Dennis looked sidelong at her as Vicky Dallon put her tray down next to him and sat. It wasn't her normal place, which was a little out of character for the blonde. He looked the other way as her sister did the exact same thing on his other side. Both girls peered around, then turned to fix him with nearly identical expressions, something that made him swallow a little.

"Um… Hi?" he tried, wondering what was going on.

"Dennis," Amy replied, popping the top of her can of sugar free off brand lemonade with a hiss.

"Amy." He stared at her, still none the wiser. She met his eyes over the can as she raised it to her mouth. "Can I help you?"

"We hope so," her sister said from his other side, making him turn his head. Past her he could see Carlos and Dean staring at them from a safe distance, while Chris was still in the line at the food service area. Even he was looking their way, mild puzzlement on his face. Vicky put her hand on his shoulder and patted it. "You have information we want."

"Me?" he replied, now a little more worried. "What information?"

Vicky leaned closer, as did Amy on the other side. "We want to know what a work colleague of yours did."

Her blue eyes were intent as they met his now very confused gaze. "What?" he said after several seconds.

"We have come into certain information that a person whose… stage name… begins with S may have been a little naughty," Amy remarked in a low voice. He swiveled his head once more, starting to feel a bit dizzy. "And it made us…"

"Curious?" Vicky put in.

"Yes. That. Because we can't help but feel that something very… wrong… is going on somewhere." Amy smiled darkly at him. "And since we know that you are more likely than certain other people to spill the beans, based on past performance, we thought we might be able to get a better idea of exactly what is wrong."

"And why."

"Yes. And why."

"Why is probably as important as what, really."

"Indeed. So, Dennis, what can you tell us?"

"About your work colleague, that is."

"Quite. We have no reason to pry into anything else."

"We're only interesting in prying into this matter."

"Because we're very curious."

"Yeah. And concerned. For…"

"Reasons. Specific reasons."

"Which we can't tell you."

"No. Pity, but that's how it goes sometimes."

"It does, yeah."

Closing his eyes, Dennis shook his head a little, the back and forth being rather disconcerting. The Dallon sisters were kind of scary when they tag-teamed you like this, he thought uneasily. "I can't really say anything about… work," he tried, not really expecting it to work. When he opened his eyes and glanced about he found a girl on each side close enough that it made him twitch. Both were looking at him very intently. Normally he'd have made a joke, but right now he wasn't really able to think of a good one.

"We're not asking for details of your part time job, Dennis," Amy said, Vicky nodding at her words. "Only some basic information that might shed light on something that's got us curious."

"Because we've been trying to figure it out since yesterday and it's annoying us," Vicky added with a small frown.

A sound from across the table made all three of them look up, seeing Carlos, Dean, and Chris sitting down while watching them with variously confused expressions. "What's going on?" Dean queried.

"An interrogation," Amy replied immediately. "Don't worry, we'll get to you in a minute." She gave him a hard look that made him lean back a bit. Turning to Dennis again, she raised an eyebrow. "So? What's our friend S been doing that's causing problems this time? Because we're pretty damn sure it's a lot more serious than… previous issues."

Dennis looked at his friends for help and found them all staring at him. Carlos shook his head minutely then jumped when Vicky's eyes snapped to his. He swallowed and busied himself with peeling his apple.

"Come on, Dennis, you can tell us," Vicky wheedled, smiling at him. On his other side Amy was glowering. He wasn't sure which was more offputting.

"I can't say anything, you know that," he said, picking up his fork. It promptly vanished from his fingers, making him look to see Amy spinning it through her own fingers, end over end, while smiling at him in a very strange way. "Ah… I was using that?" His voice went a bit high at the end.

"Speak, then eat," she replied calmly, the fork still flipping over and over in a fairly impressive show of dexterity. He found his eyes tracking it without meaning to.

"I'm not allowed to talk about it," he muttered, looking around for another fork. Reaching for Chris's one, he scowled when his so-called friend pulled it out of reach. "I'll get in trouble."

"You get in trouble as a hobby," Vicky remarked with a snicker. "You should be used to it."

"Doesn't mean I want to get in trouble for no good reason," he retorted. She looked askance at him.

"You normally need a reason to get in trouble? I always thought it was something that just, you know, sort of happened. Because you're you."

With a small sigh, Dennis shook his head, although privately he admitted she wasn't really wrong. "I still can't say anything."

Both sisters looked at each other over his head. He got the impression that they had quite an involved conversation without saying a word. After a few seconds they turned as one to stare at him again. Amy lowered her voice even more after a suspicious look around, which he involuntarily duplicated, as did the three boys on the other side of the table. Even Carlos leaned closer, apparently forgetting about his lunch for the moment.

