“Okay,” I replied. But he was already walking away, leaving me standing alone at the entrance.

  I had told myself I would rise above the likes of Sophia and Armsmaster. I was all too aware of their flaws, and first and foremost among them was arrogance, pride.

  So I’d swallowed mine.

  * * *

  Now

  There were so many ways this could go wrong.

  Tattletale held a pair of binoculars and scanned the building in front of us. “There’s movement. We’re good to go.”

  “Go,” Grue ordered.

  Hitting the target wasn’t so hard. My bugs flowed in through windows and Bitch took the entrances. Angelica had free rein, slow as she was, while the other dogs stayed on leash. Grue hung back with Tattletale, Regent and me, while Imp moved forward, not charging in, but staying close.

  The tricky part would be balancing this. Too far one way or the other, and this got really ugly, really fast.

  Our targets were looters, and they were well-armed, though bullets were getting to be in shorter and shorter supply. Coil had sources, and the Chosen did as well, but these guys were from the Merchants. They were vagrants, addicts and people who subsisted by mooching off the system. When the system had failed, they’d latched on to the only group that would take them. More had joined because it was safer and easier to be among the thugs, looters, scavengers and thieves than it was to be among the victims. Safety in numbers.

  They weren’t strong or trained, and I couldn’t call them brave. That said, they were bolstered by a kind of desperation. I’d seen it before, when I set my bugs on some of my enemies, how some panicked or saw the futility in fighting the swarm and others just fought on heedless of the damage they were taking and the pain they were feeling.

  That same desperation posed an issue as far as our plan. If we gave them a chance, they wouldn’t hesitate to hurt or kill us.

  They’d raided countless homes and businesses, taken everything of value they could uncover. Phone lines were down everywhere, police response times far slower with the roads in the condition they were. The looters had amassed a small fortune in stolen possessions, and intel said they were storing it here. As reasonable a target as any.

  My bugs drove the bulk of the looters out into the street. Between Grue’s darkness and Bitch’s dogs, those same looters were driven back and cornered, hemmed in by the snarling beasts.

  The second we had the situation under control, Shadow Stalker dropped out of the sky, a crossbow in each hand. Tattletale and Grue were darted a second later. She reloaded in a second using the cartridges that had been set on her gloves, then darted Imp and me. By the time the dart embedded in the armor of my costume, Tattletale and Grue were slumping to the ground.

  The fabric of my costume blocked the dart, so I didn’t go down. I drew my baton, snapped it out to its full length, and charged her.

  She backed away, loading and firing another series of bolts at Regent and the dog closest to her. By the time I reached her, she’d fired a second dart into the dog, then shot Bitch.

  My baton passed through her, of course. She walked through my arm, stepping right behind me, and then drove her knee into my side. I grunted and fell over, and she retrieved and slammed a dart into my shoulder before I could recover.

  Take it easy, Regent.

  Bitch managed to scream an order to her dogs before she ‘passed out’, “Go!”

  The three newer dogs hesitated, but Angelica didn’t. She huffed out a snarl as she passed them, and the others took her lead and joined her in stampeding down the street until they disappeared from sight.

  I laid in the water, aware of how cold it was, trying to ignore how dirty it was. My lenses afforded me an advantage in that I could watch what was going on without my open eyes giving anything away. I saw Shadow Stalker touch her ear, then murmur something. Tattletale had gone over everything Regent needed to know as far as that particular routine and the orders to give.

  It took three minutes for the PRT to arrive. I saw the green and white flashing lights and heard the splashing before anyone stepped into my field of view.

  “Holy shit,” one of the PRT uniforms spoke.

  “Restrain them and throw them in the van,” Shadow Stalker ordered him.

  “Jao, get the containment foam,” one uniform spoke. The captain?

  “They’re tranquilized,” Shadow Stalker spoke, sounding disinterested. “Don’t waste resources.”

  “Protocol states we use containment foam, especially when there’s an unknown.”

  “The girl with the horns? Mover three, teleports through shadows,” Shadow Stalker lied. “None of them can escape restraints on their own.”

