The dogs slowed to a trot as the warehouse district swallowed them, their bodies shrinking with every block until, by the time the Undersiders dismounted, they were barely larger than mastiffs. Nobody spoke on the walk in. Tattletale kept the gun pressed to Taylor's spine, her hand steady as stone.
The warehouse was medium-sized and dusty, but it wasn't empty. Couches, folding tables, stacked crates, a mini fridge humming in the corner. Somebody had stocked the place as a backup base — somewhere to sit tight until the PRT gave up its search.
Taylor catalogued it all while her power worked. There were already bugs inside — roaches in the walls, spiders in the rafters — and outside, a new swarm was building, block by block, as she fed everything in range toward her position. Tattletale never so much as glanced at the ceiling or the dark seams along the walls.
Bitch made it four steps past the door before she dropped.
The dogs forgot Taylor existed. They crowded over their master, barking and licking her face while their bodies kept shrinking underneath them.
"Figured this would happen sooner or later," Regent said, drifting over with his scepter balanced on his shoulder. "You can't grow that many that big in one go and expect not to pass out."
He didn't sound worried at all, and Taylor decided she disliked him.
Grue was already moving. Between the two of them, they got Bitch up onto the couch, Regent steadying her arm while Grue carried most of her weight. The dogs trailed after them, whining, and once she was laid out, the four animals arranged themselves around the couch, facing outward.
Grue straightened and looked at Taylor, then at Tattletale.
"There a reason we brought her? Because this is getting too close to breaking the unwritten rules for my liking."
Taylor blinked. Tenno had told her the unwritten rules were mostly lip service, honored right up until they became inconvenient. Apparently Grue took them seriously, and that forced her to adjust her read of him on the spot.
The question bothered her too, and she'd been turning it over since the bank. It didn't add up. Out here there were no cameras and no PRT for her secret to matter to. A teammate was down. Nobody present was a brute. Every single one of them needed to breathe, and she'd already proven she could hurt them without holding anything back. Keeping her along was nothing but risk. Leaving her at the perimeter for the PRT to collect would have been safer for them in every way that counted, since she couldn't answer one interrogation question truthfully without burning herself.
Which meant Tattletale wanted something from her that abandoning her would have ruined.
"Because leaving her behind defeats the purpose of getting her to help us in the first place," Tattletale said.
"We've already escaped," Grue shot back. "Dragging her along puts that at risk, and it's obvious she's still hostile."
Tattletale laughed for a good few seconds, then sighed and stepped over to pull the gun away from Taylor's back entirely.
Taylor's heart spiked, and Grue's head turned, clearly as confused as she was. She used the moment. Her swarm surged inward, condensing through gaps in the walls.
"Grue. What have I been telling you for the past few days?"
He was quiet for a moment, thinking, then nodded slowly. "That we never really escaped Ten-Zero."
"Right." She pointed at Taylor. "That's why she's here. Getting away from the Wards was great. It was also beside the point, because we haven't gotten away from the real threat, Ten-Zero. Not even close. So I had us take the one person who can change that."
The silence stretched while Grue and Regent caught up.
Then Grue took a step back from her. "No… Tattletale. Who did we just kidnap?"
"Someone related to Ten-Zero, I'm guessing," Regent said, almost sounding surprised. "Or just straight up a member."
Taylor kept her mouth shut and neither confirmed nor denied. She started backing away a half step at a time while her swarm swelled to the size she wanted.
Her mind was racing the whole while. It wasn't Tattletale's audacity that surprised her — of course she was arrogant enough to think she could turn her own captive — and it wasn't that Tenno was after the Undersiders, since he planned to clean up the bay anyway. It was Grue. He hadn't known. Which meant Tattletale had really worked out her connection at the bank with just a glance.
Her power really was dangerous.
Grue rounded on Tattletale. "Then what's the plan? When they come for us, and they will come, what do we do? They're powerful enough to make us disappear! There's a reason nobody fucks with them."
