2103:12:06:15:55:55

  The ball bounced once, twice, thrice as Saga dribbled the ball. She held one hand out to ward me off, but the guard was so loose and halfhearted it looked more like an invitation.

  In other words, clearly a trap. But I’d gotten used to her tricks.

  Right before the fourth bounce, Saga twisted her hand and body to move to my right. I half-stepped to follow, careful not to overcommit. Knowing Saga, this was another trap.

  As predicted, Saga twisted her grip and dragged the ball the other away, passing it to her other hand and turning her body. She took a step forward, committed to the change in direction.

  I moved my feet and turned around, dashing to make up for the distance she’d gained with the maneuver.

  But it turned out to be another trap. Saga passed the ball through her legs and spun a one-eighty, running off to the other side. Careful not to trip over my own legs, I swiftly changed gears and tried to reach her before she could take the shot.

  But the distance had grown too much; Saga crouched low and made to jump, ready to land the shot. As a final Hail Mary, I jumped to try and block the ball or knock it off-course midflight.

  And yet, it was another fake out. Saga pulled her arms back right before her feet left the ground, letting me fly past without shooting her shot. Only after I passed did she jump and take it.

  The ball sunk straight in. Didn’t even hit the back board or the rim.

  Damn.

  Saga did a quick victory lap while I retrieved the ball, but it wasn’t Saga that was the most vocal about her victory.

  “Woooo! Hell yeah!” Jolie cheered. I’d beaten her the last round, so she was feeling a bit spiteful. “That’s ten bucks, Mil; time to pay up!” She held out her hand to Millie.

  “I recall making no such bet,” Millie replied, nose high in the air like the accusation stank.

  Even though she had, in fact, made that bet.

  “Oh please. It was your idea.” Jolie beckoned for Millie to pay up. “Mess with the bull, you get the horns.” That was not at all a fitting saying for the situation.

  As the two argued, Saga walked up to me, lightly sweaty from the activity. “Want to go another round?”

  “Sure.” Better that than involve myself with whatever Millie and Jolie’s banter would devolve into.

  We were at an outdoors basketball court close to Millie’s and Jolie’s homes, part of a wider recreational and/or sports park. It wasn’t our main afterschool hangout – Millie’s home came first, and the Fairfield Acres Mall second – but it was high up the list.

  I realized I liked sports, or moving about at least. Which came as a surprise. My active outings with Mom had a wholly different results, but in hindsight, many of those involved doing things in nature and not in a mostly concrete, rubber and sand park like this one. And like with sambo, I was made to move and run around.

  And this one wasn’t directly tied to me being a hero, which was a plus.

  Playing basketball was a bit of a reprieve from masking. Last weekend plus Monday had made it feel like the city was falling apart, but moments like these ensured me that no matter how far it’d escalated, life still went on as normal.

  Not that regular people hadn’t noticed, but the ways they felt it was distinctly different. Their troubles were mainly ones of psychology (escalating fearmongering by the news), inconvenience (roads blocked off as they were destroyed) or through property damage (that one spoke for itself, really).

  That didn’t mean things hadn’t continued to escalate. The capture of Irkalla and to a lesser extent Charoniskos had destroyed the Dead Hive. Motorgang had swiftly moved in and taken over their spheres of influence – both geographically in Riverside as well as their business of pulling heists and tolling transport coming in and out of the city – while absorbing Heximinar, Death Rite and Hellear into their ranks.

  No doubt they’d be rebranded soon to fit the Motorgang mold better.

  As for everywhere else: endless fights and plots. Reddemarke and Sunthief of the Dusk Bandits, like Dead Hive, got into a fight on Monday as well, battling Soliloquy and Endoida in Greenside. That same day, One, Null and Thirteen of the Numbers Room struck at the Syndicate’s burgeoning teller and securities scam in Aberdeen on Monday, only to have their own investment fraud operation blown open by Jannacht’s Itentyrant on Tuesday. Finally, Motorgang violently stopped a freight train that tried to smuggle Syndicate goods into the city yesterday, managing to wound Charmer in the process.

  These were only the obvious ones, with who-knows how many henchie-directed crimes or attacks, or lesser-known masked battles playing in the background.

  And all the while, Magistry did nothing as per usual.

  Yet for all the bad business going around, there was an upside. Like during the Monday fight Crowsong and I were involved in, heroes got in at record response times. At the battle in Greenside on Monday, Gaptime, Jauntiste and Lady Mercy of the Wardens arrived just in time to prevent the Jannacht from killing Reddemarke (though not Sunthief) and capture him, while also preventing worse from occurring between both sides’ henchies.

