Vindication

Chapter Three

Two girls whispered to each other on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Old, cheap clothes, no make up, possibly their whole lives in their backpacks. Brockton Bay girls. Boston was full of them ever since Leviathan hit.

"You two lost?" Eddie stayed at least ten feet away, not wanting to frighten them off. Brockton Bay girls scared easily.

The two of them shared a look, apparently unsure if they wanted to ask for help or keep going on their own. One was tall with long hair and glasses, the other was short with short hair and no glasses.

"A little," the short girl said. "We're looking for the hostel on Blackbird Avenue, but ..."

The tall girl waved her phone in her hand. "Battery's dead."

He kept his face neutral. "Blackbird, Blackbird ... yeah, it's just a couple streets down." Well, a bit more than that, bu the didn't want to worry them with details.

The short girl's face lit up, but the tall girl looked more reserved. "Which way?" she asked.

"You know what? Why don't I just take you there?"

"Really?" the short girl asked. "You don't have to. If you just point us in the right direction ..."

"Nah, it'll be easier this way. It's about fifteen minutes if you know where you're going, but it's easy to get turned around in a place like this. I swear, Boston was designed by a drunken spider."

Not his joke, but it made the tall girl smile. He led the two of them down the darkened streets, making small talk along the way. He was charming and witty enough for that, and they didn't even question where he was taking them until they had reached his apartment.

"Hold on," the short girl said, scanning the building. It wasn't the worst place to live, but the few boarded-up windows didn't make it look inviting. "Where are we? I thought you were taking us to the hostel."

Eddie considered trying to string them along for a bit longer, but by this point, why bother? He yanked his nine millimeter out from under his jacket and pointed it at them, smiling as their eyes widened.

"You girls wanted a place to stay? Well, I got one for you. Now come inside and it won't even be that bad."

He couldn't tell if the tall girl was angry or afraid. She looked more disgusted than anything else, but she held her hands up and didn't talk back. The short girl's horrified expression was easier to read. "What?" she said, stepping back. "Y-you can't do this, I-I—"

He pistol whipped her across the face, knocking her to the ground. "I can do whatever the hell I want!" he said, grabbing her and yanking her to her feet. "Now shut up and move, or else!"

"Or else" was a pretty lazy threat, but the gun in his hand made up the difference. The two girls marched inside in front of him, one sniveling on the verge of tears and the other audibly grinding her teeth, but at least they didn't try to talk. Good. His neighborhood tended to mind its own business, but gunshots would draw attention anywhere.

He made them sit down in a corner and called some friends. John Cody had a van, and Austin Hall had connections with the Scarlet. The Scarlet paid five hundred dollars a head for girls these days, and a grand split three ways was more than worth getting out of bed this late.

It wasn't long before they arrived, and Austin began examining the merchandise like it was his catch from the start. "You just found them on the street?"

"Blew in from Brockton Bay." It felt like half the city had come over, and Boston had been full to bursting before. "No one will miss them. No one will come looking."

"Why haven't you tied them up yet?"

Eddie rolled his eyes. "We can do that in the van." He'd rather walk them out than carry them. Not that either of them looked like they were going to try something either way. "That's why I invited John. John?"

John Cody was peering around the corner into the kitchenette. "Bro, you shouldn't leave your food out like that," he said. "You got a serious bug problem."

"Who are you, the health inspector? Let's just—"

He cut off as something flew into both his eyes at once, and a third thing went down his throat. He clenched his eyes shut and coughed—and heard a buzzing that grew louder with each second. The buzzing almost drowned out the screams of his friends.

Something touched him. Something with two many legs, crawling up his ankle. He swatted at it, but there was more. A lot more. He rubbed his eyes and forced them open, and found the room thick with a swarm of insects, and standing in the middle was a person so covered in bugs she looked like she might have been made out of them.

Cape. There's a freakin' cape in my living room! Whether hero or villain, this was the stuff of nightmares. He pulled out his gun and shot her.

Nothing happened. It didn't even click. No, no, no! It was jammed. He had to ... he had to ...

The cape turned to him, her form writhing, and the swarm swallowed him. Bugs covered him, tried to crawl into his mouth, into his eyes. He could do nothing but fall to the ground, cover his face, and try not to scream.

"Tie them up," the cape said. Her voice was inhuman, buzzing like her swarm.

"Y-yes, ma'am," he heard one of the girls say. The short one he guessed, but if he opened his eyes who knew what would crawl into them. He felt arms pull his hands behind his back, and he couldn't bring himself to resist.

"When you're done," the cape said, "help yourself to their wallets and anything else you can carry with you. Then leave. I have some ... questions for them."

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"I can't believe how easy it is to get kidnapped around here," Taylor said as they walked back to their motel. Two hundred dollars a night for basically a hole in the wall was highway robbery, but they still managed to come out ahead. "That was our third time tonight."

They had gotten their method down to a science in the past week. They pretended to get lost in the sort of neighborhood Taylor's dad would never want her to go to, get picked up by the sort of guys her dad would never want her to go with, and then cover their faces in spiders.

