I was downright stunned to receive immediate complaints when I deleted this story, even though it ended well over a year ago. Somehow people are still finding it, despite everything. I can't help but be flattered.

But why delete it over a year after ending it? In my most perplexing move yet I've decided to rewrite this story for a third time. You can find it under its new name, The Death of Great American Cities, right here: s/13313595/1/The-Death-of-Great-American-Cities. I will try to make this one slightly less weird.

As for the original version, I've been moved to reupload it, with all its formatting errors intact and some new ones thrown in just for fun:

Title: Fling a Light

Category: Books » Worm

Author: MostlyVisibleLight

Language: English, Rating: Rated: T

Genre: General/Sci-Fi

Published: 08-17-15, Updated: 01-10-18

Chapters: 13, Words: 44,298

Chapter 1: 101

The Poverty of Nations 1.01

It's common knowledge that school doesn't prepare you for real life, with the exceptions of math and science. Like most common knowledge, this is complete poppycock. Book reports give way to regular reports, homework to busywork – as if it wasn't already – presentations in classrooms to presentations in meeting rooms, and, as things tend to, everything stays exactly the same.

That isn't exactly what went through my mind, as I made my fourth presentation in as many days as a newly-minted member of the modern economy. What actually did, was:

A person's soul is fragile, and it is the indispensable role of schoolteachers to remove it before it can jeopardize the hapless vessel's career.

The Board of Directors for the Atlantic-Superior Rail Corporation sat in attentive, though not quite interested, silence. Lauren Silva, Executive Vice-President in Charge of Maintenance, and serving double duty as the token woman and token nonwhite member of the Board, shifted her gaze between me and the spreadsheet in front of her. Acting President George Therman absently sipped his coffee. CEO Eliezer Duquette exercised his active listening skills by interrupting every few seconds.

Presently, I gestured to the map of the continental US I'd set up between the Director of Public Relations and the Vice-President in Charge of Personnel. Two glowing rectangles hovered above, one over Los Angeles, the other Brockton Bay. Next to the former was a little toy train, about the size of my pinky. Both rectangles gave the impression of mirrors, not the least of which because they reflected one another, so that each displayed an image containing dozens of progressively smaller copies of itself. The view wasn't quite right for mirrors, though. For one thing, the objects (if they could be called that) were so thin they seemed to vanish entirely when viewed from the side. For another, the view from each was reversed in a way that didn't quite match up with mirrors, so that the view from the rectangle over Los Angeles seemed to come from Brockton Bay, and vice-versa. In fact, if you looked carefully, you could see that this was exactly what was happening.

This was because they were portals.

"So, the train moves through the portal in L.A., entering the hub," I said. As I spoke, I picked up the toy train and stuck it through the portal over Los Angeles, dropping it into the Atlantic Ocean. "From there, it takes another portal to Chicago, and voila."

I realized, abruptly, that I wouldn't be able to reach the train on the other side of the table without taking the long walk around, so I reached back through the portal, grabbed the train, and created a new portal in front of the first, linking Brockton Bay to Chicago. For a moment, as I stuck the train through the second portal, my arm occupied three different places on the table.

"It seems to me," said Duquette, with the tone of someone imparting great insight, "that you could save the hassle and just run the portal from L.A. to Chicago."

"Not really. I mean, there are a lot of cities, and if I connect them all together every extra city will mean one portal for every city already on the network. But if you use a central hub, every extra city is just one connection, so you can connect more cities."

"Well, at the very least, you should do a portal from L.A. to San Francisco."

"If I did that, I'd have to make a second portal from Brockton Bay to L.A. or San Francisco so I could maintain the first one. That's two portals, which is the same as we were going to have anyway, just more complicated, and it only goes between two cities instead of every one on the network."

"There's a lot of traffic between L.A. and San Francisco. It seems to me that sending all those trains across an entire continent is a waste."

"It's a portal. Distance doesn't really-"

"I see what she's saying," Silva cut in. I let out a relieved sigh. "There's a lot of unused track in Brockton Bay. We just find a section and – here, like this, see?" She held up a hastily-scribbled picture drawn on the back of a spreadsheet. It showed a single, straight train track running between two rectangles. "The train comes out of - let's say New York, we don't have any track in L.A. - comes out of New York, passes through Brockton Bay, and goes through to Chicago."

I cringed. "Sort of. I mean, there'd need to be forks, so it could go other places. Uh, here, I have a diagram..." I felt around in my bag for the rolled up sheet of printer paper, laying it flat on the table in front of me. It showed five portals in a line, each with two train tracks leading from it. Half the tracks were labelled "ingoing," the other half "outgoing." The tracks curved right, then left in a gentle 180 degree turn before crossing back over themselves. The entire thing was roughly the shape of a lightbulb.

"There's no track like this in Brockton Bay," said Silva, tapping a pink fingernail against the paper.

"What does this say?" put in Duquette, squinting so intensely his eyes seemed to vanish under bushy eyebrows. "London, Singapore, New York, Cape Town, Paris."

"Those are the destinations. I mean, not the actual ones, just ideas. We'd want to look at how much air travel there is for each one to see where to hook up first. And no, there's no track like this. You'd have to lay new track. It doesn't have to be right away," I added quickly, "but after a month or two, when we've been doing this for a little while..."

Therman rose from his seat to get a better view, leaning heavily. The table groaned under his bulk. "It's a bad time to be laying new track. Bad economy, bad year – bad decade, and on something so uncertain."

My heart plummeted. "Not right away, though. In a few months. When it isn't so uncertain."

He shook his head, not speaking.

"This is all a bit much," said Duquette, "for something that ought to be straightforward. It seems to me that we'd be best off with just a few of these. New York, Chicago, Atlanta, maybe Montreal, maybe Miami. That's how many, fifteen? No, ten, plus one extra to Brockton Bay for our Miss Tesserat -"

"Tesseract," I corrected.

"- for maintenance purposes. It should be doable. No need to lay new track, since we can run the portals along routes that already exist."

"What about London?" I said. "People would pay to take the train to London. It'd be faster and cheaper than a plane. You could spend an afternoon in Europe for the price of a subway ticket!"

"Now, we're not a commuter rail," protested Therman, who had quite a lot of shares in a certain major airline. "The American people don't take to commuter rails."

"We don't own any rail in Europe," said Silva.

"In any case, we didn't come here to discuss the long-term," said Duquette. "The matter on the table is what you discussed with me on the phone, Miss Tesseract; that being cutting time and transportation costs by linking sections of track with your portals. Now-"

"I meant linking them all to Brockton Bay, not each other," I said, exasperated.

"Now see here," he snapped. "All we're asking for is these eleven, and none of this nonsense about central hubs and laying new track and train lines to Europe, understood? Eleven, just like you're doing for Appalachia North."

All eyes turned to stare at Duquette, who wilted just a bit. "They did a press release about it," he snapped.

"They moved that to tomorrow," said Silva. Dutifully, the eyes turned to stare at her. She didn't flinch. "And they're adding an extra connection, New York to Boston, so we should have one of our own."

"Right," said Therman. "So, ah, that's twelve, and I suppose we'll have a contract drawn up and iron out the rate, say, Thursday at three?"

Silva stood. "Drop by after your meeting with Appalachia North. We'll do the same rate as them, same arrangement – just come right in, we have an investor we're courting right about then, I think he'd be impressed." She held out her hand. When I didn't take it, she continued, "oh, come on, you already agreed to this once."

We shook.

"And don't look so down," she added. "A few more deals like this and you'll be the richest teenager in the West. Tell you what, let me introduce you to a friend of mine in London; I'd bet he'd kill to run a rail across the Channel."

"Right, fine. See you Thursday. I'll show myself out."

I showed myself out.

The streets of downtown Chicago were eerily empty of people. Cars chugged and honked, filling the air with acrid fumes, but only a few pedestrians were out and about. Those who were, were generally the sort you wouldn't want to be alone on a deserted street with. Even in broad daylight, in the richest part of the city, toughs and gangsters walked openly, bristling with piercings and ugly tattoos. No one went anywhere near me. It didn't matter where you were, from Hong Kong to Detroit, no one took a chance on someone in costume.

I'd left my portal back to Brockton Bay on the roof of a skyscraper, three blocks away. I skipped past intersections, bypassing them with my power rather than waiting for the lights. A few minutes later, I was home, and alone with my thoughts and my homework.

I had a World Issues presentation due that Thursday. Somehow, it didn't seem very intimidating.

Monday came and went with a little rain and no more than the usual amount of misery, followed (as it generally was) by Tuesday. By Wednesday, that little rain had turned into an intermittent thunderstorm, which my life took as a queue to make everything important happen at once. It was about noon, when the power had just gone out for the third time and I'd gotten entirely sick of hearing people complain about cell reception, and I'd just slipped out from where I'd been hiding on the balcony in the auditorium.

I should probably stop to give some background, there. Humans are animals, right down to the latin name. Unlike other animals, we were the ones doing the naming, and had seen fit to give ourselves a special name: Homo sapiens sapiens, meaning "wise wise person." I felt that this was a mistake. Humans demonstrated the same reprehensible, inhuman, barbaric, animalistic, stupid behaviour as every other kind of animal, from rape to cannibalism to infanticide to everyday failure to think things through. As such, I proposed an alternative classification system: Homo sapiens would refer to primates that were genetically human, in deference to their language ability and tool use, while Homo sapiens sapiens would refer to anyone who didn't act like a perverse crossbreed between a hyena and an African grey parrot. Actual humans, in other words.

With this background out of the way, I reiterate; I was coming out of the auditorium. The doors were locked, of course, and the 'balcony' – the narrow steel walkway/structural support they hung the spotlights from – was off-limits to students, but that wasn't a deterrent so much as the main draw. I had to be careful not to be seen using my powers to slip in and out, but that wasn't really a challenge.

On this particular day, I was using a janitor's closet to cover the portal. I was probably overly fond of that closet, since it was right next to the physics classroom, which was where I was going anyway, and because no one ever really used that hallway except for science classes. My power gave me some sense of what was where in terms of mass and relative velocity, so I was always careful to make sure the hallway was deserted before I left the closet.

I double checked to make sure the hall was clear before I left the closet. I had my notebook and pencils with me already; I kept my things in a little crawlspace in the auditorium that hadn't been used in almost a decade.

Naturally, this is where things started to go wrong. Like a fool, I had let my desire to actually attend school drive me from my safe haven.

On the door to the physics room was a sign, reading:

CLASS CANCELLED SORRY!

WORKSHEETS WITH MS. FIELDS IN THE CAFETERIA

HAND IN TOMORROW

The room was deserted, save three people. Madison Clements, wearing too much makeup, leaning against a wall, smirking. Emma Barnes, curvy, redheaded, and dressed like a starlet minus elegance, style, and taste, examining herself in one of those little folding mirror things. Sophia Hess, athletic, angry, had a roll of duct tape in her hands and looked like she might actually use it. Three hyena-parrots, all gussied up and ready to play pecking order.

Then, because everything had to happen at once, my cell phone rang.

I turned on my heel and ran.

It said a lot of very depressing things about my life that I didn't waste a second thinking about where I was running to. Winslow High School, my school of choice by default, was big. [I]really[/I] big. It had been built back when America had been crammed full of teenagers, when the Baby Boomers were my age. Now, the Boomers were old, and there weren't very many kids running around. Between that, budget cuts, and the fact that no one who had a choice in the matter went to Winslow, meant that almost a third of the school wasn't being used or maintained.

That was to my left. To my right was the occupied segments of the school, where I might run into a teacher. Discipline was somewhere between nominal and nonexistent, but even Sophia wouldn't do anything nasty if there was a teacher around.

Go left, and I wouldn't have to worry about hiding my powers, so long as I could break line-of-sight. Go right, and I'd have other people around to protect me.

It was a total no-brainer. I went left.

I had a height advantage, but Sophia was still a better runner than me, and I knew it. The moment I rounded a corner and saw that the hall was clear, I cleared ten meters of hallway by portal without breaking stride. After that, I didn't have to turn to see that they'd rounded the corner; I could sense them through my powers.

I was puffing when I rounded the next corner, and found that they weren't chasing me anymore. The hallway was flanked by a half dozen empty classrooms, terminating in a T-intersection. An amateurish mural of a fish adorned one wall; I sagged against it and answered my phone.

"Hello?"

"Hello, I'd like to speak with Tesseract?" said a man's voice. He had the kind of false confidence you learned in public speaking classes, but there was a hint of something else underneath.

"Spe-" I started, then froze.

Madison had rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. Alone.

I was in a T-intersection.

They were trying to box me in.

I checked my last two escape routes, finding them both still empty. I could still make a break for it. If I chose wrong, though, or there was only one route, I'd run right into Emma. Or worse, I'd run into [I]Sophia[/I].

I sprinted out of Madison's view and tried the first door I found. It was unlocked.

The room looked like it had been an art room, in some long-forgotten past where Winslow had an art program. There were paintings on the wall, in some cases painted directly on, and brightly coloured plastic pots sat in rows on shelves, with labels like "Burnt Sienna" and "Cornflower Blue." Three long wooden tables were arranged in a U facing away from the door. In the far corner was a cabinet.

I hid in the cabinet.

"This is Tesseract," I whispered into the phone. "Are you still there?"

"Ah, yes," said the voice. "Is this a bad time?"

"No such thing as a bad time. What's up?"

"Well-" he started. The classroom door opened, and immediately I shoved the phone screen-down against my side, to hide the light.

"Check the cabinet," came Emma's voice from outside. I clamped a hand over my mouth. This situation was way too familiar.

And I was being stupid.

I portaled through the wall.

The next classroom over was so dusty, it bordered on oppressive. I couldn't begin to guess at what it had been, because every single item of furniture had been carted out. All that was left were chalkboards and a single enormous wooden box, about eight feet tall and five wide and thick. My powers informed me that it was mostly filled with something that wasn't especially dense. I portaled on top of it, levered it open, and, seeing that it was filled with ancient theatre costumes, dropped inside. My eyes watered, and I sneezed, then sneezed again.

"Sorry," I whispered into my phone, "I missed that."

"How much did you miss?" came the reply.

"Pretty much everything after 'hello'."

"Ah, yes, well – is this Tesseract?"

"That's me."

"I'm Eustace Singer, Vice-President for Operations at the Atlantic City Southern Rail Company. We met a few days ago?"

I paused. "Didn't you turn me down, something something complete disregard for public health?"

"Well, not me specifically, but yes. That's part of why I'm calling, actually. I, well, we need your help. I want to take you up on your proposal."

"What, you want a portal to Boston too, now?"

"No, not that, the original one. The commuter rail to Europe and Asia, laying new rail. It can be done, right? It would actually work?"

I perked up, accidentally banging my head against the top of the box. "Yeah, I can do it. I tested it, actually, full-scale and everything. You mean it got approved?"

"Not ... exactly. This is the catch, actually. I've called a special meeting of the Board of Directors. A [I]very[/I] special meeting. We need to approve it, sign everything, and do a press conference before the actual Board of Directors can stop us, and that means you'd need to get to Atlantic City pretty much now."

"I'm on my way."

"Wait. We can't pay you your standard rate."

Isn't that lovely. Appalachia South hasn't even done their press release yet, and already I have a standard rate.

"We can't pay you at all, actually," he continued, "not anything like you're making. This whole thing is ... they're trying to destroy the company. They've pretty much succeeded, actually. They're going to crash it and buy up everything that's left for nothing, and the first part's already done. What I'm saying is, we'll have to do everything in stocks and promises, and that's the best we can do."

"I'm. On. My. Way." I repeated, not even trying to hide my glee. I hung up.

Phase 1 was a go.

Chapter 2: 102

The Poverty of Nations 1.02

Do you know how you can see something without being able to make it out, because it's too far away, or too dark – but then, someone tells you what it is, and suddenly you can see it clearly? Your brain fills in the gaps with context and memory.

My powers are a bit like that. I can sense whatever's nearby, through the same mechanism that lets me activate my power. Anywhere mass would interfere with the creation of a portal, I feel a kind of resistance. Everything is blurry, though, so that a steel plate would feel like a gradual progression from air to steel and back to air again. That blurriness gets worse and worse the further away from me, which usually gives me a maximum range of about a hundred meters.

The exception – which is a real doozy of an exception – is when I can see my target. Just like knowing what you're looking at fills in the blanks of your vision, seeing what I'm aiming at fills in the blanks in my powers, which means that my actual maximum range is however far I can see.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I can walk really fast. Faster-than-the-speed-of-sound fast. When I said I was on my way to Atlantic City, I meant it. I took a two-minute detour to get my mask from my closet, skipped the rest of the costume (which wasn't much of a costume anyway), and took off. Walking along the coast, it took me a little less than ten minutes to make the 800 mile trip.

It didn't stop me from getting utterly drenched, of course. If anything, I'd underestimated how bad the storm was. The wind was billowing so hard that the rain fell at a forty-five degree angle, and it was the worst kind of kinda-sorta below freezing that left tiny crystals of ice clinging to my hair. By the time I stumbled into the lobby of the Atlantic City Southern Rail Company Head Office (and wasn't that a lot of capital letters in a row), I was shivering so hard I could barely walk.

I rushed across the atrium to the elevator. The sole occupant, a twentysomething blonde woman with elegantly styled hair and a subtly foreign look to her, dutifully held the doors for me as I stumbled inside, tracking mud onto the polished floor. She had an amused look to her, but that could just as well have been her default expression. She seemed like the type, at least.

"Conference Room 4?" she asked.

"Huh?" I responded. It was an intelligent 'huh?', though. Very clipped, very elegant. I suspected I had made a very strong first impression.

I was so much more eloquent in my head. If I ever met a telepathic cape, I'd knock their socks right off.

"Are you headed to Conference Room 4? I'm assuming you're Tesseract, unless there's a superpowered teenage brunette convention going on."

"Oh, that's me. Yes. I actually forgot to ask where I was going. Kind of in a hurry. Conference Room 4?"

Gregarious. As. Fudge.

"It's not far; I'll show you. And here I am, half way into the conversation, and I haven't even introduced myself. I'm Rose, Rose Gauthier." She held out her hand to shake.

"Please to meet you Rose. I'm – ouch!" I jerked my hand back, shaking out pins and needles.

"Sorry," she said. "Static. The weather's a pain, honestly. Even if you stay out of the rain, it ruins any chance a lady has of keeping her hair under control. I've had to redo mine twice today."

"I'm Tesseract," I finished.

The elevator doors slid open, just then, and we both walked as quickly as we could without strictly running. As promised, it wasn't far, just down one hallway and through a door.

Conference Room 4 wasn't quite the opulent setting we'd met in last time. A folding table was set up in the middle of the room, with a half dozen tired-looking people seated at a mishmash of chairs, all likely swiped from wherever was handy. They were all talking quickly, nervously, and not at all quietly, holding and exchanging papers and making notes on whatever was available – including, in some places, their own hands. Everyone had at least one phone and one laptop out, and most had more than that. Heads turned when we entered to the room, but no one stopped their flurry of activity.

A man at the far end took a few moments to disentangle himself, ending a few conversations and closing both of his two laptops before gathering up a sheaf of papers and going to greet us. "Eustace Singer," he introduced himself, "we spoke on the phone. You must be Tesseract and – Ms. Gauthier. I admit we weren't expecting you. We're short a chair."

"Don't mind me, I'm just here to sit in – or stand, as the case may be. Let's say you've piqued my curiosity."

Singer made a face, but didn't press. Instead, he turned back to me. "We have the documentation drawn up, and a very short contract. It wouldn't even really hold up in court, but that shouldn't be a problem. The nature of your powers prevents us from cheating each other, and it's all we have time for."

I nodded. "Just give me a pen and a minute to read it."

He handed me a sheet of printer paper off his pile. It was about half a page, with almost no legalese. Parts had been crossed out, with hastily scrawled corrections in several different handwritings piled into the margins. I read quickly, frowned, then took the offered pen and signed.

"I'm not really agreeing to anything with this, am I? It just says I'm going to be paid an amount 'to be decided at a later date' in exchange for services 'to be decided at a later date'. Why do we even have a contract?"

"Well," he said, "it's a bit complex. You see-"

Singer launched into an explanation of the most despicable, convoluted, disgusting exploitation of conflicting legal loopholes, financial scamming, under-the-table corporate espionage, and open desecration of American and international laws I had ever heard. At times, my eyes watered. At others, I struggled to cover my ears, even though I knew my perverse curiosity couldn't bear not to listen. For a moment near the end, I lost all sensation in my left leg.

"So," he said, "the long and short of it is, they pre-committed to destroying the company, hired a precog to predict the stock plummeting, tipped off the other shareholders about the prediction, and got them to sell their stock for less than its value to a dummy corporation. Now they're going to short us, destroy the company to fulfill the prediction, using the controlling interest to sell off all the assets to their own firms while they do it, and dump the stock at the last second. The insurance is just to recoup the cost of buying up the underpriced stock, if they can't dump it fast enough, though they'll get a payout even if they don't lose any money."

I nodded slowly. "And so, we're going to..."

"Try to increase the value of the stock so they can't buy it up, by doing a press conference about hiring you, while at the same time getting the word out to the other stockholders that we hired you because of the prediction, which would of course invalidate the prediction itself. That's why it's crucial that we're able to claim we have a contract, even if the contract doesn't mean anything."

"Isn't this illegal?"

"Well, yes and no. Yes, it's against the law, both what we're doing and what they are, but even if Watchdog catches us it'd be impossible to prosecute. Too much hearsay and parahuman snitching, not enough paper trail. In any case, what you're doing isn't illegal, if that's what you're wondering."

"No, I didn't think it was. Is there somewhere I could sit down?"

"You could go home if you'd like, or I suppose back to school. Someone wanted to ask you to open a portal to London during the press conference for the added wow factor, but if that's not in the cards we'd understand."

I shook my head. "It'll take some time, but I can do most of it in advance. Yeah, I can do that. I have to be home by two thirty, though, or my dad will worry. When do you need it?"

"We don't know when exactly it'll start, but very soon. We have a break room you can use, if you'd like somewhere to sit."

"I'll bring her, if that's alright with you," Gauthier cut in, before I could respond. "You look like you have your hands full."

She took me by the arm and all but dragged me away. Only when we were far enough that it was discreet did she lean down and whisper, "unless you'd like to stay and watch."

I didn't have time to ask what she meant. The door burst open, revealing a drenched Lauren Silva slathered with running makeup, a furious and purple-faced George Therman, and a woman I only recognized from my research; Yolanda Floyd, CEO of Atlantic City Southern, with a harsh haircut and wrinkled suit.

The room was feeling a little crowded, now, between eleven people and the table, but I didn't really want to leave anymore. Instead, I slipped into a back corner and crossed my hands behind my back, splitting my attention between the portal to London and the brewing fight.

"You're fired!" shrieked Floyd, pointing first at Singer, then at each of the other five conspirators. "You're all fired, and as CEO I'm ordering you all to leave this building right now."

"You can't fire me!" yelled Singer. "As a sitting member of the special Board of Directors, I can only be removed by a two-thirds majority of the Board itself."

"You're only an interim member of the Board sitting in for an absent member of the actual Board. Sitting in for me! As I'm here, you're no longer a member of the Board, and therefore-"

"The special Board hasn't been dissolved. Until the special Board is dissolved, the regular Board can't convene, which means that as the only member of the special Board I'll continue to sit in for you until such a time as-

"As CEO I demand the immediate dissolution of the special Board, under the grounds that no emergency exists to justify the formation of a special Board."

"As Chairman of the special Board, I demand your resignation on the grounds that you are mentally unfit for-"

"You have no justification for-"

"On the contrary, you were detained by security on the way in under suspicion of illegal drug use and possession of a firearm."

"You told them that!"

"Mr. Singer? Ms. Floyd?" said a small voice.

Eleven pairs of eyes turned to look at the door. A mousy teenager in a rumpled blouse stood, almost hiding behind the doorframe, only her eyes and forehead visible.

"The press is here."

The room exploded in shouts of "get them out of here," and "someone get Melinda on the phone," and "where's my stockbroker?"

Very quietly, I slipped away, closing the portal I'd been working on – which presently only led halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, in any case.

The rain was cold, but I was already as wet as I was going to get. The trip back to Brockton Bay took a little longer than the trip away had. I wasn't in as much of a hurry.

Somehow, I wasn't even the latest person in collecting my worksheet from the cafeteria. Ms. Fields didn't even bat an eye as I turned up forty minutes late, dripping wet, and covered with mud.

I shook off the worst of the water before I got to work, then cut my last class and went home.

