Another Way Pt 28 (Patreon)

Rats in the Walls

[A/N 1: This chapter commissioned by @GW_Yoda and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: Just to remind people, this timeline diverges before Sophia Hess would have triggered in canon.]

Friday Night, December 14, 2007

Hebert Household

Marchioness

"You really do have nice hair."

Seated behind Taylor on her bed, Claire ran Taylor's long black curls through her hands as she braided them. It wasn't an idle compliment; while Claire's power had worked to improve her friends in various subtle ways since she'd met them, she hadn't had to do anything at all about Taylor's hair. And Taylor took good care of it, which Claire approved of. The years of carefully dyeing her brown hair to a deep auburn had not faded from her memory.

"Thanks!" Taylor's voice was cheerful. "Mom says it's my best feature. Dad says I got it from her, so of course she'd say that. That's when Mom usually asks Dad if he's certain the sofa's all that comfortable, because if he keeps that up, that's where he's gonna be sleeping."

Claire giggled. "Sounds about right." Taylor's parents had the banter down pat, as befitted two people who had been very much in love all their married life.

"You know what doesn't sound right?" Taylor's voice and posture conveyed a frown. "Emma and Sophia aren't here yet. It's been half an hour since you showed up for the sleepover, and Emma's never late."

"Huh." Tying off the braid where she was, Claire thought about that for a moment. "I don't know her as well as you do, but it definitely doesn't seem like her."

"No, it doesn't." Taylor reached over to where her phone was sitting on the nightstand. Dancing thumbs flickered out a quick text; leaning forward to look over her shoulder, Claire read: Hey slowpoke, you're missing a great sleepover. Did your dad's car blow a tire or something?

Claire grinned. "Slowpoke? Really? She's almost as fast a runner as you are, and she can wipe you at anything over two hundred yards."

"I know, I know." Taylor's smirk was pure mischief. "But it'll totally make her blow a fuse anyway. If I know her, she'll race Sophia over here just so she can kick my ass, or try to anyway."

"Yeah, that's definitely more in line with what I've seen of her." Claire perked up when she heard the phone ding with an incoming message. "Looks like you got her attention."

"Ha ha, yeah." Taylor's look of glee as she opened the message slowly froze on her face. "… what?"

"What what?" Leaning in, Claire read Emma's return message.

Forget it. Changed my mind. Sleepovers are for little kids and I've outgrown you. Sophia's my only real friend. I've just been tolerating you. See you never, loser.

"But … wait … no," protested Taylor. A stricken look on her face, she shook her head, apparently trying to deny the hurtful words on the screen. "No, that's not like Emma. She wouldn't … no, I don't believe it."

Claire shook her head. "Jesus, no." While she couldn't claim to know Taylor and Emma as well as they knew each other, she'd seen their friendship first-hand. They had in-jokes, anecdotes and embarrassing stories about each other for days. For Emma to say something like this wasn't just unexpected. It didn't fit.

"Did I say or do something wrong, did I upset her …?" Even now, Taylor was trying to excuse the message from Emma's phone.

"No." Claire knew that much about the vivacious redhead. Holding things in wasn't her style. "She would've said something."

"Maybe ..." Taylor dismissed the text and dialled a number, apparently from memory. She held the phone to her ear and waited. "Come on ..." she mumbled. "Just tell me what's wrong, so I can put it right ..."

Long seconds meandered by, then she frowned and ended the call. "Voice mail," she explained.

"So leave a message," Claire urged. "Ask her what's going on."

"If she won't answer the phone, I'm pretty sure she won't call me back because of a voice mail." Taylor set her jaw. "Time to call in the big guns."

<><>

Taylor

As Claire watched, I called up another number; this one I didn't know by heart, but it was definitely in my Favorites list.

It rang twice, then Alan Barnes answered. "Barnes household, Alan here. What's up, Taylor?"

He at least seemed pleased to hear from me, which gave me hope that this would be easily settled. "Hi, Mr Barnes. Is Emma there? I'd really like to talk to her, please."

"Emma's at your house ... isn't she?" There was a brief pause; when he spoke again, there was worry in his tone. "I thought you four were having a sleepover at your house. You're saying she isn't there? When did she leave?"

Ice water trickled down my spine and solidified in my guts. I clutched the phone like a lifeline. "Mr Barnes, she never got here. And when I texted her just now, she sent me a really nasty message saying she never wanted to see me again."

"Never got there?" The alarm in his voice was full-blown by now. "She went to meet Sophia at the bus stop. I was going to drive them over, but she texted me to say she'd ride the bus to your place with Sophia, and Danny would drop her back tomorrow."