"They're heroes, Grue. They won't do that."
"You can't possibly know that for sure! You've put us all in danger for a hunch."
Taylor had drifted maybe fifteen feet from where the argument had started, and her swarm was at the mass she needed. She was about to give the order when Tattletale shouted over him.
"I put us all in danger for amnesty!"
Everyone went still. Even Taylor froze. Tattletale was looking at Taylor. If she cared or was surprised that Taylor wasn't where she'd left her, she didn't show it.
"From Ten-Zero. Because I have something you want. The Heartbreaker situation, and who set it up. I mean, don't you think the situation is a little suspicious? Even I didn't know you guys would be in New Hampshire, and who shows up—"
"I already know it was a distraction." Taylor's voice came out flat and cold. "What I want to know is by who, and for what reason. That's what you'll tell me."
"Happy to. Right after you get me a meeting with someone at the top of Ten-Zero. Only then do you get what I know."
Taylor's jaw tightened.
Everything in her wanted to refuse. She hated liars, and Tattletale was a professional one — there was no way to check a single word of this. Folding to a villain's demands would mean walking into a meeting with Tenno having given ground to the person who made her an accessory to crime, and she hated to think what he'd make of that. Especially when Ordis could probably dig up the same answer on his own, given time.
But time was the problem. Whoever had aimed those families at Ten-Zero wasn't some run-of-the-mill opportunist. It took planning, reach, and confidence to treat an organization like hers as something you could steer, and she couldn't imagine people like that making small moves. They had to have plans already in motion, and every moment she spent refusing to hear about them was a moment those plans kept running.
Tattletale watched her work through it, and when she spoke again her voice was gentler. "You already know the right call here. You just don't like who's asking for it."
She was right. This was wasting time.
Taylor reached into her costume pocket and pulled out her phone. Tattletale smiled as soon as she spotted the Ten-Zero symbol on the back.
Taylor thumbed the screen awake and started hunting for the contact.
"Shade. Grue. Non-lethal."
The drone finally became visible, and it rammed it body across the back of Grue's helmet with a crack, knocking him clean off his feet and into the floor. He didn't get up.
Tattletale had half a second — long enough for her face to fall — before the swarm closed over her, the dogs, and Regent. Regent didn't even flinch as the bugs sealed over his mouth and nose; he just went cross-eyed at the black covering his face, like the whole thing was a mild inconvenience. The dogs bucked and snapped at nothing until the bugs found their throats.
From the couch came a groan as Bitch forced herself upright. Shade hit her once, and she stayed down.
The warehouse went quiet, but for the buzz of insects.
_________________
Grue woke to something crawling across his face.
He went rigid, which was the wrong move — the blindfold was spider silk pulled tight across his eyes, and struggling only drew it tighter. He was flat on his back on the warehouse floor, wrists lashed to a support pillar, legs bound at the ankles and knees, and over the silk a slow tide of insects kept moving, patient as water.
"For the record," Regent said from somewhere to his left, his voice muffled and resigned, "I want it noted that I voted against the bank."
Tattletale was already awake. Taylor could tell because she was talking, which seemed to be her resting state even blindfolded, with a beetle the size of a thumb tracing a line up her sternum.
Taylor let them finish taking inventory of their situation. Then she gave the speech, once, in a flat voice.
"Don't move. Don't use your powers. And don't test my patience — the next time you do, you won't wake up until you're in a Ten-Zero holding cell. Everyone stays calm, everyone stays fine."
Regent raised his voice into a polite falsetto. "And if we don't stay fine?"
Nobody answered him.
Bitch was the one who tested it. She came awake to the sound of her dogs whimpering somewhere across the warehouse and went from unconscious to violent with nothing in between, back arching, webbing creaking, chest straining hard enough that Taylor heard fibers pop. She was half a second from tearing an arm free when a bolt out of nowhere punched a hole in the concrete beside her head.
She went still. The whole warehouse went still, dust sifting down through the quiet.
