The vault was older than it looked.
Tattletale could tell from the seam patterns—rewelded hinges, a replacement dial housing, modern electronic locks bolted onto a frame that predated them by decades. The bank had upgraded the exterior security, but cheaped out on the bones.
Her fingers moved across the dial with power-backed efficiency. Left. Right. Left. The mechanical clicks were muffled by the ambient noise from the front of the bank—Bitch's dogs pacing, Regent's bored humming, the occasional whimper from a hostage on the floor.
"Thirty seconds," she said aloud, for her partner in crime's benefit.
Grue stood behind her, his skull-motif helmet swept clean of expression. She didn't need to see his face to read him. His darkness was pooling at his feet in slow tendrils across the tile floor, like it was responding to his stress. The more worried he got, the more darkness leaked out.
And right now, it was leaking a lot.
"This is stupid," Grue murmured.
"Yep," Tattletale responded.
She didn't argue. He was right. This whole job was stupid. Ten-Zero had publicly announced yesterday that they were cleaning up Brockton Bay, and yet here they were. Robbbing a bank. In Brockton Bay.
There were words for people like them, and few of them were very kind.
But despite the risk, Coil had insisted. And by "insisted," she meant he'd subtly threatened her into manipulating everyone else into going along.
Bitch hadn't been hard to convince. All Lisa had to do was mention that the boss was willing to triple whatever they stole in the heist.
But the others? They wouldn't budge. Grue had flat-out refused. Regent had raised an eyebrow at her before going back to his games—and Alec barely raised eyebrows for anything short of a natural disaster.
Then, for the first time since the Undersiders started working for him, Coil had spoken to all of them directly. Through a phone screen, of course—his voice modulated and distorted to maintain anonymity, but it was clearly a show of how badly he wanted them to take this job. He'd offered a safehouse out of state for Regent. And for Grue, the one thing that guaranteed compliance: a contact in Child Protective Services who could help with Aisha's custody situation.
Grue had still said no.
Then Coil had spoken to him privately. Whatever was said in that conversation, Grue hadn't shared it. But he'd come out with his jaw set and his darkness curling at his edges and said, "We're doing the job."
Tattletale hadn't pushed. Her own situation with Coil was proof enough that the Snake had pulled something underhanded to force Grue's hand.
The vault clicked. The final tumbler fell into place.
She hauled the handle around with a groan of metal, and the door swung open on greased hinges, revealing rows of safety deposit boxes and stacked cash trays behind a secondary gate.
"We're in," she said.
Grue moved past her to the secondary gate, and from there they worked quickly. Bags open. Cash in. Stacks of hundreds and twenties, bricks of wrapped bills, the occasional glint of a deposit box's contents—Tattletale assessed each one and either dismissed it or pocketed it.
Then her phone buzzed.
She almost ignored it—until she saw the number. Coil's. At least one of his many.
She unlocked the screen.
One line of text.
Ten-Zero departing NH. Target: Heartbreaker.
Tattletale stared at the message.
Her power immediately began dissecting it. Not the content—the content was straightforward. Ten-Zero had been at a PR event with the Protectorate in Manchester, New Hampshire. Something had happened. Now they were heading out to deal with Nikos Vasil. Which meant Brockton Bay was, for the moment, unguarded by the heaviest hitters on the board.
The timing was perfect.
Had Coil orchestrated whatever pulled Ten-Zero toward Heartbreaker? Or had he simply been watching, waiting for the opportunity, and struck the moment it presented itself?
Regardless, that was one big problem off the Undersiders' backs.
"Lisa," Grue called, his voice sharp. "What is it?"
She pocketed the phone. "Good news. We have a window."
"What kind of window?"
"Well, we won't have to worry about Ten-Zero, at least. They've got bigger fish to fry than us."
Grue studied her for a beat. She could feel his curiosity and his relief without so much as a shift of his shoulders.
"Finish loading," he finally said, and got back to his own bags.
She turned back to the cash.
The bags were heavy, and Lisa struggled to haul out as many as Grue had by the time Regent appeared at the mouth of the corridor.
"We've got a problem," he said plainly.
Grue's darkness flared. "What kind?"
"The kind with Wards." Regent pointed toward the front of the bank. "All of them are here, plus Glory Girl."