  In the financial battle between Numbers Room and Jannacht, the Guardian Knowinner (and who knows how many background augurs) uncovered and froze large parts of the Syndicate’s and Numbers Room’s financial assets, with the physical assets seized by the Wardens Orsini and Autophaser, and an army of prosecutors and police.

  The Motorgang attack was hindered by a Wardens-Guardians combined effort of Pangolin, Rostam, Tahminah, Jauntiste and Antibaronne. Although no masked were captured – or killed for that matter – they’d prevented either side from running away with the literal trainload of spoils.

  The heroes had really been on the ball since Jagar and Elegast got killed – to the point I wondered why they hadn’t before. Had the Wardens and Guardians worked out some form of intelligence sharing agreement? Or were the online rumors about them finding a teamwork augur and/or master true? If so, they’d arrived a bit too late for my liking.

  Maybe I’d find out on Sunday.

  As for our own involvement in the masquerade, it had come to a stop since Monday. Amber had become ill after the fight – a combination of fatigue and sleeplessness, no doubt – and all patrols, strikes and other heroic business was put to a halt. Which… I didn’t like, but understood. It was too dangerous to go alone, and from what I’d read most action revolved around adults doing adult things, like causing mayhem throughout the city.

  And yet she still came to our base most nights to guide me in training, to the point I started to wonder if she secretly slept there. Which in turn made me wonder what her home life was even like for that to be possible. Then again, Amber now had all day to sleep since she’d stopped coming to school for the moment, so she had plenty of time, if not plenty of energy.

  We focused our efforts on exploiting mimicking non-living forms – something she’d gotten angry over when she discovered I’d known I could do it all along. Which was unreasonable on her part. Who knew turning into a blanket would be different from turning into water? And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t explored other options. I’d also tried turning into a computer, but that had done nothing as well, so I figured the usefulness of non-living things was limited.

  But with the water proving the opposite, we took our downtime to experiment. Turns out, all liquids share the same ghost in a water web power, but only to the liquid involved. Me becoming Amber’s favorite disgusting sports drink only allowed me to move in it, while becoming a Coke only allowed me to move inside that, oil only through that, etcetera. Water could just move through all of it, so all the rest was practically useless. Except oil, but how many oil spills are there to move through, really.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  When I tried air, I couldn’t grasp it at all, couldn’t perceive it through my power. Same went for light and space, and even more visible things like smoke, mist, fire and electricity, though these ones felt strangely slippery rather than imperceptible. I could copy the live copper wire, however, and still retain some small amount of charge I could kind of manipulate? It ‘leaked out’ within a split second, but if I was quick enough I could decide which end sparked – though the current was not enough to be useful according to Amber.

  As for other objects, things were a mixed bag in terms of usefulness. A couch let me sense people that stood near me within a one-meter radius, but only when they stood; as soon as they sat anywhere, they’d disappear from my senses. The same went for chairs. Copying the generator – which turned out maker-tech or maker-derived; Amber inherited it from Blackhawk and didn’t know – allowed me to move some parts of it strangely enough, but not nearly enough to be functional. Bricks gave me nothing as far as we could tell, nor did turning into concrete.

  Although we did figure by accident that I could ‘target’ parts of things for mimicry – as in, I could choose between a piece of concrete or the whole warehouse. Not that I did that, but I noticed that the time requirement for mimicking the concrete floor was way too long it when I tried to grab ahold of just a piece of its form, with Crowsong – half in panic – figuring out what that might mean.

  So that was neat, if also not that useful.

  The strangest ones were a training dummy and a boxing bag, which gave me a sort of ‘hostility sense’ on people who were hellbent on enacting violence – including hitting me – in a hundred-meter radius. Which was absurd in both how useful and useless it was. Even criminals planning to murder someone are not in an urge to commit violence hours – or even minutes – before they’re actually at the scene, while at the same time, boxers going at it in the gym did trigger my senses.

  All in all, very scattershot results with inanimate objects. Nevertheless, it might prove useful the next time I-

  “Sam!” Jolie called from the side. “Your phone’s ringing!”

  I halted mid dribble, Saga stealing the ball from me as I became distracted (how petty). I jogged over and took the phone from Jolie.

  “Yeah?”

  “Found Motor Spirit’s – and soon to be Hexeminar’s – maker lab,” Nth-Sight spoke quickly. “An underground garage attached to an abandoned office tower in the northeast of The Hub. Can you get there before five?”

  “Consider it done,” I said automatically. Why the hurry?

  “Good. Thank you-” a harsh noise sounded over the phone, sounding as if it came from some distance. “Look, I got to go.” He hung up without another word.

  My phone buzzed right after; a text with all the information I needed to get there. Naturally, I immediately sent it and a message with further explanation to Amber.

