“No, we are not going to try and find him,” Dad thundered, face drawn into a scowl. “We’re done with Chains, you hear?”

  “But he saved me,” Sarah Miller – no longer Smokeshow – argued. “And I thought you said we always do right by people who help us.”

  “We do right by our people,” Dad corrected, thumping his chest with a clang. “And Chains never really was one of us. It was obvious he was angling for something else from the beginning!”

  “Yeah!” Sarah retorted, boiling at Dad’s dismissal of the only guy she’d run into who hadn’t been a loser. “Which is why he’s better. He’s got a life outside the gangs. I don’t. You don’t.”

  “We don’t need that kind of thing,” Dad said with a scowl, then seemed to realize what he’d said a fraction of a second too late. Sarah clenched her fists, glaring at him as if she could make him catch fire with her eyes.

  “Well I do now,” she snapped. “And because of you I don’t have it!” Dad flinched at that, losing some of his frown.

  “Look, honey,” he started, and Sarah snarled, turning her back on him and stomping out of the room. She stormed down the hallway of her mom’s house to her old bedroom, only barely having the presence of mind to close the door behind her rather than slam it. Mom would chew her ear off if she went around slamming doors.

  Her old room was not as she had left it, thank goodness, but it was spare and bare, with boxes up against the wall that she hadn’t bothered to unpack yet. She hadn’t finished unpacking her stuff the last time she’d had to move, and hadn’t had the energy to finish this time. Between losing her power and QwikMed’s lingering effects, she was spent, exhausted, disoriented, discommoded, and a dozen other dis-words at the same time.

  She fumbled through one of the boxes that was open, grabbing her notebook and a pencil and hurling herself on the bed to scribble down some of the stanzas running through her head from being so angry. Angry and sad and all kinds of emotions bubbling into words that needed venting onto a paper so she wouldn’t just explode from them all, detonating over her mother and her brother and the staff at her mom’s place who were only trying to help.

  Her powers still hadn’t come back. As just a regular person, she couldn’t be part of the gang anymore, couldn’t hang out with her dad or his crowd. Too dangerous, and it wasn’t like she had any other skills she could use as an excuse to stay. Nor was there really anyone besides Dad who wanted her to stay. Not without her position as Dad’s lieutenant. Even Columbuzz – Charles – thought it was too dangerous.

  Dad’s footsteps came up to her door, stopped, and then went away again. Sarah stayed where she was, etching her thoughts into her notebook with dark, furious strokes, smearing and scratching ink across the page. It was only when her fingers started to go numb from the weird position she had on the bed that she sat up with a groan.

  “Guh.” Sarah pulled herself off the bed, glancing out the window to try and refresh her mind as she flexed her arm, trying to work feeling back into her left hand as she watched the sun set. Somehow actual hours had passed while she was writing, and the sky outside was casting glorious colors down on a swath of green and blue.

  Mom’s estate was way upscale, the entire eighth story of the Humbert Building off of Grand Park East. The Park was one of only three real pieces of greenery in the city, making the area really upscale, but she had to admit she appreciated having a view of it at the moment. Definitely nicer than the slums, but she’d always felt the area came with so many restrictions she couldn’t really enjoy it.

  “You okay in there, honey?” Sarah scowled as her mom’s voice came from the other side of the door. it wasn’t like she was a teenager anymore; she didn’t need her parents hovering outside her door like she was a kid — though, thankfully, Mom didn’t actually come in. Though, secretly, Sarah was glad. After the blowup with Dad she was feeling just so alone, even with other people in the house.

  “Yeah, mom,” Sarah said, frantically upending a box of magical girl plushies on her bed to hide the scribbled pages that had ended up all over the sheets.

  “You’re not still mooning over that boy, are you?”

  “Mom!” Sarah protested. Crash had chased away Chains but good, and Sarah had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Or how to find him. She hadn’t even told him what her real name was – nor asked his – so there was really nothing she could use to find him. If she’d had a name, mom probably could have dug him up, thanks to being head of the Department of Housing Development, but as it was there was no telling where he’d gone. She’d still asked in a moment of weakness, and now her mom was never going to let her forget it.

  “I hadn’t heard anything for so long,” her mom continued. “I was starting to worry you were playing for the other team.”

