The fist hit my face like shovel being driven into the ground. The pain was intense, and the weight of it was disabling all on its own. My head rocked back the world transformed into a noisy blur.

I took a step backwards, but a pair of strong arms shot out from the van and grabbed onto my coat. I felt a rushing sensation, and I was lifted off the street and pulled head first into the van. The door slammed shut, and the sunlight disappeared.

"Bold move," I said. My voice was a slurred mess. I reached up to place a hand against my mask, trying to discern the fate of my nose. It wasn't even bleeding. "A street grab, less than a hundred yards from-"

A needle-sharp pain appeared on the left side of my chest, and a second later I felt the tearing sensation of electricity shooting through my body. My stomach and chest twisted into a knot, and I doubled over on the floor, dry heaving.

One of the figures stepped forward and checked my coat pockets one by one. My left pocket gave up a disposable instant camera and a flashlight. The right yielded a bump key and a set of lock picks. He reached into the inside pocket of my coat and pulled out a few creased business cards, as well as a folded sheet of paper. He dropped them all into a zip-lock bag and sealed it.

He bent towards me and I felt rough fingers against my throat, roaming, searching. He was trying to find the edge of my mask. Idiot. He gave up trying to find the seam and tried pulling on the material instead. I grunted as the adhesive keeping it in place transferred the movement to my skin.

"It won't come off. What's this shit made of."

"It's called psuedoderm," I muttered. "A gift from a friend-"

More current lanced through my body, and I slumped back onto the floor.

"Just work around it," a rough voice shouted from the driver's cab.

The man above me pulled a roll of duck tape and started winding it around my head, covering my mouth and then my eyes. I could still breathe through my nose, but the tape was tight enough around the fabric of my mask that making noise would be difficult, and the translucent material of my mask above my eyes became near total darkness.

"Wasn't this supposed to be some kinda cape?"

"No talking."

"He didn't even put up a fight."

"Follow procedure, and shut your mouth."

They were quiet after that. All I could hear was the whine of the engine as it accelerated, and the hissing of breaks at corners and stoplights.

The distribution of turns told me we were still somewhere in the city. I didn't feel the long straight lines that would have had us heading out of the city on the freeway, but Brockton had plenty of irregular corners, and I lost track of our location after only a few minutes.

I was glad of the quiet on the ride. It gave me time to order my thoughts, and it told me something about the people who'd taken me.

Any disorganized gang could have shown up in black body suits, but their silence, and the way they enforced my silence, told me I was dealing with professionals. I guessed they were probably following strict anti-cape procedures, a private-sector variant on the PRT's own Master-Stranger protocols.

The timing of this kidnapping couldn't have been a coincidence. It was less than a day since I'd contacted tattletale, and now somebody was going to extraordinary lengths to meet me. Either the girl was being watched by a third party, or I was going to meet Lisa's mysterious employer.

I had to wonder, had Tattletale set me on this collision course deliberately? Why would she let the existence of her boss slip at all, if not to leave me with information that would catch his attention? Could it really be a simple error? Could a parahuman like her even make that kind of error?

We traveled for around thirty minutes, then I felt a series of drops and turns as we descended into what I assumed was an underground parking lot.

The doors opened, and I was hauled roughly out. The next twenty minutes were spent stumbling blindly over steel floors, down wide corridors. Whatever this building was, it was big, and the humidity was different enough to the street that I guessed it was climate-controlled.

We passed people as we walked. Large bodies moving around on too-quiet feet. They smelled strongly of sweat and the same cheap laundry cleaner. Homogeneous smells for homogeneous people. I made an educated guess about their profession.

An underground, climate-controlled, steel-floored base, populated by mercenaries and other unscrupulous employees. Whoever had taken me had serious resources.

Eventually I was brought into what sounded like a small room, about the size of a walk-in closet, and I was thrown roughly onto a steel chair.