Claire nudged me to get my attention. I looked at her, realising she'd had her ear up against the phone to hear what was being said. "Ask him if she named your dad," she said.

"Hold on." He must have heard her. There was a pause. "She said 'Taylor's dad'. Why?"

I couldn't make sense of what she was getting at either. My brain was darting in half a dozen directions at once. "What are you saying?"

Claire took a deep breath. "Those messages were possibly calculated to keep us all in the dark until tomorrow morning. If that's true, Emma's been abducted. And until we find out differently, we have to assume Sophia's also been taken. So, what we've got to do—"

"Abducted?" I could hear Mr Barnes raising his eyebrows on the other end of the call. "That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it?"

"With one message, sure, but with both—" began Claire.

Apparently Mrs Barnes was in the room, because I heard her voice raised in the background. Mr Barnes reacted immediately. "Zoe, Zoe, shh, shh, it's okay. It's alright. Emma's not at Danny's place at the moment, but this has to be some kind of misunderstanding."

"Mr Barnes!" Claire's voice was sharp. "Mr Barnes, it's something we've seriously got to consider. She's not where she's supposed to be, you got lied to, and Taylor got a really nasty, vicious message. Someone doesn't want anyone checking on her until morning."

"That's true. Okay. One second. Zoe, give me your phone and see if you can reach her. I swear, if this is some kind of stupid prank, she'll be grounded until she graduates college."

We waited; I was pretty sure I heard the sound of a cell-phone being dialled. I hoped she'd answer, but deep down I knew she wouldn't. Glancing at Claire, I raised my eyebrows. She shook her head, confirming my own opinion.

Alan Barnes came back on the phone. "It's going straight to voice mail. Not even ringing. The phone must be turned off."

This wasn't definitive proof of anything, but it certainly added to the heap of circumstantial evidence we'd already gathered. I'd figured out why Claire wanted to know about how 'Emma' referred to Dad in her text message; if she'd called him by name, that would've been a strike against the kidnap theory. But if they got my name out of her and the fact that she was going on a sleepover, it would've been easy to fake a message.

"Understood." Claire nodded. "Okay, what we've got to do—"

"Zoe, call the police," Mr Barnes interrupted. "Taylor, get your father and put him on the phone. Right now."

<><>

An Abandoned Warehouse in the Trainyards

"There we go. Careful, this one's a biter."

Between them, the two men hoisted the second member of the night's take out of the trunk of the car and deposited her with the first. They were tied hand and foot, of course; while Mr Bough and Mr Drowsing were capes, neither one was particularly capable in melee, even against angry tweenage girls. Especially the second one. She fought dirty.

An athletic black girl, she'd very nearly gotten free of them before Mr Bough stabbed her with one of his needles. The long-term effect would be minimal, but in the short term (as with the redhead) it had knocked her out. Tied up she might be, but as Mr Drowsing had noted, she had not lost an ounce of the fight that was in her. As they locked the metal cuff around her ankle, she did her best to kick and struggle away from them.

This would change, of course. Whatever the customer wanted in the way of personality was what they'd get. The redhead would go the same way, even though she hadn't put up as much of a struggle. It all came down to what people were willing to pay for.

Mr Drowsing touched the throbbing gouge on his cheekbone, and his fingertip came away stained red. "I knew we shouldn't have grabbed that one up."

"We couldn't have her warning anyone," Mr Bough reminded him. "And you know there's always a market for pre-teens."

The fact that the sort of people who paid for pre-teens to order were the scum of the earth was something that Mr Bough accepted without ever caring about it. Their money spent just as well as those who spent their lives performing virtuous deeds. In fact, the more odious the transformation, the more the pair could demand for it. Without the slightest hint of irony, Mr Bough considered that they were filling a lucrative market niche that few others could.

"Yeah, but an inch to the side and the little bitch would've had my eye out."

Mr Bough smiled dryly. "I could've grown it back for you."

"Pass. Where'd we put the first aid kit?"

"Other room, on top of the boxes."

Muttering to himself, Mr Drowsing left the room.

Mr Bough considered the two girls; blindfolded, gagged, hands secured, chained by the ankles to a pair of ring-bolts in the walls. They would be enough to start with, he decided.

Using the phone to send those messages had been a last-minute inspiration; the redhead had been easy enough to bully into giving him a few basic facts that he'd made use of to put off suspicions for a while longer.

The next thing was to start putting out feelers into the local underworld. Once they got a few bites, they could start taking orders. It wouldn't be long before the money was rolling in, as it always did.