"All right. We'll start, you fill in the blanks, OK?" the healer said very quietly. "A certain person known to many and disliked by all of them did something stupid. More stupid than usual, anyway. The end result is that no one seems to have seen her in her favorite… work clothes… for several days now. In fact no one seems to have seen her at all, which is a bit odd."

"And there are…" Vicky mulled over her words, then went on, "Rumors, let's say, that there might just be something in the way of legal trouble heading in her direction."

"Those rumors are kind of related to the other ones that have been heard here and there that she was rather less careful with sharp objects than she should have been at times in the past," Amy added, giving him a meaningful look. "That's something you shouldn't do, you know. Sharp things can be dangerous. Someone might get hurt."

"Possibly someone did get hurt and the end result was… somewhat dramatic." The blonde's eyes were fixed on him. "Dramatic to the point that lawyers might be involved…"

"Which is why we're interested, you see," Amy went on, making him look at her again. She leaned a little closer. "Because it's always important to be aware of anything happening that might cause problems to other people with… similar occupations."

"Yeah, the stage scene can get nasty sometimes, and we want to check that nothing bad is heading this way." Vicky nodded slowly. "It might end up causing us issues with our own amusements…" Blue eyes bored into his remorselessly. "We remember the last time someone who might be the same person made a stupid mistake and made the whole scene a little awkward for you guys for a while."

"Is this something to do with your mom?" he finally said, after swallowing a little, when they both stopped talking. The rest of his friends were listening very closely, their lunches forgotten. Carlos was looking blank but under that Dennis knew he was doing his best not to tell him to say nothing, because that alone would confirm the Dallon's suspicions.

"That information is currently unavailable," Amy replied completely emotionlessly.

"Need to know, right?" Vicky added with a tiny dark smile. "We need to know and you don't. Yet."

He looked helplessly from side to side then mutely appealed to his so called friends to get him out of this situation. Which was much more unnerving than it should be. Unfortunately none of the other three seemed to have any idea how to fix this. Dean was staring alternately at the girls with a weird expression, Chris was watching with considerable interest and clearly had no intention of getting in the way, and Carlos was doing his utmost to develop a telepathic ability from pure willpower based on the look in his eyes. Probably to scream at Dennis to keep his mouth shut.

No one said anything for a few seconds. Dennis was sweating, sure he could feel the gazes from the sisters on the sides of his head.

Eventually the pressure became too much and he said, almost without meaning to open his mouth, "We don't know why she's been taken off the rota."

Then he slapped his hand over his mouth as Carlos emitted a low groan and covered his eyes. Amy and Vicky exchanged looks over his head, before smiling identically. "She was, was she?" the former said in a silky voice. "I wonder what on earth provoked that?"

"Family issues," he couldn't help saying through his fingers, before almost biting his tongue to prevent anything else slipping out. This was worse than trying to explain himself to an annoyed Director Piggot…

"Family issues…" Vicky mused, tapping her cheek with one elegantly manicured finger, while examining him. "How very generic. Almost as if someone didn't want to mention the real reason."

"Smells like a cover-up, doesn't it?" Amy pondered out loud.

"Could be true, of course," her sister pointed out.

"Indeed. But combined with past events, do you believe that?"

"Nope."

"Me neither."

"She fucked up and they caught her."

"Yep."

"And when I say fucked up, I mean really fucked up."

"Probably."

"How bad could it be?"

Everyone at the table looked at each other. Carlos cleared his throat somewhat uncomfortably. "You're jumping to conclusions, girls."

Both sisters looked hard at him, making him lean back a little at the sudden attention, while Dennis felt relief that it wasn't on him any more. "Are we? We all know what she's done in the past," Amy commented darkly. "I've seen enough little accidents myself to be pretty fucking sure our friend isn't really… how do I put this… in any way safe to be around. And I can guarantee that based on that, the things you guys have seen and heard are worse."

"We really don't know any details of what's going on right now," Chris put in, shrugging when Carlos glared at him. "Hey, they're not going to give up unless we tell them. Girls are terrifying."

"Yeah, we are," Vicky remarked with a grin. "Go on, Chris."

"That's about it. We don't know. Dennis was telling the truth. All we were told is family reasons and we haven't seen her since… Winslow… closed down…" He trailed off and looked confused, then worried.

The group exchanged glances again. "Huh," Amy finally said, her brow furrowed. "Really? Now isn't that interesting."

"It closed because they found asbestos in it, though?" Dean replied in a questioning tone as if he didn't believe his own comment.

"That's what they said was the reason. Question is, is it really the reason?"

"They definitely did find asbestos there, Dad was talking about it last night," Chris replied to Vicky's question with a nod. "The Mayor is furious, apparently. It kicked of that whole investigation which has proved that the last survey was a complete scam or something. It's all over the place from what the news said. So that part is definitely real at least."

