Earning Her Stripes Pt 10 (Patreon)

Part Ten: Revelations

[A/N: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal].

Friday Evening

Barnes Household Garage

Firebird

I should really let Dad and Mom know that I'm an actual superhero these days. That way, I won't have to sneak around.

Emma heaved the last piece of her ad hoc obstacle course into place, then paused to survey her efforts. Composed of empty crates, old tyres, ropes dangling from the rafters, and lengths of wood to balance on, it would be problematic for all but a professional parkour artist to navigate at speed. Except that was what she was, these days. As well as a professional everything else.

Anything that required physical coordination or endurance—or both—she could do in spades, all day long. And while she wouldn't be as strong as a male bodybuilder of the same weight—she knew about unequal distribution of muscle mass—it was a given that she'd be able to kick the ass of said hypothetical bodybuilder if he tried to push her around. It seemed her power had gone inward instead of outward, boosting her to the next level and keeping her there. No single thing she did was actually impossible for a normal human to achieve … but she could do all of it, and keep doing it.

She dusted off her hands and eyed the first crate, then launched herself onto it. Diving through the tyre she'd balanced on its treads, she did a handspring and a half-flip to end up balanced on top of the first beam. So far, all this was just going by the numbers; when she wanted to do something acrobatic, her body either did it or told her why it was impossible. Not a hell of a lot was impossible for her, these days, either.

Running along the balance beam, she threw herself forward into a handstand and pushed off so that her legs encountered the first dangling rope before the rest of her body. As if she'd practised it a hundred times, her bare toes hooked around it and she wrapped it around her lower leg. This let her swing forward, then release just in time to perform a backflip and land on the next crate.

That was when her phone rang. Not her personal phone, either. She'd paid attention to Sophia's advice on the matter, and gotten a cheap burner phone. This one was specifically for anything to do with the Real Thing; each of them had one, and nobody used their real name when texting.

Jumping off the crate, she retrieved the phone and checked the number. It wasn't one she knew, but that didn't mean much. Silently promising that if it was someone wanting to sell her extra warranty on the car she didn't own, she would hunt them down and feed them their own phone, she swiped the answer icon. "Hello, Firebird speaking."

"Ah, good evening, Firebird." The voice was that of a woman, but again not someone she recognised. "My name is Katarina Lombard; I represent KaLo Private Investigations, Incorporated. The PRT gave this to me for your team contact number. May I have a moment of your time?"

Emma frowned. "That depends," she said cautiously. "What's this about?"

Her father used private investigators from time to time, she knew that much. Even though they were in an all-party state when it came to using a recording in court, she also knew that non-police recordings could absolutely be used as evidence. So, she had to assume she was being recorded from the word go.

The second thing she knew was that PI's didn't just blindly call people, hoping to learn something out of the blue. This Lombard woman was after something, and until Emma learned what, it was a bad idea to just relax and start talking.

"I'd like to ask you about your rescue of Taylor Hebert from her locker at Winslow High School, the other day. There's a few details I need to clear up for my client."

Emma thought fast. This could be good or bad. On the downside, they hadn't actually rescued Taylor from the locker, but as she'd fallen unconscious in front of it, claiming that they had was about the limit of credit they could draw from the situation. However, on the upside, private investigators didn't work for the cops. This woman's client was almost certainly Danny Hebert, possibly looking into a potential lawsuit against the school.

That was fine with Emma. Winslow's a shitheap and a dumpster fire, and they really should've pulled us up before we went so far with Taylor.

Her thoughts stuttered to a halt. Where the hell did that come from?

She'd think about that later. Right now, the Lombard woman was waiting for an answer. "Go ahead and ask. I don't promise to answer. Also, just to check, you're recording this, right? In case you weren't aware, I haven't given my permission for that."

The woman's chuckle settled it for Emma; she was definitely recording. "Understood. How did you know Taylor Hebert was trapped inside her own locker?"

Emma drew a deep breath. Time to lie my ass off. Weirdly enough, she was better at that these days, too. "I didn't know her name before you told me just now. We were patrolling when my teammate Blockade picked up her cries for help via a Tinkertech microphone built into their power armour."

"Mmm, okay. That must be useful. Just out of curiosity, why weren't you in school at the time?"

Fortunately, Emma had already worked out an answer for that one. "Ms Lombard, I'm not about to divulge any information that might give an indication of my real age, or social situation. Please refrain from asking any more questions of that nature."

"Ahh, I see." Well, she didn't, but Emma's subtle hint was intended to make to think she did. "What happened after you located the locker in question?"