"That was a warning shot," Taylor said coldly. "There won't be a second one."
Tattletale was the only one who knew things, so that was where Taylor started.
She pulled a chair over and set it down in front of the pillar, close enough that her prisoner could hear every word at conversational volume. Then she reached with her power, and a centipede the length of her forearm crawled up over Tattletale's shoulder — up the collar, along the line of her jaw, its legs ticking against skin in slow, deliberate steps.
Tattletale held very still, but through the bugs Taylor could feel her heart rate picking up.
"Here's what happens now," Taylor said, flat and even. "I ask questions. You answer them. Every time you waste my time, this" — the centipede reached her ear, antennae brushing the shell of it — "gets more interested in digging the answer out of your brain. Do we understand each other?"
Silence. Taylor took that as compliance.
"Now tell me everything you know about the Heartbreaker setup."
"You know," Tattletale breathed out slowly, the pulse under the silk settling, "for a hero, you've got a real gift for atmosphere."
Taylor said nothing. She let the centipede creep along her collarbone and up onto her face, toward her ear.
"You're not going to—" Tattletale started, then stopped herself, and through the bugs Taylor felt her actually weigh the answer for once instead of deflecting.
"Fine. When it's touching my ear, we're going to have a problem. So let's skip to the part where I tell you that this" — she nodded down at herself, at the silk, at the insect circling her ear — "is a waste of both our time."
"Is it."
"You're not going to hurt me." Tattletale's voice was easy again, like they were two coworkers disagreeing about lunch. "I don't think you know how. And before you get creative — no, I'm not calling your bluff because bugs aren't scary. I'm calling it because I've been watching you since the bank, and everything you've done is theater. Good theater! Really. The pacing, the silence, the creepy crawl. You've got a future in this if the hero thing doesn't work out. But your bugs keep rerouting around my eyes. Probably for the same reason Grue can still see."
The centipede settled at the entrance to her ear, and beneath it Taylor felt Tattletale's pulse climb again.
Tattletale held very still. Then, quieter: "You're a hero. Whatever else you try to act like, you're a hero at heart. So how about you stop auditioning for a part you don't want."
Taylor straightened up. The centipede stayed exactly where it was.
"Are you sure?"
"What?"
"About me." Taylor crouched again, elbows on her knees, and when she spoke her voice was flat and uninflected, and it took Tattletale a moment to place what was wrong with it. "That I'm a hero. Right now, in this moment — you're sure."
"...Yes?"
Taylor tilted her head, and the swarm overhead shifted, a thousand bodies rearranging themselves with a sound like wind through dry leaves.
"Because I have to be honest with you, Tattletale. I'm not feeling very heroic at the moment." She said it conversationally, like she was reporting the weather. "Let's review my evening. I spent it herding civilians out of a bank in secret with my bugs instead of doing what I'm actually capable of, because the heroes decided Masters can't be trusted. Then a girl put a gun to my back and forced me to attack a PRT line on camera — which the news is reporting as me being your accomplice — under threat of exposing me to dangers you clearly can't comprehend. So as of tonight I'm a criminal in the eyes of the PRT, a liability in the eyes of my own team, and the only person alive who knows where you are."
She leaned in. The centipede's legs ticked against Tattletale's earlobe.
"And you did that. To me. On purpose, with a smile. So forgive me if I'm done doing this the right way. That's what got me here."
For the first time all night, Tattletale swallowed hard. Her pulse jumped, and sweat broke out along her hairline.
"I had no choice," she said, and genuine emotion finally came through the performance. "You'd have handed me to the PRT inside a minute. You'd never have listened to a villain, and a Thinker on top of it? The threat was the only version of tonight where you heard me out." A pause. "And we didn't even want to do the robbery."
"I don't care. You're career criminals. Why you did it doesn't matter." Taylor dismissed it with a flick of her hand. "Tell me what I want to know before this gets ugly."
"Why we did it is part of what you want to know." Tattletale tipped her head back against the pillar. "Grue. Tell her why you said yes."