I was sprawled out on the couch when my dad came in, dripping water all over the kitchen floor. Rather than try to minimize the spillage, he fetched the mop and cleaned up behind him as he walked. A few minutes later, he came back in wearing a fresh change of clothes and slumped down onto a chair next to me, a sheaf of papers and a pencil in hand.

It was a few minutes later, when the commercials came in, that he spoke. "How was your day?"

"Hmm?"

(I was a brilliant conversationalist.)

He didn't reply.

(I got it from my father.)

"Something on your mind?" he tried again.

"No. Why do you ask?"

"You're watching the news, for one thing. Canadian news, actually."

I glanced at the TV. Sure enough, the bright red CBC logo was splashed across the screen, triumphant music playing as the aging anchor informed me that there were rising tensions between Francophones and the Anglophones in eastern Canada.

"It was a cartoon, earlier, I think."

"Are you sure? They don't usually show cartoons and the news on the same channels."

"It might have been a commercial."

"Is there something on your mind, Taylor?"

I sighed. "I was just thinking about how much I hate corporations, I guess."

Dad laughed. It wasn't knee-slapping, fall-off-your-chair laughter – he wasn't that kind of person. It was cheerful, though, something we didn't have enough of, lately. "You're your mother's daughter, Taylor. Do I have to ask what brought this on, or is it just run-of-the-mill corporate greed?"

"Not corporate greed. Corporate greed deficiency. Contentment, I guess? Or, laziness, though I guess those are really the same thing."

Dad looked at me questioningly.

I went on. "It's like, the economy shouldn't be that complicated, right? Raw materials come in, goods go out, and the added value is split between the labour, who provide the physical labour, and the capitalists, who provide the intellectual labour. Intellectual labour is the inventions, the design, the marketing, and all that stuff, while physical labour is the actual product. As long as the difference between the value of the goods and the cost of overhead and raw materials is enough to pay salaries, the exchange creates wealth, which is distributed via jobs."

"But!" I continued. "If there's a market saturation, say too many action figures, prices drop and making more action figures isn't profitable. I used to think that this was what was wrong with the economy, that we didn't need enough things, we were being too productive. Once we've made all the cars, laptops, ipods, and cheeseburgers we need, we're at market saturation for everything and we can't squeeze any more jobs out. The solution to that would be a shorter workday, cutting productivity and creating jobs by necessity."

Dad started to speak, but I cut him off. "But! There isn't market saturation. There isn't enough to go around. Unemployment is high, but there's so much to be done that no one's doing. There aren't enough ipods, or cars, or cheeseburgers, which means that the solution is to make more of everything until we reach actual market saturation. Then there's everything else, buildings in complete disrepair, just begging for someone to do maintenance. Factories sitting empty with no workers and no products, being sold off for nothing, and no one will buy them and put them to work. There are shortages of everything, all the time. We have brownouts twice a week – why don't we build a new plant? People would pay for consistent power. There isn't any lettuce in the stores, sometimes – why doesn't anybody grow more of it? People would buy it! We're surrounded by market failures, everywhere. It isn't a shortage of physical labour, so it's the capitalists' fault. They aren't doing anything!"

"Sounds like you've given this a lot of thought," Dad said, carefully.

"I think it's contentment," I spat. "The people with power don't need anything. They're content with their yachts, so they don't care to squeeze a few extra trillion dollars out of the country for the rest of us. No one else can get in, either, since it costs so much to start up a business and compete. It's a bunch of lumps at the top and nothing getting done."

Dad was smiling. "So what's your plan of action, incorruptible leader? Shall we tear down the establishment and ready the guillotines?"

I raised one fist in the air. "I'm going to take over the world, kill the Endbringers, and fix the economy myself."

Dad laughed, again, and smiled at me. "It's a tall order, but someone's gotta do it. Don't forget the little people when you're running the world, kiddo."

I smiled back.

He thought I was kidding. I wasn't.

Phase 1, take over a single industry.

Phase 2, use money to collect like-minded parahumans from around the world. Found shadow council of disenfranchised revolutionaries.

Phase 3, use parahumans to take over the world economy, and by extension, the world.

Phase 4, fix everything.

I lowered my fist and settled back on the couch. I'd manage it eventually, though I was starting to suspect that I couldn't trust anyone to be remotely sane. For now, the groundwork had been laid, and I could try again next week, in Europe, this time with a few intracontinental portals under my belt and some spending money.

I was just standing up when something caught my eye. The anchor was talking about a riot in Los Angeles, but just beneath his face was scrolling text reading off other news.

...

Montreal Canadiens win 24-0 over Toronto Maple Leaves

...

Los Angeles supervillain to face charges of murder, copyright violation

...

Atlantic City Southern Rail Corporation acquired by Priam International in surprise merger

...

That was it, then. Europe next week. I'd talk to Silva, get the name of her friend in England, and try from there.

Very quietly, drowned out by the TV, my phone vibrated in my pocket.

Chapter 3: 103

The Poverty of Nations 1.03

My newfound freedom of motion had played merry hell with my education. Case in point: Thursday morning I took one look at the pounding rain, still going from the day before, and plopped myself down on the couch, resolving to teleport to school right before classes started to avoid getting wet.

About half an hour later, I realized that the clock in the living room was ten minutes slow, and I was late for Computers class. Since showing up late and dry would raise questions, and because I pretty much had Computers class down anyway, I decided I'd cut it and show up just in time for World Issues.

Two hours later, I weighed my options and decided that attending World Issues class, which really wasn't very hard anyway, wasn't worth the stress of spending hours in close proximity to the terrible trio. I resolved to eat lunch at home, then teleport to school at noon sharp for my afternoon classes, making sure to get rained on just a little bit to avoid suspicion. I settled down with a copy of Second Foundation and reheated some soup.

As the clock hit 11:59, I set down my book. As the clock hit 12:00, I realized that the only thing I really needed to do was hand in the worksheet from yesterday. Nothing else would actually count for grades. I decided to pop in at 1:15, drop off the worksheet, and head right home to my book.

1:15 passed, then 1:20, then 1:30. I decided that, really, no one actually followed the school's late assignment policy. Half the class would be handing the thing in a day late, and why exactly did I need a high school education anyway?

I was still reading my book when Dad came in through the kitchen door, around a quarter to two. I took a moment to shake the adrenaline out of my hands, then beat a hasty retreat to my room before he could catch me.

Safely ensconced in my bedroom, I took stock of the situation.

Dad wasn't the most observant man, but even he'd be suspicious if I just waltzed downstairs, completely dry, an hour before I should've been home. I could say it had been a half-day, and he'd probably believe me, but there was no need to push my luck. Alternatively, I could hide in my room until the time I usually came home. Both possibilities, though I didn't really like either of them.

A different plan, then. I took a few deep breaths, then got to work.

Careful not to make too much noise, I opened a portal to the closet by the door and fetched my jacket and sneakers. Carefully again, and slowly, I slipped them on, not bothering to tie the shoes. Then, I opened a portal leading to the front yard, right below my window, careful to keep it flush with the wall where passersby wouldn't see it.

Thirty seconds later, I came in through the front door, convincingly soaked. Dad was hunched over the table, his briefcase open, papers already piled high in front of him. He had a tiny little pencil that showed evidence of extensive chewing.

He looked up. "Hey, Taylor. Isn't it a bit early?"

"Last class got cancelled," I lied. "Whatcha doing?"

"Real estate stuff. Someone's buying up a lot of land really fast. Mostly from banks, abandoned warehouses and things like that. You usually see this sort of thing when someone expects property values to go up, and I'm trying to work out what the angle is."

I looked over his shoulder. Buried under the letters of sale, newspaper clippings, press releases, and transcripts, a map showed several large rectangles marked in red, and a few smaller ones marked in yellow. All of them were concentrated in the north end of the city.

"It's mostly around the trainyard. Maybe something to do with shipping?"

"Oh, I wish," he said. "Probably not, though. If it were shipping, you'd expect to see more purchases around the coast. The trainyard was really only ever used for loading goods coming in from Europe, and a little from the Caribbean, and sending them inland."

"The Caribbean? I didn't know they did anything there."

"It was before your time. There was a coup in Cuba a few decades ago, a handful of military capes and no one in any position to stop them. They set up labour camps, took over parts of Haiti and Jamaica, and for a little while we were bringing in cheap goods from there. It was a bit of a relief for Brockton Bay, at least until Charybdis put a stop to it, but not really the kind of thing you'd deal with in a history class."

I made a thoughtful noise.

None of us were very good at ending conversations, but I managed to drift away in the ensuing awkward silence and get back to my book.

My meeting with Appalachia North was at half-past two, and my meeting with Atlantic-Superior was just after that. A bit of research had confirmed that Lauren Silva was on the Board of Directors for both companies, and a lot more research had confirmed that this apparently wasn't illegal, or even that uncommon.

Somewhat more bothersome was the text I'd received the day before. I'd waited for the news program to end before slipping up to my room to read it, since I still hadn't worked out how to explain my owning a prepaid cell phone to Dad. It read:

We'd like have a conversation regarding your contract with Atlantic City Southern. A representative will be sent to meet with you following your final meeting tomorrow.

At this point, I wasn't even bothered by the fact that they knew my schedule and phone number. What was irritating was that whoever it was hadn't bothered to say which company they represented. For some reason, people kept assuming they were the only people I'd given my number to, like it was some kind of secret.

I hadn't bothered to respond. If they sent someone to meet me, that was fine, but I wasn't going to go out of my way to help them. I'd already been through all the North American rail companies anyway, and most hadn't even bothered to return my calls. Europe probably would be more responsive to what I was offering, and they'd probably heard about me by now. I'd finish what I'd started here, make a bit of money, and start fresh across the Atlantic.

I knew I'd be better off not starting anything on a Friday, so I gave myself the weekend to research British shipping companies. I sketched out a rough schedule for myself, then read until 2:15. My recent truancy aside, I wasn't about to throw away all the work I'd put into the deal with Appalachia, and I definitely wasn't about to turn down all the money they were offering me.

The Appalachia North rail corporation was, oddly enough, headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The trip was long enough that I didn't walk the whole way, choosing instead to daisy-chain portals from the comfort of my bedroom. By putting the portals high in the air, I could get a lot more distance, even if the pressure difference forced me to secure anything that might fly away lest my homework end up scattered across western Canada. By forming portals through other portals, I could travel over locations where walking wasn't an option, like midair. The combination was useful, if a bit of a pain.

I arrived to find a strange, but sadly familiar, sight. George Therman, looking dishevelled and sweaty in a charcoal suit that strained to contain his bulk, Lauren Silva, dressed severely as always, and Eustace Singer, wearing an unusually black three-piece suit complete with pocket square. They were speaking heatedly, but fell silent when I came in.

"Ah, Tesseract," said Therman. "Don't suppose you've seen the Board yet, have you? We can't seem to get in touch with them."

"No," I said. "They aren't here?"

Silva shook her head. "They aren't anywhere. Their assistants haven't seen them, their families saw them but don't know where they are, and so far we haven't been able to get a location after about eight this morning. Sorry about the inconvenience. I'd sign you on right now, but contrary to what monkey suit over here seems to think there's no such thing as a majority of one."

Singer cleared his throat. "Yes, well, you'll have to excuse the getup. Last night a few of my coworkers took up skydiving, head first, off the roof, without a parachute. Something about losing everything you own does that to people."

"My condolences," said Therman.

"Children," murmured Silva.

"Well, yes, I never liked them myself, either," said Singer.

"No, their children! They left their estates to their children!"

Silva sprinted headlong out of the room, impressive given her high heels. Singer and Therman, exchanged identical looks of horror, then ran off in opposite directions.

I could have left, and probably should have, but, well – how often do you get to watch someone solve a mystery in real life, complete with cryptic, anguished declarations? I couldn't resist.

"Everret Rio, 1.2%, inherited by Janet Rio," Singer read aloud, as Silva scribbled furiously on a whiteboard. "Mabel Carson, 4.4%, inherited by Stanford Carson. Julia Pillsford, 3.1%, inherited by Rose Pillsford. Mildred ... hmm, Mildred Silva, 2.2%, inherited by Daniel Silva. I wasn't aware your aunt was dead, Lauren."

"She is," said Silva. "We'll mark that down separately, though; Mildred died in hospital. I can't get in touch with Dan, but knowing that brat he's already trying to cut a deal."

"It can't be enough."

"Added to the stock Sovereign gave away, that's 29.1%."

Singer let his forehead hit the table.

"Okay, consider my curiosity piqued," I said. "What happened?"

"Do you have to be here?" Silva snapped. "This is an extremely complex situation. You can't possibly expect us to be able to explain the delicacies of corporate acquisitions in a five-minute crash course, even if we had the time to waste. Go to Chicago, sign what you need to sign, go on a shopping spree."

"Okay," I said, "fine by me. I'll just go and take any potentially important text messages about Atlantic City Southern that may or may not be on my phone with me. Chicago-ho."

"Okay, two minute rundown" said Singer. "She -" he pointed to Silva "-and her band of stooges tried to steal a company, loot it, and throw away the gutted carcass. She spent time and money to crash the share values, trick the holders, fill the Board with cronies, and was just about to make her masterstroke. I tried to stop her, we squabbled for about an hour, and when the dust settled we found out someone else had stolen the company."

"Priam International," I said.

"Right in one."

"Once they had control of the company," said Silva," they replaced the entire Board of Directors, who voted unanimously to sell the company to Priam for next to nothing. It turned up on the evening news – oddly enough, a few minutes before the sale actually went through – and that was that."

"And that's where it gets strange," Silva continued. "Priam didn't own nearly enough of the company to do what they did. There was an anonymous vote for the replacement of the Board. Every single vote was won with exactly 50.1%. Between us, my coalition managed to buy up close to 20%, and the vigilante over here managed to keep at least 10% from going anywhere. We're trying to account for the rest of the stock, but as far as we can tell there's no way that vote was kosher. Any questions?"

"Just one," I said. "While you're all playing spy versus spy, who actually runs your companies?"

"Very funny," said Silva. "Now, tell me about the text."

"Someone saying they wanted to discuss my contract with Atlantic City Southern. They're going to send a representative to meet with me."

She huffed. "Not worth the effort. Too vague, and nothing to do with the purchase. Fine, we satisfied your curiosity, you can go."

"Fine. Actually, wait, you know what? I'm not fine. You think that contract isn't important? Do you have any idea what real estate costs in downtown New York? Toronto? London? I could do a tram to the middle of nowhere, and bam, there's a trillion dollars worth of land. Do you have any idea what the profit margins would be on a five minute trans-Atlantic train ride? What is wrongwith you people? You fuss about mergers, buying and selling little pieces of paper that don't mean anything, when I'm right here offering the world on a silver platter and I can't even give it away!"

Silva whirled on me, leaping to her feet. "You think I don't know that? If you'd come to me ten years ago I'd have been on that in an instant. I was on that ten years ago, with a cape one-tenth as powerful and ten times as ambitious. But right now? You want to build a train station now? Alright, fine, let's say we do it. Let's say that all your little promises come through and we can save the world with the cheapest, dinkiest, more minimalist train station ever built. Have you ever hired a contractor? I have, so here's how it'd go: we hire them to do it in a year for ten million dollars. Five years later, it's cost us a hundred million, but we're finally open for business, and now we need a licence to run a train across the Atlantic Ocean."

"Okay, fine, done. Let's say we've finished negotiating with the UK, France, Germany, the US, Canada, Russia, and, just for fun, Singapore. You think the European railroads are going to be happy with that? We don't have anyone lobbying there, so we have to start from scratch and somehow stomp out all the influence railroads have on fucking Europe. That'll cost us more than everything else combined. Then we have to draw up an entire new system of schedules and rates to deal with a kind of traffic that has literally never existed, which means hiring more staff when we can't even find a half dozen competent people to fill the positions that already exist. Mr. Singer works for me, now, incidentally."

"Now, tell me oh wise one, while we're spending all this money, stockholders bailing left and right, what's saving us in the here and now? I can't buy a decent locomotive for love or money because a pyrokinetic burned my supplier's factory to the ground over a grudge with middle management, a conductor in Virginia intentionally derailed a train and no one can figure out why, and my now-ex husband who, by the way, runs the biggest voting bloc in the Canadian Senate, recently defected to the C.U.I. But fine, let's say we somehow get through all that without going bankrupt. We are now the proud owners of a new bright and shiny hope for humanity for the next month or so, until Behemoth gets around to smashing it, or the Simurgh mind-controls you into rerouting a passenger train to the North Pole."

"Do you have any idea how hard my job is, just trying to keep the infrastructure of an entire continent from falling apart? I've been sleeping on planes and living on donuts and fast food, trying to catch an occasional glimpse of my daughter, just to keep this whole barely-coherent edifice from collapsing. If you really want to help, listen to the people who do this for a living."

She sat down heavily. "And now I'm yelling at a teenager. Listen, you have the right idea, but give it time. You've been doing this for all of a week and a half. Get a sense of the game, help out where you can, don't let the PRT recruit you. And go to Chicago. They're going to try to scam you into taking nine-tenths on credit, even though you're charging a fiftieth of what you're worth. And you should let them, because it's you or maintaining a bridge in New Hampshire. Take care."

My heart was hammering in my head. I was nonspecifically furious. It was the kind of anger where I knew that everything she'd said was true, and I wanted nothing more than to shout 'I'm still right you bitch. Because what she'd said wasn't a contradiction, just a really long list of puzzles to solve, and I knew that all of those puzzles were solvable.

I didn't say anything, though, because I had a new plan that required that I not be seen as a petulant child. I was going to need a few hundred more phases for it to work, but I'd get it done.

I was still going to save the economy, even it if it took centuries.

I left. I took the elevator to the ground floor, and walked out the door, trying to work out which direction Chicago was in. I was still deliberating when a hand lightly touched my shoulder. I jumped and turned to look.

Ms. Gauthier, the woman I'd met the day before, stood next to a black luxury sedan. She held a large white cardboard sign that read 'Tesseract'.

"Good afternoon," she said. "Did you get my text?"

"You're a bit early," I said. "You said it would be after my last meeting."

"That was your last meeting."

"I still have to talk with Atlantic-Superior."

"I think you'll want to hear all your offers before you sign anything. I also think that, once you hear our offer, you won't be interested in theirs."

I drew back. "I don't like being late, and you're sounding really kidnap-y. Wow me, ten words or less, or we can talk about this after my meeting."

Gauthier drew a folded sheet of paper from her coat pocket. She held it up for me to see. It was an inkstained, half-handwritten contract, with my name on it. My contract with Atlantic City Southern.

"Would you like to change the world?" she said.

My heart skipped a beat. "You want to build my train station?"

"Want is a weak word. I prefer to say we've already started."

"The construction industry's a mess."

"I have my eye on a wonderful firm in Ukraine. I'm given to understand that distance isn't an issue for you?"

"The regulations would be impossible."

"Legal issues have never been a problem for us."

"The rest of the industry is going to kick up a fuss."

"People always do. You get used to it."

"You'll have to invent a whole business model from scratch. That'll take good people, and they're hard to find."

"We recently purchased a railroad company we aren't doing anything with, I'm sure that with their schedules cleared they'll be able to work it out."

"Where will you buy the locomotives? Wait, right, Atlantic City Southern."

"God, no, those things aren't worth the steel they're made out of. In any case, you need a different kind of vehicle to do a half-kilometer trip efficiently. We're ordering them from the C.U.I - which is technically treason, by the way, so don't tell anyone. Wouldn't you rather try to shoot holes in your plan sitting down?"

I took a second to unravel the last sentence in my head. "How come you destroyed Atlantic City Southern?"

"A lot of reasons. They had your phone number and we didn't, it was cheaper than starting a new company, and someone else had already done all the heavy lifting. Has anyone ever told you you're very confrontational?"

I bit my lip, thinking. "Why didn't you contact me earlier? Why set up this whole scheme first, then only talk to me afterwards?"

"I found out about you yesterday, called my boss, was put through to his boss, bought Atlantic City Southern, texted you, set up this meeting, flew to Edmonton, slept, rented a car, made this sign-" she gestured to the cardboard sign in her hands "-and hired a chauffeur. I'm only human." She laughed at some private joke.

I paused. I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "If I told you the world was ending, what would you say?"

"Everyone already knows. If you have any details, we'll call a meeting of the super duper top secret shadow council and you can share."

I hesitated. I looked in what I thought was the general direction of Chicago. I hesitated more.

I got into the car.

We were just far enough that I had started to wonder where we were going, when I finally decided to speak again.

"Were you serious about the shadow council?"

Gauthier laughed. "Of course not. People cooperating? Not on your life."

Chapter 4: 104

The Poverty of Nations 1.04

It was a little after sunset when I hopped up the broken steps of our little house in Docks North. The rain had finally abated, and a few stars were starting to show. It had been a long day, and surprisingly productive. Though I hadn't really done much myself, my body took that productivity as a sign that I should collapse into a puddle on my bed. There was something singularly exhausting about actually getting things done, like the shock of going down a sharp incline on a roller coaster.

There was something else, too. A subtle pressure in my chest, getting stronger every passing second. It wasn't fast, but it crept up, and every time I took my mind off of it, I'd come back to find it had grown in my absence. It was two things. First, it was the dawning realization that the world might not end, and my actions might have consequences. Second, it was the sudden awareness that planet Earth wasn't as barren of intelligent life as I'd assumed.

Hope, basically, tinged with the some other, less pleasant feelings that defied identification.

Dad was at the kitchen table again, with a yellow legal pad and an even smaller pencil. There was a pizza on the table, box open but otherwise untouched. Without looking up, he mumbled a quiet "hey, Taylor" that was almost drowned out by the sound of the door swinging shut.

"Hi," I said, my exhaustively-prepared excuses dying in my throat. "What's new?"

"Same problems, new people causing said problems."

"Well," I said, not quite able to keep the grin off my face, "I heard something interesting." I paused for dramatic effect. "There's a new company moving to Brockton Bay. A shipping company! They've got a cape that can make portals." With a small flourish, I held my new mask out in front of my chest.

He didn't look up. "Oh, I know."

Something about his tone made me pause. Well, actually, everything about his tone made me pause. Frankly, I'd been expecting more in the way of cheering and hugging, maybe with hints of crying.

"Isn't that a good thing?" I asked. "The shipping's coming back. Isn't that what you wanted?"

He massaged his temples. "It's complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"The jobs they're offering aren't as ... comfortable, as the ones there used to be. A lot of the things the union fought for aren't going to be part of the new deal. Safety regulations, regulations about working conditions, regulations for how long a person's shift can be extended, they're all going to be relaxed a bit. More than a bit."

"Can't you negotiate?"

"We've already negotiated. Ten hours of talking, and we couldn't get them to budge an inch. And there's nothing we can do. They've made it clear they're doing us a favour. Offering a dollar an hour more for union workers 'in deference to their years of experience'. They aren't even talking to most of the other unions, and their offer expires noon tomorrow. I'll give them one thing, they're not wasting time."

It took me a second before I parsed the 'ten hours' bit and realized they'd talked to Dad before they'd talked to me. Not wasting time indeed.

"And that means," he continued, "we've got no choice. Monday morning, I have to go tell everyone that the good old days are officially never coming back. Everyone's going to be making half what they did before, and it'll be an uphill battle for the union to get anything with the economy the way it is."

"But things are still going to be better, right?"

He shook his head, eyes still fixed on the legal pad. "Better in some ways, worse in others. Brockton Bay are reeling, but we were recovering. There was still work, just not enough to go around. This is going to be a death blow for every company that stuck around. For the people who still have jobs, it won't be long before they don't have any choice but Priam. How could anyone compete against a cape?"

"But there are jobs!" I protested, fighting to keep my voice even. "There weren't jobs before, and now there are. That's a really, really, really big plus."

"Yes, of course, don't get me wrong, for the people who were out of work this is going to be a godsend. But it's going to be a monopoly, and a bad one at that. All the power is in one person's hands, and there's nothing anyone can do about that." He looked up, finally. "What's with the mask?"

"I bought it at a yard sale," I mumbled. "Thought it'd make a cool Halloween costume."

"It's neat. I like the colour."

"I should probably go do my homework before it gets too late." I turned to go.

"Oh, I got pizza, if you're-"

"I already ate," I said, raising my voice to be heard. I was almost jogging by the time I reaching my room, closing the door just a little more forcefully than was necessary. I fumbled through my jacket pockets. Before I'd even got through all of them, I stripped it off and held it upside-down, shaking it violently and sending the dozen little things I'd taken to carrying around with me spilling across my bed. Gauthier's secretary's phone number, written on a post-it note, drifted away and slipped through the gap between my bed and the wall, falling to the floor. I resisted the urge to kick something.