Emma was pretty sure she knew where this was going. Time to set sail on the USS Utter Bullshit. "Why did we wreck it? Well, it wasn't a huge locker, and we had no idea how tall the student inside was, so I gave Blockade the all-clear to peel away the obstacles from all sides, and then open it like a can-opener. Minimise the chances of hurting whoever was inside. As it was, she was unconscious by the time we got her out. Shock, I think. Personally, I suspect severe claustrophobia. Kids these days can be so cruel." An impulse made her add, "So, uh, how's she doing?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not kept informed of that side of things. I believe she's recovering, though. So, I have to ask you, why didn't you just open the door and let her out?"

This was where it got dicey. "Well, it had a padlock on the door, and I'm pretty sure that the door had a built-in lock as well." That last part was bullshit, but with any luck, Lombard wouldn't see it as suspicious. "So, we decided to go with the method we knew for a fact would work."

"I see." There was a pause. Emma heard a rustle, as though a notebook page had been turned. "There was a padlock on the door? Are you certain?"

Emma froze. Shit. The question was as good as a lit-up neon sign saying THERE WAS NO PADLOCK ON THE DOOR. And she couldn't just backtrack on what she'd just said. "Are, uh, are you saying there wasn't?"

"That's what my client says the school is claiming. Are you saying there was one on there?"

So, they weren't certain. Emma allowed herself to sag ever so slightly in relief. That gave her some leeway. "There sure was. I saw it with my own eyes. As for why the school might be claiming otherwise …" Time to lay a false trail. Because she could make a damn good guess what had really happened to the padlock she had put on the door.

"I'm listening."

And now comes the tricky part. She needed to ask questions to suggest that something had happened while not actually telling a single untruth. "You're probably aware that Winslow isn't actually a great school. In fact, it's a crappy school. Something like this happens? They're going to try to shift blame off themselves as hard as possible. Kids who get locked into lockers aren't the popular ones. They're the loners, the outcasts, the ones everyone else feels comfortable with bullying." She grimaced as she felt a twinge of unaccustomed guilt. I sure felt comfortable bullying her. But she couldn't dwell on that right now. "So, if one of these loners gets shut in their own locker, is the school going to try to find the perpetrator, or are they just going to try to make it go away? Up to and including faking evidence to 'prove' the victim wasn't really a victim after all? Such as unlocking a padlock when there's no witnesses around to say otherwise?"

There was a long pause, then Ms Lombard came back on the line. "Are you saying this is what happened?"

Emma knew what to say to that. "No, because I didn't see it happen. I'm offering it as a possibility. Because I know damn well there was a padlock on that locker when I got there."

"Understood. Just a couple more questions. Did you see any containers lying around? Glass bottles or anything like that?"

"No, there was nothing like that when we got there." Mainly because the vial, firmly stoppered, had been back in Sophia's bag by that point.

"Alright then, how about Ms Hebert's physical condition. You said she was unconscious. Do you think that may have been the result of being drugged?"

As tempting as it was to say yes, Emma knew there was only one answer she could give. "I'm sorry, I'm not an expert on that. We put her into the recovery position, waited for a teacher to show up, then left." Sneaking back into the school after that hadn't been hard, given the number of students milling around. Nobody had even suspected their absence.

"Still, that's useful information. Thank you, Firebird. Would you be able to give me the numbers for your team members, in case they have any more details you may have forgotten?"

"Sorry, no," she said firmly. "I've been chosen as the public-facing team member, so everything like this has to go through me." This way, we can keep our stories straight. Besides, Sophia didn't do so well with talking to the public, and Madison didn't want anyone knowing that it was a petite teenage girl inside the Blockade armour.

"Alright, then. Thank you again; you've definitely helped clear up some points. Hopefully I won't have to bother you again."

"It's not a problem," Emma said, though she wasn't totally telling the truth there as well. She did have a problem, but it wasn't with Katarina Lombard. "I hope your clients nail Winslow to the wall."

There was a smile in Ms Lombard's voice when she answered. "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation, but I'll definitely pass that on."

The call ended, and Emma sat glaring at her phone. What the fuck? I mean seriously, what the fuck?

Given the strong likelihood that Sophia had removed the lock from the door as a fuck-you to Taylor (because she would absolutely do that), Emma was strongly tempted to call her teammate and give her both barrels, but she refrained for the simple reason that Sophia would blow her off all day long. She might even hang up if Emma started pushing too hard. This is going to have to be a face-to-face thing. With Madison there as a witness. Because for fuck's sake.

<><>

Saturday Morning

Taylor

It was odd, knowing she didn't have to go to school for the next two weeks.