He let that hang.
Grue went still. The darkness around him surged. Tattletale recognized the response—adrenaline, fight-or-flight channeled straight into his power.
Shadow Stalker was Grue's personal nightmare. The Ward had put a crossbow bolt through his armor during their last encounter, close enough to his ribs that he still felt phantom pain on cold mornings. Combine that with the rest of the Wards, and the situation was looking nearly as bad as Ten-Zero being here.
"Glory Girl?" Tattletale asked.
"She was in the air," Regent said, then shrugged. "Then she went up, and I lost her. Could be circling. Could be on a roof."
Tattletale's mind raced. This lineup was heavy. Vista's spatial warping made the streets a maze and escape unlikely. Glory Girl, Aegis, and Browbeat were durable enough to trade blows with the dogs. Kid Win had aerial supremacy and Tinkertech firepower. Clockblocker could freeze anything he touched. Gallant could make them all give up with one stray blast. And Shadow Stalker—
Shadow Stalker was a wildcard with a murderous grudge.
"So," Regent drawled. "You got a plan to share, or should I go back to watching the hostages before one of Bitch's dogs bites someone?"
"Go back to the front, Regent," Tattletale said calmly, her brain already running the angles—escape routes, timings, possible negotiations. "We just have to wait for a window. If we move now, we end up in a slugfest with the Wards."
"We can't wait forever. At some point they'll get antsy and attack anyway," Grue warned.
Bitch appeared from the direction Alec had gone. She wasn't tense, despite the full roster of Wards plus one bearing down on them. She looked the way she always looked—like she was ready to rip something apart with her bare hands and was mildly annoyed that nobody had given her permission yet.
"Let's fight," she said simply.
"What?" Grue said, baffled.
"The dogs can take them," she argued.
"Not all of them, and definitely not Glory Girl. And if we stay and fight, Vista's going to box us in before we take down a single Ward—especially if that Ward isn't her," Grue countered.
"Then we fight and run," Tattletale cut in. "Bitch holds the line with the dogs. Grue floods the street while we release the civilians. The chaos buys us time to—"
She stopped.
There was a faint buzz in the room. She almost dismissed it as the fluorescents. Then she saw a roach leading a line of ants in under the emergency door.
Lisa's eyes widened in realization, and she made a mad dash for the front of the bank. She crossed to Regent's position, looked past his shoulder, and went very still.
A girl was approaching the PRT perimeter from the far end of the street. Long black hair. A black, villainous-looking costume with yellow lenses. And behind her, stretching back for an entire block, was a cloud.
No. Not a cloud. A swarm.
Tens of thousands of insects moved through the air in a churning mass that darkened the sky behind her like a biblical plague. They moved with her, flowing over cars and around lampposts.
The PRT agents at the perimeter were doing exactly what PRT agents always did when confronted with something they didn't have a plan for: be very still and talk rapidly into their radios. Two of them had containment foam launchers raised. A third was physically backing away, gun up.
The Wards noticed too. Kid Win's hoverboard stuttered mid-flight. Aegis turned from the perimeter line to face the approaching swarm. Even from this distance, Tattletale could see the tension in his posture shift from managed concern to active threat assessment.
Shadow Stalker had moved to the edge of her rooftop, crossbow aimed not at the bank, but at the girl.
Tattletale's lips curled, fox-like and sharp with glee.
She turned to her team. Regent and Bitch were watching her, waiting. Grue stood with two duffel bags slung over his shoulders.
"Undersiders, I think I've just found our exit."
__________
Taylor approached the PRT perimeter from the east, the swarm following her like a second shadow—a living, buzzing pressure system she could feel in the back of her skull. Flies, wasps, beetles, bees, moths, gnats. Every insect within two blocks had answered her call, converging on her position in layers of chitin and wing and mandible.
She kept the bulk of them high—above the rooftops, above the trees—a dark, roiling ceiling that made people on the street stop, stare, and suddenly remember urgent business elsewhere. A swarm this size couldn't be hidden, so she'd spent the whole walk making it a statement instead.
The perimeter sat three blocks out from the bank. Barricades. Squad cars. Agents in tactical gear with foam launchers. Further back, news vans jockeyed for the best angle, cameras fixed on the bank's facade.
