2103:11:22:00:12:07

  It was rare for Crowsong and I to patrol nowadays. Which was a shame, because that had been how I’d imagined myself as a hero. Patrolling the streets, rescuing civilians, catching villains red-handed, etcetera.

  And that still happened. We were just not the ones doing it. That was the work of regular heroes. The state-backed kind, like the Guardians, the West Coast Wardens and their junior organizations. They were the ones who mostly patrolled the street, stopped shootouts between henchies, responded to alerts and distress calls, and locked villains up and put them away for good (depending on the crime of course).

  We, on the other hand, were vigilantes. Where the heroes defended, the vigilante attacked. Where heroes were bound by law and protocol, the vigilante hunts freely, with only their own righteous morals guiding them. Where heroes were sworn to protect those that lived in the light, we brought down the foundations of those organizations ruling in the night.

  At least, that was how Crowsong explained it. Barring a few embellishments, of course – artistic license or whatever.

  On the one hand, I could see the logic. Being reactive to the actions of villains meant ceding the initiative. Focusing on defense alone was a sucker’s game – Crowsong’s words – while splitting the duties of the good guys between one side holding the line and the other attacking from behind was a ‘classic hammer-and-anvil’ strategy.

  On the other hand… well, being a vigilante in the, uh, ‘Crowsongian’ sense just didn’t feel very heroic. The only rescue missions we’d done so far had been to rescue masked from each other, or the occasional henchie from himself. We hadn’t helped with rescuing civilians from burning buildings nor had to shield a single one from shootouts or masked fights.

  No, Crowsong’s all-offense approach meant we did very little of what I thought to be the bread-and-butter of heroism. In that sense, Mom was more of a hero than I was despite her lack of powers.

  Patrols there to fill the gaps. A thing we did when there were no targets to strike and training got a bit stale.

  With the Jannacht in town and local gangs not just responding to the threat with violence, but by becoming more ‘productive’ – insofar crime can be described as productive – we rarely had to worry about not having enough targets. Nth-Sight kept us well fed in that regard.

  So nowadays, the few times we did spend patrolling felt doubly special. An opportunity to do the kind of heroics, to be the kind of masked I was meant to be. Even if it was likely less effective than my mentor’s usual strategy of anti-villain activism.

  In short, it was a treat. One I enjoyed to the fullest by spreading my wings and scouting Northside as best I could.

  Flying above the city at night as a snowy owl was different than it was as a crow. Gone was the tetrachromatic vision, depths of black and white that made night as bright as day taking its place. Which was a shame, because I liked the way the city looked as a crow. Owl-vision did make scouting lightless alleys and the like much easier though.

  It had been a quiet night so far. The streets below were all but empty. The few people we did see were a guy running late-night food delivery, someone in nightwear and a coat disposing of their trash, and three cars headed who-knows-where. No shady deals, back-alley muggings, violent stabbings, or random shootings. Nor any bombings, which seemed to have stopped after I caught that Jannacht henchie.

  Which was no surprise. Much like my first night out, it was difficult to catch random street crime in the act. It did happen, but more often than not we just interrupted someone out buying drugs – nothing worth calling the police, let alone the Guardians for. We let the buyers go with a ‘warning’ (not that we could ever follow up on it, but whatever), while we interrogated the dealers before deciding whether to let them go or drop them off at the police station.

  Only three times in every patrol ever did we actually stumble upon anything resembling real crimes.

  The first was a group of people doing drive-by mugging. I spotted them from up in the sky, but we were too late to stop them in the act of robbing two restaurant workers returning home from a late-night shift. Thankfully, I managed to track the thieves from up high while Crowsong talked to the victims to explain the situation. In the end, we followed the thieves to where they stopped at the park, captured them and subsequently returned the stolen goods to the grateful victims. A nice, heroic experience.

  The second was an altercation between lovers we prevented from turning violent. Crowsong had spotted a woman getting out of a hastily-pulled-aside car, the man giving chase while shouting nonsense and berating the woman. We intervened, got the police involved and, well, that was it. Since there’d been no actual crime, no one was arrested, but Crowsong assured me that doing it this way helped the woman get a restraining order if she needed it. Less heroic because of how it ended, but I did feel we ended up doing some good at least.

  The third was a break-in at a pharmacy, a classic smash-and-grab. This one was us simply being in the right place at the right time. We were close by enough to stop them in the act, and so we did. They didn’t even put up a fight, not after Crowsong threw a few warning knives and I transformed into a rhino.

  They were small things, and for the amount of time we put into patrolling, it would’ve been more efficient to spend training than wandering here, there and everywhere. But aside from helping people, we did it to show the people in Northside that there were masked looking out for them. That they weren’t being ignored by heroes, even if we were not the heroes. Which was important.

  For some reason, Crowsong had explained that part in reverse. That we were out there to let criminals know that they were not unobserved. But considering the way Crowsong often deliberately made our presence known to random civilians wandering the street – to the point of allowing them to snap some pictures – I figured my interpretation of it worked better.

  I finished flying around the block and back to Crowsong. As usual, she was on a roof, watching over the city and keeping an eye on CrimeWatch and MaskedWatch while I did the scouting work.

