“Quake in fear under the might of Dimetria!”

  A girl in a bubblegum-pink powersuit landed on the hood of the armored van, denting it heavily and sending the engine into a grinding, sputtering halt. Dimetria laughed aloud as the return fire hit the armor and simply stopped, spending itself on the pink material and dropping onto the car’s hood. With another bound she jumped to the rear of the van, bringing a wrecking bar down on the locked door. The length of steel gouged out the lock and latch mechanism both, forcing the door open.

  Inside the van was rack after rack of softchips in padded cases and another guard whose bullets were no more effective than any of the others, who gave up after two rounds did nothing. Dimetria left the wrecking bar embedded in the door and grabbed two of the cases before turning and making a mighty leap into the air. She vanished into the tangle of buildings, railways, and roads, even as she heard the guards call in backup from actual supers. None of the guards were powered themselves, not for such a common, low-value shipment.

  Dimetria landed in an alley, attracting some attention from ordinary folks on the ground, and took another great leap, bouncing off the side of a nearby building and then ducking into the stairwell of a parking garage. Off came the painted, printed foam of the armor, as well as the radioactive blonde wig, which were stuffed into the bottom of an active burn barrel. The first appearance of Dimetria would also be the last.

  Isaac Hartson had no desire to actually be a supervillain. The ones that had any success were powerful, ruthless, and terrifying, all things that Isaac was not. All the rest were either independents who were quickly squashed by either heroes or other villains, or simply employed by the bigger names.

  Superheroes were cut from the same cloth, even if they were nominally playing police rather than predator. Violent and dangerous to everyone around, and impressed with their own power. He might have needed the money, but after growing up in the foster care system he’d seen that the people in charge were mostly out for themselves. Even the foster housing had turned out to be a coldly calculated public relations campaign.

  A waiting shopping cart had a bottle of water and some wet wipes, which were used to shed heavy makeup, leaving a young man in rumpled, mismatched clothing instead of a supervillainess. Isaac opened the cases, dumping the contents into a garbage bag, which went into the shopping cart, and then tossed the cases into the culvert outside the stairwell. Once that operation was finished, he discarded Dimetria’s gloves and when he emerged from the stairwell himself he looked like any other homeless man in Star City.

  He pushed his shopping cart through the parking garage, which was old enough to lack the ever-present surveillance in the nicer parts of the city, and when he was satisfied that he was alone he opened the trunk on an old beater car and shoved the garbage bag in. Closing the car again, he continued pushing the shopping cart. His route took him out of the garage and around to the intersection where he took out a cardboard anything helps sign.

  When he was younger, and the foster home had mandated extracurriculars, he’d tried out theatre on a whim — something that had turned out to pay dividends in all kinds of ways. Acting was useful, as was being able to spot people who were, themselves, acting. Isaac wouldn’t consider himself any great master at it, but a surprising number of people just never bothered looking past the obvious. Which was why he was making himself obviously harmless.

  The disguise wasn’t entirely safe; not because he thought he’d get caught, but because homeless beggars were organized. Isaac didn’t know which supervillain it was, but it was obvious the moment anyone took a closer look at their too-uniform signs and mysterious ability to get to high traffic areas at peak times. His chosen corner, on the other hand, was out of the way and only needed to serve for long enough to duck suspicion. A few hours at most.

  A pair of heroes flashed past as he was still trying to get comfortable — or as comfortable as he could be in thirdhand clothes on a street corner. One of them flew, the other ran, both of them moving as fast as a speeding car. They completely ignored him, no doubt searching for the brand-new villainess that had been in no database. There were certainly supers who could have tracked him, but he hadn’t even robbed the whole van. Most of the top level heroes had better things to do than account for some idiot grabbing a few hundred thousand credits worth of softchips.

  Isaac stayed on the street corner for a good three hours and accumulated exactly zero donations, despite his hangdog look and rough clothing. The closest he came was a trio of gangers shoving him over and overturning his shopping cart before going on their way. Acting like a harmless, homeless bum turned out to be harder than acting like an idiot teenage villainess. He could have easily thrashed the gangers, but that would have just made his life harder. Maybe even gotten a low-level meta called in, either hero or villain.