Or, to put it another way, it was freaking awesome. For the third morning in a row (okay, it was Saturday, but that was beyond the point) Taylor indulged herself with a lie-in, then got up and had a leisurely shower before strolling downstairs to where her father was cooking breakfast. "Morning," she greeted him cheerily.

"Morning yourself, kiddo," he said with an answering smile. "You're looking happy. That walk last night must've done you a lot of good."

She shrugged. "Well, part of it's knowing that for the next two weeks I don't have to worry about anyone at Winslow pulling their crap on me, whether it's Emma, Sophia, Madison, Julia or that two-faced Blackwell." She'd had to swallow a few insults while she was saying that; not because she thought she'd shock her father, but because she didn't want to force him to not hear it.

"You know, they still might decide to change it to an in-school suspension," he said, though the quirk of his eyebrows told her he'd probably picked up on what she hadn't said. "Which means you'd be back in the thick of it."

"Screw that," she retorted immediately. "I'm not going back in there to give them a whole new series of chances to mess with me in ways I can't just walk away from. I'll read ahead in my textbooks at home, but if they try to tell you I've got to go in, tell 'em I don't feel safe in there."

"I can do that," he agreed. "And honestly, I don't blame you. Their record so far has been appalling, and this latest incident is just the icing on the cake."

"For a definition of 'icing' and 'cake' that's not fit for human consumption," she agreed so dryly that he snorted in amusement.

"You're not wrong. So, would you like to come in to work with me today?"

She shook her head. "I think I might take the bus in to the library, and get some study done there. It's nice and quiet, and their internet's better than ours."

"That's fair." He started splitting up the bacon and eggs between them. "Just be home before dark, okay? That speeding car from last night utterly trashed the swing set in the playground at the other end of the block. They say it was Uber and Leet, but copycats are a thing, and I'm worried that they might have set a dangerous precedent."

"Thanks," she said, accepting the plate from him. "No, the last thing I want to do is end up as a statistic because some meathead decided to do zero to sixty in a residential area with blind corners." Which was precisely what had nearly happened, but for her powers. Whatever they really were.

"Mmm," he agreed. They ate breakfast in silence, Danny reading the paper in fits and starts, and Taylor mulling over her own thoughts.

Afterward, Danny helped stack everything in the sink, then gave Taylor what she'd dubbed his 'smartass Dad' grin. "New house rule. People who get to stay home do the washing up."

"Really." She rolled her eyes. "You were just waiting to roll that one out, weren't you?"

"Mayyybe." Reaching out, he ruffled her hair, ignoring her attempt to bat his hand away. "Take care. See you tonight."

"See you then." She watched as he went out the back door, then locked it behind him. The house was so old that an actual key was needed to lock or unlock any of the outside doors, but the key was hanging alongside it, so she'd be able to unlock it anytime she needed to. Filling the sink, she made sure the balance of hot versus cold water was just barely tolerable, then squirted in some detergent.

Washing the dishes was a pleasantly mindless exercise that allowed her to plan her next move. She would go to the library as she'd told her father, but not immediately. First, she wanted to do something else.

Once the dishes were dried and put away and the stove, countertop and table were wiped down, she paused in thought. There was a sewing kit on top of the fridge that had been there longer than Taylor could remember. Opening it, she found a needle she could use. Then she went down into the basement to find her father's old toolbox. Danny was an on-again/off-again DIY semi-enthusiast, but on the level of replacing the broken leg of a chair rather than remodelling the bathroom. Along with everything else, the box held a heavy ballpeen hammer, which Taylor thoughtfully weighed in her hand.

The memory came to her of walking through the school corridor, with Blackwell literally hanging off her back, and not having to work any harder to move forward. I wonder …

Dropping the hammer back into the toolbox, she took hold of the handle. From the volume of tools in it, she knew it had to weigh about as much as she did. There was no way she could lift it unaided.

Bracing herself, she heaved upward … and stared in astonishment as she easily hoisted it off the ground.

"Oh, no way," she murmured. Putting it down, she hefted it again, just as easily.

Then she tried with three fingers, ignoring her thumb and pinky.

It lifted off the floor yet again. She couldn't feel any extra strain.

"Okay, let's see how ridiculous I can get," she said out loud, and hooked just her pinky under the handle.

And lifted the toolbox.

Despite everything that had gone before, she had to stare with incredulity at the metal box suspended from her pinky finger, five feet off the floor. There was no appreciable strain on her finger; she felt she could do this all day.

"You've got to be shitting me," she began, flexing her finger. That was a mistake; her finger might have been able to support it just fine, but the grip wasn't perfect. "Shit!" she gasped, as the toolbox fell clear. Straight down, five feet, onto the bare toes of her right foot. The clang echoed through the basement.