"OK, fair enough, the asbestos is real. But what started that investigation? And why did it start in Winslow of all places?" Amy was still spinning Dennis's fork through her fingers as she thought. "Must have been a reason for that." She looked up from staring at the table, glancing at each of them. "I did overhear a cop in the hospital talking to his partner a couple of days ago that they'd grabbed some kid in a school for drug dealing and trying to blame it on someone else. Wonder if that's connected? I don't know which school, but Winslow is sure the one I'd guess at for drugs. Or anything else to do with crime for that matter."

Vicky looked around the cafeteria. After a moment she pointed discreetly. "Jackie's mom is a civilian BBPD office worker, at the main precinct," she whispered as they all looked in that direction, to see a pretty ginger-haired girl sitting a few tables away laughing about something with her friends. "Wonder if she's heard anything about that?" She got up even as Carlos put out a hand to stop her, and quickly walked over to the other girl. His aborted motion turned into facepalming.

"Oh, god, this is getting ridiculous," he hissed. "We're going to be in so much trouble… Obviously we're not supposed to talk about all this, whatever it is, and you two aren't helping." He gave Amy an aggrieved frown, which she smiled at.

"Information wants to be free," she replied calmly.

"Not all information, trust me," he sighed. They watched as Vicky squatted next to the table the other girl was at, talking to her intently. After a few minutes, she nodded a couple of times, smiled, nodded again as Jackie said something else, then stood up and headed back to them.

Sitting down she leaned in which the rest of the table mirrored, even Carlos. "So Jackie heard from her mom who heard it from the cleaner who heard it from the booking sergeant's assistant that a kid at Winslow was caught red handed by a drugs dog with a pocket full of really high grade hash after the principal called the cops in to search another girl's locker because she'd been told that it contained, get this, a whole pile of high grade hash… And then she tried to run, the dog handler shot her in the ass with a taser and arrested her, one of her friends punched the cop and got arrested too, and it all got really messy after that." She got the entire thing out in one breath at high speed, causing them all to look at each other again.

"And the best part is that the girl who had the drugs was the one who told the Principal that the other girl had it in her locker," she added breathlessly, grinning. "Sounds like either she stole the stuff from the other kid, or more likely was trying to frame the other kid with the stuff and somehow fucked up."

"How stupid would you have to be to forget to plant the drugs you're using to frame someone with drugs?" Amy wondered. They exchanged glances and she shook her head. "About that stupid, I guess."

"Anyway, she got charged with possession, intent to deal drugs, resisting arrest, and a few other things," her sister finished off, looking somewhat gleeful. "Best part? She's a black girl about fifteen and on the Winslow track team, Jackie said."

They digested her words for a while.

"Our friend runs track, right?" Amy commented idly, handing Dennis his fork.

"So I've heard," her sister replied, picking up her own and sticking it into her food.

"She's black, too, isn't she?"

"Does appear to be."

"Interesting series of coincidences…"

"Yeah."

Carlos carefully pushed his tray to the side, rested his forehead on the table, and put his hands over his head. "We are so going to be in trouble over this," he muttered in a muffled voice. "Don't ask questions. That's the first rule. Why do you always have to ask questions? We're not supposed to ask questions."

Amy reached out and patted his head comfortingly. "Don't you want to know the truth?"

He rolled his head to the side just enough to look at her with one eye. "No. I really, really don't want to know the truth when the truth will get me yelled at for an hour."

"Just don't tell them you know any of this, then," she shrugged. "Easy."

"Easy for you, maybe. I have to deal with… the stage group."

"You need another interest," she replied with a smirk, making him sigh heavily and moan again, muttering something too faint to make out.

"WHY do you two have such a burning desire to poke into things that aren't your concern?" he mumbled.

"Incurably nosy, probably," Vicky giggled. Dennis couldn't help himself and snickered a little. Dean looked at him and shook his head, but his lips were twitching.

The rest of them resumed eating, Carlos finally sighing and straightening up to retrieve his food and joining them. "Please don't go spreading any more rumors about, you two," he requested quietly. Amy smiled at him.

"We have no intention of doing that, don't worry. We just found ourselves needing to know a few more things in light of certain information we happened to run across. It was driving us nuts trying to figure out what was behind it all. I'm pretty sure we've got a good idea of the basic situation now, though. And yeah, you may find that your colleague isn't going to cause any more trouble for a while if it goes how I think it's going to."

Dennis couldn't actually find a downside to that, and felt quite a lot more cheerful after he'd considered the matter for a while. His friends looked thoughtful too and he suspected much the same was crossing their minds.