She'd changed in an alley a few streets over. Suiting up behind a dumpster wasn't glamorous, but it beat hunting for a bathroom—and Shade had kept her invisible the whole time anyway. The costume still looked like a villain's sketch of a hero, but after the Lung fight, it felt more heroic than it had before.
The agents at the barricade clocked her immediately. Two foam launchers swung her way. A third agent reached for his radio.
Nobody fired.
"Sergeant." One of them nodded toward her. "It's the bug girl. From the docks."
The man in charge—stocky, with a jaw like a filing cabinet—lowered his launcher a fraction. His gaze tracked from her mask to the swarm behind her, then back.
"You're the one who helped Armsmaster during the Lung engagement."
It wasn't a question, but Taylor nodded anyway—maybe a little too fast—and felt a small, embarrassing spark of pride at being recognized.
Before the sergeant could say anything else, Aegis landed on the asphalt in front of the barricade, easy as stepping off a curb.
"I know you," he said, and his voice carried a smile his helmet didn't show. "Half of PHO's Brockton Bay board has been arguing about you for days." He glanced up at the roiling ceiling of insects, then back. "You're here to help, I assume?"
"Yes." It came out too loud—nerves. She dialed it back. "With my bugs, I can map the building—track everyone inside, hostages and Undersiders, in real time. And if that's not useful, I figured a couple thousand bugs would make for a pretty decent distraction."
Some of them were already inside, actually. They didn't need to know she'd started before being invited.
"Here's what I don't get." A new voice, flat and unimpressed.
Shadow Stalker had drifted in at Aegis's shoulder, and up close she was all hard lines and harder body language, crossbow held loose at her side in a way that somehow wasn't reassuring at all.
"The Undersiders hole up in a bank. The Wards box them in. And now—after vanishing completely since your first appearance—is when you decide to take a stroll back onto the scene. Like you were waiting for something big to happen." She tilted her head. "That's a real convenient time to develop civic spirit."
"I've been busy—" Taylor started.
"You're also a Master," Shadow Stalker cut in, saying the word like it tasted bad. "One that hasn't been power tested. Protocol's not complicated when it comes to this, and we don't need some greenhorn glory hound screwing everything up."
"She helped Armsmaster," Aegis said in her defense, though he didn't dispute the point.
"People help when it buys them good press," Shadow Stalker shot back. "Showing up where the cameras are isn't a character reference."
"Nobody's accusing anybody of anything," the sergeant broke in, level, in the tone of a man who'd grown tired of watching children argue. "But the answer's the same either way. We've got the Wards handling this. It's a delicate situation, and there's a tactical framework in place. The PRT and Protectorate appreciate your willingness to help, but as of right now, it stays in our hands."
"For what it's worth," Aegis added, and he at least sounded like he meant it, "what you did at the docks mattered. People are alive because of it. If this were a fire, a search, or even a fight with some gang members, I'd take you up on it in a heartbeat. But hostage situations run on protocol—especially where Masters are involved. It's not a judgment."
The sergeant nodded at Aegis in agreement, then glanced at her. "Do you have a name? For the report."
"Entoma," Taylor said, and it came out half like a question. "I'm—Entoma."
The name wasn't really hers, but it fit in an odd way. It had come from Ordis—she'd found out during training that it was short for entomancer, a fantasy class for summoning and controlling insects. It was meant as a placeholder until she picked one of her own, but even days later she still hadn't settled on anything. Every option on her list felt villainous or wrong, so she'd ended up just keeping the name.
"It's a good name," Aegis said. "It suits you."
"Okay." The sergeant's shoulders eased, and he nodded back toward the barricade. "Just stay behind the line. If the situation requires it, I'll—"
The front of the bank erupted with darkness.
It poured out of the building like smoke from a furnace—swallowing light, sound, and color—and rolled across the street in a black tide that ate everything it touched.
Aegis was airborne before the sergeant could finish. "Wards, converge—" His voice cut off into comms chatter as he shot toward the bank.
Shadow Stalker turned to go—and for one second she was right in front of Taylor, close, mask first.
"If one bug so much as bites anyone," she said, "I'm coming back for you."
Then she dissolved into a spill of dark smoke and poured herself toward the bank after Aegis.