I would fix this. Dad had been right about one thing; I held all the cards. Gauthier, Priam, and anyone else who thought they could pull the wool over my eyes would find that out soon enough. No one could compete with instantaneous, one-person trans-continental shipping, and that meant that it would be all me sooner or later, and nothing could stop it. My way or the highway.

I got down on my knees and peered under my bed. I couldn't make out the scrap of paper in the gloom. I snatched my alarm clock off my night stand and pulled it out as far as the power cord allowed, trying to see by the light of its display.

It wouldn't end with shipping, either. Once my system was ubiquitous, the whole global economy would shift to suit. If it was five cents cheaper to import steel from Austria than buy from your next-door neighbour, people would buy from Austria. There would be an immediate drop in prices across the board, as the production costs for everything from cars to lettuce got lower and lower. And if anyone decided they weren't keen on any of my other programs, I could cut them right out of the system. They'd be back to pre-me production costs, and their own customers would desert them in favour of cheaper competitors.

Giving up on the clock, I reached my arm out as far as it would go, groping around in the dark. My arm up to my shoulder was covered in dust, and I had to press my cheek against the bedframe, forcing my glasses crooked.

I heaved a long sigh. I'm being stupid again.

I made a portal from the underside of my bed to just under the ceiling light. My room was cast in an odd twilight, and the area under my bed was lit enough that I could make out the post-it note propped up against the wall. Rather than reaching for it again, I made another portal to close the distance and gingerly picked it up.

I took a few deep breaths to calm myself, then dialed. It wasn't that big a deal. They thought I was just in it for the money, and it wasn't realistic to expect them to behave morally on their own. People imitated their peers, and their peers were money-grubbing, proletariat-grinding businesspeople. I'd set them straight, and everything would be back on track.

The phone rang ten times, then went to voicemail. I didn't leave a message.

I'd set them straight during business hours.

Friday, and the rain had started again, accompanied by a thick fog that soaked me right through my raincoat and umbrella. The sun was blotted out entirely, and even at half past eight in the morning the streetlights hadn't gone out. My hair plastered itself to my face and neck, until finally I was fed up enough to tie it up in a ponytail. Almost as aggravating was Gauthier's assistant, who was forcing me to be a lot less polite than I wanted to be.

"I'm sorry, miss," she was saying, "but I'm afraid she's booked right through until next Thursday. Between setting up the new offices in Brockton Bay, all the ongoing talks, and the investigations into our recent acquisition, she's barely sleeping. I'm sure you understand."

I bit my lip, moving the phone away from my ear long enough to check the time again. I was late for my first class. I'd ducked into one of the less-used hallways to make this call, but I hadn't expected it to take this long.

"I don't think you understand," I hissed into the phone. "Something's come up, and we need to have a talk right now, and I mean before noon right now, so figure our whose appointment is least important and cancel it. Right now."

"I'm sorry, miss, but it's entirely out of our hands. Ms. Gauthier needs to be on a plane by nine if she's going to make her meeting with the Mayor, and if she rescheduled it could delay the entire operation by weeks."

I wanted very much to do something violent, but there wasn't really much I could do. I couldn't punch the wall without hurting myself, and screaming wasn't really my cup of tea. "Just tell me where she is."

"Ms. Gauthier is in a very important meeting at the moment and can't be distur-"

"I'll bring her here myself," I snapped, managing keeping my voice low, "she can skip the flight and still make her meeting, just tell me where-"

Strong fingers snatched the phone, almost prying it out of my hands. I yelped, but grabbed harder, putting both hands on it to get a better grip.

"What's this? You've got a new toy. And it's a flip phone, my God." Sophia's voice was shrill, not quite cheerful enough to be mocking. She put both hands on mine and twisted, sending a stabbing pain up my arms. Involuntarily, I let go.

Goodness, she was quiet. I hadn't exactly been paying attention, but I was still surprised she'd been able to sneak up on me like that.

"I'm sorry," she said into the phone, "but Taylor's too much of a loser to take this call. Ciao." She dropped it on the ground and stomped on it.

I tried to turn around, but two pairs of hands grabbed me and forced me against the wall. I closed my eyes and focused my extra senses. Three roughly person-shaped objects were right behind me, but the hallway outside and all the nearby classrooms were empty.

This close, I had fine enough precision to make out the fat, donut-shaped object in Emma's hands. It wasn't until I heard the telltale ripping sound that I registered what it was.

Duct tape. My blood ran cold.

"Turn her around, guys, jeez," Emma said.

Madison and Sophia readjusted their grips on my arms, hauling me around so my back was to the wall. I made a renewed effort to break free while they were off-balance, but Sophia grabbed me about the midsection and slammed me against the wall so hard I saw stars.

"Is it going to stick okay?" Madison wanted to know.

"To the wall? Yeah," Sophia said. "'Kay, hang on, get her arms by her sides, like this." She demonstrated by twisting one arm behind my back, forcing it up at an unnatural angle, sending daggers of pain up my shoulders and back. She released with one hand and gestured for the duct tape.

While she taped that arm to my sides, Madison copied her technique. She didn't get it nearly as high, leaving my forearm horizontal instead of forcing it up to my upper back. Sophia made a disapproving face, but didn't comment.

It was around this time that I thought to scream, and did.

Sophia punched me, hard. My breath rushed out noiselessly, leaving me gulping like a fish. I tried to inhale again, but only managed to wheeze. Then she forced my mouth closed and taped over it, leaving me to struggle to refill my lungs through my nose.

"Holy shit, Soph, you're a friggen beast," Emma gushed. She stepped in front of me with another roll of tape, moving to cover my neck, but Sophia waved her off.

"Put it on her forehead. Don't want her to strangle herself."

Emma nodded and did as she was told. I managed a halfhearted kick before Madison grabbed my legs and secured them to the wall.

I felt like my innards were on fire. I wanted to fight back, I wanted to get free, I wanted to hurt them back so badly that it was physically painful. Every few seconds, my mind would convince itself that I could kill them all if I just wanted it badly enough, and I'd throw myself uselessly against the tape. Every yank at my bonds stung, tearing hair out of my arms and twisting them more painfully behind my back, but it hurt more not to fight.

How dare they? They didn't know who I was, but that was no excuse. They should've been terrified, bullies living in a world where pain and power were linked. They should've been jumping at every twitch I gave, terrified that some barb was the last straw. That I was about to break their backs. They should've been afraid of me.

I wanted to scream, now. But I couldn't. I couldn't do anything.

Well, there is one thing.

I lit up like a lightbulb. My whole body thrummed with something irrepressible. It hurt ten times worse than the anger had, but mixed up in it was glee, and something a lot angrier that hope.

Wind didn't usually get fast enough to hurt people, so people didn't usually think about it as dangerous. When it did, it was usually under unusual conditions, like hurricanes or aerokinetics.

But wind could be dangerous, given the right conditions. In winds higher than 120 miles per hour, it was impossible to stay upright. You'd either fall over or slide backwards until you started tumbling. It just got crazier as it got higher; 500 mile per hour winds could peel pavement from the ground, not to mention pick people up and throw them. I'd read an article about it.

500 miles per hour was about 200 meters per second, which was how fast an object in a vacuum accelerated to after falling for 20 seconds in Earth's gravity.

I'd transferred into a physics class when I got my power. It was surprisingly applicable. Applicable because I could totally do that.

I picked an empty classroom and created two portals, one at the ceiling and one at the floor. Left without support, the air started to fall through the portal at the floor and out the portal on the ceiling, trapped in an infinite loop and accelerating all the while. As an afterthought, I created more, filling the room. Desks started to slide about in the windstorm, some getting perilously close to falling into a portal and being caught up in the trap. I could use that.

I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't, and it felt like every second I wasn't letting it out it was tearing hooks and daggers into my lungs. Madison was sticking my hair to the wall with little squares of tape. Emma was next to her, layering more and more onto my right arm. I could put the first portal at an angle, throw one into the other and into the stalls. Sophia would be a bit trickier; she was standing back, looking oddly attentive. Her head was at an angle; could she hear my windstorm brewing? That was good. She should be afraid. I could put the portal above her, pin her to the floor. I'd teach her.

I reached for my power. The iota of concentration it took to work out the angles knocked me out of my state. What was I doing? I was seriously planning to reveal my identity to the three people I hated most, committing a dozen crimes in the process, and probably destroying a school bathroom. That was outrageously stupid.

The thoughts were hollow. I didn't care about any of that.

That was ... strange. I wasn't used to not caring about things. I was Miss Caring About Things 2011, actually. Not caring about things was the thing I hated most about my alleged 'peers'. I prodded at the thought, but it was solid. I actually didn't care. I prodded again. The anger lashed out again, and I gave another full hearted attempt to struggle free of the tape.

This is a stupid plan, I thought. This is a stupid plan, this is a stupid plan, this is a stupid plan.

I took a deep breath through my nose, then exhaled. I reached out to the upper reaches of the atmosphere. With so little mass, there was nothing to interfere, eye contact or no. I drained the windstorm into outer space. There was a loud bang, and the sound of furniture being forcibly rearranged. I winced.

I took another deep breath, held it, and exhaled. Little by little, the anger drained away, leaving me feeling utterly miserable. Being responsible sucked.

It was five excruciatingly long minutes before my tormentors decided their work was complete, leaving me hopelessly stuck to the wall. I spent the time searching the city, using the now-trashed room next door as a base for my portals.

Fortunately, there was an extremely architecturally-recognizable building full of people who were inclined to be helpful, and who I wasn't terribly concerned about entrusting my identity to. The Protectorate Headquarters, home to the local branch of the largest superhero organization in the world, based out of a converted oil rig out in the bay complete with missile defence system and forcefield.

It took me a little while to work out what I was going to do. I actually didn't want the kind of revenge an authority figure could dole out. I knew enough to know it'd be disappointing, anticlimactic, boring, and impotent. What I really wanted was to drop out of school, for which I'd need Dad's approval, which meant talking to Gauthier. Unfortunately, that made my grand reveal a lot less grand. Hi Armsmaster. As you can see, I'm in a bit of a bind. No, I don't want you to arrest the perpetrators, it's just that I've got an appointment I need to keep and I was hoping you could leverage your abilities as one of the most powerful parahumans on the planet to get me out of this duct tape.

At the same time, I didn't really have any other options. Gauthier would be a passable choice, but I didn't know where she was, and I wasn't really keen to get Dad to help, for about a thousand reasons. The Protectorate were pretty safe as far as my identity, and I kinda wanted to talk to them anyway, even though I didn't have anything to talk to them about. Even if I wasn't keen on their kind of heroics, I certainly wouldn't mind opening a dialogue and getting a few phone numbers. Communication was always good.

I picked a spot and opened the portal.

Chapter 5: 1x

Interlude: Ms. Gauthier

The Pease International Airport was, if not particularly busy by the standards of an airport, at least busy by the standards of a large building. For Rosalind Gauthier, though, keeping an eye on the crowd was just a habit, not stimulating enough to distract her from the chill, the boredom, or the uncomfortable dampness of her suit. Her umbrella did nothing against the fog.

For the third time that minute, she checked her watch. 11:39 AM. The sensation of time being wasted was, in her opinion, the third least-pleasant sensation, just behind public speaking and drowning. Much like public speaking and drowning, it always came with a tightness in her chest, like her organs were tying themselves in knots. Unique to it was the skin crawling, the prickling in the back of her neck, and the feeling of impending doom. It wasn't something she experienced often, but in those brief minutes she always found herself thinking of what she could have done to avoid it.

She could, for example, have asked that her driver arrive fifteen minutes early. While this would be a waste of the driver's time in the event that her flight was either late or on schedule, in cases like today where her flight arrived early it would give her extra time to work. Many of her superiors did this, and some of her coworkers as well; but when she had been lower on the totem pole, she had always resented her superiors for wasting so much of her time.

She chewed on that for a moment, trying to come up with an angle for working out the relative value of her driver's time.

At 11:40 AM, a black sedan turned the corner and pulled up beside her. Gauthier suppressed a sigh of relief and slumped down in the passenger seat. Habitually, she noted the thermos in the cupholder, and wondered if there was anything in it. She'd forgotten her water bottle in Edmonton.

The woman in the driver's seat grinned and stuck out her tongue. She was in her late teens or early twenties, with a head of red curls and an expressive face. Gauthier knew her, vaguely – or at least, enough to dislike her.

"Hello, Mercy."

"Hi, Rosie," said Mercy. "Did you have a nice flight?"

"I have a meeting with the mayor, and there's an outside possibility that I might not even be late for it, so get moving," Gauthier said.

"The mayor is being handled. You have a meeting with someone much more important."

Gauthier' blood ran cold. It was difficult to say in the moment, but she suspected this sensation might be her new number one worst. The sickening flip-flopping of her stomach, her heart fluttering in her throat, the feeling that she was falling, falling, and had no way of knowing whether she'd hit the ground in the next second or the next week. She found herself possessed by the urge to get back out and board a plane to Mongolia.

"If you're going to throw up, do it in your purse or something. I don't want to be scrubbing airline food off the upholstery."

"Thanks for being so comforting in my time of need. Is this water?"

Before Mercy could respond, Gauthier had snatched her thermos and took a long sip. A distinctive savoury-sweet taste flooded her mouth and she choked, almost spitting smoothie all over the dashboard.

"No. There's a water bottle in the glove compartment."

Gauthier fumbled with the latch, then the bottlecap. She paused to take a few deep, calming breaths before she tried drinking, for fear she'd spill water all over her blouse. Not that it would change much, with how wet it was.

Mercy echoed her thoughts. "The east coast is the worst. My last post was in California, and believe you me it was amazing. I went swimming in the ocean, like, every day. Did you know you can swim in the ocean out there?"

"It's the right weather for my funeral, at least. Do I have time to change into something dry?"

Mercy shook her head. "Depends on how fast you are, but I doubt it."

Gauthier took a few deep breaths. Wallowing in self-pity wasn't really an option with so much adrenaline in her system. She probably wasn't going to be killed, unless she screwed up in the meeting. Less than ten percent chance. She thought back, trying to work out whether she'd made any mistakes that merited a demotion. She didn't think so, which only meant she'd be caught off-guard when he brought it up. She didn't even bother to entertain the thought that it might be good news. No one got good news until they'd made back their initial investment, no matter how promising the venture.

She thought back to her meetings from the day before. The city government had stopped her from importing contractors from Ukraine; she didn't have high hopes for her appeal to the mayor – but if it was a concern with the construction schedule, he would've waited until she missed a milestone. Materials were prepared and sitting in warehouse, trolleys were under construction, no issues there. The FBI was after her for a laundry list of offenses, but none of them were provable as far as she knew. She had been aggressive, but not incautious. Had they found something? Had they blocked a suspicious purchase in time to stop a gutting? That could put them days, even weeks behind.

She resisted the urge to run her fingers through her hair. The car came to a sudden stop, snapping Gauthier out of her reverie.

Mercy unlocked the doors. "We're here."

Gauthier's hand fell on the latch. She felt sick. There was still time to run. She had her handgun, and cape or not Mercy was still an idiot. She could shoot her, leave the body in the backseat and drive for the airport. There was a flight leaving for Australia at noon. It would be worth it just to wipe that smug smile off Mercy's face, maybe throw in a taunt about following security protocols.

Gauthier took her hand off the gun and got out of the car. She probably wasn't going to die. They'd have had Mercy kill her, if that was the plan.

The meeting place was a squat, rundown little redbrick house. It was very clean, even the outside; the walls had been sandblasted, the lawn had been purged, and the floors showed signs of chemical warfare. Everything smelled sterile. She remembered doing much the same to row houses in Boston, when she was sixteen, preparing them for conversion into high-density rental properties. She remembered living in one, afterwards.

He was waiting for her in the kitchen. He seemed apart from the space around him, like he belonged in another world. The dark colours of his mask and suit contrasted so intensely with the vague pale grey-green of the wall behind him that he almost seemed silhouetted. She suspected that was intentional.

"Good morning," Accord said.

Her heart pounded. In the heat of the moment, she could almost forget her fear. Almost, because she could see that some idiot had swept the dust from the sandblasting out of the room, presumably for fear of offending Accord. She felt like smacking the sweeper, making him write construction sites are meant to be dirty fifty times, because she knew that the telltale signs of the cleanup would grate on his nerves, make him ever so slightly less favourably disposed, less merciful-

"Good morning, sir," she said, without missing a beat.

"This is hardly the place for pleasantries, and we're short on time, so I suppose I'll get right to it. Do you know why I've arranged this meeting?"

Tesseract was the obvious point of failure. Her secretary had passed on a few angry voicemails when she'd got off the plane, and Gauthier had had words with her about what constituted an emergency. Apparently, June didn't feel an angry phone call from the keystone of their entire operation was worth interrupting her meeting with a drywall supplier. That would definitely come up on her performance evaluation, assuming either of them was still alive.

But Gauthier couldn't work out what she could possibly have done to upset Tesseract. The girl had seemed perfectly happy the day before. In any case, if she guessed and she was wrong, Accord would think there were two problems.

"No sir," she said.

Accord frowned – or rather, his mask, which mirrored his expressions, shifted slightly. It could be difficult to read at times, because although it was a very intricate device it was still just a machine, made up of hundreds of metal bands rather than flesh and tendon. "No, I suppose not. It's such a small detail, and such an unlikely issue, and yet I find that I deal with dozens of unlikely issues a day. C'est la vie. Do you happen to know the names of the members of the Dockworkers Union involved in negotiations?"

The question was so far out of left field that Gauthier was momentarily stunned. Of course, she did know the names; she'd even made flash cards. "Yes, I suppose so, sir."

"So, the name of the Head of Hiring would be..?"

"Daniel Hebert."

Accord made an approving noise. "And Tesseract's name?"

That threw her, but she recovered quickly. "I mean no disrespect, but I didn't investigate her private identity. I felt, and still feel, that the risk of offending her outweighs the potential benefits of knowing more about her."

"And rightly so," he said. As he did so, he drew a folded sheet of paper from the inside pocket of his blazer and offered it to her. "However, in this case, no investigation was necessary."

Gauthier took the paper and unfolded it. It was, to her surprise, Tesseract's contract with Atlantic City Southern. She'd already read it, but, given the subject of the conversation, immediately jumped to the bottom and read the signatures. Her heart plummeted.

"Taylor Hebert. She signed it with her real name."

"It's no particular fault to you for missing it. It was only caught on review, by a low-level employee tasked with going over everything we had on her. However, in combination with her recent change in attitude, immediately after your negotiations with the Dockworkers' Union, it seems to paint a picture."

"Yes sir."

"And, of course, the phone number from which she called your secretary, which happens to be the number for Director Piggot's office."

Gauthier's heartbeat ratcheted up on principle, but she wasn't likely to be blamed for missing that. It was, however, possible that she would need a new secretary.

Accord let the silence accumulate. His mask gave no hints as to his thoughts. It was possible he was thinking about what to do. It was more likely he had already decided.

"The issue reflects poorly on you, but no more than is to be expected. You've been assigned eight new subordinates in keeping with the importance of this operation, including Mercy. I expect that when you return her to me, Mercy's temperament will be improved. I will deal with Tesseract personally. You may go."

Gauthier refrained from letting out the breath she hadn't realized she was holding. She felt as though the world were made of glass, and any misstep would shatter it. She barely managed a "yes, sir," then walked back to the waiting car as quickly as she could without seeming impolite.

It was only thirty minutes later, after she'd extracted signatures from every member of the Dockworkers' Union, that she realized that Mercy would've been told who she was being assigned to, and hadn't told her. And it was five minutes after that that she realized Accord must have known Mercy wouldn't tell her. And he'd told her to improve Mercy's temperament.

Five minutes after that, Gauthier had made arrangements for a pair of handcuffs and a bathtub. It would hardly do to drag her feet on a direct order.

Chapter 6: 105

The Poverty of Nations 1.05

There was an attractive room in the PRT building that seemed specifically designed for making guests feel important. It looked like the sort of backroom people made backroom deals in, all black leather sofas and small tables. It wasn't as gorgeous as the lounges I'd been paraded through in the Protectorate Headquarters, but it had a strong sense of the dramatic.

The room suited Director Emily Piggot in a way I wouldn't have anticipated, if I had been introduced to them separately. She was heavyset, bordering on obese, with an unstylish haircut and a gray suit that was as attractive as was possible, considering who was wearing it. Her briefcase was battered and ancient, and had what looked like a scorch mark on part of it. And yet, she had a sort of charisma, or maybe gravitas, that made the whole thing work for her.

There was, of course, a reason the Director had made time to meet me in the middle of the day, even though I hadn't actually asked to speak with her and she'd only known about my existence for all of half an hour. It was even a good reason.

The Protectorate, and by extension its parent organisation the PRT, had an aggressive recruitment policy, in much the same way Genghis Khan had an aggressive foreign policy. A bit of research over the last few weeks had revealed that the PRT got a tidy bonus to its budget for every superhero they convinced to sign on, which I approved of in an abstract sense but disapproved of in the sense that it meant I'd been subjected to a great deal of not-so-subtle hints that I should join their Wards program.

Which led to the very good reason. Of all the perks an organisation could offer, attention was by far the cheapest. They would go out of their way to make me feel important, then shove a contract under my nose while I was too drunk on the fake respect to say no. If I were any other fifteen-year-old, it would have worked like a charm.

That wasn't to say that I didn't appreciate the Protectorate. They were the best place for a garden variety, bank robbery-foiling, kitten-rescuing superhero. The only reason I could sleep at night was the knowledge that strict regulations, metric tonnes of oversight, and effective filing systems stood between me and an overzealous teenager in tights accidentally vaporising my house in the name of justice.

At the same time, it really wasn't the best use of my time. The recidivism rate among supervillains was pretty near 100%, and only the worst of the worst got the Birdcage, making law enforcement more of a band-aid than a solution. Unfortunately, not being the cleverest negotiator, it occurred to me just a moment too late that in this case I might have been better off keeping that particular opinion to myself.

Presently, I found myself saying: "and so it's really all about the economy. Supervillains crop up in droves in blighted areas, whereas countries with comparatively low poverty rates like Sweden produce correspondingly fewer supervillains. What's really cool about that is that about half of all Swedish superheroes actually operate out of Denmark, which has a much higher crime rate. Even if it's only Brockton Bay that gets revitalised, cities all over the US would benefit from the superheroes who move on to, ah, less green pastures. We can already see that happening with Boston, though I guess you'd know that, since, um - anyways, that's why I think I'd really be doing more to help crime by working in industry."

Piggot hadn't lost an once of composure, but a very faint undertone of something unpleasant had crept in, somewhere between disapproval and contempt. "Miss ... Tesseract," she said heavily, "the PRT has dozens of experts, many of whom are parahumans with Thinker and Tinker-class parahuman abilities - meaning that they have powers that allow for superpowered information gathering and technological prowess, respectively-"

"I know what it means," I cut in.

"-and they agree, almost universally, that the solution to the economic blight on the world is, quite straightforwardly, more superheroes. While your theory is very well developed, particularly considering your age, the truth is that usually the obvious solution is also the best one. Boston's Protectorate prevented the local villain population from digging in, which raised property values and made locals respond more favourably to the PRT, which is why Boston has the best recruitment rate in the country, which perpetuates the cycle."

"But that isn't all of it," I said. "It isn't a coincidence that supervillains are disproportionately poor. People are driven to supervillainy because they're desperate, because they haven't got any opportunities. Lack of supervillains doesn't cause prosperity; it's the other way around. Prosperity causes lack of supervillains."

"Ordinary people are driven to crime because they're desperate," Piggot said. "Parahumans have no shortage of opportunity. Supervillains set up in poor neighbourhoods, because it's easier to hide from the police and because it's close to their primary income sources; protection rackets and drug dealing. For people living in those areas, supervillains are in charge and the Protectorate is distant and powerless, and so when they get powers they sign up with what they see as the winning side. There's actually a classic example of that right here in Brockton Bay. Of all the villains we've arrested over the years, we've had close to a dozen from the Docks, as you'd expect from a territory with a heavy supervillain presence. By comparison, the Docks North has been in Coil's hands since 2004. Coil is an unusually hands-off supervillain, in that he pushes drugs mainly through a rotating collection of crony gangs, few of which have any capes and none of which last long. In that time we haven't had a single supervillain claim to be from Docks North, and only two of the villains we've arrested turned out to be from the area."