  Once the shadows stretched all the way across the street, he returned the shopping cart to his beater car, popping it apart by taking off a few screws. Even if he had just robbed an armored truck, he wasn’t about to litter the streets by leaving a cart out where someone could drive into it. Isaac wasn’t a villain, after all.

  The car clattered and grumbled on the way home, the old ‘832 Odelle rattling with the same not-quite-disrepair as it had for the past decade. Twice on the drive he saw supers, once on the streets and once in the skies, going about whatever it was that had caught Star Central’s attention. Distant sirens blared, then fell silent, but the car’s radio had long been broken so he could merely wonder.

  He pulled into the cramped parking lot of his apartment complex, taking a moment to shove the garbage bag into the gym bag he used three days a week, and then hiked up the stairs to the third floor. Letting himself in, he took a moment to breathe and ensure he was carrying himself normally before crossing into the common room where his roommate was tapping away at a computer. Isaac probably didn’t need to, given how deeply Cayleb was involved with his work, but even after all this time he didn’t quite understand what the strange genius of Cayleb’s talent might notice.

  “Hey, man,” Isaac called, finally relaxing. It actually took some effort to not seem too giddy, as he’d finally taken the first steps he needed. Planning, thinking, and hoping were one thing, but actually crossing the line into action was another. Though admittedly, it was only a small bit of action — the robbery wasn’t even for himself, but rather his brother in all but name.

  Cayleb swiveled his entire body around on his padded chair, since he couldn’t turn his neck. A brace supported a double-sized head, acquired along with his tinker talent, and he gave Isaac a matching double-sized grin. Clearly in a good mood even for him.

  “Yo, man!” Cayleb said, lifting a hand. “You just missed a super fight.”

  “What, someone fighting here?” Isaac said, a sudden flush of alarm running up his spine. One of the reasons he’d chosen the apartment block – aside from price – was that it was near supervillain territory. Near, but he had thought it was far enough away to avoid the low-level villain-backed gang wars that were a constant feature of the rougher parts of Star City.

  “Nah, over by your hospital,” Cayleb said, swiveling back to poke at a nest of wires and blocky cathode monitors, his tinker-rigged computer setup humming softly. A video came up of several flying supers circling cautiously around floating mechanical spheres in the sky, energy beams drawing blue and white lines as they attacked from range. It didn’t last long, but a blur at the bottom of the screen showed one of the spheres leaving the hospital at high speed. Whoever had sent them clearly got what they came for.

  “Professor Mechaniacal’s work, but not his modus operandi,” Cayleb enthused, waving a finger at the monitor. “It’s too loud and too small-scale. Someone must have found one of his stashes. Bet they’re going to get in so much trouble when Mechaniacal finds them.”

  “Don’t scare me like that man,” Isaac asked, slapping Cayleb on the shoulder. “I know we’re both metas, but we know what a real superfight looks like and it would crush us.” Cayleb swiveled slightly to look at him and made a slight movement of his head, the good humor in his eyes dimming for a second. He clearly would have loved to be out there himself, but their entire history was the result of such a superfight.

  Both of them were among the hundreds of children who had ended up orphaned by one of the only sovereign-versus-sovereign fights in history, almost twenty years ago. The school panic rooms had remained intact, but not much else had in a twenty-block radius. It was one of the biggest death tolls Star City had ever seen, but the villain in question had never been caught. Instead, Blacktime and his people still flouted Star Central’s rule and, pragmatically, controlled most of the crime in the Five City Alliance.

  Unlike Isaac, Cayleb didn’t let the thought get him down for long. He just shrugged and continued onward, which made Isaac glad he hadn’t bogged down Cayleb with weighty problems like the heist. Frankly, the guy was a born hero, easygoing and positive, and not at all cut out for the sort of skullduggery involved with supervillains. Unlike Isaac, Cayleb didn’t believe – or possibly hadn’t even heard – the rumors that Blacktime was actually the lover of the other member of that superfight. Glorybeam certainly seemed to hang around the area Blacktime operated more than she should, at least.

  “Anyway,” Isaac said, brushing aside his own comment. “Who’s this Mechaniacal? Never heard of him.” That was actually true, despite Isaac knowing a lot about supers — admittedly, not as a fan in the way Cayleb often was.