After a moment, he decided that it was going to be interesting to see what Missy's reaction was when he very discreetly let her in on it…


Taylor, with her father and Lisa, walked into the vehicle depot at the DWA, which was quite close to the shoreline in a series of connected and very large buildings, two stories high inside. They had been individual workshops at one point but over the years constant modifications and rebuilding had made the whole assembly one enormous room for all intents and purposes, with a number of vehicles lifts scattered around the place, machine tools at the back and in subsidiary workshops, several overhead cranes, and enough other equipment and parts to service and maintain a much larger fleet of vehicles than were currently in use. In fact there was more than enough there to build quite a large fleet of vehicles if they'd wanted to, and quite a few of the dock workers did exactly that as a hobby, so this place was often busier than you'd expect at odd hours of the day.

The far left corner of the huge complex had a pair of enormous sliding doors that when opened exposed a special wharf along with a small by ship terms but very large in human scale covered dry-dock, which allowed vessels up to nearly ninety feet long to be worked on. At one point much larger ones had been a regular thing with the DWA, back when ship building was very important around here, but these days it was mostly only the occasional trawler that needed maintenance. Many of the facilities of the old shipyards still existed but they were mostly long mothballed if not entirely abandoned. Some had been stripped by scavengers of anything portable although the DWA patrolled the bits they still wanted intact and tended to be quite harsh with the gangs and random individuals who tried to make off with anything without asking first.

As they walked across the stained and pitted concrete floor towards the back right, where a number of people were standing around waiting for them, Taylor looked about with interest. She hadn't been in here for many months. The huge area echoed with the noises of air tools being used, the crackle of a welder sounding from off in the distance behind a translucent orange protective screen which lit up intermittently. Sparks bounced along the floor under it, fading into darkness after a second or two. A loud metallic bang made Lisa jump next to Taylor as someone dropped something heavy behind them off to the side.

"This place is a lot bigger than I expected," the other girl commented, having to raise her voice slightly to speak over the sound of a grinder that started up somewhere.

"It's one of the most important parts of the DWA," Taylor's father replied with a glance at her. "We do a lot of work on our own vehicles here, and sometimes get contracts from the city to maintain some of the older plant and equipment they have. The municipal facilities are pretty good with the newer gear, but they have quite a bit of old stuff too which they don't really have the expertise to service. Some of it dates back to the fifties, for that matter. We never throw anything away and have all the old manuals, spares, that sort of thing, and a lot of experience. And can usually make new parts if you can't buy them any more."

He pointed at a row of huge ancient milling machines along the side wall, along with several enormous lathes. "Sometimes we've even had the occasional job from other city departments around the state and as far away as New York to make some part that is otherwise completely unobtainable. Most municipalities don't like getting rid of their machinery until it rusts away completely but there's always the issue of keeping it running, even though a lot of the older stuff was built to last. It's a small sideline but it helps keep the lights on."

With a shrug, he added, "There's an awful lot of institutional knowledge still here from the time that Brockton Bay was a major industrial hub, and we do what we can to preserve it. Remind me to show you the steam engines at some point, they're pretty cool."

"Yeah, driving a 30 ton traction engine is neat," Taylor said with a grin. "I got to do that once a few years ago. It's not very fast but it's a lot of fun."

Lisa looked at her and shook her head a little. "I didn't realize quite how… expansive… the DWA's abilities were."

"Oh, we have people who can do almost anything you care to name," Taylor's father chuckled. "Lots of odd backgrounds, lots of interesting knowledge. And we have some contacts in places you wouldn't expect as a result. There's a good reason we're still here despite everything. The union has its fingers into everything one way or another, which is all that's kept us afloat all these years."

They arrived at their destination, next to a rather battered and scarred large works truck with 'Brockton Bay DWA Road Maintenance' stenciled on each side. The front part of the vehicle was essentially a three seat van cab, while the rear half was a flat bed with mesh sides. There was a small but heavy duty crane on the thing and hydraulic outriggers at each corner which extended to stabilize it when the crane was in use. Several compartments around the bed had doors and flaps covering them, and there was also a big air compressor with its own small engine bolted down next to the base of the crane. Quite a lot of mysterious fittings and controls lurked around the sides of the vehicle as well. Between the cab and the rear bed was a ten foot long section with a roller door on it, which was for holding things like jackhammers and large portable equipment.

Two more similar but not quite identical vehicles were parked some distance away, along with a number of trailers full of equipment behind them. Taylor knew that there were also a pair of road rollers and a grader in the next shed along, but they weren't kept in here as they were so seldom used. And of course there were any number of forklift trucks of different sizes, bulldozers, and all manner of other construction machinery lurking around the facility.

"Why does the DWA have a road maintenance division?" Lisa asked curiously as they stopped, inspecting the truck with interest.