Taylor stood there, the threat ringing louder in her ears than the swarm.
She'd come here to help. She'd offered everything she had—eyes inside the building, a couple thousand bugs' worth of distraction, anything—and in under two minutes she'd been called a liar, a glory hound, and a walking security risk. By a girl her own age. One of the good guys.
And the way she'd said Master. Like controlling bugs put Taylor one bad day away from being Heartbreaker.
She knew that tone. The easy certainty of someone who'd already decided what you were, evidence optional, with no interest in anything you actually said.
This, she thought, is why I didn't want to join the Wards.
Taylor wondered, sometimes, if she was being unfair about that—if Winslow, back before Lookout and Isaac, had poisoned the idea before she could give it a fair shot. But this was what she'd been afraid of: another school, just with capes. Another hierarchy with a girl like Shadow Stalker somewhere in it. Aegis had at least been nice, but who knew how much of that was actually him and how much was just the hero mask?
The bitterness settled in, familiar as an old bruise. She breathed it out. She could be angry later.
Right now she had a bank full of hostages to keep track of.
Shouts went up along the perimeter. Radio chatter spiked. And through the bugs she'd seeded inside, Taylor felt every hostage in the building start moving at once.
She felt them spill out, stumbling through the darkness like swimmers caught in an undertow. Some fell. Some collided, tangled, turned around, and ran back into the bank's own walls.
And behind them, something massive surged out of the entrance.
Taylor had seen Bitch's dogs in grainy phone videos. The videos lied.
They came out the size of cars—monstrous things of bared muscle and jutting bone, teeth like kitchen knives. Six of them smashed through the front of the bank in a spray of brick and glass, scattering hostages like bowling pins—one woman went down hard under a glancing shoulder and didn't get up. The dogs plowed through the darkness without slowing; at that mass, their heads rode comfortably above the shadows.
On their backs, half-glimpsed shapes in the black: the Undersiders, bags lashed down, riding out.
Above the rooftops, a white-and-gold blur dropped out of the sky toward the bank.
"Glory Girl's engaging!" someone shouted, and the street dissolved into noise.
The sergeant was already turning, launcher coming up.
"Sir," Taylor shouted to get his attention.
His eyes went from the bank to her.
"Careful—there are hostages stumbling around in the dark. I can feel them."
A heartbeat, while brick dust rained off the bank's facade—and he nodded. "Thank you for the heads-up."
The Wards hit the chaos at speed.
Aegis dropped into the nearest dog's path like a wall—caught its charge on his shoulder and skidded backward twenty feet, boots carving trenches in the asphalt, but he held. The dog snapped at him, teeth barely scratching whatever his armor was made of, and Aegis wrapped both arms around its muzzle and tried to wrench it sideways.
Vista was already warping. The street between two buildings folded in on itself—fifty feet of road compressed into ten, a spatial accordion that turned the east escape route into a corridor barely wide enough for a car. One of the dogs plowed into it and stumbled, its momentum all wrong.
Kid Win cut across the sky on his hoverboard, Tinkertech cannon spooling up—cyan bolts lanced down and tore into the bone-plating of the nearest dog. It lunged to snap him out of the air, and the space between them stretched, the leap falling twenty feet short.
Browbeat was in the thick of it, biokinetically reinforced frame trading blows with the dog Hellhound was riding. He was losing. The dog was bigger, faster, and when it caught his guard the impact sent him skipping backward through a parked car. The car folded around him. He climbed out—slower—and threw himself right back into the fight.
Gallant hung back at the perimeter, firing careful shots into the melee—golden bursts that splashed against the dogs and made them flinch, stumble, lose half a second of coordination.
And above it all, Glory Girl.
She came down like a missile on the cluster of hostages nearest the bank's entrance—the woman who'd gone down hard and hadn't gotten up. Glory Girl hit the ground between the woman and the dog with a crack that cratered the sidewalk. The dog recoiled, then lunged to snap at her—and she screamed in rage and hit it with everything she had, sending it flying. She wasted no time grabbing the woman—brown hair, freckles, bleeding from her temple—and was airborne again before the dog recovered, carrying her up and out of the fight.
Taylor felt Clockblocker working his way toward the dog Aegis was grappling—trying to freeze it—but the dog kept thrashing, and every time he got close, part of its body shifted into Grue's darkness.