I felt pressure against my wrists. A second later, someone was ripping the tape from around my arms, followed by the tape wound around my head. I winced as my mask pulled at my skin, but I didn't make a sound.

Suddenly I could see again, though there wasn't a lot to look at. I was in a small space, taller than it was wide. The walls were gray plaster, and I was facing a steel door, still open. The figure who'd removed the tape pulled a pair of handcuffs from somewhere, and cuffed my hands together, with the chain looped through the arm of the chair.

Between me and the door stood a figure. He was tall, easily six feet, and almost impossibly thin. He was dressed in a black bodysuit that covered his entire body, even his face. The only decoration on the suit was the image of a white snake, winding up around his body to where it terminated, the face of the snake hanging down over his head.

There was only one reason to uncover my eyes for the kind of conversation this man was planning. He was a performance artist. He wanted me to see him. There was a justification, I was sure — something involving the power of intimidation, or brand recognition, but the real reason was vanity. This was a vain man.

One of the goons in black bodysuits stepped over to me carrying a steel case. He knelt by my chair, and from the corner of my eye I saw him withdraw a syringe, already loaded with a clear fluid. I saw him searching for an artery in my neck, and I tried to move away, but a rough hand grabbed my hair and held me in place.

"Sodium pentathol?" I asked, gritting my teeth as I felt the needle pierce skin.

"Something like that," the tall figure said. "Something a little more modern."

The goon withdrew from the room, and the man in the snake-suit stood there for a minute, staring down at me. He barely moved as he waited, not even to shift his weight from foot to foot. He had the posture of someone who did a lot of standing, pacing, striding. He looked like a man who strode.

I tried to push through my fading lucidity to try and join some dots together. There had been rumors for months of a new player in town. He was said to hold a small area of territory downtown, which he defended from the other gangs, but otherwise seemed to leave to its own devices.

He was rarely seen in public, operating almost exclusively through mercenaries. Depending on who you asked, he was either an ordinary person using his personal fortune to clean up the city, or a parahuman mastermind, whose power and skill were so great that his real operations were completely invisible.

The only constant was the name he used, and seeing the white snake slithering around his outfit, I could see how it applied.

"You're Coil," I said.

"Naturally."

I couldn't imagine why he was questioning me himself, at least until I remembered the vanity. One of the first things we learned at the PRT was that interrogations could go both ways. Ask the wrong question of a Thinker type, and you could give away more than you learned.

I didn't have a superpower backing me up, but that was likely the only reason he was being so sloppy as to interrogate me in person.

"You've taken me prisoner because I was getting too close to something," I said.

Coil was silent for a moment, then said, "I've invited you here, because you've been spending your time harassing my associates."

I opened my mouth to speak, but a wave of nausea ran through me. My head swam with a narcotic bloom, giddy confusion. I wondered what would happen if I threw up while wearing my mask.

"It will only take a few more seconds for the substance to take effect, then we can talk."

Coil stepped fully into the narrow room, and closed the door behind him. With the door closed, the only light in the room came from a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It cast a harsh white light that seemed to be absorbed completely by Coil's body suit, reflecting only from the white marks.

Somewhere between florescent fabric and drug-induced hallucinations, I began to have the impression I was speaking to a giant snake.

"I've been looking into you. What do you call yourself, The Question?"

I grunted. One thought blurred into the next. It was a struggle to remember why I was even resisting. He was such a polite snake.

"Speak up."

"Yes."

"Excellent," Coil said, clasping his hands together. "Well, it seems you've been asking rather a lot of them recently — of my subordinate Tattletale, the Protectorate, reporters, independent parahumans, the list goes on."

"So Tattletale really is your subordinate," I said, pouncing on the admission.

"I think that much was clear," Coil said, shifting his hands behind his back. "I'd be interested to hear what it is you think you've learned."

I bit down on my lip hard, harder than I'd intended. The wave of pain and the coppery taste of blood helped cut through the fog that was drifting across my thoughts.