I opened my mouth, then closed it when no retort presented itself. I hated arguing with people in their area of expertise. Piggot had probably had this exact discussion ten thousand times before in different variations, which meant she'd had years to come up with answers to tricky questions.

I collected myself. "Alright, but by your own admission, poverty is what gives villains the chance to establish themselves. Without those poor areas full of desperate people to sell drugs to, and a huge unemployed population to draw henchmen from, they can't normalise supervillainy, or even make it profitable for themselves. And like a third or two thirds of all villains who are arrested break out of prison, so fighting crime with violence doesn't solve anything permanently. You might eventually get rid of the really bad ones, but mostly you just keep fighting the same people over and over, until you or they retire and get replaced by new blood. Unless you stop the replacements."

Piggot pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'll be frank with you: you're too young for this. Your entire position is contingent on it being possible for one person to revitalise an entire economy, and furthermore that you could do that quickly enough to see any improvement before the Endbringers wipe us out. The truth is that most plans fail, and most plans that succeed are partial successes at best. The notion that your very first attempt, likely the first thing you ever do without a parent or a teacher looking over your shoulder, will be so successful as to singlehandedly save an entire city from economic stagnation, is arrogant in the extreme. You need experience. You need to learn the ins and outs of your powers, and don't tell me you already have, because I've been doing this a lot longer than you and I can tell you right now that you've got at least three surprises waiting for you down that road as an absolute minimum, probably a lot more. You need to learn about people and organisations, and you need to meet a supervillain face to face and ask yourself, 'would he burn down my train station just to make the paper?' When you've done that, maybe you'll be ready to save the world."

"What, so the celestial bureaucracy is going to come down from on high and screw up my plans because I'm too young? Last I checked there was no Second Law of Thermo-Too-Young-To-Accomplish-Anything-Worthwhile. Capes have only existed for a few decades, and as far as I know no one's ever had a power like mine, so excuse me if I'd rather try to innovate a bit than defer to a tradition that's barely older than I am. I once accelerated a rock so fast it left Earth's gravity well and I'm pretty confident I could knock Venus into Mercury like a billiard ball if I worked at it, so maybe I'm a little bit arrogant, but I'd find it pretty embarrassing if I played it safe until I was twenty and only then found out that my first idea would've worked and I'd just wasted five years twiddling my thumbs."

And then the world ended, because I was too busy playing cops and robbers to save it, I added silently.

"And if you're wrong, and your plans don't just fail, but backfire? I've seen that as well, even with the best of intentions."

"Backfire? First of all, every time anyone does anything new, someone says it's going to lead to the end of civilisation, and so far civilisation seems pretty un-ended. Doomsaying is practically a tradition at this point. Secondly, what I'm doing is just straight-up adding something to society. We won't use as much gasoline or as many vehicles on shipping, so we can use them for something else. Pure efficiency gains. It's not some kind of zany scheme, it's econ 101. How could that possibly backfire?"

"Well, for starters," said Piggot, "there are about two or three million truck drivers in the US. That's a few million jobs destroyed in one go."

"Jobs are not a commodity," I snapped. Now we were on my turf, since I was the one who'd had this discussion a few thousand times. "You can't eat them, you can't build a bridge out of them. They're a means for distributing wealth, and that's all. Those truck drivers did a job that created so and so much wealth, and now I can do that job for them, which means they can do a different job that creates more wealth. Net gain. It's the same thing that happened when we went from peasant farmers to factory workers, where nine out of every ten farmers was replaced by a machine. We didn't get a 90% unemployment rate, we got ten times richer."

"But no one is starving," said Piggot, "at least not in the US, and by your own admission there are enough desperate people to keep the drug trade flowing. That would seem to suggest that there's already enough to go around, and that having the means for distributing wealth is a very real problem."

"Once I set up my network, everything will get cheaper. Food, steel, laptops, you name it. That increases everyone's buying power, and at the same time it lets people start businesses that might not be viable if commodities were more expensive. That'll more than make up for the loss in shipping jobs."

"How sure are you? You're of the opinion that more poverty means more supervillains, so what do you suppose three million unemployed buys us in civic disorder? Suppose it takes ten years for the benefits to manifest. Suppose that they do manifest, but by the time they do the extra supervillains have lowered everyone's buying power and made people too unsure to start new businesses, meaning we're back where we started. How positive can you possibly be that putting every long-haul trucker in the country out of work won't have any negative consequences?"

"So do you expect me to just do nothing? I don't see anyone else trying to do anything, and if someone doesn't do something soon we might actually be looking at the end of civilisation, for real this time. Population is going down for the first time in forever, and with it production, military power, number of new capes, and everything else we need to save ourselves from the Endbringers!"

"I don't expect you to do nothing." Piggot opened her briefcase and took out a sheet of paper, and laid it in front of me. It was a contract, one page, in plain English. "But I don't imagine this portal business will take up so much of your time that you can't do two things."

I got to my feet. "Why does everyone insist on glorifying violence? What evidence do we have that wilfully inflicting suffering on people we don't like is actually helping anything at all? Do we think that if we just punch them hard enough, all the shortsightedness will fall out of the backs of their skulls and they'll become productive members of society? Either kill them all or leave them be, either way I'm on board, but don't try to draft me into some sort of stupid war against a bunch of idiot gangsters with superpowers!"

"Just as well," Piggot said. "I don't think that's quite how you feel, unless you were only sparing my feelings earlier when you suggested that the Protectorate was only inefficient, not completely ineffective. However, I have a theory, that at some point at the beginning of this you wanted something, and hoped you might be able to get it without joining the Wards, and though you've long since lose track of how you were supposed to get there you've persisted because you wouldn't feel quite right leaving without it. Is that about right?"

"Maybe I did," I said, and my voice came out a lot angrier than I'd expected it to. "But if I ever thought that I could make any sort of deal with you, apparently I was completely wrong, because you obviously aren't the negotiating type. Well, neither am I, so I guess I'm about done here."

Piggot frowned. "Well, I suppose that could've gone better. One last thing, then, if you'll pardon me keeping you a moment longer."

She took a little box from desk drawer and laid it out on the table. It was black and shiny. When I didn't move to take it, she gingerly lifted the lid and laid it aside.

In the case was a smartphone, brand new and absolutely gorgeous. It was rugged, but in a carefully hidden sort of way, and if I hadn't been looking I might've thought it was just an ordinary phone. I'd read about these things. They could survive being thrown off a building. Had to, given who they were made for.

"We give these to solo heroes as well as our own. It comes with all the contacts pre-programmed, so if you need to you can get in touch with us at any time. I realize it's not entirely your wheelhouse, but I'd like you to keep a hold of it anyway, just in case. Even if you never want anything to do with us, I'm sure the time will come that you'll hear something you need to pass on, or have a favour you need to ask, and I hope that when that happens you'll be in touch. We are the good guys, even if right now it doesn't seem like it."

It took me a few moments before I processed that, however politely, she was asking me to leave the premises. I wasted no time in making my exit.

It was very fortunate that I'd called Gauthier's secretary before my little argument, because it meant I didn't need to make any important calls on my new PRT phone, which I planned to leave in a box on a desert island on the other side of the world, for paranoia's sake. To pile on one more teensy bit of bad news, Gauthier was on her plane and wouldn't land until eleven forty-five. If I caught up with her at the airport, I could save her ten minutes by bringing her to the Mayor's office directly, and we could have a brief conversation before her next meeting. At noon. I wasn't Sherlock Holmes, but I thought it might be distantly possible that the noon deadline Dad had mentioned and Gauthier's meeting with the Mayor at noon might somehow be related.

And I still hadn't been able to ship one lousy load of cargo. I'd known there would be meetings and politics, but it had never occurred to me that I'd spend more time on the meetings and the politics than I did actually using my power.

And so, it was with some surprise that I found that there was an unmarked black sedan waiting for me at the airport, complete with a man in a suit and raincoat holding a sign that read "Tesseract". My benefactors' ability to make cardboard signs on demand never ceased to amaze, though I supposed that given that my phone was destroyed beyond repair it was the only way they had left to contact me.

The man opened the door for me when I approached, then walked around to the drivers' side. The car was immaculate and completely bare, except for a yellow legal pad in the side pocket, some miscellaneous junk in the glove compartment, and a thermos in the cup holder. There was an oddly dense L-shaped bulge in the inside pocket of his jacket that felt suspiciously like a handgun to my extra senses. It was an odd accessory, but I wasn't really worried. I could raise a portal between us a lot faster than he could draw it, in the bizarre and inexplicable scenario in which he decided to shoot me. More likely he was a bodyguard.

I didn't bother to ask where we were going, for a few reasons. I'd been thinking about costumes lately, and with them came appearances, and how to affect them. Not asking projected strength, because it highlighted the fact that, should he drive me somewhere I didn't approve of, I could go somewhere else.

(I actually couldn't, since we were in a moving car and I'd end up exiting at whatever speed we were driving at, but that didn't occur to me until we were already moving.)

In any case, we arrived shortly. Where we arrived was what looked like a very attractive little café, with a lot of natural light and a cozy atmosphere. There were no customers or staff, and the buildings around it were in the midst of renovations, which made me think it probably wasn't open for business yet. We were in the Docks North district, not terribly far from the trainyard, and if I remembered right a lot of this property had been abandoned.

The driver spoke for the first time. "Mr. Chesterfield's flight was unfortunately delayed. In the mean time, we've acquired a new phone for you, and your temporary costume is finished. I'm sure that by the time you've finished familiarizing yourself with both, he'll be ready to see you."

"Mr. Chesterfield?" I asked. "Not Ms. Gauthier?"

"Mr. Chesterfield is Ms. Gauthier's direct superior, but I can't say anything beyond that. I'm sorry, I only know what I'm told." He gave me a look that said that he would be sympathetic, if he weren't too busy being professional.

I nodded, and got out of the car.

The café was just as nice inside as it was outside, but much more obviously not in use. There wasn't a speck of dirt or grime anywhere, and a mural on one of the walls stood unfinished. Most damning, in place of a cash register was a sealed brown cardboard box with the words CASH REGISTER written in black marker, which (presumably) contained the cash register. At least, it would be very strange if it didn't. I took a seat in at a table for two by the back wall, where a pile of folded clothes with a pair of shoes on top had been set out next to a cell phone, still in its impregnable plastic prison.

Not having a knife, chainsaw, or industrial drill on hand with which to get at the phone, I set myself to laying out the costume on one of the tables. The first thing I did was check that the shoes, which were black loafers, fit, which they did. I wasn't about to try anything else on at the moment, so I took the rest and arranged it more or less as I imagined it ought to go and carried it out to the front windows. There were no passersby in this part of town, and I'd sense anyone coming long before they reached me, so I was safe to admire the new outfit.

Besides the mask, it wouldn't have looked entirely out of place – though perhaps a bit old-fashioned, and more than a bit ostentatious – as an ordinary outfit. The main elements were a white blouse and a bright red skirt that reached from my upper calves to just below my ribcage. A sash of the same colour cinched tight around it, though in the permanent version it wouldn't be a separate item. For when I was outdoors, there was also a very light gray raincoat that was stylishly oversized. A broad-brimmed hat of the same colour went with the raincoat, with a smaller red one for indoors so as not to break up the colour scheme.

I'd brought the mask home the night before, with the intent to show Dad. It had a butterfly theme, but the permanent one was going to dial that down in favour of a half-face mask with large, open "eyes" covered by semi-opaque lenses. I still wasn't clear on how that made me look less like a butterfly.

If the point was to make me unrecognizable, it definitely worked. I was glad the designers hadn't tried to make me look sexy, at least. A lot of corporate teams tried that, not being restricted by government rules about sexualizing minors like the Protectorate. There was a scandal along those lines about every month or so, to break up the monotony of bribes and corruption.

There was a ringing sound, and I turned. A man had walked into the café while I'd been distracted. I supposed I had to work on my vigilance if I planned to rely on my ability to sense people coming.

He was short, a few inches shorter than me, in his thirties or forties, wearing an immaculate tailored dark gray suit and tie. His face was plain, but his expression was intensely focused. He carried a briefcase.

"Good afternoon," he said. "My name is Mr. Chesterfield. I understand you have some concerns."

I waited for him to go on, possibly say something about 'resolving issues' or 'mutual satisfaction', but he didn't. I supposed he was just a man of few words.

Fortunately, I had a prepared speech. I cleared my throat. "The working conditions and salaries for the jobs you're offering to the Dockworkers' Union, and presumably everyone else as well, aren't nearly as good as those that used to exist in Brockton Bay's heyday, or even those offered by competing firms. The whole reason I set out to do this in the first place was to help Brockton Bay recover, and without a strong middle class that's impossible. Unless you raise your offer to the median afforded to a Dockworker in the eighties, adjusted for deflation, plus full benefits, I'll be forced to go elsewhere, even if it means another six months before I can actually get started."

He made a contemplative face. "Admirable. I'd suspected something along those lines, given your initial pitch. I suppose that, if that is your position, we have no choice but to concede it to you. As you've probably guessed, the operation would still be profitable if we raised wages, and without your contributions there could be no operation at all. Your position is entirely reasonable, and if our positions were reversed I imagine I would be arguing much the same point. However, having accepted that, would you give me a few minutes to try to change your mind?"

It took me almost a full second after he'd stopped speaking to realize that he'd already given up, and I was so ready to keep arguing that I almost did out of sheer momentum. "Okay," I said.

He laid his briefcase on a table and opened it, revealing a stack of folders, each labeled in an incredibly tiny, neat handwriting. He flipped through them and selected one, laying it open on the table. The open page was dominated by a photograph of an odd-looking plant, with exposed roots, broad leaves, and small indigo flowers. "Tell me," he said, "are you familiar at all with the present state of Uzbekistan?"

"No."

"I'd be surprised if you were, given the state of the education system. The issue primarily stems from Leviathan's attack on Batumi, in Georgia. Though not especially costly in terms of lives, the attack disrupted rainfall patterns and aquifers across the entire region. To put it frankly, the entirety of Central Asia is facing a wholescale agricultural collapse, and Uzbekistan, doubly landlocked and with much of its wealth destroyed by Cheval Gauvin, is looking to be the worst hit. While some aid money has been diverted, with great effort, from propping up African warlords, difficulties with maintaining civil order have disrupted distribution and poor harvests around the world have made securing supplies difficult. Unless the next harvest is successful, the death toll will be between three and seven million."

Mr. Chesterfield pointed to the plant in the photograph. "The majority of tinkertech – that is, objects and effects generated by scientific principles understood only by parahumans invested with the knowledge by their powers – can't be reproduced. I admit I've invested more time and money than is pracitcal in working out why. One of the most useful exceptions to that rule is living organisms, though the Protectorate discourages their creation. This particular plant thrives in salt water, is resistant to most pests, and provides almost all of the nutrients a human needs. Furthermore, it produces quite a lot of seeds and has a very short life cycle, allowing us to produce enough seeds for an entire crop in the oncoming months. However, while the locals are experienced and willing, the area has been so decimated that many have been reduced to subsistence farming. We need to rebuild from the ground up, and that means equipment, reconstruction, and, naturally, rather a lot of money."

He turned the page, revealing a map of Uzbekistan laid out in colourful zones. He flipped it again, showing a blueprint for a farming complex, then a list of what I assumed were kinds of farming equipment and suppliers, then a list of delivery and construction schedules.

"Up until I heard about you, it was just a pipe dream. Acquiring the equipment was possible, but getting it there in one piece wasn't. With your help, obviously that changes. However, there isn't time to get the money from somewhere else, at least not any more. Setting up this project ate up a chunk of our discretionary funding, and I'm not in the habit of keeping money lying about when it could be better invested. As for outside funding, no one I'm aware of would ever invest in something like this. I've asked.

He flipped the folder shut.

"So," I said, unsure "it's ... charity? That's where all the money is going?"

He chuckled. "There's a place for charity in this world. We wouldn't have time if it weren't for the efforts of a charitable few. In this case, however, I do need that money back. I expect a large return on my investment, which I'll use to diversify the crops and establish a manufacturing base, on which I intend to make an even larger return."

"So, you can raise their wages next year."

He looked stunned. "Pardon?"

"Raise the Dockworkers' wages progressively over a few years, until they're making as much as they did in the eighties. Promise me, and promise them, so I can tell my Dad who I am, because I know he won't accept anything about Uzbekistan. You only need the money because it's short notice, right?"

He sighed. "There will always be something, Tesseract. Or, is it Taylor? I'm not clear on the extent to which your identity is a secret."

I blushed. "Tesseract. I wasn't really thinking when I signed that contract. I'm guessing that's how you found out?"

"I'll have it destroyed, then. There's always something, Tesseract. Money is the allocation of the world's goods, and wealth for one person can well mean poverty for another. And yet, I can tell from your expression that you won't be moved."

"I'm all for ending poverty and starvation, but I think the best way to start is right here at home. The damage caused by the Endbringers is nothing compared to the World Wars, and yet we're buckling rather than pushing back, because the middle class was our backbone and we lost it. The rising tide carries all boats."

He smiled tightly. "I always wished more people were like me, and now here you are right in front of me and we have different priorities. Alright. Give me three weeks to get back from our customers and make an estimate on our scheduling and growth rate, and I'll make your promise. Try to hang on until then. If your father is anything like I think he is, he'll think a verbal promise is yet more proof I'm evil incarnate."

I smiled back, then turned to go.

Mr Chesterfield stopped me, holding the phone, still in its packaging. "Don't forget this. I'd hate to lose track of you."

I took the phone, but he didn't let go right away.

"A bit of advice, for Taylor, not Tesseract," he said. "The reason the good guys always win isn't because they're smarter, or have some heroic spirit in them. It's because the closer you are to the right, the easier it is to get along. Kaiser wants a city ruled by Kaiser, and Lung a city ruled by Lung; but Armsmaster wants a city free of gangs, and so does Miss Militia. Both pairs share goals, but only the latter agree on them. If you ever find yourself in conflict with a good person, or even just a smart person, of which there are far more than most people would have you believe, the first thing you should try is talking to them – even if a so-called superhero tells you otherwise. I know it's a bit cliché, but so many people forget."

I nodded, and he released the phone.

"I'll see you later, Tesseract," he said.

"Bye," I said, a bit unused to the sound of my own voice.

A moment later I was gone

Chapter 7: 201

A/N 1.05 has been repeatedly rewritten, to the point of pure insanity. If you most recently read it prior to August 6, I would strongly recommend going over the first half again.

The Death of Great American Cities 2.01

"I hope you realize how much money you're just throwing away, here," Gauthier was saying. "The cost of sending ships across the Pacific for an extra week, not just in fuel but in salaries, repairs, lost goods, and whatever it is you pay the family when one of your sailors gets eaten. Frankly, your expenses are endless."

"I'm sorry, Rose, but I'm adamant on this: I physically can't manage getting everything set up by the 23rd," said Mr. West. His tone was grave, but whatever effect he was going for was ruined by his Australian accent. "Even if you loaned me your portal cape, which you won't-"

"Which I can't," Gauthier interjected.

"I won't be able to bring in labour until Monday at the absolute earliest, and I'll be lucky if they're working on Tuesday. That's assuming I'm able to get warehouse space by then, which I probably won't be, and assuming anyone's willing to take a contract right before an Endbringer scenario. I might, and this is the absolute earliest, I could maybe get it done by the 25th. It'll probably be more like the 4th, and at that point you might as well hold off until after the weekend."

Gauthier steepled her fingers. The breeze, generated by the pressure difference between her office in Brockton Bay and Mr. West's in Melbourne, picked up a spreadsheet and threatened to carry it away, but she caught it deftly and pinned it under a stapler.

"We could," she said, reluctance practically dripping off her voice, "temporarily set up a truck route. It would, of course, be an enormous inconvenience on my part, one which I wouldn't have to undertake if you had been more prudent and done this last week, and it's a consideration I would only be willing to maintain for an extremely brief period of time, but it could be managed."

"Oh, don't be a pest, Rose, it wouldn't cost you a cent. And don't even pretend she's charging you an arm and a leg for these portals, because if that were true you wouldn't be using her like a glorified telephone."

"It isn't as though I can just call you up on an actual phone, and if I sent you a letter I'd be lucky if you got back to me by April. Remind me again why you live in Australia?"

Mr. West grinned wickedly. "The weather's nice. How's the east coast treating you? Still raining?"

"Never heard that one before. Let's cut to the chase; my glorified telephone has somewhere to be. You set up the truck route, your trucks, your people, and double the fee."

"Ouch, the rose has thorns." West waggled his eyebrows. "Counter-offer: my trucks, my people, half fee since you're not doing anything."

"That's highway robbery. Do you want the shirt off my back, too? My watch, maybe? Double fee, but I can set you up with a location and warehouses."

"I wouldn't mind having your shirt off, but that's neither here nor there. Three-quarters, your warehouses, my trucks, my people."

"I have cats to feed. One and a half."

"Standard, and I won't even try to poach your cape."

"Chesterfield would literally kill you," said Gauthier. "Done. Pick out a good location for your end, and we'll set it up tonight or tomorrow."

Mr. West rose from his desk. He was wearing khakis and a shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He ran one hand through his hair and offered the other for Gauthier to shake, which she took.

"Any chance I could get the shirt off your back, too?" he said.

"I can pencil you in sometime next decade. You have no idea how much I have on my plate right now."

"You should take a break."

"Let's see, spend time with you, or eat an entire box of donuts and cry with my cats." She hummed thoughtfully. "Nope, sorry, if I'm going to take a break, it's gonna be donuts and cats. Now get back to Australia so we can close the portal."

Mr. West turned to go, then stopped and turned back. "Just out of curiosity, if I were standing on the interface when it closed, would I get cut in half?"

"No, you wouldn't," I said. I'd been silent up 'til then, standing in the farthest corner of the room. I didn't understand the dynamic Gauthier had with her "friends", and after all I'd seen of them I wasn't sure I wanted to.

"I should be so lucky," said Gauthier. "Shoo." She put her hand on his shoulders and physically pushed him back into Australia, with enough force that he nearly fell into his desk. She made a cutting-off gesture at me, and I took the hint and closed the portal.

"Didn't want to answer your phone in front of the enemy?" Gauthier said.

I winced. Since multiple people getting simultaneous texts on identical phones could be suspicious, my PRT-issue phone didn't ring when I got a text. Instead, it administered a light electric shock, which meant you had to calibrate it carefully depending on which pocket you kept it in. It made a sound, but it was so quiet that I could barely hear it from inside the breast pocket of my jacket. Gauthier had to have spectacular hearing.

I didn't need to read the message. I knew what it was about.

"Listen, I kinda need to be out the door-" I checked my watch "-two minutes ago, so if we're done here...?"

"Yes, no problem. Just remember you need to pick up those steel girders from that factory in Chechnya at-"

"Six thirty, I know."

"And it's really important because-"

"There's only a fifty-five minute margin between expected time of delivery and the point in our schedule at which we'll need to use those girders, and we'll need every one of those minutes if we're going to get them in position on time," I said, imitating Gauthier's voice. "And you're never buying from that fat Russian bastard again, because this is the third time he's been late on a shipment, and if he makes you even thirty seconds behind on your schedule you'll strangle him with his own stupid necklace."

"Right," she said. "Just as long as you know."

I hurried out the door and into my half of our little shared office space in the Downtown. I'd set up a network of portals, none larger than a TV screen, to places all around the world I might need to go in a hurry. Making portals through those portals, I could cut a ten-minute trans-Atlantic trip down to thirty seconds. This time, I picked the one leading to a never-used closet in a closed-down store by the Bay, which was as close as I could get to the Protectorate's floating headquarters without having the portal literally out at sea.

The water was calm, so I made the distance to the PHQ in one jump, then another to bypass the forcefield dome and the walls, taking a moment to fish my guest pass out of my bag and wave it at the receptionist before moving on, skipping entire rooms at a time. It took me two minutes to get to the courtyard, though of course that made me a grand total of four minutes late. It wasn't as though I could say I'd been stuck in traffic.

The PHQ was a roughly square building built on a converted oil rig not far offshore, connected to the Boardwalk by a floating bridge lit by semiaquatic bioluminescent flowers. Right in the middle of it was the courtyard, an open-air space with a handful of benches, built into the second floor of the building proper. It didn't have a roof, unless you counted the forcefield dome, and the lights were bright enough to support grass and a few small trees, which made it the closest thing to a decent park that Brockton Bay had. It was also the largest "room" in the whole complex, which made it the primary mustering ground.