Silence stretched. Then Grue exhaled through his nose, long and slow.
"I'm trying to get custody of my sister," he said. "The boss called me before the job, and I told him no. He told me that if I walked, he'd bury me so deep in the system I'd never see her again. He knew the caseworker's name. He knew the judge." His hands curled inside the webbing. "And if I still wouldn't go through with the robbery, he'd show the courts exactly where my money comes from."
"Ran away from my dickhead parents, ended up living on the street, and got recruited at gunpoint by our boss's men," Tattletale added quietly. "That's my story, for the record."
The other Undersiders went still in a way Taylor found hard not to read as shock.
"You didn't know?" Taylor asked, looking at Grue, who seemed to be their leader.
"It didn't come up," Grue said bitterly.
"We're villains," Tattletale went on. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you we're not. But look around. We're also just kids, same as you, making the best hand we can out of what we got dealt — except the dealer's a monster, and he makes sure nobody ever gets a better offer."
Taylor stood in the dark and tried not to let herself feel for them. Tattletale was frightened and in custody, and sympathy was the only currency she had left, so every word was aimed. Taylor could see the shape of the play as clearly as if it were drawn on the floor.
And it was still working.
"Bitch — Rachel Lindt," Tattletale continued. She talked fast after that, like she was racing something only she could see. "Her mom was gone so much that Rachel was stealing to eat by age five. The neighbors called it in, and the state's professional assessment of a small, injured child was 'borderline feral.' Two placements followed, both with people unequipped to help her — or outright abusive. The third had a foster mother who tried to drown Rachel's puppy alive in front of her. As punishment." Tattletale slowed down. "Right then and there, at thirteen, she triggered. Her power saved the dog, but Rachel couldn't control it. Her power doesn't let her master dogs — it changes them. So when that dog got out of the pool and went through the house, the foster mother didn't survive it, and neither did the other kids. Rachel ran, because the alternative was a parahuman detention center, and she's been running since. Almost two years on the street with no reading, no people skills, and no legal existence."
Taylor stood very still and hated that she knew this story. Because it mirrored her own in an even more tragic way. A little girl neglected in the one place that was supposed to feel like home. Abandoned by the system. Abused by the people who were supposed to care for her, until she broke and made a mistake she could never take back.
Rachel was her, she realized. A Taylor without a Barnes family to help her dad find his way back. A Taylor who never had even one person reach through the isolation and pull her back toward the world. A Taylor who never had an Isaac to force the system to care for her. A Taylor only a dog ever cared for.
The silence held until Regent's whistle broke it.
"And I thought my origin story was fucked up," he mused.
"Regent!" Tattletale snapped.
"What?" he replied blithely. "I'm gonna share my tragic story too. If Ten-Zero's really going after dear old dad, I'm down to help, even if we still get locked up."
Taylor turned to him as he turned to her.
"Name's Alec. But back in the day, I went by Jean-Paul Vasil."
The surname and the words "dear old dad" hung there, and the pieces assembled themselves.
"You're Heartbreaker's son," she said.
"Guilty by birth," Alec said, like he was confirming his star sign. "Fourth of his kids to develop powers, which matters in that house, because the family is a competition and the prize is Dad's attention. The funny thing is, Dad's attention is the worst thing that can happen to a person."
He told the rest of it to the ceiling, in the same bored drawl, and the boredom was somehow the hardest part to hear.
"When I was eight, I threw a tantrum. Normal kid stuff. I don't even remember what about. His response was to hit me, two of my sisters, and the minder watching us with a wave of raw terror. I stopped talking for months afterward."
Taylor's swarm had gone very still overhead.
"I triggered at ten. Worked for him after that under the name Hijack. It was tolerable for a while, until Dad decided I was ready to be great." He rolled the word like something he'd stepped in. "That's when he started cracking the whip. Dangerous assignments. Things that were hard on what was left of my conscience. And I did it all anyway, because even after everything he put me through, some part of me still wanted dear old dad to love me. But no matter how the assignments went or what I did, he'd look at the result and tell me I'd done it wrong."