Matt, who was one of those waiting for them, answered her. "Several reasons. One is that we have to maintain our own roads, the ones inside the fence of the DWA." He waved at the open garage door behind them, through which a partially snow-covered and very large area of concrete could be seen. Even as Lisa looked someone started closing it, after a car drove through and turned towards one of the vehicle lifts." We also started fixing the roads in a lot of the general wider docks area quite a few years ago because the city didn't bother, partly because they couldn't afford it and partly because the administration didn't have any interest in doing it anyway. No one seemed to care, so we kept on doing it, and these days it's kind of just become accepted practice. The city facilities department is fine with it because they're union too and they know it needs to be done, even if they're not doing it. And it helps keep the place running as much as it ever does."

"Another reason is tied to that, of course," Taylor's father put in with a nod. "The city actually hires us to do the work in a lot of places around Brockton Bay these days, since we're good at it, they know we can do it, and even with the recent change of administration to someone who actually does give a crap, they simply don't have the manpower to do everything. We're more or less a semi-official part of the city maintenance department sometimes. City hall calls on us to do various things now and then, like help plow the streets if it snows particularly hard, or if some cape fight wrecks a street, they need us to pitch in and fix it. And now of course we're contracted to do this asbestos remedial work, which is going to bring in a lot of jobs."

"They're finding that fucking stuff all over the place," Kate commented, having walked over to join them. "No way in hell the people who were supposed to deal with it years ago did anything. I'll bet they just embezzled the entire budget and went away smiling after faking all the paperwork."

"Probably. There was a lot of that sort of thing going on for decades around here," Taylor's father grumbled. "We told them about it, and no one did a damn thing. I'm honestly surprised sometimes that half the buildings in the city haven't fallen over because someone substituted sugar for cement or something…" He shrugged. "Well, at least now Roy Christner seems to mean it about making things better. He's certainly putting his money where his mouth is, unlike the last three or four mayors. They just put our money in their pockets."

"Yeah. If he can pull it off, I'll be impressed," Matt noted. "Surprised, but impressed."

"Let's hope he can. The blockage in the harbor mysteriously vanishing will certainly help," Kate laughed. She winked at Taylor. "Lucky that something made that happen. Weirdest thing ever but useful."

Taylor smiled a little back, feeling pleased that she'd managed to help out. And idly wondering what else could be removed via gnurr…

Her father looked at his watch. "Right, it's eleven forty. Taylor and I have a meeting at four, and will have to leave by half past three at the latest. That should give us enough time to see if this will work. Is everything arranged?"

"Yeah, I talked to City Maintenance first thing this morning, mentioned that there were some massive potholes one of our guys reported around River Drive and Salton Avenue." He turned and took a map that someone held out, placing it on the hood of the truck. Pointing, he went on, "Around here. Which is actually true, the roads down there are awful. After that thaw and freeze we had three weeks back several sections of road crumbled like hell and the last time it got plowed half the tarmac went with the snow. You could lose a small car in a couple of them by now, looking at the photos Gary took. Luckily not that much traffic goes that way or there would be people wrecking their suspension like you wouldn't believe."

He moved his finger slightly. "Now, our target is, in theory, right about here. We know there are traffic cameras here, here, and here, which we have to assume he's tapped into. Over this way about three hundred yards there's the old Jackson Print Works building, which isn't really used much these days, but it's the perfect place to put another camera or two looking down these streets, which is sure what I'd do if I wanted to watch anyone approaching." Tapping a few places as he spoke, he looked at them. "From what the mercs said, and what Lisa's power tells us, he's going to see anyone who gets close to him. He might even be able to watch much further out if he's really compromised the city cameras."

"So to sneak up on him we need to not sneak up at all," Lisa commented, nodding thoughtfully.

"Exactly. Our contact in Maintenance asked us to deal with the potholes, since they're currently overworked with other road repair in several of the rich areas. Of course the DWA is happy to step up and help out our fine city, while making a bit of money out of it at the same time." Matt grinned at them, causing Lisa to snicker. "So there's an official work order and everything in the system. Even if he's got insider information into the city computer network, which I wouldn't put past him, it's completely above board as far as anyone is concerned. A report was made, a crew went out to fix the problem, nothing to worry about. We're at least two hundred yards from any of the entrances of his little base, as far as I can make out. Assuming that he is squatting down there in a place that shouldn't exist, he can watch us fix the roads all day if he wants."

"And while he's doing that we're watching him," Lisa smiled, in a rather vicious manner. "Or at least looking for him."

Opening the storage compartment roller door of the truck, Kate waved them closer. Taylor and Lisa peered inside. She reached under one of the shelves full of tools that met their eyes and pressed something, then pulled. The entire section swung outwards on hidden hinges to reveal that behind it nearly two thirds of the width of the truck cargo area was empty space. "We cleaned out this section, removed the storage containers and all the usual stuff, and fitted that table there, along with a big battery, one-twenty volt inverter, and some lights, plus those seats. It looks perfectly normal from the outside, but inside you've got enough space for at least four people including food and drink. A little cramped but nice and comfortable and very discreet. Soundproofed, even. That monitor at the back is connected to a little camera up there." She pointed at the front of the truck, where a tiny lens could just be seen under the roof rack, which had a whole stack of traffic cones sitting on it. "Another one at the rear, and one on either side. Full 360 degree coverage just to be safe."