  “But if Grue uses his power—”

  Shadow Stalker turned, then fired another dart into Grue. “Satisfied?”

  We’d drained the darts of the sedative, of course. Still, I was betting Grue would have words for Regent after this was over and done with.

  The uniform didn’t back down, “No. I want to know why you don’t want them fully contained.”

  “Because I’ve been up since five in the morning, it’s well past midnight now, and I’m going to have to start doing fucking paperwork the second we get these guys in a cell. I’m not allowed to walk away until they’re in custody, so if I let you foam them, I’m going to have to wait another half an hour to an hour for the solvent to get mixed and brought to them, five or ten minutes for it to work. Fuck that, they’re down. Listen to the hero who just took down a whole fucking team and get them in the truck.”

  There was no reply to that, but a moment later, someone picked me up and started carrying me. I maintained deep breaths, kept my body limp. A few bugs congregated on me and the uniforms moving us, and I didn’t do anything to dismiss them. Maybe they would distract the uniform from the fact that any of us were still conscious.

  I was placed on the cool metal floor of the containment vehicle, my hands cuffed behind my back. A few seconds later, someone was thrown over top of my upper body. Too light to be Grue or Bitch. It would be Imp or Regent.

  The metal doors slammed shut and locked with an audible shift of internal machinery.

  So many ways this could go wrong.

  We had safeguards, of course, including but not being limited to Coil’s assistance. Still, there was something profoundly unsettling about allowing myself to be cuffed and imprisoned.

  “No ears on us,” Tattletale murmured. “We’re good so long as we keep our voices down.”

  “PRT is having words with the remaining ‘witnesses’ who stuck around to grab loot after the dogs ran off,” Regent informed us with a whisper. “They’re backing up the story we wanted to sell.”

  We’d passed one hurdle, at least. The act could have gone either way—if we didn’t sell it well enough, we could have wound up with the PRT arresting us for real. If we timed it wrong or if one of the looters decided to attack us while we were pretending to be tranquilized, something ugly might have happened.

  “You hit me way too hard,” I murmured.

  “Muscle memory,” Regent replied. “Blame her, not me.”

  “You alright, Imp?” Grue asked.

  “Duh,” she replied.

  It was a good few minutes before the truck bucked into motion. Out of unspoken agreement, we stayed quiet, just to be absolutely sure that the driver wouldn’t hear us. It was maybe ten or fifteen minutes before we arrived.

  “We’re at their headquarters,” Regent spoke, his voice hushed.

  “Then we’re in good shape,” Grue answered.

  “Weld and the Wards are coming out to meet Shadow Stalker. Heads up.”

  The back door of the van opened. I could feel cooler air enter the enclosed space. There was an audible click of a gun, as if they were anticipating an attack the moment the doors opened.

  “Wow,” one of the boys commented. I was guessing it was Kid Win or Clockblocker. “How’d you pull that off?”

  “They were distracted, I picked them off. That little freak that saw me with my mask off was wearing armor, so I had to resort to CQC,” Shadow Stalker made it sound matter-of-fact.

  “Riiiight,” one of the other boys said, sarcastic.

  “You’re quiet, Weld,” a girl’s voice. Vista?

  Who was Weld?

  “Basking in how fucking awesome I am?” Shadow Stalker gloated.

  “Maybe later. For now…” the accented male voice spoke, “Just satisfy my curiosity. You know the passwords we memorize each week, and you know why we memorize them, right?”

  “Yeah,” Shadow Stalker replied.

  One of the other boys spoke, “For any interaction with any flagged shifter or,” the boy paused, “master. Oh.”

  “So,” Weld said, “keeping in mind that Regent is the highest-rated master in the city, I’d like for you to give us this week’s password.”

  There was a pause.

  “Comanche six-six-two,” Shadow Stalker spoke.

  Another pause.

  “Alright,” Weld confirmed. “Pick ’em up and haul them into the holding cells.”

  It was all I could do to stay still and not show my relief. Tattletale had anticipated this much, had drilled Regent on it, but she had been wrong in the past.

  Imp was lifted from on top of me, and Tattletale was picked up next, from right beside me.