Taylor's jaw tightened. Shadow Stalker's warning flickered through her head and bounced right off—the girl's opinion mattered about as much as a stranger's on the bus. What mattered was that Aegis was out there, trusting her to stay put. The sergeant too.
And she was not going to let any more innocent people get hurt because she'd stood behind a barricade being compliant.
Nobody said anything about steering.
"Shade." She didn't turn her head. She barely moved her lips. "Help Aegis."
There was no response. But Taylor knew Shade would obey.
Then—invisible, silent, two meters off the ground—Shade fired.
The bolt hit the dog's left eye like a white-hot nail. The eye burst. The dog bellowed—a sound that was half howl, half something monstrous—and reared back, massive head snapping upward, jaws gaping.
Clockblocker leapt in and tagged it.
His hand slapped the dog's foreleg and the monster locked—frozen mid-rear, mid-scream, a snarling monument of muscle and bone that wasn't going anywhere.
Then the tail came from the second dog—the one Glory Girl had launched across the street.
It caught Clockblocker across the chest and ribs. He ragdolled, spun end over end, and hit the side of a squad car hard enough to dent the door panel inward. He slid down. Didn't get up.
Taylor flinched.
Then, over the radios: "Clockblocker is down, Clockblocker is down, we need a medic at the north barricade—"
Aegis charged the second dog with a shout of rage, catching it with an uppercut, and Shade shot it through the leg, dropping the animal onto its side.
She'd helped, and he'd still gotten hurt. The guilt was a weight in her stomach, a sense of failure starting to take over.
But the hostages were still inside. They were still at risk, and she couldn't just sit by—or what happened to Clockblocker might happen to them.
She turned back to the darkness and pushed.
Her bugs—the ones inside the bank, the ones clustered along the walls and ceiling—went to work on the stumbling civilians.
Not biting. Not stinging. Gathering into tight little clusters and brushing them—across the back of a neck, along a shoulder, over an ankle—light, maddening contact, there and gone before anyone could swat it. Then again. And again. From the left, so they veered right. From behind, so they ran forward.
People fled from bugs the way they fled from fire. It wasn't a decision; it was something older than thought, and the darkness only made it worse—every touch magnified, sourceless, coming from everywhere. So Taylor became the thing they fled from, and aimed the stampede at the exits, herding them the way a sheepdog herds: never gripping, never letting them turn, pressure and release until they broke for the light.
It wasn't gentle. It worked. A man in a suit came out of the darkness's edge at a dead sprint, swatting at his collar, and a PRT agent grabbed him and hauled him behind the barricade. Then a woman, arms windmilling. Then two more. They spilled out in ones and twos, gasping and shaking—driven out by nothing anyone could see.
One agent muttered something into his radio—"—civilians coming out hot, like something's driving them—"—and Taylor let it pass over her. She could deal with that later. Right now there were still people inside.
She was so focused on the herding and the fighting that she almost missed it.
A figure moving through the darkness.
Not stumbling. Not feeling its way. Running—with certainty, with purpose—straight toward her.
The realization hit a half-second before the shape burst from the dark.
The darkness generator.
Grue came out of his own darkness like a freight train. His fist was already cocked.
Taylor threw herself sideways—the swing hissed past her ear, close enough that she felt the displaced air—and her reflexes, the ones Tenno had drilled into her during training, fired on their own. A tiny part of the swarm descended on Grue mid-dodge. Wasps, bees, hornets—they landed on his jacket, his helmet, his gloves, and stung.
Nothing.
Leather. Padding. Thick fabric. His costume was built for exactly this. He didn't even flinch—just pivoted, using the momentum of his missed swing to bring his other hand around.
Then the darkness took her.
It was like being buried. Light gone. Sound gone—the buzz of her own swarm, the crack of Kid Win's cannon, even her own breathing. Just nothing. The world became a featureless void that pressed against her skin and filled her ears with cotton.
Her swarm-sense was still there. She could feel every bug in a two-block radius, feel Grue's body through the ones clinging to him. She knew his position, his posture, the angle of his next swing.