"The last one he made me do, I finally understood. There's no finish line. There's no happy ending for my coming-of-age story. That man couldn't love a person. He was never going to love a tool."
He shrugged, a small motion inside the silk.
"So I left. Made my way around until I wound up in the bay. Became Alec. Then Tattletale came recruiting, and I became Regent."
Taylor wanted to stop. Take a moment. Breathe. But she'd already made the mistake of letting the Undersiders set the pace, and momentum was all she had. So she pressed forward.
"If you're only the fourth to get powers, how many siblings are there? And what can they do?"
"No idea how many have triggered or died since I left. Never bothered keeping up." He shrugged. "All of us trigger Master/Thinker, though. Whatever your people are, they can roll through that."
"I see," she said flatly. "Any other useful information about your family you'd like to give out?"
Regent just shrugged.
Taylor closed her eyes for a moment and forced herself to think. None of their backstories mattered if she couldn't find the thread. Start from the beginning. The boss — careful, anonymous, rich enough to hire a supervillain team, and smart enough to stay invisible to everyone but Tattletale. So why, with Ten-Zero publicly announcing they were cleaning up the city, would a man like that pick today to rob a bank? It didn't make sense…
Unless he knew Ten-Zero and the Protectorate couldn't respond.
Taylor turned back to Tattletale. So she hadn't been full of hot air after all.
"Here's the deal," she said, standing. "I'm calling my superior. I have to report everything that happened today regardless — so don't think you're buying anything. But before I dial, you're going to give me everything you have on your boss. There's no meeting without information first. And that's final."
Tattletale smiled, and it was the first smile all night that didn't have an angle in it — or that had learned to hide its angle better.
"So you put it together, huh? Guess I have no choice but to accept." She let the pause breathe. "Coil."
Coil. The man with the mercs — Tenno had mentioned, offhandedly, that one of Coil's bases would make a fitting graduation test for her. So he was already watching him. Why, then, hadn't he connected Coil to the Heartbreaker setup?
The thought snagged and wouldn't come loose. Taylor set it aside.
"Here's the timeline," Tattletale said, unprompted. "And stop me if it starts to sound like I'm bullshitting. The job gets planned days out. Then Lung gets dragged through the docks by a dominatrix in gold and Umbra — the public face of Ten-Zero — showing up to save you. So we plan to lie low until you people leave. But Coil doesn't push the job back."
She paused. "I thought, okay. Maybe his info lagged. You guys might have been blocking my attempts to warn him about you."
Taylor frowned. "Why would you try to help him at all if he forcefully recruited you?"
"Because when Coil goes down, everyone attached to him goes down with him, and I'd rather not go to juvie or get forced into the Wards." Tattletale said it simply, without apology. "That's the whole reason. I'm not complex."
Taylor felt her temper flare before she could bank it. "So you let him run around. You knew what he was, what he does, and you kept his secrets because you'd get in trouble."
"Let me paint you the alternative," Tattletale said, and now her voice had an edge that matched Taylor's. "The PRT catches Coil. Then what? His lawyers get him out in eighteen months, tops — that's if it even goes to trial, because his mercs will try to break him out before it gets there. And when he's out, the first thing he'll do is check his books. And in his books, there's a Thinker on his payroll who might have known something was wrong and never once picked up a phone to warn him." She smiled, thin. "On top of that, his power makes him nearly impossible to surprise. Coil lives two lives at once and keeps whichever one he likes, discarding the other. If I betray him, he can be on a beach in one life while he's being arrested in the other. He drops the arrest, and in the life that's left, he takes his time finding out exactly who betrayed him."
"...I see," was all Taylor could say to that. Selfish as the reasoning was, it made sense for a girl who was no hero and had no real resources to escape. "Continue."