The only tricky part was slipping into her swarm when everyone was distracted to make her appearance as Skitter, but they haven't had a problem yet.

"Want to try for one more?" Vin asked. "Maybe go after that Scarlet group, or the Cobras those people mentioned last night?

Taylor considered that, then shook her head. "Better to not risk it. Some of those bigger gangs might have capes, and I don't want to jump into anything without knowing what I'm getting into." Not without backup. Vin couldn't use her powers until the metallurgist got back to them—tomorrow, Taylor realized, if all went according to schedule—and Taylor would feel a lot better about fighting other capes once she had a teammate who could pick her up and fly away if things looked bad.

Not that Vin wasn't pulling her weight. She could play the part of a weak, helpless refugee girl so perfectly that the local scum couldn't resist. Although, now that she thought about it, Taylor wondered if that was because Vin actually was helpless right now.

"Hey, Vin?"

"Yeah?"

"Why'd you let him hit you?"

Vin blinked, then ran her fingers over a purple bruise on her face, as though remembering it was there. "It's how you run a con. If you cooperate too much, they get suspicious. I mean, what sort of girl wants to be kidnapped? But if you resist, challenge them, and lose, then they don't have to worry about what you want, because you clearly never wanted any of it."

Taylor frowned. That didn't sound very intuitive, but from what Vin had told her about her past, her teams had leaned more toward subterfuge than gang warfare. "Still seems like overkill."

Vin smiled at that. She smiled a lot more these days as the shock of traveling to another world had faded. "It has to be overkill. Any con is paper thin. You have to overwhelm them with absolute confidence, because your story might fall apart if they so much as look at you twice."

Taylor thought about her time with the Undersiders. While she had abandoned the idea eventually, she had joined them intending to steal their secrets and betray them. A con, of sorts. Tattletale's superpowered intuition should have ferreted out all her secrets if she had only used her powers on her. Had Taylor really been so convincing that Tattletale never even tried?

She shook her head and tried to think about something else. To this day, she wasn't sure if she should never have joined them or if she should never have left them, and dwelling on them wasn't productive. She turned back to Vin. "I still don't like the idea of you getting hit when you don't need to."

Vin gave her a look that may have been fond, patronizing, or both. "Well, after tomorrow I'll have pewter, so getting hit won't matter much."

Pewter. One of the eight metals Vin needed to use her powers. Technically there were eleven, but practically only eight.

"And pewter, what, makes you invincible? Super healing?"

Vin waved that aside. "It's the physical internal pushing metal. As opposed to tin, the physical internal pulling metal. I'll give you a full explanation tomorrow when I can actually demonstrate them."

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The next day Vin had five one-pound ingots of each of the eight basic Allomatic metals, enough to last her a month no matter how active she was and more than enough to keep her supplied while she waited for the next batch. Taylor also got her a diamond file with actual diamonds, which Vin thought was too much, but she knew little of the value of such things in this world.

Burning steel and pewter, she carried Taylor up to the square roof of one of the many towers in the city that night. She thought of her first night with Kelsier and how he had explained Allomancy to her, opening up new worlds of possibilities as easily as he tossed coins to beggars.

"They come in sets of two," she explained, her mistcloak catching the night breeze. That and a simple mask were her costume, which Taylor had insisted on for any demonstration of her powers. "One pushes, one pulls. One is internal, the other external. Finally, one is physical, one is mental."

She explained how tin enhanced her senses, allowing her to see at night as clearly as she could by day, and hear the rustling of Taylor's insects at a distance that should be impossible. Pewter made her stronger and more durable, increasing her endurance and balance. She wasn't invincible by any means, but she could keep fighting through beatings that would have killed anyone else.

Iron and steel both let her control metal. Iron pulled it towards her and steel pushed it away from her, though if the object was heavier than she was, she would be the one pushed and pulled. She didn't have fine control over such movements, and she couldn't make metal move tangentially or hover in place, but she could use these powers to fly, and that alone made them her favorites.

These had been the last metals Kelsier had taught her. That first lesson had ended with him telling her to jump off the city wall. Looking over the edge of the building, Vin was about as high up now as she was then. Back then, it had taken everything she had to take that step, forcing herself to trust Kelsier to save her from the fall if she needed help.

She shook her head and moved on to the mental metals. Bronze let Vin sense when other people used powers, receiving Allomatic pulses that she heard in her mind. Copper hid her from Seekers, and even though she wasn't sure if this world had an equivalent, she intended to keep burning copper until she learned otherwise.

"Copper also protects me from people trying to influence my emotions." She took a deep breath, dreading what came next. "Which is what zinc and brass do."

Taylor's mask covered her expression, though her posture grew tense. "Continue."

"Zinc pulls on emotions and makes people feel them more strongly, and brass does the opposite. I can Riot or Soothe all of someone's emotions at once, or pick individual ones to work with." She had been burning brass since before she even knew she was an Allomancer. Luck, as she had thought of it. Before Kelsier had found her, she used to Soothe away noblemen's suspicions, making them easier to con—and her crew leader's anger, when she could spare it.

"Have you ever done that to me?"

