under the force of my second jump. I flew through the air, right through the open window in the meeting room.

I landed with both my feet under me after executing the perfect roll and springing up, courtesy of Cranial's implanted skills.

All the people in the room viewed me with fear and apprehension. Most of them looked ready to bolt.

"Cape!"

Squealer laughed. "She's with us, shit for brains."

The room only marginally calmed down after that, and I saw the men judging me instead. One guy in particular decided to voice his concerns.

"This skinny bitch is supposed to replace Mush? She looks like you pulled her off the street! Mush went toe-to-toe with Armsmaster and made it out. This bitch could be folded in two by the Protectorate's girl scouts! What you did took balls, Sherrel, but-"

I reached for my implant, and it activated even faster the second time. I pulled out Squealer's little handgun from one of my jacket's pockets and rushed forward, climbing onto the table and pushing the gun into the man's slow moving mouth.

"ouwgh muw..." The man finished, and to his credit, he stayed extremely still. I slowly pulled the gun out of his mouth and then crushed the barrel with my bare hands with the faintest of whines from the internal servos.

The only advice Squealer had given me was to be flashy and violent, since that was what Skidmark did. Given the silence in the room, I think I had succeeded in showing both in equal measure.

"Anyone need another demonstration?" I asked.

The man next to him shook him head, and everyone seemed to agree with him.

I marched over to Squealer and stood next to her. I wasn't too intimidating in my green jacket, black shirt, jeans, and sunglasses combo, but my display made up for the terrible outfit. It wasn't entirely my fault; I'd gone into a fugue because of the drug, and the AI hadn't seen fit to snap me out of it, which meant I'd had to throw together an outfit in a blind panic, which led to the trashy hobo look I had going on now. It fit in well enough with the rest of the Merchants, though.

"Me and my new enforcer," Squealer looked at me.

"Sidewinder."

"Have some changes we're going to announce."

I cleared my throat.

"Your gang is the worst one in Brockton Bay."

The men in the room seemed angry at that, and I smiled.

"In a town you share with a gang of literal neo-Nazis and sex slavers, you have somehow fucked up enough to become the least respected gang in the city. If you weren't so pathetic, I'd be impressed at how you managed to do that."

I swept my hand through the room. "You want to know why? It's because you have no understanding of long-term planning. You're all junkies, unable to see anything beyond your next high or the next stack of bills you can earn. You don't care if you fuck over your earnings for next month. All you care about is making money now, and this means you're slowly killing yourself from the inside."

Squealer looked pensive, which was a strange look on the woman. Everyone else looked even angrier than before.

"Skidmark was lenient and let you guys do as you pleased as long as you brought him tribute. Well, that changes today. From now on, I expect you to bring me your accounts and show me what expenses you have for every single week. Now, some of you might want to talk to Squealer directly. Well, too bad for you, she's a Tinker, so she doesn't have time for mundane stuff like that. So you report to me."

They began to protest, and I held up a hand to stop them. "I still haven't gotten to my set of rules yet. I only have three."

I held a hand and began to count down. "No more selling drugs to kids, no more forcing women into prostitution to pay off their debts; and no violence against civilians."

The men began to yell at me, and I slammed my fist into the table, smashing through the wood. They shut up. "This isn't a one-sided deal. In return for following these rules, you'll be compensated and given certain benefits. The first of which is that we'll compensate you for any money you lose because of my new rules. In fact, we'll give you double the amount as long as you follow the rules. The second thing I can offer you is that you don't need to worry about production of your product anymore, including the products you get from your pipelines from out of state. In addition to that, Squealer will give you invisible trucks you can use to move your goods."

The murmurs quieted. The man to the left of the one I'd intimated held his hand up. I pointed to him. "What do you want?"

"How can we trust you? That's a lot of money you're offering us, and you look like you crawled out of a dumpster, which makes it seem like you don't have the money now."

"What's your phone number?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"Just unlock your phone and give it to me."

The man seemed skeptical, but he was curious enough to unlock his phone and give it to me. I looked up his number and sent it to the AI, allowing it to break into his phone. I tossed the phone back to the man and pulled mine out.

Are you reading his texts?

I've finished reading them and have calculated the amount of compensation he requires. Shall I wire it to him through the proxy account?

Yes.

"I've wired the money to you. Check your bank account."

The man with his phone for a bit before pulling up something and going still. "You weren't lying after all."

"You'll find that I keep my promises."

The rest of the Merchants seemed eager to get their money too, but I wasn't done yet. "What I give, I can easily take away. Break my rules, and I'll make sure to pay you a visit to permanently strip you of your duties."