  “Oh my god, mom!” Sarah shrieked, jerking open the door to stare at her mother. Unlike Sarah, Sally Miller was tall and buxom. Most of Sarah’s looks came from Crash, which might explain why she had powers when her brother and sister, who took after mom, didn’t.

  “Well, you’re not moping now, are you?” Mom pulled her into a hug, which Sarah fought only half-heartedly. “Anyway, wanted to give you some time to clean up. Aunt Gloria and Uncle Mark are coming to dinner so everyone will be here.”

  “Alright,” Sarah said. Gloria and Mark weren’t actually family – they weren’t even married to each other – but they were long-time family friends. It wasn’t often they came by, but she had memories of them attending Sunrise Festivals and Spring Jubilees in the park from the time she was young.

  “And if you’re worrying about what to do now, why don’t you work on your writing?” Mom said, leaning forward to look over Sarah’s head and peer around at the still mostly-bare room. “I’m sure you have the talent to make it into a real career. Journalist or novelist or anything you want to put your mind to.”

  “I’ll think about it, mom,” Sarah mumbled into her mother’s embrace, and Mom released her.

  “I’ll let you get ready,” she said, and headed off back into the suite. Sarah grabbed the box with her toiletries before heading to the bathroom down the hall. It had a massive walk-in shower, huge mirrors, a triple sink, and exorbitant amounts of marble. The kind of opulence that felt more intimidating than indulgent, but maybe she’d just spent too much time in a little converted office building in the slums.

  She looked through what she had, then glanced at herself in the mirror and decide to just get rid of most of it. Tins and bottles went into the trash with a crush and a smash as she flung the old makeup in the garbage. Since she wasn’t Smokeshow, there was no point in the goth aesthetic, even if she did like it. It wasn’t Sarah, and that’s who she was now. She only kept the most ordinary, normal, boring items. Like any other non-meta person. Like herself.

  Her parents were, mercifully, off doing something else when Sarah emerged, and rather than join the guests in the drawing room she found herself following the scent of food into the kitchen. The on-staff cook was an aged, waist-high lizard-man from the Deep Kingdoms that had been old when Sarah was young but hadn’t changed the slightest since the last time she’d seen him.

  “Hello Sarah again! You can chop onions yes?” Mister Gratin flipped onions onto a cutting board with a twist of his talons, wielding a santoku half his size as he arranged some kind of string-cut vegetable side-dish. Sarah wasn’t sure that any part of dinner was going to use onions, as the beef bourguignon was already simmering, but she still grabbed a knife and started to chop since otherwise Mister Gratin would chase her from the kitchen.

  “How’s Mom been?” She asked, for lack of any better topic. “I haven’t been around for, well. A while.”

  “Same as always! Busy busy busy! So many things happening!” Mister Gratin waved the knife in a frankly alarming manner. “People coming from my homeland even again!” Sarah nodded, trying to imagine the difficulties of getting housing ready for lizard-people who could range from Gratin’s size to – in the case of the Great Scaled Kings – skyscraper-scaled.

  “But that is not why you are here no. Something on your mind yes?”

  “Maybe.” Sarah wondered how often she’d actually talked to Gratin. It hadn’t been that much, especially once she’d moved out to live with her Dad in high school, when her powers first manifested. “Just, wondering what I do now. I don’t really know anyone here anymore.” In fact, she didn’t know much of anyone outside the gangs – and until recently hadn’t seen a point in it – but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. Mister Gratin probably knew, but there was a difference between an unspoken secret and a spoken one.

  “You have family here yes. Knowing starts with them!” Gratin chattered happily as he checked cookpots, ovens, and started to shred lettuce for a salad. Sarah still didn’t know why she was chopping onions, and she blinked away the fumes that stung at her eyes.

  “I guess I could say hi to James before dinner,” she muttered, and Gratin whisked the cutting board and knife from her grasp.

  “Yes, you do that,” he said, turning her rough-chopped onion into diced with a flourish and dumping it into a sizzling pan. Sarah coughed, rubbed at her eyes again and ducked out of the kitchen with a mostly-ignored thanks. She wandered through the halls, finding her older brother setting the table.

  The dining room looked out over the park, of course, and it was nice enough outside that the balcony doors were open. It was large, lavishly furnished with sculptures and paintings, and often held a long, polished wooden table for formal affairs. For something smaller like tonight, though, the tinker-made table had been shrunk to something more conventional, just by the balcony.