  I stared at my phone for a second, frowning. Even by Nth-Sight standards, that was weird.

  “Who was that?” Jolie asked.

  I looked around, just to be sure. Saga had joined us at the concrete giant stair-like benches. On the other end of the court was another group of basketballers, too far away to overhear. The same went for the soccer players further to the left of us, the people working out at the scattered exercise equipment, as well as another group of teens sitting with their bicycles and scooters, busy doing nothing in particular.

  “Nth-Sight,” I replied, voice low. I’d already shared various bits and pieces – to Amber’s dismay – with my friends, so they knew more or less what was going on.

  “That creep again,” Jolie said, not bothering with lowering volume or hide her disgust. She might’ve misinterpreted some things.

  “He’s not…” that bad, I figured Millie’s next words to be, but she trailed off before finishing. “At least he’s fighting the Jannacht, right?”

  “Next target’s Motorgang,” I replied.

  “Well,” Millie said, recalculating, “they’ve been going at it too, what with them absorbing Dead Hive after you… well, you know.”

  It was a good point. Or would’ve been, if Nth-Sight hadn’t been playing games from the beginning. Then again, if Nth-Sight hadn’t been playing games, Amber and I wouldn’t have gotten into a position to capture Charoniskos – and perhaps, by extension, Irkalla. And where would Motorgang be then?

  Nevertheless, it was still a request I aimed to fulfill. Destroying Motorgang’s maker lab might go a long way to halt their momentum.

  “Either way, I have to go,” I said to my friends. “Got to get there before five, and be done before six or else I’ll miss Mom getting home.”

  “You can say you ate dinner with me?” Jolie suggested. “I don’t think she got my parents’ phone numbers yet, so she wouldn’t know who to call to confirm.”

  It was an idea, but, “Maybe as a last resort.”

  I picked up my bag, said, “See you tomorrow,” and went on my way.

  X

  Amber had yet to return my message – maybe she was asleep? – but I’d arrived where I needed to be.

  As Nth-Sight had said, the location was an office building. Not the kind of office building you’d see in Aberdeen or along the Hoquiam in Bayside, but the kind of wide-but-low two-floor office building you’d find in industrial districts. The kind that rented to industrial engineers, small-scale printing houses, garages, headquarters of small chains, or the occasional poor artist, freelancer or independent.

  It housed none of these. The building had been abandoned, the windows boarded up where the glass had been thrown out, and the entrance stickered with faded ‘for rent’ signs offering a variety of square meterage floor space.

  The underground garage had likewise been closed. Old metal roller doors occupied the entrance, with yellow ‘keep out!’ tape to drive home the message. However, the doors were old as well, and a couple of hooligans and/or bored teenagers had had their fun with it, creating dents and holes all over. Especially along the edges.

  In short, nothing a rat couldn’t get through.

  The second gate behind it – one of iron bars painted green – was much more pristine than the outer one. It seemed fully operational as well, with a box in front of it asking for proof of identity, and a working stoplight in the corner burning red, waiting to be turned green. Not that it would for me.

  But again, nothing a rat couldn’t get through.

  And so, with minimal effort, I was in.

  The first floor of the parking garage was as derelict as expected. Puddles of water everywhere – it had rained yesterday; the drainage here wasn’t great – and was completely dark. Switching to cat form – a new one, rest in peace random alley cat number one – relieved that part at least, even if feline instinct made me much more careful with stepping around the puddles.

  But from up here, I could already tell the floor underneath this one was much better. Light flooded upward invitingly from the slope, and so I made my way to it, heading down.

  And it was better. The lights were functional and the floor was clean of water or other filth, not a single speck of dirt or dust to be found. Whereas the pillars on the first floor had looked to be crumbling and the paint on the parking lots had all but faded, the structural integrity of the second floor was pristine, and the paint for the parking lots completely, deliberately absent, purposefully washed clean.

  The floor was also completely empty.

  There were no motorcycles. There was no workbench. There were no machines to manufacture whatever Motor Spirit required, nor great stockpiles of fuel or raw materials to work said nonexistent machines. The place wasn’t even used as extra storage, or, as far as I could tell, as a safehouse or even a base at all.

  I inspected every corner, just to be sure I hadn’t missed some secret entrance or hidden button to open the wall. But there was nothing. It was completely, suspiciously empty.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” A voice – a familiar voice – said behind me.

  Cat-me jumped in startling, an unintentional mrauw passing my lips.

  As soon as I landed, I turned around and found my spook.

  Blazin.

  “I tell one augur – a friendly one, one I’ve worked with for years. I tell him, ask him, ‘is this place going to be discovered?’” he said, swirling around that Dieselpriest-petrol-substitute bottle of his. “He says ‘no’ of course. And for the longest time he was right. But just to be sure, I asked him again last week, and the answer was still ‘no’.”