I knew my body could process a safe dose of sodium pentathol in a little over an hour, but I hadn't kept up with the pharmacology of interrogations. With modern, or even tinker-created drugs, nothing was beyond reason. I should have kept up with the literature. I'd been sloppy.

Coil leaned over, the snake descending directly into my field of view, its deep black eyes staring into me, hypnotizing. "Tell me what you know."

I searched my thoughts about the recent investigation. I wanted to tell him everything. I was expository by nature —a weakness I would have been foolish to ignore— and this was playing in my innate desire to reveal the truth. This was one of the few cases where a frank answer wasn't the best course.

"You have a history working in a corporate environment, a bureaucracy," I said, eventually. I was giving him something, anything, to relieve the pressure to submit.

Coil pulled back. "You discovered this during your investigation?"

"Just now," I said. My head swam. "You have boardroom body language. Reminds me of- pointless middle managers."

Coil leaned down and pressed his hands against the arm rests of my chair. His knuckles creaked as he squeezed the metal. "I don't want your idle speculation. I want to hear what you know."

My neck muscles felt weak. My head rolled back against the chair, and I took a breath to speak. There was lots I knew. Some of it might even be of interest to a mastermind. I spent long seconds dredging up secrets that weren't exactly the ones he wanted.

"The information portal to Aleph is an elaborate fiction," I said, "designed to market sub-par media to a mass audience."

"No," Coil said. His tone was low, and there was a warning in it. He leaned closer. I could almost feel his breath, almost hear the hiss of his forked tongue. "Not theories. Tell me what you've discovered about my organization, about my plans. If I have leaks or weaknesses, I need to find them before- anyone else."

It was getting harder to resist. Everything was blurry, dreamlike. The concrete world seemed like a distant place. Here, everything was fluid, what did it even matter what I said?

"The government did put a man on the moon in '69," I said, my voice little more than a hiss by that point. "It was the only place he could be safely contained."

"No," Coil snapped. He started moving, as if he wanted to pace, but in the small room all he could do was turn on the spot. It was a little ridiculous. "I don't want to hear about Earth Aleph, or my body language, or aglets! I want to hear what all of your digging into my affairs has got you. Why did you arrange a theft from the city hall? What did you learn at the PRT building?"

Something about that comment pricked my distant mind. What had he said? Aglets. The conspiracy surrounding aglets was as deep as it was sinister, but it was something that only I was aware of. It wasn't something I'd ever told the man in front of me.

Coil withdrew and turned to face the door, collecting himself. The weight of my confusion began to drift away, swept upwards by the delirious haze. He turned back towards me.

"Let's try something easier." He stepped behind my chair, and I heard rustling, the clatter of something plastic. When he stepped back into my field of view he was holding a plastic tray with the equipment his thugs had taken from me. He plucked out a blank white card. "What are these?"

"Business cards." I said.

"Good."

He tossed the card back into the tray, and pulled out a larger sheet of paper. He unfolded it, then held it up for me. The crayon drawing was crude, abstract. Two lines, endlessly intertwined, firing sparks in every direction as they spiraled towards a green dot.

"And this?" he asked.

"A child's drawing."

He glanced at it. "Your own child?"

From somewhere below us in the base came a prolonged scream of tortured metal. Coil didn't even twitch. Whatever it was must have been business as usual to him.

"I don't have any children," I said. "It was drawn by a young parahuman in Nebraska."

He tossed the sheet back into the tray. "Why do you carry it?"

I waited a second, then asked, "Come again?"

"Why do you carry that particular drawing? What does it have to do with you?"

"Interesting," I said, as my head rolled back against the chair.

He turned then, folded his hands behind his back, and began pacing around the small room. He was suddenly calm. All of his agitation of moments before had drained away. At first I assumed he was thinking, but after five minutes, I guessed he was waiting for the drug to sink in deeper. Maybe one of its metabolites had some additional effect he was waiting for.

When he turned back to me, his body language was strangely confident. "If you don't want to answer my questions, perhaps Phillipa might."