Taylor noted there was a laptop on the table, plugged into a cable that went up to a couple of boxes attached to the wall. "Internet?" she queried, pointing at it. Matt nodded.

"Yeah. It's got a cellphone tethered to it, and a repeater antenna on the roof, so you get a good signal. And there are some UHF radios in there too, the usual ones we use, although obviously they're not exactly secure. Anyone could listen in, so don't use them except in an emergency. There's also an intercom to the front seat, there." He indicated a small panel with a speaker grill in it below the monitor, and a couple of buttons.

"U.N.I.O.N. seems to have some interesting stuff," Lisa commented with a smirk. "Do we call you Q then?"

He snorted with laughter. "Q Department is much more than just me. U.N.I.O.N. is a group effort after all."

"Good work, you guys," Taylor's father said, visibly trying to ignore the banter and failing. "For a rush job it came out really well."

The other man saluted smartly. "Thank you, Chief! We do what we can for the good of all DWA workers!"

"Oh, for god's sake, cut it out," her father sighed while most of the rest of them started laughing. He still looked almost unwillingly amused even so. Looking again at his watch, he nodded. "All right. How long will it take the crew to patch the first pothole?"

Matt waved one of the other people who'd been standing there listening forward. "That's your expert area, Harry."

"Half an hour to block the area off, set up the diversion signs, and do the prep work," Harry said after a moment's thought, glancing at a couple of others who nodded. "If we start with one of the smaller ones, after that probably about an hour, hour and a half to fill it in and roll it, then seal the edges. Might get two done in that time depending on size and depth. We can have our guys survey the rest at the same time as the work crew is patching that one, so we know what the rest of the job will take. We can be back here by half past three easy, no problem."

"Sounds good." Her father looked at Taylor, then Lisa, both of them nodded agreement. "That should let us start looking for him. We might even get lucky the first time out but I wouldn't want to lay money on it."

"Worth a try even so, right?" Taylor commented brightly. "And worst case we find out he's not there, so we have to work on locating him. From what the mercenaries said, though, he's practically always there."

"Yeah," Lisa nodded. "My power thinks he's been spending a lot of time recently trying to 'recruit' Parahumans for whatever little plot he's got going on. Me being one of them, probably the first one for that matter." She shook her head in disgust. "I hate him for that, but with any luck he's so stuck on that plan that he's concentrating on it enough to stay in one place."

"If you have a secret underground base with dozens of armed people protecting it, you probably wouldn't want to leave it all that often," Kate put in.

"It's a point, yeah," Matt agreed. "Anyone who needs a piss better go do it now, since there's no bathroom in there and we don't want to risk opening it anywhere else just in case." Taylor looked at Lisa, then her dad, who shrugged.

"We're good, I think."

"OK. Ready to go?" Matt asked. All three of them nodded.

Sticking his fingers in his mouth, the man produced an ear-shattering whistle that echoed throughout the entire huge room. "Mount up!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "U.N.I.O.N. Assemble!"

"Christ's sake…" her father grumbled as he climbed into the compartment, Kate, who was almost bent double laughing, holding it open. "You people are insane."

"You're one of us, Chief, never forget that," Matt replied happily. He opened the passenger door having shrugged on a hi-viz vest over his DWA coat, as Harry got in the driver's side, snickering to himself. Standing on the running board he looked around at the sudden burst of activity. The other two trucks had started up, Taylor saw just before she followed Lisa who'd already gone into their secret compartment. Each was connected to a trailer with more equipment on it. Raising his voice again, the man hollered, "Roll out! Mission is a go!" The work crews climbed aboard their vehicles, a series of doors opening and closing, and within seconds everyone was in place.

Grinning to herself she entered the compartment and sat down in a free seat, Kate, still chuckling, waving at her before closing the hidden door with a solid clunk. A couple of small LED lights in the roof illuminated the compartment more than well enough and Lisa was already investigating the laptop with the air of someone who knew what she was doing. "This is cool," Taylor said, smiling.

"You have corrupted my union with your crazy ways, evil child," her father grumbled as he put on the seat belt that all the seats were equipped with, being essentially aftermarket car ones mounted on frames to the floor. The trunk's engine rumbled into life in front of them, making the entire compartment vibrate a little as the big diesel idled.

"They were already like that, you know that as well as I do, Dad," she giggled. "I just accidentally gave them an outlet for it."

"This place is nuts on a good day," he acknowledged, sighing. "Oh, well. Let's see what happens."

"All good back there, Danny?" Matt's voice came as the speaker crackled slightly.