  “Mechaniacal is an old school villain, his tinker stuff doesn’t even use electricity! Complete mystery origin, people think he might even be extradimensional.” Cayleb laughed, rubbing his oversized head, bald before its time. “Man, his stuff is slick. I’d love to pick his brain.”

  “I can just bet,” Isaac laughed. “Hey man, lemme grab a shower, then you can run the footage for me,” he said, hefting the gym bag as an excuse. Cayleb waved a dismissal, turning back to his monitors, and Isaac ducked into his own room, shoving the pilfered softchips under his bed.

  Much of the room was taken up by scraps of material and a few full costumes — a couple reproductions of fictional metas, and one game character. Some people liked to cosplay as actual supers, but Isaac had always thought that was just asking for legal entanglements or personal grudges. Star Central was understandingly protective of its superhero images — and aping supervillains was just not a good idea regardless.

  He grabbed his towel and trod the well-worn path around his costuming work to pull out some ordinary clothes before heading to the shower. It wasn’t just a cover story, since he’d been out there for hours in stuffy armor and grungy thirdhand clothing, and besides the shower would help him think over his next move. Isaac wasn’t so dumb as to think he had a chance of actually taking out a supervillain or, for that matter, a superhero since ultimately he wasn’t that powerful a meta. In fact, Isaac didn’t want to try any real vigilantism, but rather just get some intelligence from the local gang leader who, not coincidentally, was one of Blacktime’s lieutenants.

  Crash Hardiron – a name that said everything anyone needed to know about the guy – was, so far as Isaac could tell from his research, an old friend of Blacktime’s. Someone who would have dirt, connections, and other things that Isaac could use. Maybe not personally, but he could sell to media, to rival gangs, or whatever was necessary to take them down a peg or three.

  But to even think about touching someone like Crash, Isaac needed support. He wasn’t going to pull Cayleb into his actual activities, but tinker work was necessary for someone with a low-level talent like Isaac. The costumes he’d made were a start, and Dimetria had been a good proof of concept, but he knew he needed more. Armor and weapons, of course, but items for transportation, communication, and fabrication. All things that he knew Cayleb could do if he only had a little bit more available to him.

  When he opened the door again, dressed in fresh clothes, he heard voices out in the living room, ones he didn’t recognize. Despite the fact that it was probably nothing, given that there was no yelling and Isaac was pretty sure Cayleb’s chair had weapons, it was still unexpected enough to make him tense, ice flooding his veins. He kept the towel around his neck, charging inertia into it just in case it was needed and walked out the short hallway into the room, then froze.

  There were two supers in full uniform. He recognized them in a vague way, as he knew the faces of most supers operating in Star City, but what was more important was that both of them sported the golden-rayed insignia of Star Central. Official heroes on official business. One was clearly a tech type, an albino man with a cybernetic slimsuit and what seemed to be mechanical eyes, while the other was probably a bruiser given her oversized gauntlets.

  “Isaac Hartson, nominal-class strength-type power,” the cyborg muttered dismissively, returning his regard to Cayleb. The bruiser eyed him a moment longer, but also didn’t seem much interested. He was used to that; nominal-class strength-type metas were really at the lowest end of the power spectrum and most other metas found it vaguely pitiable at best.

  “Hey, Isaac!” Cayleb said, completely oblivious to the supers’ attitudes. “Cyberlocution there snagged my drone from the hospital fight and thinks I’ve got what it takes to work for Central!” He was excited, but clearly uncertain about the whole thing.

  “Oh, wow, bro!” Isaac forced himself to speak as normally as he could, now that it seemed that they weren’t there about his earlier theft. The mask he used at work slipped into place, something less confrontational and slightly duller than he was at home. A slight slump of the shoulders, a bit of droop to the eyes, and a certain slackness to his jaw made people see him as quite a bit dimmer than he actually was. It was especially hard since he had to force down his frustration at the timing; he never would have risked the robbery if he’d known Cayleb was going to get that kind of offer. “That’s a hell of an offer. You’ll be able to do all kinds of fun stuff. Congrats, man!” He stepped forward and slapped Cayleb on the shoulder.

  “Heck yeah!” Cayleb said cheerfully, his worry clearing up. “I can just imagine all the toys I’ll get to work with!”