But knowing wasn't the same as reacting. Her body was still trained to trust her eyes, and her eyes were telling her there was nothing there—and in the half-second of lag between what her power told her and what her instincts believed, Grue's fist connected.
It caught her across the ribs. The air left her lungs. She staggered, tasted copper, and her knee hit pavement she couldn't see.
Through the bugs clinging to him, she felt his weight shift forward—following up, pressing the advantage.
She stopped trusting her eyes. Closed them entirely. And retaliated with a kick.
Her heel drove upward into his gut from the ground, fueled by adrenaline and every hour Tenno had spent teaching her to fight from disadvantage. Grue's armor took some of it—but not enough. He doubled forward.
Taylor was already moving. Before he could recover, she dropped a massive swarm on his head.
Everything that could bite or sting or crawl descended on him—a black flood covering his helmet, his shoulders, his neck. They poured under the rim, into the gap between leather and skin, and bit.
Grue screamed—a sound she felt through the swarm rather than heard.
His hands clawed at his helmet, but he couldn't get the strap; the bugs were in the way. He reeled backward, thrashing, darkness spraying from him in uncontrolled bursts that splashed against the street, the buildings, and Taylor herself.
She held the swarm, and thought about pressing the attack physically—then discarded the idea. If he managed to pin her, his superior weight and strength would give him the advantage again and force her to get truly vicious.
Instead, she stayed precise. The bugs might have been crawling over his face, but they were routing around his eyes, keeping clear of his mouth and nose.
She didn't want a repeat of her going psycho. That wasn't the kind of hero she was going to be.
Grue finally tore free. The helmet came off, and he retreated toward the dogs, swatting and crushing insects off his face and body as he went.
Taylor stood in the settling dark, breathing hard, ribs screaming, bugs pulling back to her in a slow river of chitin. She could have kept biting, but the swarm alone wasn't going to put him down—and he was retreating anyway. In his state, a Ward or even a lucky PRT trooper would finish the job.
She didn't want to stay in the dark a second longer than she had to. She started walking, bugs mapping the path ahead. The edge of the darkness came in pieces—gray, then color, then the street, then the barricade. She stepped out of the murk and into the open air, and the world came back: sound, light, the distant wail of sirens and the crack of combat down the street.
Then she heard the voice.
"H—help. Please."
Two women. Stumbling toward her out of the dark. One was middle-aged, shaking, mascara streaked down her face. The other was younger—blonde, slight, supporting the older woman with an arm around her waist, limping.
"I've got her, I've got her—" the blonde was saying, voice thin and scared. "We got separated, I don't know where—"
Taylor moved toward them on instinct. "This way, you're almost—"
The blonde's eyes met hers.
And they weren't scared at all.
Blondie shoved the older woman backward—the woman stumbled, yelped, and vanished into the black. Then the blonde pulled a gun. Small. Black. Pressed low against Taylor's sternum.
For a half-second, Taylor was just confused—a hostage, pulling a gun on her? Then her eyes dropped from the gun to the purple and black of the girl's costume, and it clicked.
Undersider.
Tattletale smiled, plucked a domino mask from the small of her back, and slipped it on.
"Hey, bug girl," she chirped, almost conversational. Like two friends meeting up on the Boardwalk.
Taylor didn't freeze. Getting hunted down by Venari had been scarier than this, and she'd been shot at before—just by a forever boy with disintegration beams and a rampaging man-dragon, instead of a gun.
The swarm Taylor had been pulling back from the darkness was slowly closing in on Tattletale from behind.
"Don't." Tattletale's voice dropped, less casual, almost bored. "Don't even think about putting your creepy crawlies on me, or I scream very loudly about your little Ten-Zero connection."
Taylor's body locked.
The swarm locked with it. Wasps and bees and beetles went still in midair, a frozen cloud that touched neither of them.
She knows. How?
That shouldn't be possible. She'd only been a member for a week, and in that week she hadn't made a single appearance in her cape persona, much less told anyone about her affiliation.
Had Tattletale's power picked Shade out of the air? No—that couldn't be it. To Taylor's knowledge, Shade hadn't dropped its cloak, and as Ten-Zero stealth tech, it should have been shielded from Thinkers.
She remembered Tenno's warning: unlike him and his technology, Taylor had no anti-Thinker protection.