  “Hey there, you doing okay?” James was built like a linebacker, big and broad with muscles straining the seams of the tailored suit. Despite that, he was actually part of the Deep Kingdom diplomatic corps, using his brain rather than brawn.

  “Mom asked the same thing,” Sarah said, taking the stack of silverware that James held out to her. “I dunno. Maybe.” She wanted to mention Chains, but it wasn’t like James would know more than Mom about tracking the guy down. Part of her still hoped she’d see him, but her brain was completely unable to summon any way she could. But her conversations with him had stuck with her, and she knew that he would want her to do something besides mope.

  “Well, if you need a friendly ear, I’m topside for another couple weeks before going back down,” he told her.

  “Thanks,” she said, wondering what it’d be like to go down to the Deep Kingdoms. She’d read about how strange it was, all those thousands of miles beneath the surface with sprawling greenery and massive crystals lining Earth’s hollow interior. Ever since the passage through Hyperborea had been discovered, there’d been some form of trade and communication but it was still a wild and violent place.

  “Maybe I’ll go with you,” she said, the thought coming to her all of a sudden, and James threw her a startled look. It wasn’t that she had any particular love of the Deep Kingdoms, but she really wanted to get away from everything that reminded her of what she’d lost — and there really weren’t many people who got the opportunity to go to the Deep Kingdoms. She couldn’t shake her mom’s suggestion that she try writing something, and writing about far-away places sounded like something she actually could do.

  “We can discuss that later,” he told her, his expression turning thoughtful. Sarah nodded, glad that he hadn’t just brushed her off.

  The doorbell rang, and mom’s voice came from the front room, assuring them that she’d get it. A few minutes later, Mom and Dad arrived in the dining room with Gloria and Mark in tow. As usual, Gloria was dressed plainly, the small blonde woman trying to seem unobtrusive, and even in such a relaxed house as Sally’s she was stiff and precise. Mark, by contrast, was an easygoing, smiling man with black hair that Sarah had never seen in anything but a three-piece suit.

  Rather like Gratin, the two of them hadn’t changed much from how Sarah remembered. Gloria seemed to give off a youthful glow, and Mark seemed almost frozen in time, even his haircut identical. While Gloria was generally subdued, when she did smile it lit up the room; by contrast, Mark’s pleasant demeanor never really reached his eyes. There was a brief bit of bustle as everyone got seated, after which Gratin appeared with the salads, whisking them into place despite his diminutive size.

  “So what brings you to Star City this time?” Sally asked Mark as Dad carefully watched Gratin pour a beer.

  “Had to deal with some employees,” Mark said, shaking his head. All Sarah knew about Mark’s job was that he was some sort of corporate executive, moving between the cities of the Alliance. Gloria, on the other hand, worked for Star Central. Some sort of specialist that sent her traveling almost as much as Mark. “And of course Gloria is stuck for a while.”

  “I am required to stay in the city until a certain HR matter has been cleared up,” Gloria said, straightening her glasses. While the words were neutral enough, she sure sounded annoyed.

  “It’s been a rough week for everyone,” Sally said sympathetically, with a glance in Sarah’s direction. She almost sneered at that, but managed to muffle it by crunching down on some croutons. Mom meant well, but Sarah felt almost insulted by the comparison between having her life upended and just some ordinary business nonsense. But it was hard to summon the proper attitude when she wasn’t Smokeshow anymore.

  “However, this too shall pass,” Sally continued, waving at the kitchen to ask Gratin for the next course. “Just need to keep your head up and move forward.”

  Sarah bit back a reply, nodding stiffly instead rather than saying something rude to her mom. It was easy enough for her to say something, but Sarah didn’t even know how to start. The little bit of a life she’d started to have had been taken from her. But she didn’t want to give up hope entirely, and she knew that if she ever got the chance to find Chains again she’d have to take it.

  ***

  Isaac sat on his bed in the tiny room that he’d been given at Justice for Hire, looking at what he’d been able to rescue from the self-store the day before. It had been a risk, but if anyone had been keeping an eye on it, they were drawn away by Blacktime’s activities because he’d been able to retrieve his clamshell, his tinkered costuming station, and his credsticks, along with a few changes of clothes and some personal items. Most of it had to stay, years of work and accumulation of materials, but the self-store was paid for through the next six months. If nobody found it, it’d be safe for a while.