"Now then. Ten-Zero declares, publicly, that it's cleaning up Brockton Bay — and Coil still doesn't move the date. In fact, he starts leaning on us. Incentives for the ones who'd listen, threats for the ones who wouldn't. He wanted this robbery today by any means necessary."
The warehouse was very quiet.
"And then," Tattletale said, "mid-heist my phone buzzes. One line: 'Ten-Zero departing NH. Target: Heartbreaker.' Now, maybe it's all coincidence, but—"
"—he set it up," Taylor said. The words came out of her like something being extracted. "Or he knew about it early enough to position himself."
"Either way," Tattletale said, "he scheduled us around it. He wanted every cape and cop in Brockton staring at a bank—"
Her voice trailed off, and Taylor finished the sentence in her own head.
So he could do something else. Something he needed the whole city blind for.
But how had Coil learned that? Living two lives explained how he acted on information, not how he got it — not if he was only as capable as an ordinary man in either one.
Taylor stood motionless as the other half of the answer assembled itself, faster than the first part. To orchestrate New Hampshire, Coil needed to know Ten-Zero would be attending before anyone outside the organizing bodies did — because Ten-Zero had been added too late to make the advertisements. And the only people who had that information were the PRT and the Protectorate themselves.
A mole?
Taylor's mind scrambled for the gentler option. PHO had plenty of Bagrat types, people who always seemed to have someone whispering in their ear. But if it had been leaked online, then surely Ordis would have found it. Or maybe it was a Thinker. It had to be a Thinker, because the alternative was that the PRT and the Protectorate were compromised from within.
Part of her wanted that to be the case. It meant the choice she'd made at the perimeter — trusting not even the heroes with her secret — had been right.
Flawed, most definitely. But right.
Because if Coil or a random Thinker could get inside the PRT and the Protectorate, then who else was already inside?
"You okay?" Tattletale asked. "You've been quiet for a while now."
"I'm fine." Taylor dragged her focus back. "His endgame. The robbery was a distraction from what — do you know?"
"I don't. I've been trying to figure out the why this whole time. I've got nothing." Tattletale grimaced. "All I can guess is that he wants something high-value in this city. Something he can't buy."
Taylor pulled her phone back out, and the centipede began its slow retreat from Tattletale's ear.
"I can help," Tattletale said, fast — she could see where this was going. "Right now. Give me my phone and let me call him. He'll be expecting contact soon anyway. I can dig while he talks and find out what he actually wanted from tonight before he—"
"No," Taylor said.
Tattletale went still. "No?"
"No." Taylor stood, already dialing. "You've given me what I need. The rest I'll get from my own people."
Despite everything — the backstories to earn sympathy, the timeline to prove value, the blocked channels to position herself on Taylor's side of the table, and now this: partnership, us against him. One more hook. Taylor hadn't forgotten what Tattletale was really doing, or what she'd done to her to get this far.
Tattletale jerked against the webbing. "You still need me! You know you do — I'm the only person in this city who can—"
"I don't."
The line was ringing. Taylor walked, unhurried, and paused halfway to the door.
"Did you really think a rapist and a few kids warranted the entire attention of Ten-Zero?" She turned, just enough to take in all four of them. "Every resource we sent after Heartbreaker was bait. We wanted to see who'd be stupid enough to make a move the moment our backs were turned. Now that we have a name, it's just a matter of digging."
"I…," Tattletale hissed.
The sound was followed by a sharp grunt, halfway to a gasp, and her head knocked back against the pillar. The silk, probably. She'd been straining against it for a while. Taylor didn't spare it much thought.
"You've all been very helpful," she said. "Thank you for your time."
"Don't you dare forget our deal!" Tattletale's voice cracked at the edges, echoing off the rafters. "You promised!"
Taylor stopped at the door with her hand on the push bar and turned her head just enough.
"I won't forget," she said. "As long as all of you are still here when I get back."
She pushed through into the cold. Behind her, muffled by steel, Tattletale was still talking.
The phone rang against her ear. Once. Twice.
On the third ring, the line clicked open.