The Orchard would soon be in business again.

<><>

Taylor

Dad took the phone after listening to my brief explanation, and put it to his ear. "Okay, Alan, what are you thinking?"

Turning away, I ran my hands over my face. "What do we do?" Emma was my oldest friend and I desperately wanted her to be okay. And Sophia too, of course. "Why would they even take Emma? Mr Barnes has money, but he's not that rich, I don't think."

"It depends." Claire's voice was calm and measured, almost hypnotically so. "We don't know who took her or what their aims are. What we need to do is keep our heads and figure out a plan of action. Going off half-cocked would be the worst possible thing to do, right now. So, the first thing you need to do is take a few deep breaths."

"Okay. Okay." I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself down. It helped more than I thought it would. Claire's unflappable demeanour seemed to be rubbing off on me. "How did you even figure it out?"

"I had an abduction scare myself, at the beginning of the year." Claire's voice was matter-of-fact. "Since then, Dad's had me sit through security awareness courses. This fits one of the patterns they covered."

"Oh." If she'd been saved, maybe we could save Emma and Sophia the same way. "What happened? When they tried to kidnap you, I mean."

"My father has serious resources to call on when he needs to." I noticed she didn't elaborate on the fate of the would-be kidnappers.

"Oh." The inference was obvious. "Could we—could you—ask him to maybe help find Emma and Sophia? Please?" I'd totally beg if I had to.

"Okay, Alan, I'll call you back if we hear anything, anything at all." Dad ended the call and handed my phone back to me. "So, I hope you two weren't going to run off into the night looking for them. Alan says the police have been called, and that we should let them do their job."

Claire snorted. "It wasn't the police who saved me last time."

"Or us, for that matter." Mom interjected, putting her arm around Dad's waist.

"Hmm." Dad rubbed a knuckle across his lips thoughtfully. "You know, there's no harm in hedging our bets. I think we should be calling in other assistance. People we know for a fact are capable of helping."

Claire raised a cynical eyebrow. "If you're going to say 'the superheroes', I don't think—"

"No." Dad shook his head. "I've still got Marquis' pin on my bedside table. May as well put it to good use. And if we need to chip in an extra twenty or fifty to add Emma and Sophia to our protection plan, that's money well spent."

Claire blinked. "… really? You want to ask Marquis, an actual supervillain, to help find Emma?"

"Just because they call him a supervillain doesn't mean he's a bad person!" I remembered all too well that horrible night when Dad got stabbed and nearly died, and only Marchioness was able to save his life. Even though the heroes had shown up, it had been far too late to help anyone, and they'd just tried to make the situation worse.

"Being a supervillain is kind of the definition of being a bad person, but you can be one without being a bad person." Mom looked determined. "So, how were we going to get in touch with Marquis?"

Dad looked at me. "Still got that card with Marchioness' number on it?"

"Totally!" I rummaged in my purse until I pulled it out. "Here you go."

"Thanks." He took it. "If this doesn't work, we'll go for a drive until we find one of the Mercia. Emma needs help right now, and if it means being in Marquis' debt to get that help, then so be it."

"Yeah, well, you do that, and I'll call Dad, and maybe we'll accomplish something between us." Claire pulled out her phone.

<><>

Danny Hebert

These were strange times, Danny reflected. Gang activity was at an all-time low in Brockton Bay; not because of the PRT and Protectorate and other heroes, but due to the actions of one villainous gang against the others.

Over and above that, Earl Marchant's investment in the Docks and in Lord's Port specifically had revitalised the Dockworkers' Association to an astounding degree. Men and women who had been scraping by from week to week on whatever work he could find them were suddenly being paid premium wages. Morale was higher than it had been in years; everyone had food on the table, new clothing on their kids' backs, and money in their savings accounts. As a welcome knock-on effect, the local businesses were responding to the influx of trade now that the Dockworkers had more money to spend.

But even that paled in comparison to what he was doing right now. Yes, he'd been saved by Marquis' daughter, but there was a difference between that and actively seeking the assistance of the crime lord himself. Up until now, he'd resisted making use of the pin for his own ends. Protecting himself and his family from the criminal element was one thing, but actively trying to capitalise on the protection was something else altogether.

"Are you sure that this isn't breaking any laws?" he asked quietly, pitching his voice to carry only to Anne-Rose in the passenger seat. "I'd hate to get arrested for trying to get Emma back safe and sound."