  “You would be beholden to a certain degree of security, Mister Ruston,” Cyberlocution said to Cayleb, as if in an attempt to repress Cayleb’s usual cheer.

  “Oh, sure, sure. Not a problem,” Cayleb said. “When do I start?”

  “Immediately,” the bruiser grunted. “We’ve got a van inbound.” Isaac nearly rolled his eyes at the word choice, figuring that the super was ex-military. Or maybe she just read too many books.

  “Oh. Oh, I see,” Cayleb said, his cheer disappearing as the potential suddenly became immediate. Isaac pursed his lips for a moment, then patted Cayleb on the shoulder again, habitually reducing his inertia a little bit in respect to Cayleb’s uncertain and potentially fragile frame.

  “Hey man, it’s going to be great,” he said. He personally didn’t trust any of the supers, no matter what the public relations department said about them, but a tinker just couldn’t get by in a cramped, low-income apartment. Cayleb was practically a brother, and Isaac wasn’t going to let him ruin his chances with cold feet or just because it was personally inconvenient. “They’ll probably have something better than a neck brace for that giant noggin of yours, too. Just remember your pal Isaac when you’re tinkering up supercars or something, eh?”

  “Hah! Yeah, don’t worry about that, man,” Cayleb said, thumping his chest in a salute that he’d picked up from one of the Tech Legion’s commanders. “I’ll make sure I make you some good stuff.”

  Cyberlocution politely waved Isaac away and produced a small packet from a pouch at his waist, eyes glowing before he pressed it against Cayleb’s chest. In a moment it expanded outward into a cybernetic suit, but one that wrapped around Cayleb’s oversized cranium. Cayleb blinked, and then stood — something he didn’t do often. His grin somehow got even wider.

  It didn’t take much more time from there. Some very professional movers bustled in, secured all of Cayleb’s belongings, and bustled out in less than five minutes. Cyberlocution and the bruiser whose name Isaac still didn’t know stood impatiently as Cayleb shook Isaac’s hand, the tinker looking about as numb as Isaac felt. They’d been roommates for over a decade, even back when they were teens in foster care, and it was all over in the span of maybe twenty minutes.

  The two supers escorted Cayleb away, leaving the apartment much emptier. Isaac retreated to his room and dropped into his bed, letting out a long breath as he tried to relax. Cyberlocution had probably marked how nervous he was the entire time, but hopefully only the amount of nervousness anyone would have with two members of Star Central invading their personal space.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Without the constant hum of Cayleb’s machinery the apartment was eerily silent, but Isaac couldn’t sit and stew. Things may have changed instantly for his roommate, but Isaac still had work the next day, bills to pay, and plans to redraw now that Cayleb was going to be a superhero. Not to mention a few hundred thousand credits of stolen softchip to somehow liquidate.

  The last thought really made it hit home, for some reason. He’d planned the heist in secret for months, tested his powers where nobody was watching, and planned on ways to present the loot to Cayleb. Yet it had turned out to be entirely useless.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told himself aloud, making a tossing-away gesture with one hand as if he could physically discard his worries. A visualization exercise taught to all the hundreds of traumatized children that had flooded the foster care system after the disaster, and one that had stuck with him through the years. “I’ll figure it out tomorrow.”

  His shift was just the same as any other. Saint Anne’s hospital also served supers in addition to normal people, and so it had some exceedingly heavy equipment that it was his job to move around. Isaac was little more than a glorified janitor, allowed to handle the megacredit machines simply because his so-called strength power came with a lot of finesse. He ran no risk of breaking anything when he moved it around, even when he was irritated.

  “Come on, Isaac, we don’t have all day!” Mister Graham said from the doorway of the freight elevator, as if he weren’t the one responsible for scheduling and sending people out to shift equipment. Graham was a standard-class psychometry super, something verging on technopathy, perfect for making sure that none of the scanners or bracers or regenerators were damaged or broken. He was also a sovereign-class pain in the ass, taking all the credit and none of the blame for the maintenance and janitorial department and resulting in Isaac’s nearly-nonexistent raises.