  He took a swig of the bottle and I backed up a bit. He was between me and the entrance. I had to get into a better position in order to run away.

  “But he doesn’t know that I have eyes as well. My sight might not be as clear and far, but even the smallest patterns burn well in bright minds.” As before, he liked his fiery metaphors. “So, I didn’t trust him. I made the effort – and it was a bitch of an effort, truly. But I still did it. I moved eve-ry-thing out. Every piece of my Motor Spirit’s tech, every bit of my Dieselpriest’s fuel, every piece of my furniture; I moved everything out. And lo and behold!”

  He spun around theatrically. I dashed for the exit, but he threw his bottle with unerring precision right before my face. Flames leapt from the puddle, going left and right to cut me off, the heat licking at my whiskers. Instinctively, I jumped further back.

  Blazin tutted. “Don’t be rude. I said ‘lo and behold’, not ‘try and run’,” he said. “All I’m asking for is your attention. It’s not like I’ll kill you or anything – I’ve always obeyed the Treaty, unlike another in this charming city of ours. Besides, why would I, when we got the same enemy?”

  I looked at him intently. What did he mean by same enemy?

  “If you’ve got a question, you’ve gotta get out of that cat form,” he said mockingly.

  I hesitated for a split second, but shifted back. “Same enemy?” I asked, narrowing my eyes in suspicion.

  “As I was saying: my friend the augur, I ask him about my many, many places and spaces. ‘Is this location safe? Is it hidden? Is it secure?’, and he deemed it so,” he reiterated. “Then, somewhere else, someone else, an augur with a completely different name spills one of them, and days later that location is raided.”

  I could see what he was getting at, but still.

  “Augur interference. That’s to be expected right?”

  “True, true,” he said, pacing around. “This is a war we’re going through, after all. Augury, counter-augury, counter-counter-augury ad infinitum ad absurdum per aspera blah blah blah – it’s to be expected he’d get it wrong sometimes. Sometimes. Soooomeeetimes.” He drew the last one out playfully. Too playful for such an old man.

  “But see, you’ve only got part of the puzzle.” There was something like glee in his voice. “You see masked fighting each other or gangs shooting at each other; whatever makes the news, whatever’s recent. But I see it all, and all the way back. The all-too-convenient thievery, the sabotage of specific sites, of specific people, the all too well-timed bombings… All of it aimed at Jannacht. Except when one gang gets a bit too… uppity for their own good. Or just when they’re about to strike a deal with the Jannacht, or try and set rules for engagements in this war, or attempt to join in an alliance, or a truce, a ceasefire – if people try anything but drive the Jannacht out of Charm.”

  He paused than, stopping his pacing and turning to face me head one, voice uncharacteristically cold. “That is not how business is done.” I shuddered. He returned to his pacing and his earlier cheer returned. “And of all people, I should know. I’ve been the head of Motorgang long enough to have forgotten the name of my predecessor. I know business. I know when spanners get thrown in the works. And I know when I’m being led around the bush.”

  He remained silent after that, though continued to pace.

  “Okay,” I said. “But why tell me this?”

  He stopped and turned on a dime, then took three hurried steps closer – a power walk straight to my face. Instinctively, I took a step back, which caused him to halt mid-stride.

  “Because, little Jester,” he all but whispered. “I do not know how to get to him. But I think you and your mentor might. And I’ve seen you throw spanners in his work, both intentional and not, and I’ve seen what happens to those augurs megalomaniacal enough to think they can control a war.”

  He took a step back, returning to his former tone. “He’s going to fuck up – or maybe he’s already fucked up by fucking with you, and I, and Crow. Which is why I’ll tell you this: you’ll receive a text, or a call, or an email or a pigeon with a letter attached to its feet the moment you step out of here. And that text holds both an easy truth he organized and an all-too-difficult-lie he failed to make reality. But I would recommend checking. Just to be sure, you know?”

  He waved his hand and the flames that previously barred my way split in two. At the same time, the flames fanned out and spread everywhere else.

  He was planning to burn this place down, it seemed.

  “So run along once again, friend,” he said, laughing. “I’ll stay here and pray for your mentor’s continued good health, and your not-friend’s misfortune.”

  At those words, I dashed away, turning into a cat for added speed. And once I was out, I immediately opened my phone and read the text that came in as soon as connection returned.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss Jester. I received the vision too late. There was an attack, Mangine of Destruction and Maxxellerate have struck your base at the Intra-Cascadian. Crowsong’s continued vengeance-seeking against Motorgang proved too much, and they’ve gone too far. Trust me, we will make Motorgang pay when all this is over. And it will be over soon.’