"Don't start getting cold feet on me now, Danny Hebert," she chided. "It's a good idea and we're going through with it. Besides, we're not committing a crime just by trying to get in contact. It's not like we're going to try to join his gang or pay him to hurt someone. Emma's welfare is at stake here. Also, her friend's."

"Yeah, true." He hadn't actually considered backing out of the situation, but driving through empty streets in the dark hours of the night tended to raise these questions in his mind. "Kids, do you see anyone yet?"

"Not yet," Claire admitted, leaning out the driver's side rear window. "How about you, Taylor?"

"No … wait, wait, stop!" Taylor's voice rose and she pointed. "I saw someone! I saw someone! Up on that roof!"

Danny didn't slam on the brakes, but he did apply them fairly sharply as he pulled over. As soon as the vehicle was out of gear and the handbrake on, he opened the door and jumped out, straining his eyes to see the Mercia member Taylor had pointed out.

A moment later, as his eyes adjusted from the glare of the headlights, he saw the figure. Black-clad, standing atop the roof of a nearby building, it seemed to be watching him.

"Hey!" he called out, waving his arms. "I need to talk to Marquis!"

A second figure appeared alongside the first, both clearly looking down toward the stopped car. One stayed where it was, while the second started down from the roof of the building, dropping from handhold to handhold like a sped-up parkour video. Mere seconds later, the Mercia member was on the ground, striding over to where Danny stood next to the car. He belatedly noticed that this one was a woman.

"Mr Hebert," she greeted him politely, with just a hint of an Irish accent. "Have you had any problems with your protection service?"

"No, I haven't," he said. "Thank you for asking. No, I've got a new problem. A friend of my daughter's—two friends, actually—have gone missing. We think they've been abducted. If I paid to have them put on my family's protection plan, could you—could Marquis—look for them? Get them back for us?"

"Let me check." She tapped her ear twice and half-turned away from him. He couldn't quite make out the low-voiced conversation she had—presumably with Marquis—and he didn't want to even look like he was trying to listen in. The Mercia, he suspected, were not people who took kindly to people eavesdropping on their private conversations.

"Dad," said Taylor from inside the car. "Show her this."

Reaching down, he took the phone from her; on the screen was a picture of Emma and Sophia laughing together over something. His heart almost broke at the sight. God, I hope they're okay.

The Mercia woman finished her conversation and turned back toward him. "Marquis says we can do this. Twenty dollars will add both of them to your protection plan. Do you have pictures?"

"Yes, I do." He handed the phone over and dug in his pocket for his wallet. This twenty, he suspected, would get a lot more value than the same amount he paid in taxes. "Their names are Emma Barnes and Sophia Hess."

"Thank you, sir." He heard a sharp click as the woman took a photo of the screen with her own phone. "This will help a great deal." She passed Taylor's phone back, and accepted the twenty dollars in return. "Ms Barnes is the daughter of Alan Barnes, the lawyer?"

"Uh, yes." He was surprised, though in hindsight he decided he shouldn't have been. Marquis had his fingers in a great many pies, after all. The man probably had dossiers on everyone he was protecting. "They vanished from the bus stop near Alan Barnes' house. Thank you for doing this."

"It'll not be a problem, Mr Hebert. We'll contact you as soon as we've got something." She paused. "Will you be wanting to press charges on whoever has taken them?"

He was easily able to read the subtext there: do you care if the kidnappers don't survive?

The answer to that one was easy. He looked the woman in the eye. "Their safety is paramount. Everything else is secondary." I don't give a fuck.

She nodded once, with a tight smile. "Understood, sir."

Turning, she dashed across the footpath and ascended the side of the building almost as swiftly as she'd come down. Danny watched her go, right up until she got to the top of the roof, then vanished along with her comrade.

Letting out a long sigh, he opened the door and got back into the car. He wordlessly handed Taylor's phone back to her, then fastened his seatbelt and closed the door. For a long moment, he stared out through the windshield at the road ahead.

"You okay, hon?" prompted Anne-Rose.

"Yeah." He felt oddly drained. The encounter had been entirely without danger to him, yet he'd been hyper-aware of the capability of the Mercia all the way through it. Was this how people who dealt with capes all the time felt, or did it go away after a while? "Well, we've done everything we can. Let's get you home, Claire. I'm sure your father will be wanting to keep you close right now."

"And I was looking forward to the sleepover, too," grumbled Claire as Danny started the car, though he could tell she was only joking.

Taylor leaned across and gave her a hug. "There'll always be another night."

"True." Claire returned the hug. "Here's hoping they find Emma and Sophia and get them home safe."

"Yeah."