  In a way, Isaac was fine with that. Janitors were invisible, and that gave him more latitude to move around — and access to the hospital gave him more opportunity to find out about supers. But it wasn’t like he would have had much of a choice, either. Just being registered as a meta, even a nominal-class or more euphemistically, a dreg, closed a lot of doors. People like him required licensing and insurance overhead most normal employers would wish to avoid, and as a low grade super with, at least on the record, a simple strength ability, he didn’t have any talents in great demand.

  The only other place he might have found a use was in construction – there was plenty of that, thanks to the occasional destruction wrought by superfights – but that didn’t appeal to him. More, it might expose his actual talent, which he certainly didn’t want. Not only did he want to avoid being recruited by either heroes or villains, but that kind of scrutiny would make it harder for him to operate. Lacking any kind of stealth ability, he had to remain anonymous.

  “Coming, Mister Graham,” Isaac said patiently, in his persona as just another dumb strength meta, maneuvering the recently empty shell of a one-ton energy scanner through the halls so it could be returned to the maintenance area. The ruined device was one of the casualties of the previous day’s supervillain raid, which had scavenged the components of a number of medical devices, most of which he was slowly ferrying down to the workshops in the basement.

  The ease with which he could move the shell around was thanks to his power, which wasn’t actually strength. It was inertia, the resistance of something to a change in motion. Speeding up or slowing down. He couldn’t do anything about gravity, since that was a constant acceleration, and the fact that he couldn’t lift anything big was why he was a solid dreg-class power. But dropping the inertia of something huge down to near-nothing meant he could push heavy things very easily, put them around corners without effort, and wouldn’t hurt a wall or a person if he happened to hit them.

  Even better, he could treat anything he invested with inertia as possessing either its original inertia or the changed amount. If push came to shove he could brace himself against the scanner shell as if it really were a full ton, rather than the far lower inertia he’d given it. Or when it came to things like his painted foam armor, he could move it as foam rather than push against the sheer amount of inertial resistance he’d invested into it.

  Isaac rode the elevator down and maneuvered the shell into the maintenance bay, where Graham would almost certainly complain about it for some reason, restoring its inertia before going off to shift some tinker-made traction frame into one of the secure rooms. Someone was bringing a supervillain into the hospital, it seemed, as that was all those rooms were meant for.

  It wasn’t his business though, so he just kept his head down and went about his work. It wasn’t worth getting noticed, even by his immediate superior, and it wasn’t like there was a lack of scut-work to do. Sweeping, mopping, polishing, and general fetching and carrying. Stuff that kept him essentially invisible, which was how he liked it. He’d seen how often metas got picked up by one group or another, with very little choice on the part of the man or woman being recruited, and Isaac’s goals were too important for that kind of thing.

  His job kept him busy, but after a week had passed he decided to go about the ticklish business of fencing the softchips while he waited for word from Cayleb. One of the advantages of being near gang-controlled territory was that he knew there had be a black market or a fence close by, though he hadn’t ever engaged with one himself. Fortunately, he did know some people from the foster home that had gone in that direction.

  More kids in the Lost Generation, the massive group of kids with lives upended by the superfight, had developed powers more often than usual. Unfortunately, like with every disaster-related power bump, all those extras were dreg class powers. More hinderance than help, and many of them locking people out of useful jobs. People with unfortunate mutations, or low-tier strength or endurance abilities, or even tinkers like Cayleb whose power sets relegated them to maintenance and repair.

  Isaac extracted the outfit he’d made from costume scraps some time back, in anticipation of needing to blend in with the gang. A heavy jacket, even if it was starting to get warmer as spring wound onward; pants with chains. The blue and white armband that the local gangers used, as even if his contact knew Isaac wasn’t part of the gang it’d help him fit in. He even used some gel to slick back his short, dark hair, which he thought made him look like an idiot but was the style the local gangers used. Finally, he used a bit of his supplies to give himself a rougher face, some scars and markings, snapping a few photos of the face with his instant camera in case he needed to reproduce it in the future.

  Only once he was fully equipped did he set out, pushing inertia into his clothes as he walked the streets with the adolescent swagger of the ganger. He was a little older than most, a few years past twenty, but still could pull off the young-man’s sneer. A few loitering pedestrians glanced his way, but nobody dared to bother him as he strolled up to the run-down gas station where he was supposed to meet his contact.