Taylor stared at where the toolbox lay across her toes. There was no pain, nor any other sensation other than mild pressure. The light down in the basement wasn't great; a yellowing bulb hanging next to the stairs. But if her eyes weren't deceiving her, there was something white covering her foot just under where the toolbox had landed on her.

Keeping her eyes on the white covering, she reached down and hefted the toolbox away. She'd seen correctly; covering her toes, and a little way up her foot, was an undercoat of gloss white that followed every contour down to her toenails, almost as though she'd dipped her foot in enamel paint. Overlaid on the white, or so it seemed, were odd black lines that almost looked like the rainbow lines visible in oily water. She wriggled her toes; the white covering wriggled as well, the black markings shifting back and forth as if alive.

Go away, she thought. The white covering vanished, as though it had never been. Her toes looked perfectly normal in its absence. Come back. It reappeared. The black markings were different again.

Crouching, she used the needle to jab at the white covering. It stopped solid after giving her the tiniest sensation of pressure. Then she told the covering to go away, and jabbed again.

"Ow!" The needle had punctured her skin, not far enough to draw blood, but definitely far enough to cause pain. It was clear that she could do something that hurt herself deliberately, but by accident? No.

She stood up again, and imagined the white covering enveloping her feet up to the knees. An instant later—there was literally zero lag time between wanting it and seeing it—it was in place. Eyeing the toolbox, she gave it a light kick with the same foot she'd dropped it on.

Flying across the basement, the toolbox crashed into the far wall. The lid came open, and tools cascaded everywhere. From the way it was lying, she could see the huge dent she'd kicked into the side of it.

Her jaw dropped. "Well, I'll be fucked."

Holding the needle up against the side-frame of the stairs, she pushed with her thumb. Where normally it would've dug painfully into the pad of her thumb, this time she was able to effortlessly push it into the hard wood up to half its length. Leaving it there, she went across to the toolbox and righted it. She smoothed out the new dents in the metal with her thumb—holy fuck, being a Brute on command is amazing—then she loaded all the tools back into it and stashed it back where she'd gotten it from.

Okay, she decided. Let's see how hard I can really hit now. She'd never thrown a serious punch in her life, but she had a vague idea how it went. Folding her fingers around her thumb, she found the darkest corner of the basement—her father might notice a patch of cracked concrete anywhere else—and called up the black and white covering over her hand. Then she swung her fist at the wall with all her strength.

With a tremendous crash that shook the house, she found her arm buried up to the shoulder in the wall. Pulling it out again was no real effort, and she noticed that the black and white covering had extended over her T-shirt sleeve, protecting it from the abrasion of the concrete. She stared at the hole disbelievingly, shaking her head. It had literally been like punching a barrier made of tissue paper. There had been zero real resistance whatsoever.

"Holy motherfucking shitballs," she murmured. In the back of her mind, some part of her thought she should be freaking out harder than this, but she shrugged the idea off. This was big. This was huge. There was no time to run around in circles gibbering in shock.

This is how I got out of the locker, she realised. In an instant, she called up the covering all over her. Just as she recalled, she couldn't see or hear a thing, and neither could she breathe. Need air, she decided, and breathing slits opened. And light. With that, she could see. Sound, too. Her ears suddenly worked again.

"This is how it happened." The parting-cobwebs sensation had been far too familiar; smashing a hole shoulder-deep in the concrete wall had felt exactly like when she was in the locker, and had lost touch with the outside world. "It locked me off from everything until I passed out from lack of air."

Excitement rose in her chest, along with bubbling laughter. It all made sense now. So very much sense.

After a minute or so, she decided to get back to business. Dismissing the full-body covering, she reached out and plucked the needle from the stairs. Then she headed up to the kitchen.

With the needle—amazingly undamaged, considering what she'd put it through—back in the sewing kit, she went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. Okay, she mused, if I got myself out of the locker, why did the Real Thing say that they did it? What have they got to do with all this?

Putting a pin in that question, she dismissed it until such time as she had a member of the Real Thing to ask it of. Then she checked that the windows were curtained, and held her hand in front of her. Calling up the white covering, she experimented with the black markings; dispelling them altogether, creating a circuit-board pattern, bee stripes, skunk stripes, fish scales, cheetah markings, and then full black. When she decided on a pattern, it stayed, but when she didn't have one in mind, it tended to go back to the oil-on-water configuration. The other interesting aspect was that she could contour the white covering to make her hand look larger, give her webbing or claws, or even make it into an animalistic paw, so long as it didn't go more than an inch from her skin.

This absolutely has potential, she decided with a grin of pure satisfaction. Now all I have to do is figure out exactly what I want to do with it.

Part 11