<><>

Marchioness

As soon as the front door closed behind Claire, she hit the stairs, going up two and three at a time, her knees and hip joints adjusting on the fly. By the time she was at the top of the stairs, she was moving faster than most people could run on the flat. She knew exactly where she was going; her father only ever used one room in the house for gang business.

"I'm back," she announced as she skidded in through the doorway. "How's it going?"

"Oh, good." Her father was already dressed in his Marquis regalia. Of the others, only Justin and Abigail weren't there, with everyone else geared up for action. "Just in time. Some people nearby saw a car with out-of-state plates driving away from the area just after the timing of the first text message. I've got our people hitting security camera feeds to follow where it went to, but the chances are we'll lose that trail sooner rather than later."

"Out of state, huh?" Claire frowned as she followed that chain of logic. "Anything pop on it in the police databases?" As was sensible, her father maintained a financial arrangement with key members of the Brockton Bay Police Department. They weren't being asked to do anything so blatant as to visibly commit indictable crimes themselves, but the spoken word was an intangible item that could hold great value if passed along to the right listening ear.

"Yes." Earl looked mildly satisfied. "We got a make, model and color; the car was sold second-hand in Ohio to a pair of men using what I strongly suspect were fake IDs. Both were white, one had brown hair and one had blond. Past that, I doubt there's any description we can count on, and even the hair colour might be different. Also, there's been nothing in the financial sector with those names behind it, even down to buying a house."

"Okay, so they're new in town." Claire nodded slowly. "They haven't had time to buy a property, I doubt very much they'd risk bringing two abducted girls to a hotel or motel room, so …"

"There are more than a few abandoned buildings in the north end of town," Kayden noted. "Mainly commercial; shopfronts and warehouses and things like that. Skidmark and his crew squatted in those places quite a bit before you sent them on their way."

Earl nodded. "I'm hoping they went that way. With all the money I've been pumping into that local area of the economy, most of the shops can afford good security cameras now, and I've been offering a nominal discount on their protection money if they actually go ahead and install them. After all, why not reward them for making it easier for the Mercia to protect them?"

"Wait," objected Robert. "Did you expect this to happen?"

"Not specifically, no." Earl's expression wasn't quite smug, but there was more than a bit of self-satisfaction going on there. "But something like it wasn't too hard to predict."

"And Justin's already out there, searching with his ghosts?" It was what Claire would've arranged. "I think I'll go and see what Mr Green has to say about all this." When every piece of greenery in the city was her snitch, including weeds, it was really hard to hide from her.

Earl smiled. "Let me know how it goes."

<><>

Damsel of Distress

This was the best idea of my life. Ashley allowed herself a tiny smile of triumph as she poured tinned stew into the tiny saucepan and set about heating it over the camp stove. She'd been in Brockton Bay just a little while, but already she was beginning to bring together the core of a gang. Marquis had recruited many of the eighteen-plus wanna-be mooks who had been left hanging after the Empire Eighty-Eight and the ABB fell apart, but that still left a bunch of younger would-be delinquents with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Marquis' big mistake, she decided as she stirred the stew (it smelled fucking amazing, and she knew what she was talking about), was to not have a junior version of the Mercia, like Kaiser and Lung had had in their gangs. From what she gathered, he actually wanted them to go to school and learn about shit. That wasn't the way to get ahead in life.

"You need to grab the world by the throat," she mumbled, standing up and pacing away from the corner she'd colonised in the warehouse. There was a sofa she'd dragged out of a dumpster, and a chair she'd found somewhere; all the comforts of home. "People don't respect you if you knuckle under. So you push, and shove, and claw your way to the top. And once you're there, you make damn sure everyone knows who's the boss, and that it's not them."

The words helped clear her head, and she moved back toward the camp stove. One day, when she had established herself in Brockton Bay as a force to be reckoned with, she was going to deliver that speech or one like it, and everyone damn well better applaud if they knew what was good for them. She was destined for greatness, and the sooner people understood that, the better.

Sitting down on the chair again, she took up the saucepan and turned the camp stove off. The stew was nicely heated now, just right to eat. She had a neat little fork-knife-spoon package that she'd found in her old place back in Stafford, and she pulled that out now. Where it had come from she was never quite sure, but wondering about things like that made her head hurt so she didn't do it much.

Just as she dipped the spoon into the stew, she heard the unmistakeable sounds of her rubble barrier across the main entry door falling over. She hadn't been able to get hold of a padlock yet, so piling rubble was her next best bet. The door scraped open, and she heard quick footsteps and a murmured voice.