  The stuff he’d gotten out still needed a bit of protection. Somewhere to hide the things that didn’t fit with Ravdia’s image, but still under his control close at hand, rather than a rented locker somewhere. He knew some people would super senses would be able to realize much of Ravdia was a costume, but that was different from having something that prompted actual curiosity. After getting accosted having breakfast, he wasn’t ready to trust anyone or anything he didn’t need to.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Looking around the small room, there weren’t really any places he could hide things, but as he went and poked at the corners he realized that two of the walls were paperboard rather than anything substantial. Probably the result of subdividing the back of the former gym, as most new construction employed a meta for the rough shape at the very least.

  Hiding things in walls was something the kids had done back in foster care, to keep their most important treasures from getting stolen. It might have been prison-like, but it worked, and it sprang to mind for his current situation. He just needed to make a few preparations first.

  Cracking open his costuming station, he sorted swatches until the tinkered color-checker found one that matched the pale blue of the walls, then packed everything away again and shoved it under the bed. Then, as the final touch, he disarrayed the bed so the linens draped off it, hiding that there was anything there. It went against the grain, as he had always been neat and tidy, but Ravdia probably wasn’t.

  The one thing he reserved was a magnetic tape, with the next set of information to send off to Rebecca. Shrugging on a small backpack and stowing the tape inside, he slipped out of the merc house and skated off into the early morning. In a concession to his supposed job he did keep the radio-armband, but shucked the costume and packed it away at the earliest opportunity. As David Jeffries, he sauntered through the upscale area until he found a wrapping store, passing by a few shoppers to present his swatch to the paper-printer.

  Actually buying a bit was wince-inducing for mere colored paper, as this was an upscale shop and he was used to rummaging for cheap stuff, but he needed it. The roll of paper went into his backpack and he exited the shop, vacillating for a moment on where to go. Back to the merc house, to finish his preparations, or stop by a café with cybernet access to see if he’d gotten any communications the past few days. Eventually he chose the latter, stopping by a post office en route to send the tape to Rebecca and keep up the pressure on Blacktime.

  The fact that the man himself had shown up, in addition to the way Plasmaster had broken into the conference, was proof that Isaac’s simple information campaign was having a real effect. There was no telling how fragile Blacktime’s empire really was, and how much harm just exposing his holdings could do. Not enough to take down the man himself, of course, but infighting and chaos could crush his influence down to practically nothing.

  Despite everything that had happened, that was a cheerful thought, and from a glance at the headlines as he strolled past a newsstand, the papers were still after Glorybeam. He wasn’t sure what good it’d do in the end, save for keeping her on a tighter leash. No matter how bad the press got, Star City couldn’t afford to ditch its sovereign-class hero, something he’d had to accept some time back.

  Finally finding a breakfast place with a cybernet link, he ordered a savory waffle with bacon and eggs before cracking open his clamshell. The heavy minicomp whirred and beeped to itself as it booted and with a couple commands he connected and started checking his usual. He started clicking by habit before he froze and stared at his screen where there was a new message — from Cayleb.

  Hey bro! Sorry I couldn’t get to talk to you earlier, all kinds of hush-hush sort of stuff here in Star Central. But now I can! Except, they said that you left the apartment? And your job? You okay man? Nothing bad’s going on is it? I can call in some favors now if you’re in trouble! Let me know!

  Isaac started typing a reply before his brain caught up with him, and he stopped in midsentence, staring at nothing. Even after they’d made Cayleb vanish, he probably wouldn’t have been so distrustful of Star Central that he would suspect the message. But being attacked by a pair of supers in broad daylight, having a car thrown at him, had cranked up his paranoia.

  He deleted the reply he’d started and sat back in the seat, chewing over how he was going to respond. The lady at the counter had to call his assumed name twice before he realized it was him, so he took a break to pick up his waffle and make the chewing more literal as he thought. The problem was, he had no idea how to set up a meeting with Cayleb that would be safe. If anything, the fact that Cayleb would be there meant it was more likely there’d be some other super around, even if they didn’t suspect Isaac directly.

  Glad to hear from you, man! Yeah I’m doing okay, minor trouble but nothing serious. Just had to skedaddle for a bit. Good thing too given all the ganger stuff going on. Just kind of knocking about now, getting myself some job experience. Maybe we can meet up sometime? If that hush-hush stuff is all done with.