I was puffing a bit when I finally arrived, for all that I hadn't actually run very far. My new costume had shipped a few days ago, and although it looked light and breezy, I swore it weighed at least twenty pounds. It was tiring enough just standing in the thing, so, all the seats being taken, I plopped myself down on the ground.

The courtyard wasn't exactly packed, but it was at least populated. All eight members of New Wave were in attendance, along with the four local Protectorate capes, three local Wards, and five of the six independents. By my count, every single local hero save Shadow Stalker had turned out.

Armsmaster stood in a position of prominence, imposing in his full kit and armor. Presently, he said, "she just arrived, that makes everyone on our end." He turned to me, tapping the side of his helmet with one gauntleted finger. "Dragon saw your stats from the last test, and wants to add Albany and Philadelphia to your territory starting at the beginning of March. Are you alright with that?"

I nodded.

Armsmaster cleared his throat. "For those of you not formally affiliated with the PRT, I would like to inform you that the list of potential targets for the upcoming Endbringer scenario has been narrowed down, and Brockton Bay is on the list. In the event that we are the target of the attack, those not cleared to engage the Simurgh, as well as those who would prefer not to, can be evacuated to New York for the duration of the scenario should they so choose."

"In the mean time, we've also received clarification on the timetable. The Simurgh will likely attack between Wednesday the 23rd and Saturday the 26th, with outside possibilities as late as March 1st and as early as the day after tomorrow. For those of you not familiar with the planning aspect, I can assure you she'll choose the worst possible moment, so remember to sleep with your phones."

"With that out of the way, I'm being informed that the last of the stragglers in New York have arrived. I can only hope that lateness isn't going to be a recurring theme. Tesseract, if you would?"

I got to my feet and walked over to him. Miss Militia, wearing an American flag scarf and cameo, produced a thin silver visor and clipped it to my glasses. Everything took on a faint blue tint, and a little timer in the bottom-left corner of my vision read out 00:00:00.

"To clarify" Armsmaster said, "this is a drill. I would like to make this very clear. Do not panic, scream, or speculate about this not being a drill. We have, in the past, had cases where individuals claimed that a thing that was a drill was, in fact, not a drill; doing so now will be punished harshly. If at any time you become confused about whether or not this is a drill, you will address any questions to the head of your local Protectorate, the Director of your local PRT, or Dragon, and no one else. If the Simurgh should choose now to attack, we will inform you by directing a mass-broadcast through your wristbands and all the speaker systems. Is there anyone who is in any way confused about this?"

"Yeah," said Clockblocker, kneeling backwards on a bench with his elbows resting on the back. He was a vigilante, and his "costume" was street clothes and a domino mask. "I don't know whether or not this is a drill at all. You should say it, like, eight more times."

Armsmaster didn't smile. "We will begin the drill presently. Stand by for the countdown."

Everyone who had been sitting got to their feet, and we waited in silence, as across the continent speeches finished and questions were fielded. After less than a minute, the speakers switched on with an audible hiss, and a smooth, feminine voice sounded out. "Standby for countdown. Countdown: five ... four ... three ... two ... one."

A wail sounded, a quieter version of the air raid sirens, and everyone formed into groups: the Wards with Miss Militia, New Wave with Assault, the younger independents with Battery, and the older with Armsmaster. Wristbands were distributed, though not to me, and I didn't join Battery.

The timer on my display was ticking up, and a list of the teams I was responsible for picking up had joined it at the edge of my vision. The site of the drill, New York City, had flashed across the center of the display the moment the countdown had reached zero - of course I wasn't allowed to know in advance, that would be cheating - with a dialogue box asking if I needed a map. I dismissed it.

I opened portals back to the network in my office, which only took a moment, and then more to the cities I was responsible for. With each, I had a portal in my network that was nearby to the local PHQ, and, with the kind of surety that only came with practicing something over and over until you never want to look at a map of the eastern seaboard again, one by one I opened portals to their mustering grounds.

The locations and order were pre-arranged. First, I opened four portals to New York in the middle of the courtyard, each three meters high and two wide, matched with four portals in the middle of New York's mustering ground, which my display told me was Central Park. Our four groups went through, clearing our mustering ground, just as I opened a portal to Boston at the east wall. As the Boston capes were moving, I opened a portal to the second city on the south wall - normally New York, but in this case Providence, then Hamilton on the west wall, Toronto on the north, and, with the Boston capes already through the portal to New York, I replaced that portal with one to Pittsburgh, and so on. As teams arrived and were accounted for, they were ticked off the list on my display. When everyone was accounted for, I was the last one through the portal, which I closed behind me.

The sheer logistical difficulty of shipping hundreds of people from hundreds of cities to one place was mind-boggling, and the fact that, as a rule, we were lucky if we got an hour to do it, plus build our battle lines and organize everyone, meant we had to work together or die alone. All sixty-some PRT departments, plus FEMA and the King's Men, coordinated on these programs, which included separate drills for the public, setting up shelters, and relief for cities that had been attacked. If you were one of the small handful of people with a logistically useful power, like mine, you were slotted into High Command's power structure, and then promptly relied on to get everything done.

In my case, in the event of an Endbringer scenario, I was to handle transportation for two-thirds of the east coast. If that seemed like a lot to put on one person with no track record, it only said that I was one of the five mass-teleporters in the entire world, and one of the three that weren't evil. Once I had a track-record, I could expect to be responsible for transportation for the entire continent, maybe more.

Hopefully, by then, I could just tell them all to take the train.

I found myself working, by coincidence more than any intent on our part, with Browbeat and Panacea. Both were from Brockton Bay, like me. Browbeat was an independent, though I'd only met him because of the drills; he had super strength of some kind, and his costume incorporated a luchadore mask, which I thought was kind of funny, if silly. He wore a nametag that read "Othala," indicating that he was a stand-in for another cape, rather than a participant himself, and for the purposes of the drill he was pretending to have healing powers, which he used to heal pretend injuries.

Panacea, on the other hand, was a fixture, so I'd known about her basically forever. She was famous, one of the most powerful healers in the world. She could cure cancer with a touch, reverse age, heal deformities, even fixed botched surgeries. I disliked her on principle. People treated her like a god because she saved lives and never asked anything in return, but as far as I was concerned she was just doing the obvious thing with powers that had fallen into her lap. If she had brains at all, the correct thing to do was to occasionally condescend to heal a billionaire's cancer for a hundred million dollars a pop. That kind of money, donated to a charity dealing with hunger or disease in third-world countries, could save ten times as many lives as she was saving now. She wouldn't even have to change anything about what she did, just let someone skip the line every once in a while.

That she wore a white robe with a red cross on it was just icing on the cake. She walked around like the second coming of Jesus, marinating in her own self-righteousness, just because she'd won the superpower lottery and done some glorified volunteer work.

Presently, the big monitor on the wall of our safe room pinged loudly, and shifted to show a new location for the "Endbringer". A countdown started as the people in the new danger zone hurried to get out of the way, then finished with most of them still in "mortal peril".

Vista down, CD-2, announced my headset. Good Neighbour down, CD-2. Intrepid down, CD-2. Iron Falcon down, CD-2. Miss Invictus down, CD-2.

On my display, CD-2 was highlighted, and two red dots appeared, with my name underneath. Three more were gray, their tags showing they'd been assigned to Strider. I frowned. I was faster than Strider, but he could teleport people whereas I needed my henchmen to carry people. I'd have to ask Dragon how her program made these decisions.

The aforementioned henchmen were EMTs, all three of them young, fit, and wearing sturdy boots, utility belts, and respirators. They stepped up to our impromptu starting line at the sound of the tone, and when I made my portals they split up, two going to cart a fully-conscious Iron Falcon off on a stretcher while the third picked up Vista, who was playing dead, and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

"I think this one's actually dead," said Henchman #3 smilingly. "Someone get a doctor, we've got a dead girl." He crossed back through the portal and dumped Vista unceremoniously onto the bed next to Panacea.

Vista's costume was the rummage-bin costume to put all other rummage-bin costumes to shame. Fittingly since she couldn't have been older than twelve. She wore a knee-length blue-and-white dress that could've as easily been part of a princess's dress as a space alien's, horrible purple-pink stockings, white fuzzy legwarmers over boots, and a pair of antennae that constantly fell off her head.

"I'll get the shock paddles," said Henchman #1. "Don't worry little girl, we'll save you!"

"There's no time!" exclaimed Henchman #2 - who was, technically, a henchwoman, but no need to break symmetry. "The only chance we have to restart her heart is ... to tickle her!"

"Ah, no!" Vista leapt back just in time to escape her lunge, giggling. "I'm alive now, no tickling."

"Where do you want me to put you?" I asked. Not that I disliked Vista, but the four of them had been at this all day, and as cute as it was it was getting tiresome. I checked my watch. It was 5:43 PM. Almost done.

"How can I help, wristband?" Vista said into the open air.

I recommend that you assist Armsmaster and Legend in tracking the Simurgh, chirped her wristband.

"Accept."

Sending a low-priority request for relocation. Stand by. My headset beeped, and a red dot showed up in C-8.

I opened the portal, and Vista thankfully departed, just as Strider appeared to cart off Iron Falcon.

"Shouldn't you have..." Browbeat said. "Used your power on her? Or pretended to?"

"I'm not chasing her. Actual wounded people don't tickle each other," said Panacea. She checked her watch, and so did I. Still 5:43 PM.

There was a loud chirping sound. I spent a few seconds searching for the red dot before I realized it was my phone. Not the PRT-issue one, but the one Mr. Chesterfield gave me. "I need to take a call, I'm stepping out," I said.

Acknowledged, said my headset. I took it off, then unclipped the visor from my glasses and answered the phone.

"Gauthier?" I asked.

"In general yes, in specific no," said a voice. I recognized it - it was one of Gauthier's employees. Mercy. She was the only person who could get away with gum-chewing in Gauthier's presence.

"Is it important? The drill is almost over."

"Depends on what you mean by important. Rose thinks it's the end of the world, so maybe a one-day delay in the schedule. Bit of a punch to the wallet, stuff has to be replaced, you know."

"What happened?"

There was a loud pop as Mercy smacked her gum. "One of the buildings is on fire. Can you spare a minute?"

Chapter 8: 202

The Death of Great American Cities 2.02

The station was comprised of the terminal itself, plus a handful of outbuildings connected by covered walkways and tunnels. The terminal was the largest building, but not large in the grand scheme of things. It was pragmatic: redbrick, squat, with wide overhangs over the windows that enhanced its horizontalness. A new feature had been added since I'd last seen it, which I wasn't sure I approved of: it was on fire.

Black smoke poured out of windows, lit from behind by a red-orange glow. Rain sputtered and hissed where it touched hot metal roof, and even as I watched something inside gave way with a resounding crash, sending showers of sparks into the sky.

I searched with my powers for anything person-shaped, but the interior was too far and too obstructed to get that kind of clarity, and I didn't dare get closer for a better view. Instead, I did a quick circle of the building, looking for anyone who might have some idea of what was going on, and hopefully what needed to be done about it.

Mercy was on the far side, much closer to the blaze than I would've liked. A portal brought us closer together, but a wave of heat hit me as soon as it opened, baking the rain off my face and fogging up my glasses. I didn't step through, instead leaving it hanging between us.

"Is anyone still inside?"

Mercy startled, whirling around. "How long have you been standing there?"

"I just got here. Is anyone still inside?"

"Christ, we need to put bells on you or something, 'cause that portal shit is way too quiet."

"Is anyone still-"

"Rescuing people is for firefighters. A category in which you are not included, in case you had any ideas." She smacked her gum.

"I'm going in," I said.

Mercy spun, faster than I would've thought possible, and caught me by one wrist. Her hand was burning hot. "Find the firefighters, help them get here. You aren't going anywhere near a burning building. Do you understand?"

"Let go of me."

"I don't have to let go of you for you to find the firefighters and help them get here. Start with the fire station, it's on 31st and Marion, then work your way from there to here until you find them."

"I don't want to hurt you, Mercy."

She made a sound between a laugh and a snort. "Kiddo, if you think I'm afraid of you, you've got another thing coming."

I clenched my fists, fingernails finding familiar grooves in my palms. I had to force myself to relax them before I could draw blood. "Don't laugh at me ever again, or I swear to God I'll make you pay for it."

She caught my other hand and yanked me through to her side of the portal, transferring both of my hands to one of hers and wrapping an arm around my back. "What're you gonna do? From this vantage point, two inches away, what can you do to me? Nothing. So go ahead, dump me in the middle of the ocean the second you get the chance. But right here, right now, you make a portal to the fire station on 31st and-"

"Will you two get over here and help me?" Gauthier shouted.

Mercy dropped me like she'd been shocked, and I stumbled back a few paces, rubbing my wrists. Gauthier stood in the doorway, holding it open with one shoulder, her back to the flames. In her arms, she held a stack of folders and loose papers.

"What on Earth are you doing?" Mercy shouted.

"I'm getting things out, like you should be doing. In case you haven't noticed, Mercy, the building is on fire. There's a filing cabinet on the second floor, second window from the left from your perspective. Get it down here, then ... I don't know. Look for things, there isn't time to prioritize. As much as you can before it burns."

She shuffled over to us and dumped the papers on the ground, then turned around and ran back inside.

"Looks like you've been overruled," I said, not making any effort to keep the smugness out of my voice. Mercy glared at me, but said nothing.

I moved to open a portal, but hesitated. A half-remembered fire safety lecture was niggling at the back of my mind. If you were escaping a burning building and came to a closed door, you had to check whether it was hot with the back of your hand. If it was hot, you didn't open it. I remembered being in school, a firefighter having us line up (crawling, I remembered, because smoke rose) and touch a door with the backs of our hands.

"Are you just gonna sit there, or are you gonna do something?" Mercy said.

"I'm worried about backdraft," I snapped. That was what it was called, backdraft. An oxygen-deprived fire could flare up if you fed it fresh air.

I gave it another moment's thought, then started working. I knew what to do.

The rain was heavy and frigid, and the wind blew it everywhichway to get under hats, into coats, and beneath umbrellas. Everyone on the whole eastern seaboard knew, you didn't leave home without a raincoat and umbrella, you stuck to covered sidewalks, and you plotted your route to stay indoors as much as possible. I could use that. Beginning at the nearest corner and working my way room by room, I opened flat portals from the ceilings of rooms to the air over the trainyard, taking care to keep them from overlapping so that as much rain as possible made it inside. As predicted, a few portals visibly flared up, sending plumes of fire and smoke into the sky, and I winced at the thought of whatever had been inside.

As a whole, though, I thought I could feel the fire dying down.

Finally - or at least it felt that way, though it'd only been a minute at most - when I'd finished opening every room to the elements, I made a doorway to the filing cabinet in the room behind the second window on the left.

"I'll take this end, you take the other," I said. Mercy put one hand on her side and one underneath and lifted the whole thing, seemingly without any effort at all. I tried to pick up some of the weight, but to no avail, and wound up ineffectually resting my hands on either side.

Over the next few minutes, we worked our way through the building. We started with cabinets, but by the end we were carrying desks, boxes, even wastepaper baskets outdoors. Eventually, much to my relief, we ran into Gauthier in the basement, pushing a metal lockbox on a dolly. With Gauthier directing us to the most important rescuables, we made rapid progress in clearing the building. If she was upset about the water damage from my indoor rainstorm, she didn't say, and I was confident that the fire was dying rather than growing. It wasn't long before I made a portal overhead to shelter our cargo from the rain, at which point it was, ironically, raining indoors but not outdoors.

An hour later, I sat gasping in the rain. My skin was dry and red, lips cracked and bleeding; the water felt like heaven. I waited until I was shivering before making my way back to where Gauthier and Mercy sat sorting through muddy folders, trying to wrap their heads around what needed to be done to sort through the heap of paper that was all we had left of two weeks' worth of records.

"What happened?" I asked.

Gauthier was still for a long moment. Finally, she said, "someone set the building on fire."

I swallowed. "You mean, someone left a hairdryer running next to a sheet of paper, or-"

"She means someone half-filled a bottle with gasoline, stuffed a lit rag in the neck, and threw it through an open window," said Mercy.

"This is all fucked," said Gauthier. It was the first time I'd heard her swear. It seemed appropriate.

It had been two weeks since we'd formally started, and she'd had construction going for two and a half. We'd needed to renovate the old terminal, which had been in a pitiful state, lay new track, get locomotives in position, clear out warehouses and storage containers, purchase new equipment, and get all the employees trained for a job that wasn't quite like being an air traffic controller, customs officer, or train conductor, but not unlike being all three at once. Now we had no terminal until we could fix it - assuming that was even possible - which meant nowhere to store the ungodly amounts of paperwork an operation like this generated. A not insignificant fraction of our records had been destroyed, and what remained was in disarray and would probably need to be painstakingly restored and copied onto paper that wasn't covered in mud.

"This was calculated," said Gauthier. "Whoever it was had some way of keeping the fire department away, and they almost certainly waited until the Endbringer Preparedness Drill so Tesseract wouldn't be there."

"That's our angle, then," said Mercy. "We need to find out how they sabotaged the emergency response."

Gauthier shook her head. "Right now we need to focus on getting on our feet. We're supposed to be running at full capacity by Wednesday, and if it's at all possible I'd like to keep that."

"I don't think the building is the issue," I said, the words spilling out of my mouth before I'd even realized I was speaking.

Mercy smiled condescendingly at me. "I'm glad you think so highly of us, but three days isn't enough time to build something of this scale. Sure, we could put in an empty shell if we really boogied, used prefab walls and stuff, called in favours, but plumbing, electrical work, painting, furniture, those things take time."

"No," said Gauthier, "I get what she's saying. We could find another building, buy it, or maybe take one we already own, and put up portals all around it, and all around what's left of the terminal. To an outside observer, it's like we picked them up and swapped them, at least as long as the portals are open."

Recognition dawned in Mercy's eyes. "I get it. We don't need to pretend like there's a real building, though. It takes Tesseract like five minutes to keep all these portals open. We can have as many as we need. We could have a non-Euclidean office building."

"Ooh, do you know that building on Medford and Polk in Charlestown, by the community center? James used to say it looked like a church had sex with an office building?"

Mercy's eyes sparkled. "With the really flat side, kinda looks like got sawed in half." She gasped. "We could-"

"Stick it to another building, exactly! Ac- Mr. Chesterfield always wanted to, but he could never justify buying the next lot over for what they were asking. It'd be major brownie points."

"But it wouldn't be permanent, that'd rankle."

Gauthier bit her lip. "Could it be permanent? There's got to be a cape who can just pick up a building and move it, and with Tesseract helping we wouldn't need to move it far. Plus, it'd be much easier to rebuild the terminal in Boston."

I cleared my throat. As if to punctuate it, an entire wall in the guts of the terminal gave way, disrupting three portals where a particularly heavy beam or chunk of drywall hit the edge and distorted it past the breaking point. Bits of ceiling gave way, and where the rain hitting the topsides of the outdoor side of my portals was redirected inside the building, rubble hitting the topsides of the indoor sides was redirected outside, and ash and chunks of wood rained down over the trainyard.

"Shouldn't we be doing something about this?"

Gauthier sighed. "Nothing left to do. It's beyond repair. All that's left is to collect the insurance money, tear it down, and move on."

Mercy snapped her fingers. "Isn't there a cold cape in India who can maintain relative orientations or something?"

"I was thinking of Tōng Líng Tǎ, but he could work too," said Gauthier.

"Tōng Líng Tǎ doesn't exactly do contract work."

"We have an in with her, I think."

"Chesterfield has an in with her. You really want to go asking for favours after this fiasco?"

"Fair point. Maybe-"

"Someone burned down our building!" I shrieked. "Someone sabotaged the fire department and lit a building on fire, with people in it. We've been attacked. We need to call the police, the FBI, Homeland Security, someone. How are you both just completely not upset?"

Mercy shrugged. "It happens. Obviously it wasn't a random act of arson, but let's not overreact."

"We'll deal with it," said Gauthier. "Let's not involve the police until we know what we're up against."

"The fire department thing was just them being practical. They probably just snuck in and slashed some tires or something. And anyway, everyone got out okay."

"You should probably go home and rest. I promise everything will be better in the morning."

I gaped at them, tears forming unbidden in the corners of my eyes. Behind them, I saw a segment of roof give way, revealing a bed of embers and giving a half-hearted infusion of life to the dying flames. The pair were giving me eerily identical sympathetic looks.

I turned on my heel and left.

"Oh!" said Gauthier, just as I was leaving. I hesitated. "That Danish materials tinker, what was his name..."

"Robinson?" said Mercy. "I thought he was Swedish."

I stopped hesitating. Maybe they were right. Maybe it'd be better in the morning.

...

Our house was dark and quiet when I rounded the corner, costume safely stored in my half of the office space in the Downtown. I could be grateful, at least, that none of my things had burned. I couldn't keep myself from walking quietly. The sun was setting, and I didn't really have a decent explanation for coming home so late.

As it turned out, I wasn't the only one. I was just coming up the steps when headlights illuminated the garage door, and I turned to find Dad's car coming in the driveway. We exchanged identical sheepish looks. We hadn't seen much of each other these last few weeks. Dad had more work to do than he'd had in years thanks to my little stunt, and I'd been incredibly busy helping Gauthier set the whole thing up.

I waited for him to unlock the door, rather than go for the one under the mat. We exchanged monosyllabic pleasantries, neither having the energy for actual words.

In the light, he looked as tired as I felt. His hairline might have receded a few milimeters, his eyes grown a bit more sunken. He looked happy, though. More than happy, he looked excited. It felt odd seeing him like that, moreso because he seemed subdued by his lack of energy, like he'd be bouncing off the walls if he weren't too tired.

"You look well," I said.

He looked startled at the observation. "I feel well. Did you eat?"

I nodded.

"I'm just going to have a cup of tea, then. Should I make two?"

"That'd be nice."

"You're looking well too, by the way," he said over his shoulder. "Have things been getting better?"

I bit my lip. I knew he meant school, but in all honesty it hadn't gotten better at all. I still hid during lunches. Emma, Madison, and Sophia still made life hell for me wherever they could. It was still miserable.

But it was better in general. Not in the moment, but between moments. At school, everyone knew I was a victim, a bullied child. At home, Dad tiptoed around the issue, and it coloured every interaction we had. I knew he wanted to make things better, but I just wanted to get away from it and never look back, and as long as he thought it was a big deal, I couldn't escape it.

But Gauthier didn't care if someone dumped pencil shavings down my blouse. Mercy didn't care if someone spat on me in the halls. We were all busy people, and as long as it didn't affect how I did my job they had more important things to do than fuss. It was comforting. Their distance meant my victimhood couldn't reach them, and that gave me a place where I could really forget. Relief.

And it gave me perspective. Once I got past school, real life would start, and no one would ever care again. I'd always known, but now I got it reinforced every day, every second I spent listening to people chatter about building facades and what sort of benches to buy and delivery schedules, and sometimes even having thoughts of my own on the subject. Those things really mattered, not acne and who wore what dress and all the rest of that highschool juvenility.

"Yeah," I said. "Things are getting better."

He nodded sagely, bringing the teapot over and pouring. "I'd forgotten that sometimes the good guys get to win. Maybe we're not there yet, but it's good to be reminded."

He raised his teacup, and I clinked mine against it. Then my brain caught up with what he'd said. "Who won what, now?"

He smiled. "Oh, nothing really, things have been pretty much straight downhill. Some company man came by today and gave a speech, promised higher wages in some pie-in-the-sky future, 'a return to the previous degree of prosperity' blah blah etcetera, the usual drivel. But..."

"But maybe it's different this time?" I offered.

"Hm? Oh, no, I figure they'll keep wages just about as low as humanly possible, unless someone forces them. I guess I just didn't understand that we could force them, until-" he shrugged "-someone showed me."

"The fire?" I said. My voice came out so quiet, even I could hardly hear it.

"You heard about that?"

"I was ... I saw it. You weren't, I mean, you didn't..."

"I wasn't involved," he said. "I'm too old for that kind of thing, anyway. I don't think this was ever really my fight. I spent so long saying, 'we can't fight this,' 'this is the best we'll get,' 'we'll never beat them.' Maybe I was just part of the problem. The unions back in the good old days, they fought for every inch. Maybe I didn't get what it meant to fight for something. To really fight, like it's a war."

"But isn't that wrong? They burned down a building. That's arson, not-"

He shrugged. "Sometimes you have to break the rules. When they come in here and destroy a thousand jobs, take away livelihoods, just to line their own pockets, is it any less wrong just because it's legal? Just because they make the laws, just because their lawyers and their buddies in Washington and their lobbyists make sure they get off scot-free? If we act inside the law, they win. That's just how the game is set up, how they set it up."