A man near the far end of the table scoffed. "This seems pointless. Why the fuck should I stop making some extra dough on the side?"

I activated my Sandevistan and moved behind the man, leaving ghostly afterimages behind me. The Sandevistan in this body was a placeholder for a more potent version, but it still made me twice as fast. I allowed time to resume its normal pace after I stepped behind the man.

"This town," The man almost toppled off his chair in surprise. "uses reputation as a currency. If people respect you, they'll choose someone weaker to pick on. As of now, every cape in the city sees the Merchants as a soft target. Hell, before Squealer offered me this job, I was attacking your labs for chemicals. If we play the long game, more people will respect us, and more people will start to take us seriously. You'll become somebody people don't mess with because we have a presence. Skidmark was an idiot, but he had the right idea about respect and reputation. If people respect you, you gain a foothold in the city, and it becomes easier for you to do business because of it. Don't you want to be looked at with respect instead of disgust?"

I stretched and used the Sandevistan to walk back and stand next to Squealer. "That brings us to the last two things I wanted to walk about."

"Three men haven't shown up to this meeting. Do any of you want to volunteer any names?"

A younger man close to me spoke up. "Mikey's defecting to the Empire. He's in the Docks South in some old apartment complex. Cheng's going to the ABB, and he's operating out of a warehouse close to the boat graveyard. Jamie's dead, the Nazis got him while he was on a supply run."

"Does this Jamie have any family?"

"Yeah. A wife and a kid."

I reached into my coat and pulled out of two stack of bills.

"There's twenty thousand here. Make sure it gets to his widow. I'll know if you've pocketed the cash, so don't try."

The man nodded.

"I'm going to take care of the defectors. While I'm gone, I want you to decide on who gets the newly vacant areas, and to make me a list of all the graffiti artists you know."

I tossed a card onto the table. "My contact number's on that. I'll be back in thirty minutes. Be ready to give me your answer and the list by then."

I stretched. This body had been made to fight Lung. Even incomplete, a couple of Merchants thugs shouldn't be a problem for it. I slowed down time and jumped out of the window.

"Taylor? Are you alright? Taylor!" Someone shook me by the shoulder, and I looked up to see Alice Stillman, Creative Director of the PRT.

I flushed as I realized that I had just fallen asleep while talking to one of the most important people in the PRT ENE.

"I'm so sorry. I've just been having so little sleep-"

The woman laughed, and waved me off.

"Don't worry, I know how packed your schedule is because of Director Piggot. Besides, I'm glad you fell asleep. It tells me that you're not too mad about the alternate narrative we're proposing."

My sandevistan-induced headache stabbed at me again, and I smiled at the woman while seething with anger on the inside.

I knew it was a bad idea to try and show off by claiming to capture two men on opposite ends of Merchant territory in a mere thirty minutes. In the end, I had been able to do it, but only by constantly activating the Sandevistan over and over again to stretch out what little time I had. I had assumed that I had no upper limit on the number of uses. I had been wrong.

In the end, I had collapsed after sixteen uses; the last use was me jumping out the window after throwing the bodies of the two comatose men on the table and telling the Merchants to expect instructions to be sent to their phones. The Sandevistan didn't like being abused, and the damage it had done to my body only confirmed how dangerous of a trump card it was.

It had started with a nosebleed, and then I had promptly lost consciousness. The AI rolled the bike around and woke me up with aerial dispersed smelling salts, but even after I'd regained consciousness, I felt like my entire body was one big bruise. My brain was on fire, and I couldn't focus on anything for too long without bursts of pain, and time itself seemed to wobble ever so slightly. A side effect of messing with nerve signals. My body refused to move, all the organics damaged and the synthetics overworked.

When I had gotten back to Wards HQ after a rather large dose of Brown Study for the headache and the swap back to my "hero" clone, I'd expected to simply go to my room and lie down. Director Piggot apparently had other ideas.

Immediately after I gotten to Wards HQ, she had used her power over my schedule to get me ready for my debut, time constraints be damned. In the three hours I had been here, she had me take an open-book test in order to get me my Ward's license, had me take twenty courses on PR and take a computerized test to ensure I had internalized the lessons, made me do a mountain of paperwork for the tinker tech I would take on my first patrol, gotten me to make the Image department several spools of shock-absorbant fabric to see if it was any different that the combination of high-density Kevlar weave and light alloy armor they used, and then had set me up with a meeting with Miss Stillman to finalize my costume. She hadn't even set up a lab for me- I was working out of an old storage room.