  It seemed a good enough message. He wasn’t going to flat out lie to Cayleb, but considering that someone else might be reading the message he wanted to keep things vague. Before actually sending it, Isaac finished his breakfast, just in case someone decided to trace the message. Yes, Cayleb had tinkered it for privacy, but what one tinker could do another one could undo. Or Cayleb himself could, whether because Star Central asked him to or just out of a genuine concern for Isaac’s well-being.

  Once he pressed the button, he packed up in a hurry and slipped out the door, changing back to Ravdia in a handy gas station bathroom and skating back to the merc house. There were more people around than just Lia when he arrived, a clearly motley lot hanging out in the common area. A cybernetically augmented man-sized, raptor-like dinosaur; a vaguely man-shaped pile of rock; an amorphous shadow covered in a dozen crisscrossed bandoliers equipped with what seemed to be playing darts. He hadn’t seen any of them at the convention but, taking Lia into account, all of them were either nonhuman or had a mutation so severe that might as well be the case.

  “Ravdia!” Lia said, rising from the table and flagging him down before he could slip into his room. “Captain Multiples would like to see you when he gets back, give you the run-down on duties in Justice for Hire. For the moment, if you’re issued a group mission you’re with—”

  “The brute squad,” the dinosaur cut in, voice obviously synthetic, and Lia sighed.

  “You know Captain Multiples doesn’t like that name.”

  “Don’t care. I’m a brute, I’m on the brute squad,” the dinosaur rebutted. It wasn’t humaniform at all, and at a wild guess it was some collision of a tinker experiment and Deep Kingdom wildlife — though for all he knew, the species was sapient to begin with. Dark green scales, taloned forelimbs, and aggressively black cybernetic armor covering the dino’s face and spine gave it a particularly savage cast.

  “Don’t let him fool you,” the shadow-man said in a voice like bubbling tar. “He writes poetry when he’s on break. Love poetry.”

  The dinosaur turned and hissed, black cybernetics whirring as a shining blade unfolded from one forearm. The shadow-man ignored it and waved at Isaac with a single-fingered hand. Whether it was index or middle was not at all clear.

  “I’m Bubs, that’s Savage, and rocky here goes by Stratum. It doesn’t talk much.” The stone being made a grinding sound, but that was all.

  “Ravdia greets you,” Isaac said, studying them from behind the veil. “Though she suspects you are not the usual group for newcomers. She guesses that you are generally given more select jobs, those not in the public eye?”

  “Hah!” Savage whirled and jabbed a talon in her direction, the blade fortunately vanishing again with the motion. “Yes, good! But we’ve never had a magical girl in the squad before.”

  “Ravdia will endeavor not to disappoint,” Isaac said, though he dreaded the entire thought of having to get to know people and – apparently – meet with a boss. He’d never even met the actual hospital administrators; Mister Graham, his immediate superior, had been as high as he’d ever gotten. It was probably something from when he was a lost kid that he’d never gotten over, but he had never been never comfortable getting noticed by anyone higher up. Or really, new people in general. Even with Chains, the only person he’d exchanged more than a few words with was Smokeshow.

  The real question, though, was why he was stuck in what was almost certainly not the usual entry-level squad. He doubted that Justice for Hire did some of the wetwork nastiness he’d heard of when it came to the very worst supervillains – or truly horrific awakenings – but there were plenty of less public-friendly things that were entirely above-board. Like scouring the rail and maintenance networks below the city.

  “We don’t have anything at the moment, so I can help you with those runes,” Lia added, beckoning for Isaac to follow. After a moment, he did so, reflecting that it was a very good thing that he’d picked up the tinkered workbench. Otherwise he would have been better off buying all new materials for a second costume rather than adjusting the one he had. Something that he still should do, but in truth he would be better served by making another new meta identity.

  Lia led him down the same hall that his own room was in, but stopped a few rooms earlier. Opening the door, the interior didn’t look like it came out of a moonie drama, but more like a college frat house. The walls were plastered with posters for Star City’s Superjump and Rocker teams, including a couple signed pennants. A signed basketball stood on a dresser and a guitar leaned against the wall in the corner. Isaac forwent comment; he was masquerading as a magical girl so he hardly had room to judge on taste and inclination.