  I descended and shifted back into base form.

  “Nothing?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “There’re a few people around. All of them hurrying like they don’t want to be here.”

  “Unsurprising. Everybody out late is tense right now.”

  And for good reason. Two nights ago, Gleamring of the Jannacht had become the first casualty in this war. Where, how and by whom was still unknown – at least to Crowsong and I – except that she’d died of asphyxiation. Considering her corpse was found in Northside, people blamed Motorgang, and specifically the villain Black Lung.

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  And in retaliation? Darkstar had killed Leadhead of Motorgang yesterday, also in Northside. They hadn’t been subtle about it at all and announced the deed on Chitterchat, NurTube, Cycles and everywhere else they could, Featherpiercer claiming the kill openly and proudly.

  It was another reason why we were patrolling, and why we were out at all on a Wednesday night when we usually skipped it.

  “Nothing from Nth-Sight?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” she groused. “You’d think that a moment like this would-”

  She was cut off by her phone ringing. Speak of the devil…

  “Fucking augurs,” Crowsong grumbled as she retrieved her phone.

  She held it up between us, answered the call and put it on speaker.

  “Not interrupting anything, am I?” Nth-Sight asked.

  “Just tell us what you want us to do,” Crowsong said.

  “Very well,” he replied. “As you both are no doubt aware, the loss of Leadhead has set Motorgang off something fierce. So fierce in fact, that Chroming Hand and Motor Spirit, along with some henchies on the latter’s motorcycles, are heading out to do something about it.”

  “Where?” Crowsong asked.

  “Bayside.”

  “Bayside?” I asked. Weren’t there targets closer to home for them to strike?

  “Western Bayside, to be exact. They’ve found a lawyer’s office that they believe to be an affiliate or front of the Syndicate. They hope to set it alight before the city’s shields can come down and ambush their first responders. Unbeknownst to them, their target is a dispatch base for Jannacht’s masked.”

  Damn.

  “How many?” Crowsong asked.

  “Auroran, Featherpiercer and Snorkel at the very least. Soliloquy might be there as well – he’s difficult to track at times – but whether he is or not, Darkstar will arrive quickly to reinforce.”

  Double damn.

  “And where do we come in?” Crowsong said, an edge to her tone. “There’s no way we can deal with all of them at the same time.”

  “And you won’t have to. The Guardians and West Coast Wardens are onto Motorgang’s movements through the use of their own augurs. But without a suitable distraction, they will arrive too late to do anything about it.”

  “So we stall them,” Crowsong concluded.

  “Exactly. Ten, fifteen minutes at most. As long as you can manage that, the heroes’ response will go to your location, Motorgang will retreat without casualties and the Syndicate will relocate to another base. Easy as that.”

  “Fifteen minutes, huh? Fantastic,” Crowsong said sarcastically. “Any tips on how to do that?”

  “Fight them, negotiate, tell them the truth, do a little dance – whatever works, just do it. All you need to do is make sure they do not get close to the Jannacht’s base,” he said. “I’ll send you the address. Good luck.”

  Without further comment, he hung up. Three seconds later, Crowsong’s phone buzzed.

  X

  The fake lawyer’s office was in a neighborhood full of old white European-style mansions. Of course, the mansion could only be as old as Charm itself – and likely much younger considering the city was build from Aberdeen outward – but it certainly tried its best to look historic.

  Not that we got close to the Jannacht base. We were posted a few streets away, right in front of the only opening into the community from Northside: a wide bridge across a small moat isolating the block. Unless they went a long, long way around it, the Motorgang group would have to pass through here.

  And if they didn’t, well, I was in the sky, keeping watch just in case.

  Crowsong was on the bridge, standing off to its left side. Her swords were ‘unspooled’ – or however the action of turning the sword into its whip-like state was called – across the width of the road, its not-quite barbs acting as improvised tire shredders. For some reason, she’d also wrapped it around the stone pillars of either side of the bridge. Maybe so if they get snagged on the tires, she wouldn’t lose them?

  Regardless, whether that would do anything to Motor Spirit’s maker-tech bikes…

  Well, we were about to find out.

  The first sign of the oncoming horde was the rumble of engines filling the air of the otherwise quiet night. Even without my owl form’s sensitive hearing, I would have recognized it to be Motorgang. It was distinct from even the most artificially loud electric engines of consumer motorbikes, the much deeper rumble of a maker-tech, older style of combustion engine sounding much bassier and random compared to the fake tunes of an augmented electric one.

  As gasoline and the like was a restricted substance, that meant it could only be Motorgang. Dieselpriest was the only one who could produce a similar enough replacement through the use of his power, with Motor Spirit’s machines refining it into something useable.

  It was another cornerstone of Motorgang’s core business: producing, selling and transporting this false gasoline to rich bikers all across this part of North America.

  The second sign heralding their arrival came a while after I first heard the noise. Beyond the park on the other side of the moat, and beyond the road running parallel to it, I saw a series of motorcycles driving down the road towards us. Their bright headlights were side by side as they drove two-by-two for a total of eight bikes. Meaning there were six henchies besides the two masked Nth-Sight told us about.