Even so—had her power actually handed her the information, or was she bluffing on a hunch? Last Taylor had checked PHO, Tattletale wasn't rated that highly as a Thinker. She shouldn't have been able to pull facts out of thin air.
Tattletale's smile widened a fraction, and Taylor felt her stomach drop.
"You're quick," Tattletale said, sounding genuinely impressed. "Good for you. But not quick enough. You reacted—and that means I was right. Thank you for confirming my hunch."
She shifted her weight, casual, like they were talking about the weather—and something new stirred in Taylor. Anger. This felt far too much like being cornered at Winslow.
"So let me tell you what else I know." The smile didn't waver. "This isn't some fan thing. You're a full-fledged member. You know their real mission. You know who's behind the suit. And—ooh, juicy—you know who the real head honcho is."
Taylor said nothing, but her brain was firing as fast as her panic was rising, trying to work out how this girl's power was digging secrets out of her head.
"And that," Tattletale monologued, "is what we in the business call leverage."
Shut her up shut her up shut her up—
The urge hit like a wave. The swarm tightened. Tattletale's eyes flicked to the mass of insects, and her finger settled on the trigger.
"Ah-ah."
Taylor forced the emotion down. She breathed in and pushed the feeling out of her body and into the swarm—letting the bugs absorb the fear and the fury and the panic, letting them carry it so her hands stayed steady and her head stayed clear.
It worked. The storm in her chest drained outward, flowing through the link she'd built with her insects, and her breathing evened and her jaw unclenched.
Tattletale started to say something—then closed her mouth. She tilted her head, eyes narrowing, glancing from the insects to Taylor and back.
"Neat trick," she said. "But I've already got you exactly where I want you."
Taylor wanted to deny it, but it was true. Short of doing something permanent, there was no way to stop her from telling anyone.
Through the wide net of her swarm, Taylor felt another dog go down—and felt Aegis streak farther out to engage the next one, past the distance Shade was willing to stray from her.
It would be on its way back now.
And when it arrived, it was going to find a person pointing a gun at its charge—and respond the way it was programmed to respond.
It'll kill her, and no one will ever know it was me.
The thought came clean and cold, and with her emotions riding in the back seat, Taylor didn't flinch away from it.
There'd be no order to trace, no moment anyone could point to where she'd chosen anything. All she had to do was nothing.
And she had reasons. Tenno had told her there were dangerous, powerful people out there who'd give anything to hurt Ten-Zero.
And what was Taylor, next to them? The newest member. No warframe. No anti-Thinker protection. A fifteen-year-old who'd kept her secrets for exactly one week before a stranger read them off her face.
The weakest link. And the weakest link knew who was behind the suit. Knew their real mission. The secret of the Specters. Even the identity of Ten-Zero's true leader.
Tattletale had gotten all of that because of how her power conveniently worked. Taylor imagined how someone without that convenience would go about finding it: a basement, tools, and a villain with no reason to stop until he got what he wanted.
So the numb part of her said: stand still. Let Shade come. Everyone you love stays safe that way.
Taylor let the thought run all the way out, because if she was going to let this happen, she wasn't going to pretend she hadn't seen where it ended.
Where it ended was a dead girl on the pavement with Taylor standing over her, knowing one command could have stopped it.
That wasn't nothing. It was a choice.
It was murder.
The secret hadn't leaked yet. Tattletale wanted her alive and cooperative. That meant there was still time—time to find a way out, to undo this, before anything reached the kind of people who'd do worse than put a gun to her chest.
If that ever changed—if it ever came down to Dad, or Isaac, or the others, against this girl—she'd decide then.
But not yet. Her second patrol as a hero was not going to end this way.
So she commanded her bugs to sweep the airspace where she'd last placed Shade. Its anti-Thinker field meant she lost track of any bug it touched while cloaked—a hole in her awareness—and with the density of the swarm, it didn't take long to find the gap.
A cluster of moths and flies dropped in front of Shade, wrapping it in a soft, fluttering blindfold. Then more—ants and wasps—arranged themselves on the pavement before it, in a pattern anyone could read.
Four words.
DON'T SHOOT. FOLLOW.
A pause in its movement was the only indication Taylor got that it might be smart enough to understand what it was being asked. The moths lifted, and almost to her surprise, Shade drifted back and tucked itself into a higher position where it could watch while keeping focus on her aggressor.