  “Here we go,” Lia said, opening the drawer of a desk up against one wall and taking out two sheets of something that wasn’t quite paper, given its silvery sheen. She placed them down and pointed at one, then the other. “These are the symbols that it’s fine to use. But, you can’t mix them up with any of these,” she said, tapping the second paper. “Only royalists use these.”

  Isaac stepped up next to Lia, looking down at the not-paper. The runes inscribed there had a clear glitter of power, given that they were created by an actual lunarian, but looking from one to the other he saw a problem. The forbidden list was short, but a number of symbols were completely identical to the ones on the okay-to-use list.

  “Ravdia can’t tell the difference between these two,” Isaac said, reaching out to put his fingers on the offending symbols. “Or these two, or these two,” he added, just to drive the point home.

  “How do you mean?” Lia scowled, staring at the rune sheets. “Look, the curve of the zvith is totally different between these two,” she said, pointing one long silver finger at a loop-de-loop that seemed utterly the same to him. “And the angle of the koscht is almost the opposite.” Again, she prodded a bit of the squiggle where no difference was apparent.

  “Ravdia is afraid she does not understand,” Isaac admitted. No matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t distinguish any detail that would let him tell one symbol from the other. It wasn’t like they were even particularly complicated. “Nor does she know what zvith and koscht are.”

  Isaac spent a frustrating fifteen minutes trying to understand as Lia did her best to explain the underpinning principles of rune geometry. In virtually all of her examples, things that were supposed to be obviously different looked the same, or things that were supposed to be the same looked wildly different. It wasn’t simply a magic thing, as after trying to draw the sigils himself, sometimes she claimed it was one thing, and sometimes another.

  “Ravdia thinks there is something to runes that the human mind does not grasp,” Isaac admitted. “She cannot distinguish the differences, or control them.”

  “Zekcha vieds.” Lia muttered, in a tone that made it obvious the words were some sort of epithet. “Nobody talks runes with me. Some sort of rule, like no politics or no religion.”

  Isaac made a non-committal noise, rendered girlish by his voice-changer. He imagined that there was some briefing most metas got about moonies when they joined any organization where the non-human runecasters were likely to show up, but Isaac was just a janitor. If there was some general rubric to dealing with the moon folk, he’d missed it.

  “Then, perhaps limit yourselves to these,” Lia said, tapping the rune-sheet and erasing offending symbols with a touch. Isaac nodded and picked up the sheet, but Lia wasn’t done. She glanced around, a series of runes on her skin that he hadn’t noticed before lighting up and then vanishing, and she waved at the door, making it close of its own accord.

  “Not to pry,” she said, looking more concerned than anything. “But if I know I might be able to place you better within the company. Why are you pretending to be a girl?”

  Isaac froze for a moment, a reflex pushing his power in that sideways direction for a moment, the one associated with identities. Not that it achieved anything, because not only did Lia already know, but unlike with Chains there were serious differences between Ravdia and Isaac that no amount of power would cover. Then he sighed, and reached up under the veil to flip off the voice modulator.

  “Mostly it’s about protecting my identity,” he replied. “Most people wouldn’t connect Ravdia with me if they knew me. It seemed appropriate, under the circumstances.”

  “Your divinations are weird,” Lia mused. “If I hadn’t been able to perceive beyond the armor I would not have thought of it. It’s like Ravdia is your real identity, so I was — well. Confused. I put you with the Brute Squad since I could tell you didn’t want to be too exposed, but I wasn’t sure why.”

  Isaac nodded slowly. Another thing that fit into his slowly growing pile of evidence that his talent was doing something about his personas. He had an impulse to be entirely honest with Lia, but he shoved it down. There were some things he could explain, but he didn’t have any reason or need to trust her with all his troubles.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” he told her. “But it’s only tangentially related to the powerset I’m using as Ravdia. The costume stuff is for me, but for Ravdia all I’ll be saying is I make a fair bruiser.” He hadn’t heard about how common it was for people to have edge cases for their powers. People didn’t spill everything they could do for a variety of reasons. Though if he did trust them, it was likely the veterans at the guild would have ideas.

  “You’re not wanted or anything, are you?” Lia asked, but he’d already signed off on a statement to that effect, one of the few pieces of paper that was actually necessary to start with the guild. The secret identity was enshrined deeply into both culture and law, so Ravdia was entirely her own thing — up until she crossed certain lines, anyway.