I looked up at him as my mind wheeled.

"Phillipa?" I asked. There was no way he could know that name.

"Your contact in the city police," Coil said. "We have her in the next room."

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. I took a deep breath to try and push back the nausea, and deadpanned, "Really."

Even through the drug haze, I knew there was no way Coil had Phillipa locked up in a cell. There were several reasons it was impossible, chief among them was that 'Phillipa' didn't exist.

Phillipa was a code word, a private signal to whoever I was speaking with. It meant trouble. Specifically, it was the signal that I was under duress, and close to breaking.

I'd used similar passwords in the past, but I'd only given the cipher to a small handful of people, and none of them would have been easy targets or willing partners with Coil.

Could he be working on one of those people in an adjacent room? Faultline, maybe, or one of my old teammates from the PRT, someone trying to ask for my help using my own system. If that were true, why wouldn't he just threaten me with their lives. The ploy he was trying here spoke of ignorance.

"What has she told you so far?" I asked, trying to work out whether the chemicals were affecting my reasoning, or if the situation really made as little sense as it seemed.

"I'm afraid so far she's been too distressed to say much at all," he said, and there was a smile in his voice, "but I'm sure once she recovers, she'll be quite cooperative."

My neck felt slack, and I could feel a line of drool crawling down from the corner of my mouth. My mind was swimming, punch drunk, and I struggled to concentrate on what the situation was telling me.

In all the narcotic jumble of thoughts and theories, I felt pieces of information snapping together that wouldn't normally fit. In my insensible state, I was making leaps that were in no way logical, but were, I was sure, correct.

"You're a parahuman," I said finally, my words slurring as I tried to articulate. "I wasn't sure before, but it's true."

Coil was silent. Cold reading someone in a mask was difficult. Doing it to someone as disciplined as Coil was next to impossible. Under the influence of a potentially a tinker-tech chemical cocktail was doubly or triply impossible. I was left trying to parse his lack of body language.

"What's your power?" I asked. "Memory alteration?"

Coil remained silent, and perfectly still.

"How long have I been here? Days?" I asked. I certainly wouldn't be completely recovered from this kind of drug in less than a day. "How many times have you interrogated me?"

He didn't move, even the slightest inch, and in that moment I thought I had him.

It was the only thing that fit. In my mad, half-deluded intoxication, it was the only explanation that made sense. He'd interrogated me at some forgotten point in the past, and through some insight, or logical deduction, or sheer desperation, I'd infiltrated my responses with a code word. Coil had taken it as a true answer, and was trying to use against me.

I couldn't imagine what had been going through my mind to give that word. Had I been hoping his follow up searches for Phillipa would trip an alarm set by one of my few friends? Had I made an intuitive leap about his power? Had I just been screaming every prepared response I could think of under the stress of what he'd done to me? I had no way of knowing.

"You're raving," Coil said finally, his tone showing no sign of discomfort. "Let me help you back to reality. You were the beneficiary of a data theft from the city hall several days ago. What were you looking for?"

"You can't win, Coil," I went on, ignoring his question. "I don't remember what I've already told you, but you do. I know that you know, and you know I know you know, ad infinitum. You can't trust any information I give you not to tip your hand."

At some point I started laughing, and the next coherent thing I remember was Coil knocking an elaborate staccato on the cell door. It opened to reveal the medical goon who'd dosed me.

"He's having a bad reaction to the drug," Coil told the guard, stepping out into the corridor. "We'll give him a little time to cool off."

"There's only one of you Coil," I shouted after him. My eyes were unfocused, and I felt on the edge of hysteria.

The door slammed closed and left me alone in the dark. It took a while to return to any kind of ordered thought. Minutes, or maybe hours. The first thing I found was that my face and clothes were all damp with sweat.

It would be a while before I'd be ready to be dosed again, so I guessed I had some time. Time to think, time to plan, and if he'd really been so careless as to leave me alone with the tray of my equipment, time to escape.