  Kevin was a former friend and a meta with the very unfortunate feature of having metal arms with supernaturally sharp blades projecting from them. It was the kind of thing that made him practically unemployable and so Isaac didn’t much blame him for falling in with a supervillain gang, even if it was an obviously stupid decision. At least with the gangers he had some kind of worth and something like an income.

  The other meta was easy enough to pick out as Isaac approached the gas station, steel-colored arms bare despite the colder weather. Compact, wiry, with a long face framed by dirty blond hair, a weak chin, and the twitchy, glazed look of the drug addict. Isaac was glad that he’d figured out a way to make himself resistant to things like bullets and blades, since he didn’t trust that Kevin wouldn’t jump him. Or that he was sufficiently careful with the razor-sharp edges of his arm-blades.

  “Yo, Kevin.” Isaac strolled up, getting all the way into Kevin’s personal space the way a superior ganger might and looking down at the man. Kevin took a step back, eyes clearing from the drug-induced haze and taking in Isaac’s posture. “Long time, no see,” Isaac continued, barging forward and keeping the posture of the arrogant superior. Not that he had anything against Kevin, but there was no trusting anyone in the employ of a supervillain and it was easier to control people who were off-balance. One of those things he’d learned in theater.

  “Hey, uh, Isaac…” Kevin trailed off, not sure how to deal with Isaac’s sneer. For his part, Isaac had to ruthlessly quash any empathy. If he wanted to sell off the softchips in any kind of timeframe, he needed to deal with criminals, and criminals were dangerous. Kevin, though, was too dim to be a real threat. He’d never been the sharpest kid, and without a backbone he was unlikely to question anything, even the gang badge Isaac shouldn’t be wearing.

  “Y’said y’had a contact.” Isaac loomed over Kevin, even if the blade meta was actually an inch or so taller. It was easy to see Kevin was merely one of the rank-and-file, meta or no, given how quickly and easily he gave way to Isaac’s swagger.

  “Oh, uh, yeah!” Kevin nodded convulsively. “Yeah, I can introduce you to Kleppy.”

  “By all means, lead the way,” Isaac said, not budging from where he stood. Kevin blinked at him again, then seemed to get the hint and circled around Isaac, glancing back two or three times in the span of a couple seconds. Isaac strolled after him, hands in the pockets of his jacket. He kept his back straight, acting like he owned the street, but his hands were touching the brass knuckles he’d stuffed into the jacket, just in case. With his abilities, he could pack a pretty mean punch.

  A few minutes of walking along dirty streets brought them to a pawn shop with bars on the windows and a bright sign proclaiming that they bought anything. Which was a place Isaac could have found himself, but with an introduction he could use the place as a fence, not merely someplace to liquidate old stuff at one-tenth cost. The proprietor inside looked ordinary enough, but not all metas were obvious and Isaac kept the inertia invested in his clothing just in case.

  “Heeey, Kleppy. Got someone who wants to do business,” Kevin said, trying to match Isaac’s swagger as if he were actually important.

  “Oh yeah?” Kleppy squinted at Isaac from a tanned and wrinkled face, the guy looking like he’d been dealing with shady customers for at least sixty years. “Whatcha got?”

  “Softchips,” Isaac said, withdrawing a sheet of the stuff. They were packaged like pills, in perforated eight-by-sixteen plastic trays. He’d only brought a quarter of what he pilfered, just in case, and the way that Kleppy’s deeply-lined face lit up with avarice confirmed that was the right choice.

  “How many you got?” Kleppy asked, holding out a hand. Isaac didn’t hand over the merchandise. A thug might, but Isaac was playing a smart thug and should be more careful.

  “How much are you paying?” Isaac countered, returning the sheet to the jacket’s inside pocket and looking down his nose at Kleppy. It wasn’t just an act either, since the entire point of the trip was the money. There was definitely a point at which it would be better to sell them at an online auction, even if it would take a very long time to offload them if he wanted to avoid suspicion.

  “Ten per,” Kleppy said, and Isaac just turned around. Kleppy wasn’t taking things seriously, since softchips were usually closer to a hundred and fifty creds secondhand. More, when they were still fresh in the packaging. He’d gotten two steps toward the door when Kleppy’s voice came again. “Hey, I’m just kidding! I can pay ninety for them.”