Taylor turned her attention outward, back to Tattletale. She thought about asking Shade to contact Ordis but rejected it.
She couldn't bring Tenno into this. Not yet. He was going after Heartbreaker, had promised those families he'd bring back their loved ones. She was not going to pull him away from that for this.
She could handle this. She had to handle this. But she wouldn't do it recklessly.
One hour.
That was the timer she set in her head. If she couldn't find a way out in that time, or if things got worse, she'd ask for help.
But first, she'd try on her own.
"Okay," Taylor said. Her voice came out flat. "What do you want?"
Tattletale's grin sharpened. "Now we're talking."
The gun didn't move. But Tattletale's free hand came up—a small gesture, almost gentle—and she turned, positioning Taylor between herself and the PRT barricade. The darkness was thinning, slowly returning them to the view of everyone at the line.
"Here's what happens next. You're going to help us leave."
"How."
"Your friends at the barricade have been very politely ignoring you. That ends now." Tattletale's voice was light, conversational, like she was explaining a board game. "You're going to take your swarm and make a very loud, very public show of hitting the perimeter. The Wards, the agents, the cameras, all of it. Bugs everywhere. Big scary Master moment. And while you're doing that, we walk."
Taylor stared at her, hard.
"You want me to attack the Wards."
"I want you to look like you're attacking the Wards. The bugs don't have to hurt anyone—I don't care. But it has to be loud enough that every camera on the street turns to you and every agent reaches for his launcher. Can you do that?"
She could. A wall of insects descending on the barricade would draw every eye and every weapon in seconds.
And once she did it, there would be no taking it back.
Shadow Stalker had looked her in the lenses and called her a villain in waiting, and Taylor had brushed it off as noise.
In thirty seconds, every camera on this street was going to agree with her.
Aegis. The sergeant. Tenno. Every one of them had trusted her to do the right thing today. And she was about to let them down.
The refusal rose in her chest, hot and immediate—
—and she shunted it into the swarm before it could become a word.
"Okay," Taylor said.
She didn't give herself time to second-guess. The swarm moved.
It came out of the sky like a curtain falling—tens of thousands of insects breaking formation, pouring toward the PRT barricade in a dark, buzzing wave that blotted out the light. Agents shouted. Foam launchers swung. Aegis, grappling a dog halfway down the street, snapped his head around.
The insects didn't bite or sting. They swarmed—thick enough to blind, loud enough to deafen, a moving wall that made every PRT agent on the line stumble backward and fire foam wildly into the air.
And in the chaos, four shapes moved the other way.
The Undersiders—Grue limping, Hellhound's dogs carrying the bags and the team, Regent half-laughing—cut west through the darkness and around the corner of the bank, invisible in the confusion.
Tattletale walked beside Taylor, gun hidden in the press of her shoulder blade, and guided her into the dark after them.
"Bitch. Dog. Now."
The beast—one Taylor hadn't tracked—materialized from the smoke. Tattletale climbed onto its back and pulled Taylor up after her with a grip that was deceptively strong.
The dog lurched into motion, rounded a corner, and the noise fell away.
Grue rode ahead, helmet back on, posture rigid. He hadn't spoken since the fight. His jaw was set, and the darkness leaking from him was thin and controlled.
Bitch glanced back once. Her face bruised and expression angry. She looked at Tattletale, at Taylor, at the gun Tattletale was still holding low—and her lip curled in anger but she didn't argue.
Regent, riding behind Grue, caught Taylor's eye.
His head tilted in interest.
Then he turned back around and said nothing.
Nobody spoke. The dogs ran, claws gouging the asphalt, and the city began to blur past.
Behind them, block by block, Taylor felt the swarm fall out of her range. First the ones inside the bank. Then the ones over the barricade. Then the whole dark ceiling of it, receding past the edge of her awareness like a tide going out—and what the passing streets gave back was a trickle: a fly here, a spider in a wall there. Each a little distraction to keep her head clear.
The gun stayed cold against her spine.
One hour.
One hour to find her own way out of this before she pulled Tenno back from Heartbreaker.
She closed her eyes and started counting.
Sixty.
Fifty-nine.