  I swooped down to join my mentor, landing next to her and shifting back to base.

  “That them?” Crowsong asked, having heard the motor cavalcade before she could see them.

  “Yes. They’re heading right for us.”

  “Good. That makes things easy,” she said. “Go stand on the other side of the bridge. After they pass us by, press the button and- you know which button, right?”

  I’d seen her press it often enough during training to give her a confident nod.

  “Good. If all goes well, their tires will be ripped apart as they pass. You can retract the blade after. Just make sure the sword doesn’t fall in the river.”

  “We’re not going to try talking to them first?” I asked.

  “Not immediately. If we try to block the road, they’ll just speed past us. At least this way we’ll have some advantage to make sure they listen to what we have to say,” she said. “And if they don’t, well, hopefully wrecked bikes and a conversation is long enough to stall them for the heroes to come in and save us.”

  I nodded, but swallowed underneath the mask. ‘Come in and save us’ sounded about right. If Motor Spirit, Chroming Hand and their henchies decided to engage us seriously, there’d be little we could do against them.

  It was nerve wrecking.

  “And remember, our goal is to stall, not to engage them,” Crowsong added, to which I nodded. “Don’t get close to them, don’t rush in, don’t threaten them or anything else like that, alright?” Again, I nodded at her. “And if you get beaten by one of them, masked or otherwise, you. Stay. Down. We don’t want-”

  I cut off her worrying right there. “Don’t want another Darkstar incident, I remember.”

  Crowsong paused for a second. It wasn’t often I cut her off like that. “Well… as long as you understand.” The rumbling noise drew ever closer. “Now, get ready,” She gestured towards the other side of the bridge.

  It took them a little under a minute to get to us, tires screeching as they turned the corner up ahead. From the way they were driving, I feared Crowsong had been right that they would’ve driven right past us – or over us – if we’d stood in front of them rather than try an ambush.

  They reaccelerated after turning the corner, revving their engines playfully in excitement. Their maker-made bikes were behemoths of steel painted a mat black and red – the colors of Motorgang. The wheels themselves were behemoths all on their own, spaced far apart and spanning nearly a meter in height. The chassis looked as if it were suspended in between them like a hammock.

  The henchies were dressed similarly to their leader Blazin, except their leather was completely black without their leader’s trademark flames. Their red bandanas hung around their neck rather than obscure their face, their helmets fulfilling that function instead.

  Somewhere underneath the noise of their firing engines, I could hear them faintly whoop and yell as they approached their target, no doubt excited at the prospect of enacting vengeance and drawing blood.

  I watched as the head of the cavalcade – two henchies – drew closer and closer to the improvised spike trap. Soon, they’d pass the threshold and our trap would be sprung. I hoped Crowsong’s spikes were long and strong enough to pierce the thick rubber the wheels possessed. If not, things might get difficult.

  Yet a few meters before the two big-wheeled behemoths were about to race over said trap, they revved up their engines hard and pulled a wheelie, swiftly dashing ahead of their column.

  My eyes widened and I turned to Crowsong. She looked at me at the same time, no doubt similarly shocked.

  She made to step away from her position to warn them…

  But it was too late. Before either of us could do anything, their rear wheels drove over the barbs of Crowsong’s sword.

  Rather than pop their tires and send them skidding across the road, the barbs got stuck in the rubber of the giant rear wheels and pulled into their rotation, dragging the line up and around the fork and fender.

  “Jester!” I heard Crowsong yell. “Reel-!”

  Before my mentor could finish her order, the tripwire snapped taut.

  The pull of the maker-made motorcycle proved to be too much… but it wasn’t Crowsong’s weapons that gave way. Instead, the rear of the bike was pulled apart wheel first, large parts of the chassis giving way before the tire and the fork did. At the same time, the stone pillar of the bridge’s railing the sword had been tied around gave a resounding crack! as the pull proved too much for it.

  The now one-wheeled motorcycles slid along the road for a few seconds in a shower of sparks as the metal chassis ground along the asphalt. Then, as the momentum bled off, the bikes and the henchies fell to their sides.

  I spared the henchies a quick look to check, but since they were moving and cursing rather than screaming in pain, I figured they were fine enough for now.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, my body relaxing as the tension I didn’t know I held left it. That could’ve gone far, far worse. Did they really have to pull a wheelie right then and there?

  The remaining six motorcycles skid to a stop right before where two tires now hang suspended in the air. Which was good; I didn’t think the pillar could withstand another one of the bikes getting caught in the wire.

  I quickly pressed the sword hilt’s button, hoping the blade’s protrusion would be sharp enough to tear themselves free from the wreckage. And they were… But they made a hell of a noise as they tore themselves free from tire, fork and fender.

  Instantly, headlights swerved and their blindingly bright light hit me straight in the eye.

  “The fuck is-” a harsh voice said. “Jester! The fuck are you-!”

  The unknown figure was cut off as Crowsong reeled in the sword on her hand.

  A headlight turned to illuminate my mentor. “Peace, Chrome. Spirit,” Crowsong said. “We’re here to prevent you from doing something stupid.”

  My mentor sure had a way with words.