  Isaac paused, turning around to look at Kleppy and raising his brows while Kevin hovered uncertainly. After a moment Isaac extracted two sheets from his pocket and held them up, showing them to Kleppy.

  “One-twenty,” Isaac said, no humor in his voice.

  “Best I can do is ninety-five,” Kleppy said, eyeing the softchips.

  “One-ten, but I’ll provide a minimum of four sheets at once.” That was half a box, five hundred twelve, as softchips were sold in powers of two. Kleppy chewed on nothing in particular for a bit, focused on the softchips in Isaac’s hand, then shrugged.

  “One hundred, and four sheets at once.”

  “Done,” Isaac said, able to do the math easily enough. The two boxes would net him enough for a reasonable nest egg without breaking into the serious money, the kind that would make the real criminals start paying attention. He took out the last two sheets from his pocket and held them out, although he was still expecting some attempt to cheat him. Maybe Kleppy would just grab them and refuse to pay.

  Surprisingly, the shifty-looking man actually unlocked a cabinet underneath the counter and extracted the required credsticks, placing them on the counter and stowing the softchips in the same place. Isaac figured that Kleppy was used to dealing with metas, who wouldn’t be particularly forgiving if Kleppy welched on them. Or maybe it was just the promise of future product.

  “Hey, you gonna have more?” Kleppy asked, while Kevin hung on every word for some reason.

  “Probably,” Isaac said, refusing to make a commitment, and turned to leave. This time nobody stopped him, though Kevin tagged along behind. For all that Isaac had known Kevin once upon a time, he definitely didn’t want a drugged-up meta following him around, so Isaac popped a couple of tabs off the smallest credstick and tossed them over.

  “For your help,” Isaac said. “Enjoy.” Kevin pocketed the money, looked at Isaac and worked his jaw for a moment.

  “Hey man, I got — I got a dealer for Fasttab. Makes everything seem so slow, like whoosh.”

  “No,” Isaac said, giving Kevin a scornful look that was mostly real. There was just no way he was going to join a junkie on a drug run. “I stay clean,” he said, and waved the other meta off. Kevin frowned but scurried away after a moment, heading down the street deeper into gang territory. Isaac went the other way, keeping up the swagger so nobody thought about jumping him after clearly doing some business with the fence. Even if he looked like a ganger, that didn’t make him safe, and it didn’t require meta powers to slip a knife in someone’s ribs or hit them over the head with a pipe.

  His brisk, purposeful walk deterred any scavengers from trying to approach him, and marching into a slightly better area of the city shed the pair of gangers following him. He ducked into an alley, taking a plastic bag from his pocket and removing his jacket and the chains from his pants, shoving them both in the bag and then ruffling his hair. An alcohol wipe got rid of the fake scars, and he relaxed his stance to the slight hunch of his janitor persona. When he emerged a few second later, he was obviously not a ganger, so it was a completely different person that headed to his home.

  Some might have thought he was being overly cautious, but Isaac had been at the hospital long enough, and done enough research, to know how dangerous supervillains could be. Or for that matter, superheroes. They were all, without exception, brutal mercenaries who didn’t think twice about destruction and death.

  When he got home, he checked his network accounts once again, still finding nothing from Cayleb. Which contributed to the growing unease and a gnawing feeling in the pit of Isaac’s stomach, something that made his sleep restless and his job more irritating than ever. He went to work, returned home, went to work, returned home in an aimless, frustrating grind. Isaac had few friends outside his former roommate, and with Cayleb’s status in flux it was hard to make any plans, leaving him coasting on the momentum of habit.

  Isaac returned to Kleppy’s pawn shop three more times over the following week, liquidating the remainder of the softchips. He used his ganger persona each time, sauntering fearlessly down the street, and nobody dared mess with him. Nobody called his bluff, either, which was fortunate since he wouldn’t have been able to really fake being in Crash’s gang.

  At the end of the third week after the superheroes recruited his friend, Isaac finally got a message from Cayleb. Yet he just felt a sense of foreboding as he clicked the item in his inbox, which had the header of whoops!

  Hey Isaac! If you’re reading this I haven’t been around to stop my dead man’s switch from going off, or maybe I just forgot. If I forgot, feel free to slap me about the head. If I’m not around, well, I’m sure you know more about what’s going on than I do. On the off chance someone needs a will, just send all my tinker stuff to Techbro, and you can have everything else.