  I was among the last to get lifted off the floor of the truck. Shadow Stalker held me until a pair of PRT uniforms could haul me to my feet and lift me by my armpits, my feet dragging on the ground, my head hanging. I chanced a partial opening of my eyes, knowing my lenses would hide them, to sneak a sidelong peek at this ‘Weld’. Metal skin, metal hair, and a strange melted-junkyard texture to his shoulders. I’d crossed paths with him before the Endbringer event.

  He spoke, his voice quiet enough that it was probably intended for just him and Sophia, “Where are the dogs?”

  “Tranquilized them, they didn’t go down. Ran when Hellhound dropped.”

  Weld nodded, “This is good work, but it doesn’t excuse or make up for what happened earlier.”

  “Whatever,” Shadow Stalker replied.

  “No. This is serious. You assaulted a team member. I’m not about to let that slide.”

  On one level, I wasn’t surprised to hear that. I knew, cognitively, that she had that kind of personality. But emotionally? I hadn’t really believed it. It caught me off guard to hear she was that big a problem in the Wards, as well.

  A few seconds passed before she finally asked, “What are you going to do?”

  “After these guys are securely in custody, we’re going to have words with the Director. She wants you on this team, for whatever reason, so I don’t expect your probation will be broken, but there’s going to be consequences.”

  “Fuck,” Shadow Stalker said.

  “And you’re going to apologize to Kid Win. I don’t ever want you assaulting him again.”

  Shadow Stalker paused. “Stop fucking testing me. I’m too tired for this. It wasn’t Kid Win.”

  Weld nodded. I blinked a few times in surprise. Tattletale hadn’t gone into this, hadn’t anticipated it. Weld had just tried to trip up Regent/Shadow Stalker, and Regent had anticipated it. A bullet dodged.

  I saw we were passing by a front desk. I’d never been in the building, but I had passed by it a few times. It was surprisingly empty. There weren’t many PRT uniforms around, either.

  “Who was it, then?” Weld asked. It took me a second to parse what he meant.

  Shadow Stalker groaned, “Fuck off! It’s me.”

  “Hey,” he turned, putting one hand on her shoulder to stop her mid-stride. “Who was it?”

  She glanced at the group. Clockblocker, Kid Win, Vista, and the girl from the Endbringer fight who called herself Flechette.

  “Clockblocker,” she guessed.

  Weld didn’t move an inch, and my gut told me Regent/Shadow Stalker was off the mark. My heart sank.

  Clockblocker and Kid Win stopped walking and looked our way curiously.

  “Heads up! Trap!” Weld shouted.

  Parasite 10.3

  We burst into action the moment Weld called out his warning.

  Bitch drove her shoulder into the PRT uniform that held her back, then backed towards the front desk. Weld had already changed his hand into what looked like a baseball bat with four sides to it, long enough to reach from his wrist to the ground. Studs the size of golf balls ran down each of the four faces, with a blunted spike on the end.

  Weld and Flechette were variables we hadn’t planned for. It was unfortunate, but Weld in particular was also very well equipped for the task of keeping us from retreating back to the front door.

  Weld swung at Shadow Stalker, but his club passed through her. Fearless, she stepped close and punched the metal arrowhead of one of her crossbows into his right eye. He stepped back a few steps, one hand going to his eye, and she threw herself at him, bringing her knees to her chest and then kicking out. Her feet slammed into his chest, and pushed him further back. Weld only staggered back a short distance, and it was Shadow Stalker who landed hard on her back. Kicking a five-foot-nine-inch block of metal had to hurt, but Regent didn’t exactly have to be careful with Shadow Stalker’s body.

  Bitch slipped past the pair of them, reaching the front door. I could hear her whistle at a volume that I doubted I could scream.

  Grue and Regent were already free of their cuffs, the three PRT uniforms closest to them lying down on the ground. Tattletale was grinning at the four wards at the end of the hall closest to the elevator—Kid Win, Clockblocker, Flechette and Vista. The laughter didn’t belong to Tattletale, however. It was cackling, sounding like someone having way too much fun.