"What the fuck?" she muttered to herself. "Can't people just leave me the fuck alone?"

The only thing between her and the intruder was a large crate that formed part of the nook she'd set up in. Sticking her head up briefly, she saw a shadowy, dark-clad figure. Even though she ducked down again just as quickly, she thought she saw his head turn her way.

"Hey! Who's there?" It was a firm, masculine voice; the footsteps moved in her direction. "Come out where I can see you!"

He was telling her what to do. She hated being told what to do. Edict told her what to do all the goddamn time, and if she pushed back against it, she ended up blind in one eye or unable to stand upright or other annoying shit.

Nobody tells me what to do!

Putting the saucepan back on the upturned milk crate beside the camp stove, she stood up straight. The intruder was much closer now, and she stretched out her arm. Before she actually intended to, her power blasted across the distance between them, removing a corner of the crate along the way.

There was a dull thud as the after-effects of her power died away. Walking closer, she saw that it had been a guy, wearing black clothing and a long-coat. Her power had shredded his upper body, obliterating his right arm and destroying half his chest. Even though it hadn't been an aimed shot, the imprecise nature of her power had killed him anyway.

And then, as she leaned over him to try to figure out who or what he was supposed to be, his eyes snapped open and he lunged upward at her. Letting out something that she would forever after deny was a terrified shriek, she blasted him again. And again. And again.

By the time she was done, nothing remained of the intruder except for a largish crater in the concrete floor, reaching all the way down into the dirt in some places. Whoever the fuck he'd been, she had no idea. But he was dead now. More than dead, he was gone now. There was literally nothing left of him.

Serves him right for coming in and disturbing me.

Heading back to her little home base, she sat down and set about eating her stew. It was really good stew; she decided she'd get more of this type when she went shopping next.

She thought no more about the crater in the floor.

<><>

Marchioness

Still absorbing and sorting the memories from the seed she'd popped into her mouth, Claire re-entered the action room. "Got them, I think," she announced with satisfaction.

Earl looked up from the map table; his fingertip was resting on a spot in the north end of the city. "So do we. Shall we compare data, my dear?"

"Sure." Visualising the information she'd garnered from the plant life across Brockton Bay, she touched her finger to the map. "Several shrubs saw them being abducted here, then weeds and trees followed them this way. They performed a few basic anti-surveillance maneuvers here and here, then finally ended up … here."

Earl blinked. Where she'd traced the path to was separate from where he was touching by several inches. "Are you absolutely certain? Because the Mercia is reporting that Brent just went off the air while checking this set of warehouses here. Even his phone is going straight to voicemail."

"Off the air?" That was a first to Claire. She knew for a fact that she'd rebuilt the Mercia to be more durable than that. Even a shotgun blast to the chest barely fazed them, and they had enough redundancies built into their systems that losing a limb or two was only a moderate inconvenience. "That's really concerning."

"Which is why I'm asking if you're certain." He tapped the location with his finger. "This is our best guess for where he was when he went dark."

"I'm absolutely sure." Claire examined the map again, just to clarify matters in her own head. "I've got an unbroken chain of observation to this spot here. That's where they are, I'd put money on it."

"Damnation." Earl grimaced. "This means we've got two problems in the city."

"I told you something like this would happen." Kayden put her hand on his arm. "And Accord sent you that message. We've created a vacuum, and supervillains will try to fill it."

"I know, I know." Earl ran his fingers through his hair. "I got complacent and let things get out of hand." His eyes fell on Marcus and Robert. "Let that be a lesson to you both. Always—always—keep your eye on the ball. Or someone will do their damnedest to take it away from you."

"So, what are we going to do?" asked Robert. "Split up?"

"Never a great idea." Earl's lips thinned as he looked down at the map. "I'll put a dozen Mercia to forming a cordon around the area where Brent vanished. Nothing gets in or out. In the meantime, we'll take the rest of the Mercia and secure the girls. Once they're safe, then we find out exactly what's happened to Brent."

It wasn't an ideal solution, but Claire knew full well that there often were no perfect answers to a problem. Brent was tougher than Emma and Sophia and could handle a lot more punishment: that was the beginning and the end of it. She knew, as did the others, that Brent himself would advocate for the girls to be rescued first. It was a point of pride among the Mercia that they were the toughest of the tough, the first in and last out.

"Okay, then." She nodded. "I've got a good idea of the surrounding area, so here's what I think we should do."

<><>

Sophia

"I'm scared," whispered Emma. She didn't speak any louder, even though they'd gotten their gags out of the way, because getting the attention of the two men in the other room was a bad idea.