He finished his tea. I stared down at mine, half full.

"Jobs aren't the same as buildings. They're just ideas. It doesn't take months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix an idea."

"Yeah, well, let's go tell that to Phil Peterson, see if that pays off his mortgage. Don't worry about it, Taylor. With any luck, by the time you're out of school, we'll be ready to run Priam out of town and rebuild things the old-fashioned way. No capes."

He climbed the stairs and went out of sight, leaving me alone with my tea.

Chapter 9: 203

The Death of Great American Cities 2.03

There's a certain anticipatory stress that comes with growing up. For fifteen years, lazy Saturdays had been followed by lazy Sundays had been followed by lazy Mondays. School was a five and a half hour day in which to do ten minutes of work (being generous), two days off a week, and no real responsibilities.

That was changing. Intentionally on my part, and I had no intention of backtracking, but still a change. Every ounce of power or leverage I got came with one more thing on my to-do list, a progression that showed no signs of stopping.

Three important people had wanted to speak to me that day.

The first came early Sunday morning. I was in bed, not quite awake or asleep. I'd forgotten to switch off my alarm the night before, so it had awakened me at six, much to my chagrin. I hadn't slept well, and hadn't gotten to sleep until well after midnight, so I had no intention of getting up until noon at the earliest. After yesterday's excitement, I needed some rest and relaxation.

My phone, set to vibrate, made nothing but a barely-audible buzz, but it terrified me so thoroughly that I was already out of bed before I got enough of my wits to realize that it was my work phone, not my PRT phone. I tracked down both while I waited for my hands to stop shaking. The former was under my pillow, while the latter had been in my hand when I'd gone to sleep, but wound up buried under the covers sometime during the night. I took a moment to check the display on my PRT phone. 17 hours, 56 minutes until the earliest projected time the Simurgh might attack. The list of potential targets had been narrowed down to eleven; Brockton Bay was still on it.

I answered the phone. "Whatever this is, I hope it was worth giving me a heart attack."

"I would think that, wouldn't I?" said Gauthier. "But then, hearts can be replaced, mornings less so." She was positively chipper, despite the hour. If I didn't know any better I'd suspect she was on Ritalin. Or Crystal Meth.

"I've arranged a lunch meeting with someone who can help with our little problem," she continued. "Can you come in to the office in fifteen minutes?"

I glanced at the clock, as though I expected it to have any answers. "Fifteen minutes? Don't you mean a breakfast meeting?"

"It's lunchtime in Norway."

I suppressed a groan. There went my morning. If every week was like this, my heart may well need replacement. My sleep, too, and with drugs if time couldn't be borrowed or stolen. "See you in fifteen."

Gauthier offered a vague pleasantry and hung up. She had the peculiar skill of being able to give the impression of having said something polite without actually pronouncing an entire word, presumably to save time. I dropped both phones on my bed and trudged to the bathroom.

One abbreviated shower later, I was hastily changing in my half of the office while Gauthier tapped away at her laptop around the corner. She came in while I was still half-decent, a satellite map of Norway in hand, with our destination marked in black marker. I tried, and mostly failed, to work on the portal and finish getting dressed at the same time, and after maybe ten minutes and three progressively more detailed maps I was able to dump my pyjamas on the floor and step out into Oslo sunlight.

Our meeting place was a nice little restaurant called Solberg's, in which we'd reserved a private room. The appointed time was technically seven - one in the afternoon, local time - but we arrived half an hour early, and our contact fifteen minutes.

He was tall and wide, as much with pudge as armor under his coat, with a long face and stubbly chin. Something under his coat poked and prodded at my powers like static electricity.

"Doctor Dynamo," said Gauthier.

Dynamo stared unblinking behind transparent goggles, his eyes glassy and, perhaps, glass - the left moreso than the right. They swivelled independently of one another, focusing on each point of interest for a half-second before moving on. "Ms. Gauthier. I trust you had an uneventful trip." He had a strong accent, like he was gargling potatoes.

"Will it be business first, or pleasantries?"

"If we start our days with work, our dispositions will spoil. Better to have our pleasantries while we have nothing to be unpleasant about."

"If pleasantries are only necessary while we're in a meeting, we might as well have them last," I said. "Then, when we're done with business, we'd have no need for the pleasantries."

"If you take the sour and none of the sweet, your face will stick like that," said Dynamo, eyeing me curiously.

"You can't see my face," I said.

"Neither will anyone else, if it sticks like that."

"This conversation is getting entirely too philosophical for this early in the morning," said Gauthier. "Particularly since it's night for me. Let's call that the pleasantries and move on. As I recall, last we spoke, you expressed a desire to negotiate payment in person?"

"Not in so many words," said Dynamo. "Forgive my English, I am out of practice, not knowing how to word this. Tesseract doesn't speak, only comes along to stand behind you, and you are supposed to be the one making the decisions, yes? But I knew a girl, young cape, who was tricked by a rich gangster into making his weapons. This gangster was killed, and the killer took the girl as spoils, and his killer did the same. It was very long before they caught on to who was doing the tricking, and who was running the gangs once this prize was taken. When you are not a player, you are not a target, and so a little girl might play at not being a player. Is this blunt? I am trying to be clear, but this is not my language. I was not interested in speaking with the flunky."

"Ah ... ha," said Gauthier. "So, you believe that..."

"That I'm manipulating Gauthier?" I finished. "That's-" I cut myself off. I didn't really know what to say to that.

"I think you're misinterpreting the nature of our relationship, Doctor," said Gauthier. "Tesseract has neither the time nor the expertise to run a business on this scale, nor could one person manage something so large to begin with. Priam has dozens of employees, each of whom contributes their own talents and expertise to the greater project. Boiling it down to one person or another operating as some sort of puppetmaster ignores the reality of the business relationship."

I frowned. That had sounded suspiciously like corporate speak for 'obviously I'm in charge you idiot, she's fifteen.' Of course, that was pretty much true.

Doctor Dynamo steepled his fingers. "Is that so? Then I suppose I've had you two come all this way for nothing. Ms. Gauthier, the offer you made on the phone is entirely reasonable, and I would be remiss to refuse it. However, while I could always use the money, I could never forgive myself for passing up on such an opportunity. I would be willing to do the job at cost, in exchange for Tesseract's help with a personal project."

Gauthier sipped her coffee. "I don't suppose that, if I ask Tesseract's opinion before volunteering her for your 'personal project,' you'll take it as evidence for your theory?"

"Not at all. Business partners often confer, and for that matter it would be unreasonable of me to ask such a thing without first explaining the project itself." Dynamo turned to face me. "I would like you to help me launch a satellite."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gauthier's eyes widen, then narrow. It was as close as she ever came to emoting.

"A satellite?" I asked.

"It's a kind of machine that orbits the Earth," said Dynamo.

I blinked. "Orbits? Like, 'planets orbiting the Sun' orbits?"

Dynamo nodded.

The word 'why' was on my lips, but I couldn't bring myself to say it. I had a very ugly idea of why, the product of certain books I'd been reading, of what you could do with the right math and the wrong intentions...

"We used to use them for communications, which is what I have in mind. With my own technology, I believe the satellite could send and receive an arbitrary number of text communications, allowing customers to send intercontinental messages in hours, rather than weeks. I'm sure you see the potential. In fact, with multiple satellites, real-time communication may even be possible."

I made a relieved sound.

"Getting it into orbit would be a trivial effort, for you," Dynamo continued. "The portal you made to come here covered far more distance. Of course, it is not uncommon for powers to have arbitrary limitations. Have you tested your vertical reach?"

I swallowed. "Yes. It ended pretty badly, though. I was using an airtight box to keep the portal in, but it wasn't very strong, so it broke almost straight away and I had to stop. I thought it was about five thousand miles, but I'm not sure about that number. I'm sure I could go farther if I had a better box."

The estimate had been pretty loose, but I hadn't had much time. My power didn't give me measurements, but it did give me a general sense of the topography of Earth. Going out, I had been fairly confident that I'd made it more than twice the distance between New York State and California, assuming I was right about what California felt like.

Dynamo nodded. "Fantastic. I see you were right all along, Ms. Gauthier; there is no need for puppetmasters when our agreements are all mutually beneficial. We do have an agreement, don't we?" There was an edge to his voice.

I looked at Gauthier. She had a tortured look on her face.

"I don't have a problem with it," I said cautiously.

"I suppose that settles it, then," said Dynamo. His tone suggested he believed no such thing.

"No," said Gauthier. She shook her head. "No, we can't agree to that. Not without further deliberation on the subject."

"Hm, such a shame. It was my understanding you were in a rush," said Dynamo. "I suppose that's that, now that you've both come to that decision. That is what you meant by 'we,' isn't it? This is not my first language, you understand."

Gauthier glared. "Are you suggesting that this is somehow evidence for your absurd puppetmaster theory?"

"Certainly not. Neither of you is any sort of puppetmaster."

"Launching a satellite is not a small matter. Certainly not something to undertake without first consulting governments involved, and least of all right before a Simurgh attack."

Dynamo shrugged. "I never suggested I needed the launch today. In fact, doing it after the attack sends a powerful message, no? It says we will fight back. The European Union has already agreed, as well, though of course they will reserve their statements until after my satellite has proven itself."

"Which it won't," said Gauthier. "The Simurgh will destroy it."

"My satellite is Simurgh-proof," said Dynamo.

I accidentally inhaled my water, sending me into a coughing fit and spilling my drink all over the table. Gauthier and Dynamo covered their cups while I recovered.

"That is the most hubristic thing I have ever heard," said Gauthier.

"It's true, and I'll say as much publically before the launch," said Dynamo. "Her manipulations can't touch it. If she wants it down, she'll have to do it in person."

"You're insane."

"So, do we have a deal?"

"No!" Gauthier snapped.

Doctor Dynamo ignored her; he was looking at me. I stared into my drink. I wasn't running on enough sleep to make this kind of decision.

On the other hand, this was what I wanted - everything I wanted. Hadn't I said I wanted to kill the Endbringers? This wasn't killing them. It was less than that. This was defying the Endbringers. How could I honestly tell myself I was going to destroy them, if I was afraid of drawing their eye?

I swallowed.

"I still want to do it. I mean, if it's alright with you, Ms. Gauthier. It doesn't have to have anything to do with Priam, but I want to do this."

Gauthier took a deep breath, looking at me with what was probably supposed to be warmth. "No," she said again. "As your friend-" she stressed the word, glaring at Dynamo out of the corner of her eye "-I don't think you should tarnish your reputation by associating yourself with a project doomed to failure."

I met her gaze. "I understand. I still want to do this."

Even if it fails, I didn't say. Because if people think of me as the girl who tried to defy the Endbringers and failed, then maybe they'll think I'm an idiot. But if there's anyone out there who thinks like me, maybe they'll understand. Maybe they'll think of me as someone willing to take chances on ideas, even if they're risky. And if there's even one more person out there who's like me, some kid with no resources or connections, with nothing going for them but a power and an idea-

-maybe they'll come looking for me.

Founding a cabal of parahuman idealists was somewhere around Phase 3,167 in my revised plan, but there was no time like the present.

I got the sense that was a little too radical for Gauthier's tastes.

Gauthier pinched the bridge of her nose. "This will not work. Nothing is immune to the Simurgh's power. What he's proposing is nothing but a high-velocity pile of space debris aimed at the most convenient available population center."

"Oh?" said Dynamo, in mock curiosity. "Tell me, Ms. Gauthier, if my satellite is no more immune than our Tesseract over here, then isn't everything that we do meaningless? Unless, of course, some of us are more immune than others."

Gauthier froze. "The Simurgh has a history of destroying satellites, much more regularly than people. There's no reason to tempt fate."

"Is that so? How disappointing."

Gauthier grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise, yanking me out of my seat. "This conversation is acquiring subtext."

"Have a nice-" said Dynamo. If he said anything else, it was cut off as Gauthier hurried me through the door and into the street.

The second call came in the early afternoon. Dad was working, having given up on the idea of weekends altogether, so I was curled up on the couch with a book. I was reading aloud to myself, having at some point got the idea that it'd make me more comfortable speaking in public if I practiced my enunciation, though after a chapter or so I was feeling quite silly.

"'Manuel,'" I read, "'you asked us to wait while Mike settled your questions. Let's get back to the basic problem: how we are to cope when we find ourselves facing Terra, David facing Goliath.'"

"'Oh. Been hoping that would go away. Mike? You really have ideas?'"

"'I said I did, Man,' he answered plaintively. 'We can throw rocks.'"

The sound of a phone ringing shocked me out of my reverie. Keeping my place with my index finger, I leaned over to where my phones were stacked atop one another on the coffee table, by my left foot.

It was my PRT phone, not my work phone, that was ringing. My blood turned to ice.

It's twelve hours too early to be the Simurgh, I reminded myself.

She could be early, said some rebellious corner of my mind.

This isn't a mass-call. Mass-calls don't ring. Whatever it is, is just for me.

My heart declined to stop pounding. I answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"Good afternoon. This is Alice; is Theresa there?"

"Speaking," I said.

"Could I ask you a favour? I was out visiting relatives by the Boardwalk, and my car broke down. Could you give me a lift?"

'Theresa' was my less-conspicuous code name. When you made a call to a PRT phone, there was no guarantee the person on the other end was in on your secret. Rather than risk outing anyone you called by talking openly about cape business, we used coded names and ambiguous phrasing to make the conversation less of a giveaway.

I didn't remember an 'Alice,' though. Aegis was 'Atticus,' which was close, but the voice was distinctly female; and the only female heroes in Brockton Bay were Miss Militia, Battery, Brandish, Lady Photon, Laserdream, Glory Girl, Shadow Stalker, and Vista. Milly, Betty, Beatrice, Lydia, Liz, Gertrude, Sandy, and Veronica - no Alice.

On the other hand, I wasn't busy.

"No problem. Where should I meet you?"

"I'm at the corner of Auburn and 5th. There's a cafe with a covered dining area, can't miss it."

"I'll see you there."

I bookmarked my book and hung up the phone. My costume was at the office, but it only took a few minutes to get there and get changed.

The hard part was finding the place. We had plenty of maps, but I'd never had cause to read one before. I'd assumed it would be easy, but for the life of me I couldn't find either Auburn or 5th. I was only willing to waste five minutes on the fruitless search before I folded up the map, grabbed my umbrella, and walked out into the rain to find the place the old fashioned way.

I knew in a general sense where 5th was, having passed it more than once while en route somewhere else. I walked briskly, only stopping to read the signs before moving on. With my powers, each step took me to a new street, and 5th Avenue was only the eleventh I checked. Mercifully so, since every time I used my powers I left behind someone frantically scrabbling for a phone or camera, trying to snap a photo before I got away.

This is how I found her:

By the Boardwalk there was a crowd. It spread out over two blocks, starting with a ring of lightly-packed interested bystanders, progressing to young adults taking pictures and video on their cell phones, and concluding in a dense nucleus of parents with children on their shoulders. They parted as I approached, clearing a path for me. It was only then that I had a clear view of her.

'Alice' sat crookedly on a table, an umbrella sheltering her from the rain as she posed for a photo with a gleeful preteen girl. Her cape hung limp and damp, but still managed to convey a sense of drama. Her smile was more of a smirk, but there was a hint of something genuine in her eyes, barely visible behind her visor.

I stared, and Alexandria met my gaze. I tried desperately to think of something to say, but came up blank.

"This is me," she said. "Sorry to leave, but duty calls. I'm sure the crooks came out of the woodwork as soon as I left." She set the girl on the ground and half-walked, half-floated over to me, feet barely touching the ground. "Shall we?"

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. What could I even say? 'I have a poster of you in my bedroom'? 'Can I have your autograph, please'? Alexandria, the world's greatest superhero, was talking to me. It was one thing to know, intellectually, that we were arguably in the same ballpark, power-wise. It was another to come face-to-face with the most powerful person in North America - maybe the world.

I tried and failed to gather my confidence. Instead, I busied myself with my work. Blessedly, I had an open portal to L.A. in my office. It only took a few moments to work my way over. In the mean-time, I put on a little show. It was a trick I'd been practicing, faking a long build-up time for long-distance portals. By opening two portals right next to one another, I could create patterns of distortions in the air, like light refracted through glass. Done just right, it looked like the fabric of spacetime itself was buckling under the strain of my power.

Or something a little less melodramatic, whatever. The truth was that my power didn't look all that impressive, and some of Gauthier's aides had complained of motion sickness from looking directly at the portals while I daisy-chained them. Hiding the real portal between two dummies made the process less seizure-inducing.

Alexandria hardly seemed to see my show. She moved constantly, swivelling this way and that to wave at cameras. She waved and smiled, but her eyes were on the windows and rooftops, not the people.

I finished my portal, and she turned to face it a moment before I dropped the screens, making it seem as though I'd been waiting for her. I turned to leave, but she casually slung an arm around my neck and spun me around to pose for a photo.

"We need to talk. Can I buy you lunch?" Alexandria whispered in my ear.

I managed to twitch my head in the affirmative, trying vainly not to look too shell-shocked for the cameras as she pulled me through the portal.

She lowered until her feet touched the pavement, and I was surprised to note that she was a tad shorter than me. Curiously, she didn't stop flying, doing an astonishingly perfect pantomime of walking without actually putting her weight on the ground. If not for my powers, I'd never have noticed. But then, I supposed that she couldn't stop flying without damaging the pavement; she weighed as much as an SUV.

For all that she'd mentioned crooks not a minute ago, Alexandria didn't seem in any hurry. I said as much, and she smiled.

"The I.X. turned up at the Pan American thirty seconds after I left. By now, they'll be gone. When your villains have precogs, you learn that most of the time the best you can do is force them to not act. Theoretically, I could stop a bank robbery, therefore I am stopping theoretical bank robberies. Oh, this place looks nice."

She stopped abruptly in the street not two paces from the portal, where a surprised hot dog vendor stammered apologetically. I had already eaten, and as far as I could tell Alexandria didn't have a digestive system, but we got two hotdogs, which we apparently didn't have to pay for.

"So," I said awkwardly, staring morosely at my hotdog. It wasn't raining, which would've been an exciting change for me, being an Atlantic girl, if I weren't entirely capable of popping over to Hawaii for an afternoon. As it was, it was overshadowed by the holy crap-ness of the situation.

"Yes," said Alexandria, as though I'd made a coherent point. "I wanted to have a little chat, but it's not the sort of thing we'd want overheard." She glanced up, looking left, then right, then doing a full counter-clockwise spin.

It occurred to me that Alexandria was in her thirties at the youngest. It shouldn't have been surprising to me, and wouldn't have been before, but she didn't act thirty, and I had to keep reminding myself that she wasn't a teenager. I'd read that she was super-intelligent, smarter than any normal human could be. Was this an act, maybe to give her more opportunities to check the rooftops and windows for assassins? Or to put the public at ease, showing a bubbly personality so people didn't fixate on the fact that she could fistfight a tank? Was it a side-effect of her powers, locked in the frame of mind she'd been in when she got them, an eternally teenaged genius?

Or, worst of all but definitely not out of the realm of what I'd read of the more dangerous Thinker-class parahumans - that is, those whose powers dealt with information - was it a fabrication for me, specifically? I wouldn't even fault her for it, if she concocted a new persona to optimise all her meetings for the greater good. But what did it say about me, if this was her ideal personality for this conversation?

"That place looks nice," she said, gesturing almost straight up. I had to crane my neck to see what she was pointing at. A shopping mall with a Latin theme and a flat, walkable roof. It was accessible, but deserted, though I didn't know how she'd known that. "Getting up there won't be an issue for you, will it?"

I shook my head, then, realizing she was looking the other way and couldn't have seen me, started to speak, but she'd already flown away. I followed, arriving on the roof just as she sat down at the edge of the roof. She indicated the spot next to her, and, fighting off vertigo, I sat. The wind was cool, and gentle by my standards, and the sun was warm. It was pleasant, and probably pretty as well, though I didn't feel inclined to look down.

"So," I said.

"So, shipping. Not what I'd do with that kind of power, but level-headed as zany schemes go."

"Thanks, I think. Do you think it'll work?"

"I think," she said, "that it will influence the world, both in ways you can predict and ways that you can't, and in ways you approve of and ways that you don't. The balance of those will depend primarily on what you approve of, and secondarily on details I'm not party to."

"How about in ways you approve of? Certain, um, parties, have expressed concerns about unintended consequences."

Like putting every long-haul truck driver in the US out of work.

"Well, I suppose that depends," Alexandria said. "I can't see the future, and the realities of my work leave me more sensitive to the goings-on of the cape world than the civilian. Maybe you'll save us all, maybe you'll crash the economy. The outcome will likely fall somewhere between those two extremes. Just keep your ears open, and the rest of us will do our best to warn you if you're about to make a big mistake."

We sat in silence for a while. Alexandria took a bite of her hot dog, and I watched fascinated as she quite literally inhaled it, and it was torn apart by nuclear fire in her windpipe. One mystery solved. She caught me looking, and I blushed and turned away, though something about her expression made me certain she knew I'd been staring at her digestion, not her chest.

"What do you know about cape fights?" she asked at last.

"Not much. I used to follow that stuff, but I don't think that counts."

"Mhm. There's a lot of 'who'd win in a fight' stuff. You'll hear about ratings; Blaster 5, Master 2, Thinker 12, whatever. Could so and so's fire burn through whatshisface's armor? Who's stronger, King Konquest or Lady Lakefront? That kind of stuff. Fights I've been in, that never matters. 'Course, I never fight anyone tougher than me, unless you count the Endbringers, so maybe other people feel differently. In my experience, though, it comes down to information. You know how their powers work, and how they don't work."

I nodded.

"In Brockton, the big guy's Lung. Lots of cities have one, not many have two. The one cape who's just that much tougher than the next guy. I guarantee you, though, what keeps Armsmaster up at night isn't what Lung's going to do. It's who's gonna turn up on the E88 roster. It's the same for me. We keep international databases, team leaders have cram sessions, trying to keep up with roaming villains, what crazy gizmo's coming out of Toybox next. Still, we get blindsided nearabout every second time. Even me."

"So-" I said.

"So," she said. "You want to build a commuter rail, so anyone in the world can go anywhere else in the blink of an eye, for the price of a subway ticket."

"Not if you think it's a bad idea! We don't even have anything concrete. We wouldn't want to cause any problems."

She smiled, and drifted off the ledge, so that she was hovering in front of me. "Turn it around, though. Think it through, from both sides. What do the villains have to worry about?"

"Well," I said, "you could all show up to the same bank robbery. Instead of fighting five heroes, they're fighting-" I did a bit of mental math "-three hundred? Probably more. But that's kind of silly. You could rotate teams, though, send the Seattle team to New York and the New York team to San Fransisco. They wouldn't know what to expect."

Alexandria nodded. "That takes time, though. Take the subway, get to HQ, put on our costumes, get to the robbery. They'd have to be fast enough to get away before we can call in reinforcements, and they'd never be able to fight us head-on. Brockton Bay would have an easier time of things, at least."

I followed the chain of implication, considered suggesting what Alexandria was hinting at, and decided to skip that step. "You want your own portal network?"

She made an innocent gesture. "Hey, you don't hear me suggesting it. Just making sure you know the whole picture. I'm not going to pretend it isn't on the wishlist, of course."

It takes me about half a minute a day to maintain a portal. How many PRT Departments are there? Fifty? Sixty? Half an hour a day, for the rest of my life, and in cities that already have portals. But I'm getting faster...

"That's a lot of extra portals."

Alexandria nodded sagely. "Don't feel pressured about it. I really did just want you to know the whole picture. Anything beyond that is just gravy."

I sighed. "I hope that's everything. With the day I've been having, I might just save or destroy the world by dinner. Or both."

"Well, not quite everything."

I sighed again, pointedly. "Go ahead, then. Is there a small fishing village that's economically dependent on overharvesting Lake Superior? A trolley about to run over five cute puppies, but I can redirect it so that it only mows down one adorable kitten?"

"No, nothing like that. This one's personal, and feel free to take your time on it. It's something you'll want to discuss with your parents. I know you already turned down the Wards-" I opened my mouth to protest, but she went on "-but hear me out. Give me one hour a day. No patrolling, no fighting crime. Just one hour a day. You'll travel the world, meet interesting people, and for the other twenty-three you'll have the full resources of the PRT when you need them. We can get you into your choice of any school in the US and Canada, public or private, and any university after that, and as a formal member of the L.A. Wards you'll have all the perks. The best medical care on the planet, invites to the fancy parties we'll be throwing to celebrate our many, many victories, you name it."