  Flechette shouted, “They’ve got someone with the stranger classification!”

  We did?

  The Wards recovered fast enough. Vista was working to distort the ends of the hallway, the front doors, and the elevator at the end of the hall into impassable terrain. Flechette fired a shot at Grue, pinning him to the ground, quickly loaded and fired a second, rooting his feet to the ground.

  Flechette was loading for a third shot when a girl in black clothing with a horned demon mask and black scarf struck her weapon with a fire axe, splitting the metallic string and knocking it from her hand.

  The girl with the horns was on our side, wait—I could almost remember her. Some relation to Grue.

  Then it slipped from my recollection, and I was distracted by the fact that Flechette was disarmed, her weapon broken. How had that happened?

  I couldn’t afford to worry about it. I had to focus on contributing.

  I released the bugs from beneath my costume, drawing them out from beneath the panels of my armor and the compartment at my back where I kept my equipment and weapons.

  I’d known I wouldn’t be able to bring many bugs, and that it would be difficult to get more on site with a clean, sturdily built structure like this one. I could gather a swarm, but it would be a few minutes before the bugs arrived en-masse. I might have started sooner if I hadn’t been so concerned about alerting someone and giving us away.

  The nine hundred and seventy bugs that poured forth were roughly equal numbers of bees, wasps, spiders, mosquitoes and cockroaches. It was a smaller number than it sounded like, and their deployment was slower because of the way I had them arranged, stingers and abdomens carefully kept out of contact with one another.

  I hadn’t come without a plan.

  The bugs found their way to Vista, Flechette, and Kid Win, the only young heroes with exposed skin, at roughly the same time as they managed to get beneath the masks and protective clothing of the two PRT uniforms that were holding me.

  At first the teenaged heroes swatted at themselves and backed away, as was usual. The ‘fun house mirror’ distortion at the exits stopped spreading as Vista’s concentration broke, and Flechette dropped one of the small lengths of pointed metal that she’d been withdrawing from her belt.

  Then Kid Win cried out, his words raw and barely intelligible because he was also screaming as he shouted them, “It burns!”

  Capsaicin was the chemical that made hot peppers burn your tongue. It was also the active ingredient in pepper spray. I’d used pepper spray a few times, myself, and I’d had it accidentally used on me when I’d been out in costume, rather recently. At the time, I’d stepped in to help fight back a crew of the Merchants up near the old Boardwalk. They’d been aiming to loot the stores, and a contingent of people who’d created an armed force in the ruins of the upscale shopping district had stepped up to fight them off. One of the defenders had sprayed a looter, and caught me in the effect as well, maybe intentionally.

  I’d stepped back and let my bugs do the work while I recovered. After the fight had wrapped up and I’d headed back to a shelter in my civilian guise, I’d been left to consider the fact that my bugs were vulnerable to the pepper spray. By all rights, I should have been alerted to that fact the night I sprayed Velocity at the fundraiser, but I hadn’t been able to keep that many bugs on him, then, and I’d had many, many other distractions at the time. It had escaped my attention.

  While sitting up all night at the shelter, with kids crying and wailing and assholes making noise to intentionally piss off the other hundred people in the room, I’d had time to think. The next morning, I’d woken up, donned my costume and started experimenting to see if I could protect my bugs somehow. Pepper spray was only one thing. I was bound, sooner or later, to go up against someone who used some kind of bug spray or gas on my tiny minions.

  Had I found a solution? Not so much.

  I had discovered that I could use hair spray to coat the abdomens and stingers of my bugs, and then dip said abdomens and stings into some of the capsaicin. With a bowl of each in liquid form and two single file lines of bugs, I could dose a fair number before I went out in costume. It did wind up killing some of the less durable ones eventually, either through the hairspray obstructing breathing or the capsaicin getting on the bug, but the end result was that I’d stumbled onto a weapon while trying to experiment with defenses. I had figured out how to use my bugs as a delivery mechanism, smearing pepper spray onto fresh stings and bites. I could jam their abdomens into people’s noses, mouths and eyes to cause intense burning and pain to the point that it made them nauseous.