"Yeah, we're ready, Matt. All good."

"OK. Hang on, we're heading out now." With a slight jerk the truck moved forward, making them all grab for hand-holds, turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, and slowly proceeded out of the vehicle depot. Watching through the wall she saw the door to the depot roll up out of the way as they approached, then down again after the third truck and trailer passed through it. Shortly they were bouncing around a bit as their vehicle headed towards the gate to the DWA facility. Satisfied everything was going to plan, she looked at her dad, who smiled at her even as he shook his head a little.

"I have to admit I never expected to be doing this cloak and dagger sort of thing," he chuckled. "Not since I was about ten, anyway."

"It's kind of fun, even if it's also a little weird," she admitted.

"It's also very unlikely Coil will see us coming unless he really is some sort of actual pre-cog," Lisa put in with a small frown as she fiddled with the laptop, nodding to herself as she clicked on an icon then typed a few characters into the window that opened. "Which my power is telling me he isn't. His power is kind of pre-cog, sorta, I think, but he still needs information and this should stop him getting it. He can't pull data out of his ass without going looking for it." She looked up at them for a moment. "Or that's what my power is telling me and it seems pretty convinced about that."

"Hopefully it's right, then," Taylor's dad said. "So far it seems fairly accurate. Sometimes to a rather freaky level, I have to admit."

"Powers are bullshit, everyone knows that," Lisa laughed. "Although I have to say that since you… crashed it… or whatever the hell that was, it seems to be working better than ever. Maybe it needed a factory reset?" She looked at Taylor with her eyebrows up, the other girl shrugging. "Or just a good kick in the ass."

"How are the headaches?" Taylor queried.

Lisa frowned. "Oddly enough, they're almost not there any more. Which, even if nothing else changed, I'd be your friend for life for. They were horrible and just wouldn't go away once they started. Painkillers hardly did anything. The only way to stop them was to pass out for about twelve hours which was getting old a long time ago. But now… It's kind of a faint dull ache at worst and I could swear it's getting less with time. Or I'm getting used to it." She shrugged a little. "Hard to explain. Parahuman abilities are always difficult to really understand, even your own."

All three of them leaned a little to the side as the truck made a sharp turn. Taylor checked outside, then glanced at the camera monitor to compare the results. Both her looking beneath and the cameras agreed that they were heading onto the flyover that would take them across town for a few miles, the other two trucks bringing up the rear. Their entire convoy rumbled onward at forty miles an hour in the right lane, faster vehicles passing them. Although it was a chilly and overcast day, in here it was nice and warm and surprisingly comfortable.

"About fifteen minutes, Danny," Matt said through the intercom. "How's the ride back there?"

"A little disorientating since I'm sitting backwards but not bad at all," her dad replied. He was watching the monitor with interest. "This worked a lot better than I thought it might."

"Yeah, we're pretty pleased with the result." The intercom clicked off and they sat back to wait, Lisa still working on the laptop.

"What are you doing?" Taylor asked curiously after watching for a while. She was quite good with computers herself but Lisa was clearly much more experienced. Her power probably helped with that too, she thought.

"Setting up a series of virtual private networks and cutouts, so any connection can't be traced back to us," the girl replied absently, opening various windows and clicking icons with the air of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. "All anonymous, routed all over the place. Dragon might be able to figure it out in time, but hardly anyone else would." Tapping a few more keys, she nodded in satisfaction. "There. Just in case we need to do any… um… unrequested information harvesting, let's put it."

"Hacking, you mean," Taylor's father said in a dry voice, making her smirk a bit.

"Some less enlightened people might call it that. I prefer to think of it as preemptively arranging useful data in the face of possible resistance to that data being arranged."

"I'm sure you do." He shook his head as she laughed. "Try not to break too many laws. We're trying to be reasonably discreet here."

"Oh, I'm not planning on hacking Coil right out of the box," she assured him. "That would be too risky, if nothing else. But it's useful to have things set up ready to go in case we do need something, right?"

"I suppose so," he admitted. Looking at the monitor, he nodded, then pulled out a rolled up large-scale map he'd printed off before they went to the vehicle depot, which covered several blocks around their estimated position of Coil's base in surprising detail. It was drawn from city records and showed things that most maps didn't, like the routes of electrical wiring, underground services, and so on. Lisa closed the laptop and moved it to the side to allow him to unroll it on the table, then leaned over the map as did Taylor.

"The mercenaries said they went into his base down this access alley here," he went on, tapping a small road that branched off the larger ones. "Inside this building, which according to the map is supposed to be a loading dock for this other one here. They've both been empty for at least eight years, since the company that owned them went under when the Teeth destroyed their main premises over on Ninth and Acorn during a huge fight with the Empire. From what they said, Coil repurposed this one into a vehicle entrance. God knows how he managed to hide it but there we are."