  Isaac stared at the message, simple as it was, and felt bile in the back of his throat. He rose from his clamshell computer, went to the bathroom, and spat, washing out his mouth and then chugging a glass of water. His thoughts spun pointlessly for a few minutes, his body moving on inertia and pouring another glass of water of its own accord, which he downed before he turned to leave the apartment. There was only one thing he could think to do.

  In all his time in Star City he’d never visited Star Central. Even when he was a kid at the children’s home, despite Star Central actually funding the home, there’d never been a trip out there. The enormous tower loomed in the middle of the city, taking up a full block and fifty stories tall, a pillar of white metal and dark glass, housing the superheroes that protected Star City from villains and the depredations of the world at large. For all that, the lot where Isaac parked his old, beat-up car was just like any other, if occupied by a higher class of vehicle than he normally saw.

  Isaac looked both ways before crossing the road and headed for the front doors, noting that there were more metas – or properly, supers – in evidence than anywhere else in the city. A sentinel inside, figures flying to and from balconies high up on the building, and there was almost certainly a tinker or two behind the slick, low-profile camera bubbles that were dotted all over the building.

  He was in his janitor persona, hair slightly unkempt, with a hunch to his shoulders and a droop to his eyelids. It put him at the bottom-most rung of the kinds who frequented Star Central, who seemed to be mostly individuals in suits or designer dresses. Or, of course, costumes.

  A gust of wind hit him just before he went inside, cold air seeming to blow right through his jacket. The interior was warm though, perfectly climate controlled as might be expected, spotless and populated with more metas than Isaac had seen in one place before. Mostly they were clustered around a desk with a sign above it labeled Tasks and Bounties, presumably loitering around until there was something they could fulfill, but many were entering or leaving a personnel-only area at the far side. Isaac ignored all that and crossed to the information desk, standing in line and tapping his fingers impatiently against his pockets.

  “Can I help you?” A listless meta drawled, a third eye on her forehead managing to look just as bored as the rest of her.

  “Uhh…” Isaac affected uncertainty, even if he’d rehearsed dozens of lines in his mind. “So, a friend of mine was recruited a few weeks ago? And I haven’t heard from him,” Isaac explained, although he very much doubted that he’d get anything useful from the receptionist. “His name’s Cayleb. Cayleb Ruston. Is he doing okay?”

  “One moment,” the secretary said, still bored, and tapped at her computer. Then tapped again, as Isaac fought the urge to bounce on his feet, waiting with his persona’s patience and trying to ignore the taste of anxiety in his own saliva.

  “Mister Ruston is on a classified project.” The voice came not from a secretary, but from a woman that had somehow appeared at Isaac’s back. He whirled around before he could suppress his own reaction, eyeing a tall, busty super in faceless black-and-gold armor with the icon of Star Central on both her shoulders. Glorybeam herself. “You are Isaac Hartson. You work at Saint Anne’s Metahuman Hospital.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Err. Yes.” Isaac said, gawking at the sovereign-Class super and clinging desperately to his cover as a slightly dim janitor.

  “Initial appraisal put you at nominal-class, strength type,” the woman said. “Metahuman employment policies mandate a reappraisal. Methysia, schedule an appointment for Mister Hartson on Monday.”

  “Of course, Glorybeam,” the secretary replied, followed by the sound of keys rapidly striking a keyboard. “Monday at noon.”

  “Monday at noon,” Glorybeam said. “Be there, Mister Hartson.”

  “I, uh, okay then,” Isaac replied, although he was already trying to figure out how to get out of it. Star Central certainly didn’t have his interests at heart, and definitely wouldn’t sign off on Isaac’s project to get some exposure on Glorybeam and Blacktime. Besides which, if they’d disappeared Cayleb, he might need rescuing somehow. Isaac didn’t know how he’d do that, but he did know that he couldn’t do anything from the inside.

  He had other plans, ones that he had to move forward on, because he just couldn’t see himself stopping. And while he was working on them, he could try and figure out what to do about his brother. Nothing he could do would be helped by the presence of Isaac Hartson, however, so the next step was obvious.

  At least for the moment, Isaac Hartson needed to disappear.