Sophia had sore ribs already from where the blond asshole had kicked her after she cursed him out. He seemed to bear some sort of grudge from when she'd nearly gotten his eye with her nails. Well, duh. You fuckin' kidnap me and my friend, see what you get. She hoped his face hurt as much as her side did.

"I am too," she murmured back, because it was true and anyone could tell that Emma needed some emotional support. "But we're gonna get out of this, I promise."

Behind her back, she'd never stopped trying to wriggle her wrists free of the flex-cuffs binding her. If they'd been ropes, she and Emma could've cooperated to untie each other, but the assholes had gone the whole hog on keeping their captives secured. This was not turning out like any of the teen movies she'd ever watched.

When she straightened her legs (also flex-cuffed together) the clink of the metal cuff and chain around her ankle reminded her that escape was going to be a little more difficult than those movies suggested. But she knew she couldn't afford to give up. Emma was depending on her to get them both free and out of there. The redhead was strong but she'd never had to struggle in her life, and it showed.

If she could just get herself and Emma free, they'd show these assholes why it was a bad idea to abduct a couple of track stars. Emma had the endurance to run all night and all day, and Sophia figured she could keep up for the most part. And there was no way two assholes with a car could catch up with them, not when they could climb fences and run down dumpster-clogged alleyways.

Getting free was the problem, of course. Sophia gritted her teeth at the sensation of abraded flesh, and twisted harder against the unforgiving plastic of the flex-cuffs. It hurt, but few things in life were painless. Come on, you fucker. Give me something to work with.

In the movies, spies could apparently dislocate their thumbs to get out of handcuffs. That was something else that Hollywood got wrong. Sophia didn't have the first idea of how to dislocate her thumbs, but she'd tried anyway.

The two assholes came back into the room just about then. They seemed to have a silent discussion between themselves, then one pointed at Emma and the other nodded.

This was bad. This was very bad. Sophia's last-ditch escape plan had been to be the first picked for whatever they had in mind, then fight her way free once they took the cuffs off. But picking Emma threw that all out of whack.

"Hey!" she shouted. "Leave her alone, you motherfucking cocksuckers! Take me! Don't touch her! I said, don't touch her!" Adrenaline flooding through her system, she threw herself from side to side, wrestling futilely with her bonds. "I'll kill you! I'll kill both of you!"

Blondie left Emma with his buddy for a moment and came over to her. She tried to evade the kick, but it still drove the wind out of her in a pained gasp. Then he crouched down alongside her; she snapped at his hand, but with a practised move, he grasped her around the throat and pushed her down to the floor again.

"Normally, I don't care one way or the other about who I do this to," he said, sounding almost bored. "But occasionally, I meet a little shit like you who makes me enjoy it. You see, once we're finished with your little friend, who she is now will be dead. She'll be a perfect little slave doll, a plaything for some rich guy to use and abuse, and throw away when he's finished with her. But before we sell her off, I'm going to bring her back in here so you can look her in the eye and understand that you're next."

The knowledge that he was serious terrified her, but she fought all the harder because of it. "Don't care what you do," she forced past his constricting hand. "I'll still be me. Kill you."

His laughter was harsh mockery. "They all say that. They all become what we make them. Enjoy being a spiteful little bitch, for what little time you have left. Pretty soon that'll all be gone. So will you."

And then he pulled her gag back into place and stood up again. Grabbing Emma's feet, he unfastened the metal cuff from her ankle then picked her up by the knees while the guy in the beard and glasses lifted her by the shoulders. Emma shrieked in terror as they carried her into the other room.

Sophia went ballistic.

<><>

Emma

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, even worse than the time she got The Zit just before her first model shoot. Emma didn't know what the two men intended doing as they held her down on the table, and she didn't want to know. She tried struggling, which didn't do much, and she tried screaming for help, which only worked until one of them pulled the gag back over her mouth.

Through the mind-numbing terror that almost paralysed her, the one thing she clung to was the sound of Sophia throwing herself around like a wild animal, clanking and banging the chain against the floor and the wall. Sophia's screams—pure fury, not fear—had been muffled by the gag but not muted altogether, and Emma could still hear her. Get loose, Emma prayed. Get help.

"Okay, prep this one," said the blond one. "I'll go over the personality requirements again."

His partner nodded and held up his hand with one finger extended. A long needle extruded from the tip, and he looked down at Emma thoughtfully. "Here," he decided, more a murmur to himself, and punctured the skin just below Emma's collarbone. Emma flinched as it went in, not knowing what it was, but absolutely certain that she didn't want it.