  “Not that I know of,” Isaac replied, mostly honestly. He didn’t know what the actual status was on Chains or Harkeem. Let alone Isaac himself. But Ravdia and his newest cover identity, David Jeffries, certainly weren’t.

  “Would it be a problem if your team members knew? You can probably fool Savage and Stratum won’t even notice, but Bubs will probably figure it out eventually.” The questions were asked in a tone that was more professional than personal, Lia clearly having no issues with the identity herself.

  “So long as it’s not made broadly public,” Isaac said with a shrug. “Ravdia is not necessarily permanent, but I’d rather not compromise the identity if at all possible.” He could probably create a new super identity easily enough if he had the help of Justice for Hire, but again it would require trust — and he’d have to have done enough work to make it worth their while. Even the softest mercenary group was a business first and foremost.

  “Understood. I’ll have to tell Captain Multiples, but he will have no problems with it if it’s simply a personal issue. And if he doesn’t say anything, neither will anyone else,” Lia assured him, though Isaac doubted that. Once people noticed, it was only a matter of time before loose lips made it impossible for him to keep Ravdia as an identity — but perhaps whatever his power was doing would help.

  “Very well,” Isaac said, though there wasn’t much he could do about it. He reached up and flicked on the voice changer again, doublechecking the veil’s attachment to the costume. “Now, Ravdia will fix her costume! And she thanks you for the instruction!”

  Lia nodded and flipped her hand, opening the door again as runes shone on her skin. Isaac inclined his head to her and slipped out, returning to his own room. The fact that he’d been busted already made some of his worries about hiding things a little bit moot, but he’d already put the time and effort into a plan so he couldn’t just not carry it through.

  He closed the door and then, after a moment of thought, put his hand on it and invested it with inertia. Not just the door itself, but the lock plate as well. It wasn’t like anyone was liable to break down the door on him, but after what had just happened and with the way Lia had seen through his disguise, he needed a bit of security. Only once he was safely ensconced behind a closed door did he shuck the costume and get to work.

  First, the hiding place. All it took to cut the wall’s paperboard was a utility knife, and he excised a small square to reveal the empty partition beyond. It wasn’t a large space, and a little dusty, but big enough for him to cram in his non-Ravdia belongings. Pulling his stuff from under the bed, he slid it carefully into the wall, all save for the workbench. He’d need that to modify Ravdia’s costume.

  The blue paper got cut to cover the square, the tinker station touched up the gloss and texture, and a little bit of glue set it in place. He only fastened the top, leaving it so he could lift up or push through the paper square, and ensured that the patch fell flat against the wall before securing the bottom with a tiny piece of clear tape. A few moment’s work with some of his supplies blended the slight difference between the paper edge and the paint on the wall, then he touched the patch to invest it.

  The problem was, if he left only the cover invested, it’d rip through the wall whenever he tried to handle it. Something he should have thought of before that moment, but this wasn’t something he had been given time to chew over. He frowned at it, then tried something he’d not really spent any time doing — investing only part of something.

  Generally he shoved inertia into a discrete object, like clothing or a machine, but there didn’t seem to be any reason he couldn’t reinforced just a piece of it. He ran his fingers over the wall around the hidey-hole, and focused on investing in just an inch or so of perimeter. It felt diffuse and slippery, like he couldn’t control it properly, but he hadn’t practiced it much. At least he got enough feedback from his power to tell there was extra inertia in the area, though it faded to normal over a few inches rather than being a sharp demarcation.

  Prodding it without using his power exemption, it seemed entirely solid, so he was satisfied enough even if it wasn’t a completely perfect hiding place. With the clamshell and some of his more personal, identifiable items hidden away, he started working on retooling Ravdia’s detailing. It would be interesting to see if giving the costume genuine runes made the identity more solid, and add another point to his investigations.

  He'd try to square away his business with the mercenary company as quickly as possible, and get through intake processing, because he needed another round at the library. If he was going to come up with a plan to get at whoever was behind the attack on him and Smokeshow, if he was going to meet with Cayleb again, if he was going to actually act like a super if only for a very specific purpose — he needed to understand what was going on with his power. There was no telling what small edge or odd effect could be exploited to best effect.

  Isaac would need every advantage he could get.

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