I was already stressed out without Miss Stillman explaining Director Piggot's "alternate narrative" to me like I was a five-year-old. To make matters worse, the brown study in my blood was beginning to wear off, and it was causing me to drift off into daydreams.

I blinked the sleep out of my eyes. "We were talking about the Bootcamp effect, as you called it?"

She nodded. "Shadow Stalker is a good example of this. When she was a vigilante, she, on average, would make five arrests per night. This high number, however, was the result of her throwing herself into dangerous environments while using lethal equipment for fast but often near-fatal takedowns."

"When she joined the Wards as a probationary member, however, she was forced to go on patrols with a partner and to stick to safe patrol routes that skirted gang territory instead of simply rushing into the thick of things, which meant the number of arrests she performed drastically decreased. This was for her safety, but dissidents will claim that PRT using her inefficiently is what caused her numbers to go down. Which is why we ensured that her records did not become public. As the old PR adage goes..."

"When an answer can be twisted against you, is it better not to answer at all?" I parroted.

"I see you're taking your lessons seriously. That's what Director Piggot is proposing. Skidmark and Mush are high-profile arrests, and it would be best if they were kept out of the public eye. They'll be added to your file, but not made public. We'll simply add any questions regarding Skidmark and Mush to the banned questions board, so the reporters know to steer clear of them, while discreetly giving most of the credit to a senior cape like Armsmaster. Do you understand?"

I grit my teeth and nodded.

"Now that the boring parts are over, it's time to get to the fun parts."

The woman pulled out a binder and gave it to me. It was labeled concept pieces.

"So about the name..."

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, Taylor. While I think Neuromancer is a lovely literary reference, the rampant anti-master paranoia that's spreading through the country in the wake of the Simurgh attack on Canberra means names with master connotations are a no-go. Anything with the word Neuro is tentatively off limits."

That stung, but it was fine. I opened the binder and began to go through the pages.

The PR image department was infinitely better than me at coming up with names, which made sense, considering it was their job.

The various concept pieces were extremely detailed, and I was surprised to see the amount of effort that had gone into each one. The pages were filled with information, not even a single square of space was wasted. Projections of cost for the public appearance version of the costume and the street version of the costume, how well they do with different demographics, and even a graph highlighting which adjectives fit the costume best, including approachability, professionalism, relatability, conformity, and uniqueness.

"This is...extremely detailed. I didn't know this much work went into just what costume a cape wears. But what's up with the names? Peacemaker, Crackshot, Dead Eye, Cordite, Armory. It seems my only options are to pretend to be a cowboy or a soldier."

"Well, Taylor, for most heroic capes and especially Wards, weapons has always been looked down upon. In cases where using weapons are an essential part of your power, as with combat tinkers like you, we need to present you in a way that the weapon becomes a part of your costume. In some cases, it means making the weapon not look like a weapon. It's the reason why Kid Win's spark pistols look more sci-fi and toylike than real guns, also and why Miss Militia dresses in military fatigues. You can either change your weapons to fit your aesthetic, or you change your costume to fit your weapons. After all, a person in uniform holding a gun is less threatening than a civilian holding one. The uniform subconsciously implies they have training."

"So you're saying that if I chose a military outfit, my loadout could be more effective? No offense, but how do you guys have power over what I build for myself and how it looks?"

"What do you mean?"

I filliped through the binder until I had an appropriate example.

"This one is a good example. You've called it Arquebusier, which means I'll have a cyber medieval-infantry theme. It states that you want me to design my gun after an arquebus. They designed that gun during 15th century. Even if I modernized it, it would still be a terrible gun, because an arquebus is essentially a long barrel with a piece of wood mounted to the back and a hook on the underside to brace it on battlements. I am obviously not going to be under siege in some medieval castle, and so implementing those features into the design would be a waste."

"It's more than the costume, Taylor. It's about the mindset. Heroes, unlike villains, need to show restraint. What people think this means is that you are holding yourself back from hurting people with your powers or keeping collateral damage to a minimum. What it actually means is that you are now part of a greater whole. You can afford to not be armed to the teeth because you're part of an organization now, and thus a large part of your worth comes from projecting force rather than of applying it."

"We need to leave an imprint in people's minds. The flashy, themed costumes help with that. But more than that, we need to seem like we can afford to do things like this. We restrain you to show the villains that even if you are limited, you're still effective because of the PRT and the Protectorate are helping you. In a town like Brockton Bay where the PRT is outnumbered, appearances matter more than simply waving a big stick around and hoping we hit something. Simply being seen as larger than life is better than taking down a hundred thugs. It gives people hope and gives them a rallying point."

I thought back to my persona within the Merchants, and smiled.

"I'll keep that in mind."