I swallowed. Any school I wanted. I could start over, leave Brockton Bay and the locker incident behind - without us having to move. Or with it, if Dad wanted to move to L.A.

But that meant telling Dad, which I couldn't do until I cleared up the Olympic swimming pool-sized mess that was his opinion of my secret identity. That was going to be one hell of an awkward conversation, just as soon as we managed to convince him the pay increases were really happening.

"Think about it," she said, and turned to go. She'd probably known before she'd asked.

"Wait!" I shouted.

She turned, confused, and hovered. "Yes?"

"What do you know about satellites?"

It was dark when I finally got back to Brockton Bay. Alexandria had been singularly unhelpful about Dynamo's proposal, alternately raising points for and against it. Once we'd got to talking, I found her to be an endless font of information and analysis (although she'd refused to comment on the subject of Simurgh-proofing, which was disturbing).

Everything about today had been exhausting. My brain was too burned out to think anymore, but I still had to work out what the deal was with the satellite, and what to do about Alexandria's offer, and how to convince Dad that Priam was good for Brockton Bay, and what to tell Gauthier about what I'd learned from Dad about the arson, not to mention all the things Alexandria had brought up about tariffs and invasive species.

I hadn't quite started changing when my phone rang. I picked it up. The display identified the caller as 'Gertrude.' Glory Girl. I set it down, screamed, pivoted, and punched the wall.

Pain shot up my arm, driving me to my knees. Cradling my injured fingers, I picked up the phone left-handed and answered.

"Hello?" came the voice on the other end.

"Hello, Gertrude" I said sunnily.

"Uh, yeah, sure. Listen, do you wanna come out to the old factory on Moore? We're having a bonfire."

"That sounds fun," I said, managing to almost sound like I believed it. "I'll see you there."

I hung up. At home, my book was beckoning. But they wouldn't have called me if they didn't need me, and by the sounds of it a building was on fire. Again.

I left.

Moore was in the northernmost part of town, right in the middle of one of the most deserted areas. The buildings were old, and packed tight, and the streets hadn't seen repair in years. I had a sickening idea of why they needed me. If the fire trucks couldn't get there, this whole area could turn into an inferno before they could stop it.

I was three streets off when I saw the smoke, a mercifully thin tendril, not even visible from town. Even the graffiti didn't reach here. The city was given over to nature. I passed a tree growing in the middle of the street, where the asphalt had gone entirely.

Two streets. The wind started to smell like smoke and ... cooked meat. I shivered. The streets were impossible to navigate, cluttered with uneven piles of debris and twisted metal hulks.

One street. I could see hints of the blaze above the old factory. Its ancient sliding doors had been chained shut, but the chain had been broken by something impossibly hot. I could see where droplets of molten metal had fallen and cooled, leaving little circles the size of quarters on the pavement. There was no one in sight, but I could sense people moving behind the doors.

With my right hand out of commission, I didn't think I could budge it. My heart pounding in my throat, I knocked. The sound echoed in the empty streets.

A pause, as footsteps approached. The ancient door groaned and screeched as someone forced it along twisted rollers with inhuman strength. It caught on something, then lurched all at once, jumping aside to reveal -

Glory Girl. Behind her were Vista, Gallant, Browbeat, and Clockblocker, and to the side Aegis, Shielder, and Panacea. Kid Win roasted marshmallows by the heat of a bonfire while Laserdream threw glittering nimbi into it, each one sending up showers of sparks and making the fire perceptibly hotter.

"You're having a bonfire," I observed.

"Yeah," said Glory Girl.

"What's the occasion?"

She looked away. "Last night on Earth, maybe, for some of us."

Right, that. Somehow I'd managed to stop thinking about the impending Endbringer scenario for thirty seconds. "We're still on the list?"

She nodded. "Down to six."

I wasn't surprised. I'd known this was coming. Behemoth destroyed our industries, and Leviathan our institutions, but the Simurgh had eyes only for our minds. Those who spoke out for peace were remade into demagogues and rabble-rousers, brilliant scientists became saboteurs and terrorists, and our greatest heroes became our cruellest villains. Everyone else might expect Behemoth to come for us, but I'd known from the start it would be the Simurgh, could only be the Simurgh.

Maybe a party is just the thing. After all, the world might well end tomorrow. For some of us, anyway.

Chapter 10: 204

The Death of Great American Cities 2.04

In accordance with PRT policy, on Monday morning I was hit by a bus.

I wasn't really, of course, but excuses had to be made to remove me from witnesses. The Simurgh had a habit of attacking at the least convenient possible time, so strategically important capes had to be excused from anything that couldn't be ditched at a moment's notice without jeopardizing our identities. For me, that meant that my father and the faculty at Winslow High were informed that I'd been run over by a bus and would be in hospital for at least two weeks. A suitably bruised and battered double grown in horrifying fashion from one of my cells would be lying comatose in a hospital bed until I "recovered," just in case anyone decided to visit.

Even knowing her brain was just a circuit board stapled to the inside of her skull, with barely enough processing power to keep her lungs and heart running at the same time, it was disconcerting.

Brockton Bay PHQ gave me a cozy little guest suite buried in a sub basement, and an anonymous closet in an unused building three miles away I could use for a portal exit. I ate a lot of street food.

Mostly I worried, and to get rid of the worries I worked. There was a lot of work to do. Paperwork needed to be replaced from copies stored off-site, and we hadn't finished moving furniture yet, both of which could be done much faster with my help. There were also the trucks: although we hadn't finished laying track yet, we'd already started shipping frankly impressive amount of cargo, mostly through truck routes which I needed to maintain, reposition, and recreate constantly. On top of that, the gravel kicked up by the trucks' tires was cutting down the portals' lifespan to a paltry twelve hours, to my eternal chagrin.

But it was mindless work, and there wasn't even enough of it to keep me occupied sixteen hours a day, and with Taylor Hebert officially laying comatose in a hospital bed, I didn't have much of a life out of costume. So I had a lot of time to worry.

The Simurgh would come. She was an unstoppable killing machine, with a seemingly endless array of powers, who pulled out at least one complete surprise in every battle. To make matters worse, precogs had been picking up an enormous 'death zone' lasting five to ten minutes after she landed, with only a handful of capes in existence durable enough to escape unscathed - and I was probably the only person who knew that that wasn't her surprise.

But when the call came just before dawn on Thursday, February 24th, I wasn't afraid.

I was grateful for how simple my costume was; I beat everyone save Miss Militia and Battery, who'd already been about and in costume, to the mustering ground. Battery had my visor in hand already, and clipped it to my mask.

I was in the zone. I'd worked out a system over the last few weeks to shave almost twenty seconds off my performance by starting some of the work of making my portals before I got there, leaving a complex trail of very small portals on the ceiling linking BBPHQ's hallways to their equivalents across the continent. I could already tell that I was beating my best overall time by entire seconds.

The display indicated that the target for the scenario was Montreal. I noticed it, registered that it was not Brockton Bay, acknowledged that that meant that the Simurgh didn't see me as a pressing concern and had put off killing me until next year, or possibly not even then, and felt the ground drop out from under my feet without even breaking stride.

My part of the drills had focused on one-off relocations of entire teams, starting with the assumption that everyone was in position when I started making the portals. In practice, though, since I was one of the fastest-moving capes in the world, not to mention living in headquarters, that was unlikely to be the case. So, while we still did the one-off relocations during weekly drills, every night Alexandria and Dragon ran me through their own preparations.

Today, I'd be doing a Rabbit Hole. First, I made four portals to the destination - today Montreal, because apparently I wasn't going to do anything important for at least another year, and realistically for the rest of my life - in the center of BBPHQ's mustering ground. Then, I made eight more in a ring around that, leading to eight other mustering grounds. Then, in each of those eight, I made seven more portals to yet other mustering grounds. 8 + 8 x 7 = 8 + 56 = 64, out of 60 total branches of the Protectorate, leaving four portals to lead to mustering grounds in London, Paris, Berlin, and Stockholm.

(Europe had its own teleporters, but none with the range to cross the Atlantic.)

So for a cape in Hawaii, it was just a matter of going from Honolulu to New York, from New York to Brockton Bay, and from Brockton Bay to Montreal. The entire Protectorate could deploy from their headquarters to the staging ground in under a minute, on their own initiative.

And I'd just beat my best overall time by almost four whole seconds. How was it that the Simurgh thought some bozo in Montreal was a more important target than me? Alexandria had been in a tizzy for days over the windfall of extra time they had to set up. Even putting aside not having to coordinate manual teleportation for every single cape they wanted to bring in, they had almost fifteen more minutes to coordinate, set up static defenses, and distribute equipment.

"Tesseract-" said a voice in my ear.

"Augh!" I exclaimed, whirling around to see that, in fact, there really wasn't anyone standing behind me.

"I'm speaking through your earpiece," said Dragon. "It's attached to your visor. Sorry, I forgot we only added it last night. You probably aren't used to wearing one."

"Right, yes." I glanced at the clock on my display. How much time had I just wasted by freaking out over nothing? "What do you want me to do?"

"Relax, first of all," said Dragon. The clock in my display winked out, following in quick succession by the rest of the readouts, leaving me with nothing but a faint blue glow colouring my vision. "Deep breaths, there's no hurry. I only need you to pick up a few capes, and then you're going to assist with evacuation. Portals in shelters only; we're still waiting for approval on your other ideas."

I waited for instructions, like directions or maybe a map to whoever I was supposed to pick up, but instead my display changed to a video of a still lake, with the word INHALE superimposed on top.

I wanted to protest, but I knew that would just waste more time. I inhaled and exhaled on cue until Dragon told me to stop. It was only after she'd given me a map of someplace in Alaska that I said, "I wasn't panicking."

"We'll discuss it later, I promise. Right now, I only have a few more things for you to do."

I focused on my work. Alaska was cold, Spain was hot, and Japan was full of Japanese people. I didn't really register any of it, too busy rushing to get the next thing done. My powers didn't feel as responsive as they had earlier. Dragon forcing me to stop had knocked me out of my rhythm, and now it was just business as usual. Once the pickups were done, I was helping to move equipment and supplies, and then after that I was making portals inside the shelters.

That last one was a compromise. I had the idea of peppering target cities with evenly-spaced portals in the middle of streets, enough to evacuate every single person. Alexandria pointed out that the drills had focused on getting people into the shelters, so putting the portals there would prevent confusion. Dragon added the risk of stampedes, obstructed streets, and mass panic.

So it was a compromise, one that meant anyone who didn't make it to the shelters in time wouldn't be evacuated.

I didn't have all that much to do. For the most part, anything that could be done without me, was being done without me, just by dint of the fact that they hadn't had time to update all their plans to account for the fact that I was available. Only the most time-intensive tasks and the ones already demanding additional administrative resources, like routing around obstacles, had been switched over. It wasn't long before the time came when I asked "what's next," and Dragon answered:

"Nothing! Good work today."

"Alright. Where's the field hospital being set up? I need to make sure they didn't switch my henchfolks on me again. It takes like half an hour before people stop flinching when they walk through a portal." I habitually checked the place in my display where the clock usually was, but Dragon still hadn't put it back.

Dragon was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, I thought you'd already been told. You aren't being deployed to the field hospital."

"But where else would I go? I haven't been trained for emplacements yet; Alexandria said there wasn't time before this scenario." I furrowed my brow, turning it over in my head.

"High Command has requested your help moving supplies for the refugee centers."

I stopped dead. The control I'd had since that morning evaporated, and I started processing, which I very much didn't want to do.

I also started registering my surroundings, which didn't help. All around me, preparations were underway. A man in glowing armor distributed guns that looked like something out of Star Wars to soldiers in fatigues, stopping to remove a canister of some kind with a practiced motion, then slide it back in slowly, taking care to show them how the mechanisms worked. A man in a hardhat directed a woman in a leotard as she picked up a car that had been blocking the road and lay it on its side as a barricade. Another woman stepped up and touched it, and the metal liquified and reformed in the shape of a miniature castle wall no more than a meter high, complete with tiny crenellations.

This city was about to go to war, and I was being ordered to the sidelines.

"It's a very important job," Dragon said when I didn't respond. "Estimates put total evacuation rate at almost fifty percent, and we'll have another wave as people flee the city in the aftermath. You've done your part; this scenario is predicted to have the lowest death toll of any Endbringer scenario in history."

"Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die," I said. "Maybe fewer if I'm going to help. Endbringer scenarios are supposed to be all hands on deck, and you're sending me to help move supplies. Which they can handle without me for a few hours, by the way. I should know, I've been helping set up those centers for two weeks."

"It was in the works for a while. High Command ruled that your portals expose you to potential attack. Your provisional approval never extended to hot zones, and the entire battlefield is a potential hot zone. You're only allowed to do search-and-rescue in cleared areas, and not for any of the Big Three. I'm sorry, you should've been told sooner."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "You're kidding."

"Setup is finishing and I'm needed elsewhere. Keep the visor on until we give the order to close all the portals, then bring it to the quartermaster in Brockton Bay. New York PHQ is hosting a big breakfast for all the off-site personnel. You should go. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day."

There was a small click, and she was gone.

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," I said.

My job was to go eat breakfast, because breakfast was the most important meal of the day.

The same feeling that had hit me when I'd found out the target was back in force. That ground falling out from under me, stomach forcing itself up my esophagus feeling. The feeling that, actually, maybe I wasn't going to make that much of a difference, maybe I was just going to serve a convenient but ultimately unnecessary supporting role while other people saved the world. Or didn't save the world, as the case happened to be.

I took a few deep breaths, and found that I was already on my way, with a smile on my face. Just like before, following the plan was like second nature. I didn't even need to think about it. High Command wanted me to move supplies, alright.

I was completely fine with that.

The Simurgh descended from the sky like a Biblical angel. Or, I imagined she did, because I couldn't see her, since I wasn't there.

But I could see through a webcam someone had left running, pointing out a fifth storey window. It wasn't perfectly positioned, but I could see some, and the rest I could pretend I could see. There was a break in the clouds as she came down, surveying the city like a conquering empress. She assessed the situation, searching for the enemy army who would oppose her.

And then her eyes fixated on someone, and she raised one hand, delicately, like a queen waving at a crowd. Then an entire building imploded, and the debris crashed down on the defenders like an avalanche.

That last part I saw. Not the Simurgh, just the building coming down, and the heads of some of the defending capes.

Some of the debris was vaporized, some deflected off of forcefields, and yet more caught and trapped in extra spatial prisons.

Then the counterattack came. An armoured knight on a motorcycle couched his lance and charged, flying off a ramp at death-defying speeds to deliver a crushing blow that sent the Simurgh reeling. A fleet of flying attack drones poured in behind him, closing ranks around him to guard against a retalliatory blow that never came.

A woman in all-concealing scarlet veils rose into the air as if on a wire, skirts swirling in an otherworldly wind. She flicked her wrist, and twisting vines burst through windows and up through the ground, shattering asphalt and glass with equal ease. They trussed up the Simurgh, digging thorns like barbed wire into her ashen skin, and still she didn't respond.

Alexandria, resplendent in her armor, took took the center like a hero out of a Greek myth. She opened her mouth and white-hot liquid metal poured out and formed a halo, congealing around her until she couldn't be seen for the glare. Her halo formed into two rings that spun like buzzsaws, with only a faint blur around the edge betraying their serration. She pounced, driving the rings into the Simurgh's neck from either side, carving deep gashes that widened by the second.

Only then did the Simurgh deign to act.

The debris from the fallen building formed into grasping, three-fingered hands. They crawled over one another, meeting at the joints to form spidery monsters of concrete. Immediately the knight was surrounded, and his drones formed into a circle around him, forcefields keeping them at bay.

The woman in red fled into the sky, but the spiders paid her no heed, rushing the vines and carving at them with talons of shattered glass. With each severed vine, a tiny scratch appeared on her skin, until finally, bleeding profusely, she dismissed them, and they died off as one.

A man in gold flew at the Simurgh, swinging gemstone chains to wrap her up. A woman carried by stained glass cherubim sang a mournful song that sent a wave of powdered glass crashing at the Simurgh like a tidal wave, forming into a solid block of glass that entombed her. A teenaged girl, no older than me, led a legion of phantom warriors mounted on zebras to break the knight's encirclement.

And still Alexandria kept cutting away at the Simurgh.

Though the Simurgh was too far buried to be seen, the spiders were joined by four-winged ceiling fan bats, six-legged refrigerator rhinoceroses that spat ice and snow, and a humanoid furniture beast with an oven for a head and five televisions embedded in its chest, each playing a video of a human being subjected to some terrible torture on loop.

The bats flocked around the gemstone-man, forcing him down, closer and closer to the spiders with every passing second. The rhinos met the phantom army and broke it. Their teenaged commander rallied with a wave of small Conquistadors on large birds, but the rhinos froze the birds' wings and crushed the ectoplasmic warriors beneath their polished hooves. The giant raised a single linoleum fist and smashed the Simurgh's prison, sending Alexandria flying five meters and through sixth-storey window. It grabbed at the gemstone chains and tore them free, and cut through the few remaining vines.

Only when she was completely free, without a single hair out of place, did the Simurgh raise both hands like a conductor. The ground shook, a spiderweb of cracks forming in the asphalt. The girl screamed, the vestiges of her phantom army struggling just to keep their commander from falling into the claws of the spiders; the gemstone man tried desperately to escape, but was cut off at every turn by the bats; the stained glass woman had been caught, and her cherubim had resorted to clawing at the spiders that held her.

The two capes who had protected the battalion from the falling building entered the fray, abandoning their defensive positions to try to salvage the situation. The first rode a forcefield like a surfboard, throwing discs of blue light that momentarily halted the Simurgh's construction. But then a gorilla of pipes and electrical wires came barrelling out of a window and crashed down on him, dragging both inexorably to the ground with its bulk.

The second waded through the crowd like a VIP on a runway. Every second she lashed out with a barely-visible distortion in the air, and a monster would lose a head, or a limb, or a chunk of its torso. But no matter how many she dismantled, more took their places, and even when one was taken to bits, its parts would keep moving on their own.

The Simurgh waited expectantly, and I imagined she wanted to know if the third defensive cape, the one who had trapped falling debris in prisons outside of space, would join the fray. I obliged her.

A cubic meter of concrete weighs approximately 2,400 kilograms. If accelerated at a uniform 9.8m/s^2 for 120 seconds, it would reach a speed of 1176m/s, which, as the simple equation K.E. = 1/2 * m * v^2 tells us, gave it a kinetic energy of 1/2 * 2,400 * 1,176^2, or approximately 1.6 * 10^9 Joules. If it were trapped in a box of portals, the top leading to the bottom, the left to the right, and the front to the back, then these conditions would be met; with the air falling at the same speed as the rubble, wind resistance wouldn't factor in, allowing the full force of gravity to come to bear.

Carrying approximately as much energy as a Boeing 767 in mid-flight, a chunk of rubble rematerialized less than six inches in front of the Simurgh's face. She went flying back, travelling six city blocks before she hit the ground with a crash like the fist of God.

I expanded the dime-sized portal I'd been using to extend my senses into Montreal and entered the city. I skipped up to the top of the tallest building in my range, to get a better view of where she'd landed.

I didn't need to gesture to use my powers, but it felt appropriate. I pointed with my index finger, raised my thumb, and curled the rest of my fingers into a fist.

"Bang!" I shouted. It was drowned out by the sound of the second 2,400 kilogram chunk of concrete hitting home, kicking up a cloud of dust that reached the tops of the tallest skyscrapers.

"Ready or not, here I come!"

Chapter 11: 205

The Death of Great American Cities 2.05

A/N: Over the course of this story, I've received some strange comments, so I'll come out and say it: the views of the characters in this story are not shared by the author.

The Simurgh had dug a furrow in the asphalt where she'd hit the ground, bisecting a city street. The upper half of her body had gone through the front window of a store - probably. My follow up had reduced it to rubble, so all I could do was speculate based on what remained of the buildings on either side. I stood on a roof across the street, waiting for her to make the first move. Feathers rained down from above.

The destination had been deliberate. I'd been involved in the evacuation from minute one, and I knew exactly where to go to avoid civilian casualties. We were right on the edge of an enormous, continuous area with 100% evacuation - which I'd created deliberately, using portals to direct stragglers away from danger, against orders from above not to contradict the drills or give preferential treatment. The Simurgh, for her part, tended to try to maximize civilian casualties, which meant we'd known she wouldn't go here, which in turn meant there were no defenders.

There were some things I could never say out loud, because if I did, I'd be written off as an irresponsible idiot and never taken seriously again. So, until I killed an Endbringer (which was a one-way ticket to being-taken-seriously-ville), I couldn't tell anyone that I'd done it to keep the other defenders out of my line of fire, no matter how much sense it made. I personally had more firepower than every other cape who'd ever lived put together, let alone on this battlefield, because I had no upper limit. The kinetic energy equation is 0.5mv^2, and it was that last "^2" that made the difference. An object becomes quadratically more energetic as it goes faster. With no friction to give it a terminal velocity, a 2kg piece of rebar accelerated for ten days by Earth's gravity would carry the force of a nuclear weapon, only without radiation and all pointed in the same direction. When I'd told Director Piggot I was pretty sure I could knock planets around like billiard balls if I wanted to, it hadn't been hyperbole. I wasn't a soldier, or artillery, or any other comfortable little metaphor phrased in the terms of last-century warfare so people could feel safe and relevant. I was the meteor that had wiped out the dinosaurs. I was a force so far outside the norm that sensible people like Piggot and Alexandria and High Command wouldn't be able to wrap their heads around it until they saw me in action.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice, my hands had started shaking an hour ago and never stopped.

The Simurgh stirred. One of her heads lay back, stupefied, eyes half-closed. She levitated herself into a clumsy half-upright position, and I saw that the entire left side of her body was limp. Black ichor dripped from her feet and the tips of her fingers.

I did a mental rundown of my arsenal. I'd never intended to rely on conveniently falling blocks of concrete. A week before, I'd taken over an abandoned mineshaft in Colorado and filled it with portal cubes. I didn't know how much force I needed to use, so I'd given myself a gradient, creating twenty or fifty or a hundred new portal cubes evenly-spaced throughout the day, every day. If there was a limit to how many I could sustain, I hadn't found it. Debris from the burned-out wreckage of the old terminal provided my ammunition. Nobody noticed a that few thousand kilograms of scrap metal and brick never made it to the landfills. I kept a large portal to my stash directly behind me so nothing could sneak up, and thirty more hidden in evenly-spaced positions around the city.

I went for something on the lower end, at a longer distance, to get a sense for how well she could dodge. Instantly, before I'd even formed the portal, she dropped all pretense of injury and flew out of the way, moving faster than I'd ever seen her go without ballistic assistance. Without waiting to see how it played out, I dropped my attack and moved to another rooftop. Even as I closed the portal, I saw the building I'd been standing on disintegrate behind me, reforming into a massive snake with rows upon rows of teeth. It snapped at me, only for its jaws to close on empty air.

Not about to let her have that, I let loose ten shots from my arsenal, originating them directly above her: one aimed at her body, the other nine all around her so she couldn't move out of the way. My low estimate of her speed was rewarded by her avoiding it almost completely, with nothing but a clipped wing for my efforts. I raised portals all around me to block the shrapnel, then jumped directly from that position to another rooftop to avoid her counterattack.

Half a dozen hand-crabs were waiting for me when I arrive. They pounced, but I was too fast. I made my exit, then blew up the building for good measure.

I knew I'd left the Simurgh to her own devices for way too long, and sure enough, she had two hands raised, and gaping fissures were forming in the ground around her. The other two arms were still hanging limp - apparently she hadn't been faking that part, for all that it mattered. Not about to let her finish, I went for a medium payload, then made myself scarce. From a safe distance, I watched the entire block vanish beneath a cloud of dust.

I didn't wait for it to clear. Instead, I went above it, using a portal flush with the street to make a platform high in the air.

I couldn't see her, but I didn't need to. She stood out like hunk of depleted uranium in a helium balloon. Which is to say, she was very dense. Impossibly dense, actually, but that didn't phase me. She was only on the order of about a ten thousand times heavier than Alexandria.

Aiming with my powers, I fired a salvo of low-power shots. She tried to dodge, but this time I'd covered too wide an area for her to clear it in time. A length of rebar impaled itself in her torso, and another caught her in the foot, overpenetrated, and nailed her to the ground. I took advantage of her momentary immobility by throwing in something with a little more punch. The force of the blast put her through two buildings. I guesstimated where she'd end up and welcomed her hard enough to leave an impact crater.