Taylor, who was studying the map closely, nodded slowly. "I doubt very much that's the only entrance," she commented. "He's paranoid as hell, right?"

"Oh, sure, he's guaranteed to have at least one other exit," her dad replied. "No self respecting villain would let himself get trapped inside someplace with only one way in or out. He's probably got more than one." Moving his finger a couple of inches, he indicated another spot. "See here? This is one of the main storm drains, which leads all the way down to the Bay through a couple of collection sumps. If you get into it, and know where you're going, you could end up almost anywhere in the city. There's miles of tunnels down there, and a lot of them are big enough to at least crawl through. That one is so large you could drive a car down it since it's one of the big ones which all the smaller stuff drains into."

"And it goes within about twenty feet of where the original bunker was meant to be," Lisa remarked thoughtfully.

He nodded. "Exactly. It would be almost trivial to connect to it, and disguising the door on the other side wouldn't be hard. Not a lot of people ever go down there, not to mention it can be extremely dangerous when it rains. You wouldn't believe how fast they fill up in a big storm. Not even most of the junkies want to risk getting too far into the drain network. We've pulled enough bodies out of the bay after a storm to make most people think twice about poking around down there. But it would be a really good emergency escape route."

"There's another one over there on the other side," Taylor pointed out, prodding the map.

"Yes, although that one's far enough away that it would be a lot more work to connect to. And there's a gas main and several fifteen kilovolt electrical feeders in the way. You sure wouldn't want to accidentally cut into one of those. So if he put in more than one escape route, it probably doesn't go that way."

All three of them studied the map closely. "What's this?" Lisa asked, pointing at a symbol about a hundred yards from the garage the mercenaries had told them about. Taylor's dad peered at it, pushing his glasses up his nose with one finger.

"Ah… Hold on, I know this one… Oh, right, that's an underground phone exchange." He nodded to himself. "A room about twice this size with a lot of communications equipment in it. They're scattered around the city, although most of them are pretty old now. Most have been upgraded and bypassed, I think."

"Sounds perfect for a discreet exit," Taylor remarked. Lisa and her father both nodded.

"It's certainly a good candidate, I agree. Close enough to be accessible, nothing particularly difficult to avoid between the bunker and it, already has access to street level… Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd used that too."

"He could have half a dozen ways in or out." Taylor studied the map closely. "There's all sorts of things down there. A lot more than I realized even after looking around at home."

"City infrastructure is pretty complicated and most people never really understand how much there is underneath their feet," her dad smiled. "Plus Brockton is an old city. There's stuff down there that doesn't show up on any modern map at all. Every now and then someone accidentally discovers something weird when they're excavating a street or demolishing a building, even now. And I wouldn't actually be all that surprised if there were secret bases that random capes have built over the years which no one knows anything about these days. We've had a lot of capes living here in the last thirty years. A hell of a lot more than most places. I know for a fact that Marquis had at least two small emergency hideouts somewhere, probably up in the hills to the north."

"How the hell do you know that?" Lisa asked with an odd look.

He grinned. "He told me. I don't have a clue why, like I said we were hardly friends, but we talked a few times for various reasons. He happened to mention them, just in passing. I'm pretty sure he was being honest, but I'd be shocked if he was being complete. He probably didn't use them any more and had others. There are rumors about other villains, too, and a couple of old heroes." He shrugged. "This place has a history."

"Not to mention all the smuggler's tunnels you told me about," Taylor chuckled.

"Oh, yeah, those definitely exist. Or existed, at one point. I have no idea how many are still intact but we know a couple are still around. Pat's place has at least one under it. They used to run rum into Brockton through there, back in the eighteen hundreds." Her father stopped talking as the intercom crackled.

"We're about two minutes out now, no problems so far," Matt reported. "We're going to park near the first pothole, Kyle's crew are going to block the road and set up diversions, and Janet's one will start surveying the area. Once the diversions are in place Kyle's people will start prepping the area while Harry and I get the gear in place for patching the first hole. You guys do whatever it is you're going to do."

"Got it, Matt. Good work."

"Thanks, Chief."

With a sigh Taylor's father looked heavenwards and spread his hands. "You see, Annette?" he mumbled. "You see what I have to deal with?"

Taylor and Lisa were giggling at his expression. Soon enough they calmed down, though, just as the truck stopped. The engine rumbled down to silence and moments later banging sounds and various calls from the road crew faintly penetrated their compartment.

"Well, let's see what we can see," Taylor commented, cracking her knuckles. "Lisa, take notes."

"Got it, Agent Gimme," Lisa replied with a grin, opening the laptop and firing up a word processor. "Let's go super-villain hunting."

Taylor grinned back, then she and her father looked beneath.

It didn't take long for them to make some interesting observations...