Vin considered lying, but she didn't. She wanted to have a crew like Kelsier's, and Kelsier had trusted his crew with much more on much less. Taylor had spent the last week guiding her through this world and supplying her with metals based on nothing but Vin's word that she would pay her back. Vin could trust her with the truth.

"Yes, but not since we decided to work together." Not since her metals ran out.

She seemed to consider that. "How much control do you have? Are we talking Glory Girl levels of aura blasts, or more like Heartbreaker?"

"I don't know who those people are, but it's not about controlling people, it's about manipulating them. If I flare zinc and brass at someone as hard as I can, they still might not do what I want. In fact, they'll be less likely to because it will make the manipulation obvious. It's like ... it's like with the cons we've been running all week. If we had gone out at night dressed in formal ball gowns trying to get kidnapped, would that have worked as well?"

Taylor considered that. "No."

"Why not? We would have looked prettier and more attractive, wouldn't we? Wouldn't the gangs have wanted us more?"

"We would have looked out of place. They might have thought we had rich parents they could ransom us back to, or that we were associated with the Ambassadors or something."

Instead their clothes bore carefully placed rips and stains, and Vin rubbed a small amount of grease and dirt into her face and hair every night before going out. "What if we had gone to the other extreme and looked like we had been living in the sewers, covered in mud and rags?"

"We'd have the same problem. If we wanted people to kidnap and then ignore us, we needed to look like refugees."

Vin nodded. "I knew a Soother back home who told me that manipulation is the core of social interaction, and emotional Allomancy is just one tool of many. If you're smart you can notice the manipulation, and if you're stubborn you can resist it. Is it unnerving? Sure, but it's not mind control."

"That's a very persuasive argument," Taylor said. "Part of me is worried that you're using your powers to make me believe you."

Vin winced. That was why she had been so worried about revealing the last two metals. They weren't any more dangerous than steel or pewter, but from now on Taylor would be suspicious of everything, even her own emotions.

If only Vin had experience dealing with a paranoid teenage girl.

What would Kelsier do?

Vin turned away and looked out over the city. In the night, its lights put the stars to shame. A place like this couldn't have been built by people expecting to get stabbed in the back by everyone they met. "I grew up in the skaa underground of the Final Empire. It was just me, my brother Reen, and a whole world of people who might kill you in your sleep for a crust of bread. Anyone would betray you if they had the motive and the opportunity, he would say. He beat that into me until the day he left, abandoning me to a crew like any other.

"Then I met Kelsier, and he was insane. Not because he wanted to challenge an evil god, his immortal priests, and his army of monsters. Because he built his crew on trust. And it worked. Somehow." He had given her the mistcloak she still wore. Taylor had talked to her about costume ideas, but no matter what, she'd keep her mistcloak. "So if we're going to work together, I'm going to need to trust you, and I want you to be able to trust me. Because ..." Because I'm tired of always being afraid. "Because we'll be more effective that way."

Kelsier would have done things differently. He would have spoken with a conviction that people couldn't help but feel, but that was the best she could do.

Still, it seemed to work. "Alright," Taylor said at last. "If ... if you think you can trust me." For some reason, Taylor sounded like Vin trusting her was as bad as the reverse. "So is that all of them?"

"Yeah." The eight basic ones at least. Taylor had never heard of Atium, Vin had never learned the tenth metal, and for all she knew Kelsier's Eleventh Metal was made up. "What now?"

Taylor took a deep breath. "Well, it's our last night here. Tomorrow we'll take a bus back to Brockton Bay."

Vin nodded. She had only spent a day in Brockton Bay, and it wasn't until she had arrived in Boston that she learned what Earth Bet cities were supposed to look like. Brockton Bay was a shattered husk in comparison, and she wouldn't have blamed Taylor if she decided to establish herself in Boston instead. But Scadrial was also broken compared to Earth Bet, and that didn't stop Vin from wanting to go back.

It was her home and people needed her. That was enough.

"Until then," Taylor continued, "we've accumulated a lot of information about the local gangs here." That had been mostly for an excuse to attack small time criminals. If Skitter only attacked people to rescue a couple of refugees, the wrong people might sift through the rumor mill and realize that those two refugees were identical every time. "I thought about passing it along to the local heroes before leaving, but I don't feel comfortable talking to heroes."

Vin nodded. Earth Bet law enforcement didn't seem as bad as it was on Scadrial, but it was still a sentiment she could understand. "Do you want to go after them ourselves instead?"

"We should probably stay away from the big leagues like the Teeth and the Ambassadors ..."

"Sure, sure."

"But the Scarlet, the Cobras, the Family, and the Wall ..."

"We have six hours until dawn. Throw in the Outlaws and the Playboys, too."

"We can sleep on the bus ride home."

"Exactly."

Taylor walked to the edge of the building, Vin took her by the arm, and the two of them stepped off the wall into the night.

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A/n Most of this chapter was exposition, but Vin's powers are complex enough to make that necessary for the readers not familiar with Mistborn. This chapter was edited by Exiled and brought to you by my Patrons, Exiled, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, Lady Charon, LordXamon, Victoria Carey, and Bridie. Thank you for everything.