My platform imploded, but I was already moving to the next. Two more quick hops put me directly above her, where she lay in what was left of a supermarket. Deciding on a repeat performance, I went through my stash for more implements of impalement - rebar, railroad spikes, pipes, anything long and thin - and crucified her, nailing all four hands to the ground through the palm, then doing the same for her feet. A few went clear through and into the ground rather than sticking in her, but I moved on without correcting it, going for the wrists, then the forearms, until I got to parts too durable for me. It was cruel arithmetic that anything going fast enough to get through her bicep was also going fast enough to disintegrate, shatter, or explode on impact. I moved on to shooting at her through the walls, each blast doing more damage to the structure of the building. Some missed, thrown off course when they went through, but most hit dead on. It didn't take long before the roof came down on top of her, burying her completely.

My plan was to keep shooting until I ran out of ammo, but I felt something fly at my head from outside my field of vision. Without thinking, I jumped off the platform and into open air.

It was a fifty-storey fall, but I shortened the distance to something more manageable with a portal and hit the ground running. Immediately I was back up on a rooftop, spying the area I'd been moments before. Nothing.

I felt something wet on my cheek and prodded at it with my fingers. There was a deep gash, running from my jaw to just below my eye. I hadn't even felt it. What had hit me?

I found the Simurgh right where I'd left her, and started shooting at the rubble on top of her, but most of my focus was on the sky. Whatever had got me, it was nowhere to be found. I almost wanted to run away, ask experts what they thought, and be fresh and still in possession of all my limbs for next year. Would the Simurgh back off too, to lick her wounds? She still hadn't moved from where she was crucified under the rubble.

Something appeared behind me. Being ready for it, I got a better 'look' at it, so to speak. It was roughly the size of a condor and about as dense as a dust devil, its form shifting erratically, sprouting and losing limbs from moment to moment. I bolted through a portal, but it followed before I could close it behind me. I made another, but a concrete hand formed out of the ground and grabbed my leg, and I went down hard. My knee skidded on the rough pavement, drawing blood. I turned on my back, clumsily punching at where I could still feel the monster. Dozens of cuts materialized on my hand and wrist, and hot blood splashed on my face. It didn't hurt at all.

I wiped the blood from my eyes with my sleeve. The hand was slowly crawling its way up my leg, pushing up my skirt as a consequence, like an abnormally lethal prom date. Acting more on terror than good sense, I picked the weakest shot from my arsenal and blew it up as far from my body as I could. Shrapnel showered over me, and white-hot pain blossomed across my entire side, but I was able to stumble to my feet.

The monster, the one that had followed me, was gone. I didn't know if my punch had killed it or it was just toying with me. Either way, I stumbled my way through half a dozen portals, moving in what I hoped was too erratic a pattern to be followed. I ended my escape in a mostly-empty shelter thirty blocks away from the Simurgh. I distantly remembered emptying it out earlier, so all that was left were the people who hadn't made it before the city had been locked down to keep any monsters from escaping. People scattered in my wake, and a few went for cellphone cameras.

I was losing blood, and fast. I tucked my hand in the crook of my elbow, but it did nothing to staunch the flow, and before long it had soaked through my jacket. If I was going to win this, I had to do it fast or not at all. Again, I was tempted to make a run for it. It was the smart thing to do. Certainly, it was what Dragon and Alexandria wanted me to do. But if I did, I'd be accepting the loss. Even if this drove the Simurgh off, which I doubted it would, seeing as she was winning, they'd never let me try again next year. They'd sooner chain me to a wall, or more likely threaten to do that if I didn't swear I wasn't planning something like this again in front of a room full of soothsayers, precogs, and whatever the hell else they had.

So, it came down to whether I thought I was right, and whether I was willing to bet my life on it.

Maybe it was the blood loss, but as I saw it, there was only one answer. This trick was positively tame by the Simurgh's standards. Heck, this was probably just an appetizer for whatever her real trick was. If I gave up now, Alexandria would play it safe right up until the human race went extinct, and I'd starve to death in a cave in the Himalayas, hiding from the Endbringers. Waiting for the right hand before you made your bet was a nice thought, but I was our royal flush. I couldn't imagine we were going to get anyone more powerful than me, and I certainly couldn't bet thousands of lives on it. It'd be nice if High Command was willing to play ball with me on this one, but they'd made their choice, and anyways a jetpack and a suit of powered armour probably wasn't going to make the difference.

I went back outside. I was starting to feel the cold, now. It was February in Canada, and blood loss and fear couldn't account for all my shivering. It was only one more reason to do this quickly.

The Simurgh was right where I'd left her, but she hadn't been idle. Great crevasses had formed in the street, showing the sewers below, and I knew she was getting ready for her big finish. If she was willing to do it nailed to the floor of a buried supermarket, she wasn't going to stop just because I threw a few rocks at her. Her patience had run out. I needed to end this.

I stood on the edge of a roof, waiting. Just as predicted, I felt something materialize beside me, outside my field of view. Rather than run, I spun on my heel, lashing out with the elbow of my injured arm. Tiny cuts appeared in the fabric of my jacket, but mercifully didn't break through to the skin.

My gamble paid off. Just for an instant, before it broke apart, I saw it.

I felt it break apart, and the sudden wind from its dissipation. The leftmost third of my field of vision went dark, and I knew I had lost an eye. Still, it was what I'd been looking for.

It wasn't just approximately as dense as a dust devil, it was made of dust! Specifically, the dust that I'd covered the battlefield with with my little artillery show. That was how they kept appearing right next to me - she was making them then and there. Heck, it was probably why the defenders hadn't regrouped in the five-ish minutes since I'd shown myself. Someone would've lost a hand to an invisible monster the moment they got close, someone else would've got a good enough look to notice what I hadn't, and they would've had everyone back off while they dealt with the dust. It was standard operating procedure with the Simurgh; slow and steady wins the race, if you lose the city you lose the city. Even Alexandria wouldn't try to engage without support, and with so few eyes, they probably hadn't spotted me since that first engagement. In a way, the Simurgh had done me a very perverse favour, keeping my babysitters from catching up.

I'd probably have felt different if I could feel the worst of my injuries.

I made my way to a vantage point overlooking the spot I'd buried the Simurgh. She was almost ready for her big finale. I could see the water from the sewers frothing and churning through the cracks in the street, and the walls of the buildings had started to melt. If I waited any longer, the city would be swarming with monsters, and not in the manageable numbers I'd seen up until then.

I needed to make this quick.

I made a portal high above the supermarket, leading right into outer space, expanding it until it was five meters across. The vacuum created an immediate windstorm, strong enough to dissipate the dust devils (as I'd decided to call them) the instant they formed. I started battering the Simurgh with increasingly powerful projectiles, knocking the debris into smaller bits that could be pulled out into the portal. The moment she was uncovered, I redoubled my efforts, firing shot after shot into her neck, her eyes, anywhere that looked vulnerable.

Abruptly, the walls stopped melting. The cracks in the ground stopped getting wider, and the bits of metal that still held the Simurgh's arms and legs to the ground tore themselves free all at once. She rose into the air, looking right at me. Her expression never changed, but somehow I knew she was angry, even furious. Like I was a mosquito that had startled her into dropping something expensive.

Then again, maybe it was just the fact that the skin had been scoured off most of her body, exposing black muscle.

She didn't move from her position, but she didn't need to to go on the offensive. Bits of debris destined for outer space stopped mid-flight and came to life, becoming bats, birds, giant beetles, and more exotic things; dragons rose from the ground, minotaurs and cyclopes assembled out of brick and mortar, snails made of asphalt rose from the sewer, melting the street with acid and incorporating the material, growing as they went. I destroyed them all in two quick shots, removing most of the street and surrounding buildings in the process, and I had to shield myself to avoid being shredded by shrapnel.

Before she could recover, I fired back, ten shots in quick succession, each powerful enough to bury her in the ground. She didn't dodge, but they did, veering in mid-air to avoid her. I was beyond surprise; I just registered that it had happened. She stopped making monsters and started flinging telekinetic projectiles at me, but I boxed myself in with portals and switched strategies. I made a portal behind her, bigger than she was, leading to another in front of her. The next shot I fired missed, but when it did, it passed through the portal behind her and came back through the other, looping twice more before escaping.

She sent three chunks of rubble into the building beneath me, and they transformed into moles mid-flight, burrowing through brick like hot knives through butter and forcing me to leave my shelter. I hopped down to street level and started on another set of portals. Once she was surrounded on all four cardinal directions, my shots would keep looping until gravity pulled them out the bottom, or they hit her - hundreds, maybe thousands of chances. If I dumped enough in there with her, she'd be overwhelmed.

Not willing to let me have that so easily, she kept at me, setting a pack of ceramic wolves the size of corgis on me. I jumped back to roof level before they arrived, but she followed up with a giant rubber octopus. I leaped through my portal just in time to avoid a grasping tentacle, and came face to face with a levitating SUV going highway speed.

I had exactly enough time to lament the unfairness of it, but nowhere near enough to get out of the way. She'd known exactly where I was going. But if she could do that, why not before? Why not kill me before I even touched her? Was it just to toy with me?

The world turned indigo as a forcefield materialized around me, and the SUV crumpled like wet tissue paper against it. The forcefield popped like a bubble, but the instant it did, two more took its place, and an instant after that, a veritable rainbow of lasers brought it to a smouldering halt, then reversed its direction and flipped it lengthwise. Still recoiling aimlessly, I lost my feet and fell into someone's arms, and I didn't have the time or attention to see who it was. All the strength had gone out of me. I felt cold, and shaky.

But I had a job to finish.

Three pairs of hands carried me into the air, and so many shimmering and glittering walls, forcefields, robots, armoured capes, and other thing I couldn't begin to count closed in around me that I couldn't see the sun. I could still sense the Simurgh, though. I made a new pair of portals on either side of her, then started firing blindly into the box. No matter how she pushed them, the projectiles always wrapped around back to her. Unable to block them all, she, finally, tried to flee out the bottom.

I was having none of that. I made another portal into space below her, so she was boxed in on all sides. She came to a panicked halt, making vague, slow, pinwheeling motions her with her two working arms in a desperate bid to avoid being drawn into space, and giving her wings a drunken flap. I followed up, dropping a pile of concrete on her head, and she twisted out of the way, barely avoiding it. My next shot came from below, then another from above, which hit her clear in the face, but this time she wasn't so nonchalant about being moved. She gave up all pretense of attack, digging in her telekinetic heels. I didn't give her a chance to recover, hitting her again and again, each blow driving her precious centimeters closer to the edge.

I dropped the portals to space. Behind them were two more portals, leading to one another. She was in a cube.

"Got you," I said. It came out as an indistinct mumble, but that did nothing to dampen my glee.

This was my plan, and I was inordinately proud of it. Her overconfidence would be her undoing. There was no doubt in my mind that the Simurgh could survive being sucked out into space, although she wouldn't be coming back to finish off Montreal after. She could walk off having nuclear weapons go off in her face. She was used to people trying those kinds of things with her - and, because she loved to tease, she never put even a tiny bit more effort than she had to. She'd stayed right there, in that exact spot, just to hammer home how helpless we were.

And now she was in an inescapable box. I'd maintain it every day, work out how to kill an Endbringer, and come back for her. I had all the time in the world.

I'd won.

The Simurgh was examining her prison with her usual nonchalance, but I could tell she was looking for a way out, and I knew for a fact it wasn't there. She ran her fingers along the edges, as if looking for a seam, wandering closer and closer, like she was afraid to touch it. Then she squared herself and floated right through, as if there was nothing there, and suddenly all I could feel was pain.

Chapter 12: 301

Discourse on Inequality 3.01

The world was like a gradient of gray, ranging from the dull steel colour of the clouds to the dark, speckled concrete that was barely distinct from black, to the pale and shimmering fog that kept me from seeing more than a few feet in front of me. Only the spires of what was once the Montreal skyline gave any indication of where the horizon was.

"I'm getting something. Low. Two and a half," said Cutlass.

"We're still about two hundred meters off," I said. "It could be outside. Want to sit tight and see if it gets bigger?"

She shook her head. "It's definitely inside. Let's get this over with."

We walked in silence, skipping large swathes of open space with portals. At each one, Cutlass passed through first, pausing a few seconds before gesturing for me to follow. When we reached the shelter, she banged her fist three times on the massive door. Each blow left a dent in the steel.

"I'm sorry. We're under orders not to open this door," shouted a voice from the other side.

"We know," shouted Cutlass. "We're coming in anyway. Stand back and tell everyone not to panic."

"Do you have to do that every time?" I said.

"Do what?" she said innocently.

"Imply that you're going to knock the door down."

"Wherever did you get that idea? They need to stand back so they won't interfere with the portal, and they need to not panic because they're all on edge."

I rolled my eyes and made a portal into the interior of the shelter.

It was mostly one big room, with the remainder given over to bathrooms, the doors to which were on the wall opposite the entrance. The occupants were standing well back, with four police officers in navy blue uniforms at ease between us and them, each toting an assault rifle. Again, Cutlass took a moment before waving me through. I closed the portal behind me.

"Six and a half," she said under her breath.

I sighed and took the clipboard out of my waterproof backpack. "Alright, who's the representative?" I said.

One of the officers, a blond woman in her thirties, stepped forward. "Lauren Tremblay, SVPM," she said. She had a pronounced French Canadian accent.

I copied down her name.

"Are we being evacuated?" she asked.

"Yes and no. Does anyone here need immediate medical attention?"

"No. What does 'yes and no' mean? Are we being evacuated or not?"

"Soon, hopefully, but not immediately. Don't worry, the shelter is more than up to the task of keeping any stray monsters out. Cutlass?"

"Four and a half," said Cutlass.

"Do we need her to stand back?" I said.

Cutlass shook her head.

"What's going on?" asked Tremblay.

"We're bringing in supplies for an extended stay," I said. "Dinner, beds and blankets. We'll try to get PRT officers to relieve you, but we're stretched thin. If you can't be relieved, at least one officer will need to remain awake and seated at the radio station at all times, both to maintain communications and to watch for any ... cabin fever-induced incidents. Naturally, you'll receive overtime for the additional hours."

"One of them is in here with us, isn't it?" she whispered.

I bit my lip. "Maybe. We don't know much, but they're more focused on escaping the perimeter than killing. We haven't had a single fatality yet. The important thing is not to start a panic."

"Understood. How long are we looking at, here? I'd like to be able to tell everyone when we can get out of here. I'd like to know, too."

"An hour at least, no more than six. There are teams of capes sweeping shelters as we speak."

She nodded. "Alright, I won't hold you up."

"How many people are in here?" I said.

"Two hundred and sixteen."

I wrote that down as well. "We're going to bring in two hundred and twenty servings of soup, same number of water bottles. I need you to get everyone to form into four orderly lines while we bring it in, and then you and the other officers will distribute it."

"Alright." She turned to the crowd, and I turned back, not paying attention to what she was doing.

I made a portal high in the air, then daisy-chained it to Depot 5. I had a brief moment of indecision as I had to choose between crossing the St Lawrence early or taking the shorter route that exposed me to stronger winds that interfered with my portals. It was in that moment that I felt someone rushing at me from behind.

She came at me straight, arms outstretched, a kitchen knife in one of her hands. I pivoted to face her, catching her right hand in my left, taking the knife, and jamming it into the side of her neck with the same motion. She stumbled back, and I took the opportunity to sweep her feet out from under her. She reached for the knife, still buried in her neck, but I stomped on her fingers, feeling one of them break under my heel.

I looked around. Cutlass had a man by the throat, and as I watched she threw him against the wall with enough force to break bones.

"What's the number?" I asked.

"Zero," said Cutlass. "Guess that was it."

"You're a really shitty bodyguard."

She winced. "Sorry. They had a really clever distraction, actually-"

"Not an excuse, and not me you should be apologizing to."

"Yeah, I know." She raised her voice. "Tremblay! Change of plans. We're evacuating."

I turned my back. The danger was gone, and Cutlass would definitely be on her guard after that fiasco, so there was no need to be on mine. I redirected the portal to the primary camp, opening it wide, then stepped through. Cutlass followed.

"How mad do you think Alexandria is going to be?" she asked.

"Apoplectic."

Cutlass groaned. "Any chance we could just not tell her?"

"She'd find out, and then she'd be even angrier."

"Can we at least procrastinate on telling her?"

A uniformed man stepped in front of me, cutting off my reply. "Tesseract, could I have a word?"

Walking on autopilot, I had wandered in the general direction of the administration buildings. Each camp consisted mostly of grey mass-produced cubes, with strategically-placed vents that provided just enough airflow to make them almost tolerable. The administration buildings were distinguished in that they were slightly larger than the surrounding cubes, and that rather than a mix of paperwork and vital supplies, they only contained paperwork.

Of course, if I'd been thinking, I never would've gone near the administration buildings. Without fail, any time I went within a hundred yards of them, someone would appear out of nowhere with more work for me to do.

"Of course-" I glanced at his name tag "-Mr Litzvig, how can I help you?"

"We were supposed to get the green light to start resettling people this morning, but we're still being told to hold position. We have almost a hundred thousand people in the camp already, and we're supposed to get another two hundred thousand by the end of the week. We just don't have the facilities or the resources to support that many long-term."

I dumped by backpack and clipboard into Cutlass's hands. "File this."

"Aye aye, boss."

I turned back to Litzvig. "So, was it a delay? I could go and get the buses, if they're stuck."

He shook his head. "We have the buses, but they aren't letting us move them. I don't know what's going on, but they've turned half the camp into a 'quarantine zone.' All the new arrivals are going there, but not a lot are being moved to the rest of the camp. It's already overcrowded, and if we don't get people moving out by tomorrow the depots aren't going to be enough to feed everyone for the duration."

"Sorry, this is above my pay grade."

"Can't you talk to someone? This is a serious issue. Unless they start letting people out, there aren't going to be enough beds, and I'm not just talking about the quarantine zone. This camp was only ever meant as a processing station. We don't have the facilities to house a refugee population long-term."

"Have you spoken to High Command?"

"Yes, but-"

"Then there's nothing I can do that you can't. I'm sorry I can't help, but I'm very busy right now." I stepped around him.

"Wait-"

"Tesseract! Alexandria needs to speak with you," shouted a woman, jogging up to me. She looked like a volunteer, or maybe an intern.

I made an apologetic gesture to Litzvig, picking up speed at the same time. "See? Very busy, not really in charge of anything, deginitely not my department. You should definitely ask someone else about it."

"Can you at least bring it up with-?"

I grabbed the intern by the arm and jumped us a few hundred meters with a portal, cutting Litzvig off. "Where's Alexandria waiting?"

The intern looked up somewhere behind me, and I turned. Alexandria descended from the sky, black cape billowing. I waved.

"I saw you arrive and tried to reach you, but you bounce around a lot," she said. "Can I have a word?"

I nodded. She led me into a nearby building/cube, which turned out to contain crates full of thousands of mass-produced raincoats. It was deserted. She shut the door behind us.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Exhausting."

"You've been awake for almost thirty-six hours."

"Stimulants."

"Anything interesting happen?"

"Someone named 'Gauthier' called a about collapsing portals, so I went and fixed them. Twice, actually. Only took a few minutes. Oh, and someone tried to stab me."

Alexandria made a noncommittal sound. "We had a precog check it out. No risk of death."

"I thought I was black boxed."

"Yes. Twice, actually. Apparently Tesseract's corporate sponsors went all out on that costume. We ripped both of them out for the duration. There's nothing the Simurgh could've done in the time she had, and given the situation I felt it was important to make sure you were safe from more conventional threats."

I nodded. "What's the verdict? Am I fifteen for the duration?"

Alexandria shook her head. "No, I think she got the message. Go home, get some rest."

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, Masquerade was standing next to me, and I was free. A strangled cry escaped my throat, and my legs gave out from under me. Tears welled, and I screwed my eyes shut, focusing on the feeling of my fingers relaxing and contracting. Thirty-six hours, trapped in my own body, not able to move, not even blink, while someone else controlled me like a puppet, forcing my body past the limits of what it could handle. Everything hurt.

"Sorry about that," said Masquerade, sounding genuinely apologetic. "Alexandria's lessons can be a bit harsh."

I listened to her footsteps trail off, not daring to look until the door had clicked shut behind her. Those horrible pink eyes would haunt my nightmares.

"So, what did we learn from this little exercise?" asked Alexandria.

"That if I disobey you, you'll have me mind controlled for the rest of my life," I said.

"Come on, this should come easily to you. It's what you've been saying all along."

I pushed myself into a sitting position, but overbalanced and fell against a crate. It was a struggle to crane my neck up so I could see her face. "I don't know. Can I go home? I'll do whatever you want, I promise. I've learned my lesson."

She sighed. "The lesson is that you're very important and we can't afford to lose you."

"Can you explain it like I just spent thirty-six hours in a state of abject horror and want nothing more than to curl up and sleep until I die?"

"Sure thing." Alexandria knelt down and slipped her arms under mine, pulling me partway into her lap. "I want everyone to be have everything. Food, shelter, love, happiness, the works. But we can't have everything. And because I'm in charge, sometimes I have to decide between two competing needs. Sometimes there's not enough money to go around, and I have to sacrifice someone's happiness so their neighbour won't starve. I try to be nice about it, when I can. I don't rob banks to feed the hungry, or push fat people in front of runaway trolleys. But sometimes I have to make an exception. You're so powerful, the tiniest mistakes you make can ripple across the world. At some point, I have to draw the line. Your happiness, or a thousand lives. Maybe ten thousand. Maybe a billion. Who knows?"

She spun me around, holding up my chin so I was looking into her eyes. "I budget death. I have limited resources, and I have to use them to save as many people as I can. I can't afford to lose you. Understood?"

I managed a tiny nod. She stroked my hair.

"Good. Now that you understand, we won't ever have to do this again. Next time, we'll have a nice, long conversation about what you're planning, and I'll show you all the think tanks and projections, and explain why we need you to do what we need you to do. And right now, I'm going to get you into a nice, warm bed, and when you wake up you'll eat a big, nutritious breakfast. You have such a bright future ahead of you."

Insulated from the consequences of what she was doing, Masquerade had run my body to the limit. I understood the arithmetic (my comfort versus all the good I - or, rather, my power - could do in the immediate aftermath of an Endbringer attack), but with the stimulants wearing off I struggled just to stay awake. My head lolled to the side, and Alexandria caught it with one hand. The ground seemed to recede from beneath me, and my vision faded.

I slept dreamlessly, and as promised, I awoke in a warm bed to a nutritious breakfast.

Chapter 13: Postmortem

Postmortem

Fling a Light was one of the first things I ever wrote, and the first to follow anything resembling a plan. It suffered a lot from my inexperience, languishing in a state of perpetual Act 1, Chapter 1, Scene 1. Every new chapter introduced new elements rather than building on what was there, as I spent more and more time trying to set up what was, in retrospect, an unfocused and bloated plot. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it while it lasted, and learned all that could be expected.

And, just in case it could be helpful to someone reading this, I'll repeat those lessons here.

Fling a Light was supposed to be about choosing not to fight, and sacrificing the close and emotional for the distant but ultimately more valuable. The plot would reinforce this at several points, and, each time, Taylor would voluntarily give something up. At the conclusion of Arc 4, for example, she would sacrifice her focus on Brockton Bay in favour of a more globalist attitude, simultaneously moving to Boston. I fell short of this by a mile, and in a lot of different ways, but the one that I feel I understand most clearly is that I failed to deliberately convey a sense of anticipation. I suspect that each event in the plot should give the reader a deliberate impression of what's going to come next, so that subsequent events could either confirm or subvert these expectations - something I didn't realize until far too late. Instead of understanding the story as a series of changes, I thought of it as a series of static scenes that the characters progressed through, which, since it didn't convey a sense of direction or future, left the audience with a dizzyingly wide variety of impressions about what was going to happen next, which contributed to the sense of perpetual Act 1, Chapter 1, Scene 1.

Or maybe I'm completely off-base. I'm still really new to this. I suppose I'll find out when I write my next story.

Finally, much of the story fell victim to a plague of pointlessness. Entire characters and events came and went, never to influence the plot again - I dedicated much of a chapter and a bizarre, confused chase scene to the Trio, who, beyond being disgustingly overexposed, had no bearing on the story I was trying to tell.

I hope this was of some use to someone. I know I'd appreciate it if writers explained their thought processes more often - although, precisely because they don't, I have no idea if I'm alone in that or not. Either way, this story can be considered deceased as of 10/01/2018.