A moment later, the brown haired one swayed on his feet and took an involuntary step sideways, pulling the needle out again. At the far end of the table, the blond one also looked somewhat dizzy. Both of them shook their heads, as if casting away some kind of passing dream.

It took Emma a few seconds to realise that Sophia had stopped shouting from the other room. And then, in the unexpected silence, she heard another sound: a single metallic clank, as of steel falling onto concrete.

"What was that?" asked the brown-haired man.

"And why's she stopped making noise?" His blond companion stared at the doorway. "Think she's knocked herself out?"

"Maybe. Go check it out. I've got work to do here." He held up the finger with the needle extending from it.

"You go check it out. I'll keep an eye on Red here."

The brown-haired man sighed. "Fine." He headed for the doorway.

At the same time, Emma saw something odd. In her current mental state, it took her longer than it should have, but she finally recognised the ghostly shape that had floated in through the wall and then out again. As with the rest of Brockton Bay, she was pretty sure that the cape calling himself Legion had once been Crusader of the Empire Eighty-Eight, but right now she wasn't about to look any kind of gift horse in the teeth.

She was jerked out of these meanderings by a brief, ugly sound of pain from the other room. The brown-haired man fell backward into sight and collapsed onto the ground, clutching at his chest. And then, through the wall, came Sophia.

She was able to step through the wall because she was composed of some kind of misty shadow-stuff, but that wasn't the only thing different about her. From the elbow down, her right hand had morphed into a broad, stabbing spearhead, composed of pure blackness. Even when she cycled back to human form, the spearhead remained. Although it was surely what had done whatever it did to the brown-haired guy, it remained unstained by blood.

"Get away from her, you son of a bitch," Sophia snarled, stepping forward with pure menace in every movement.

"Uh, uh, uh," counted the blond man, snatching up a sharp-looking blade and holding it to Emma's throat. "Not so fast. One step closer, and you'll be seeing if your brand-new powers can fix her carotid artery."

"Kill her, and I kill you. Let her go, and I hand you to the cops alive." Sophia gestured with her spear-hand. "As much as I'd prefer otherwise."

The blond man put a hand on Emma's forehead. "If you don't—whoa!"

The outburst came when he was suddenly dragged back by half a dozen of Legion's ghosts. As he struggled against them, Emma heard a crash from where she suspected the door to be, as well as the sound of shattering glass from the windows. Within moments, people had crowded into the room, all costumed and all members of Marquis' gang.

The man himself strode into the middle of the gathering as an armoured man leaned over Emma's bonds. She felt a knife slide through the flex-cuffs, and then they were gone.

"Good evening, ladies," Marquis announced. "I rather wish we had gotten here earlier, but I suppose late is better than never. Have they harmed you in any way?" The glower he turned on the blond man made Emma suddenly glad she wasn't his enemy.

"Uh, no," Emma ventured as Sophia stepped up protectively next to her. "I think they were just starting, then something weird happened."

"Yeah, no shit." Sophia held up her hand then cycled it through spearhead, sickle blade and trident head before it resumed its normal shape and shade. "I couldn't do this before."

"I see," murmured Marquis. "If you wish, Marchioness can look you both over and ensure you have no hidden health issues from this ordeal?"

Sophia nodded. "Check Emma out. I'm fine."

"You are not fine," chided the tall brunette in the evening dress. "Your wrists are all torn up and you've strained half a dozen tendons, and fractured your left wrist."

"Still didn't get loose, though," mumbled Sophia.

"But you tried." Emma hugged her friend. "And thank you for that. I would've totally lost it if you hadn't been there."

"Yeah, I guess." Sophia hugged her back. When she let go, Emma watched as she checked her wrists and found unmarked skin. Suspiciously, she looked at Marchioness. "You didn't even put a hand on me."

"Didn't have to." Marchioness smiled. "Area effect healing for the win. But what I'm curious about is this guy." She gestured at the brown-haired one, who was being supported by two more of Legion's ghosts. "What did you do to him? He's debilitated, but I can't find any marks on him."

"Oh, it's this blade thing," Sophia said, then formed it around her hand and shifted to the shadow form and back. "When I'm all shadowy, it doesn't affect solid stuff, but it still hurt him. Not sure if I could kill someone that way." She glowered at the two men who had been holding them prisoner. "But I'd be willing to give it a damn good shot."

Marquis nodded. "That sounds remarkably intriguing, to be honest. Tell me; what are your aspirations for using your powers? Dull, boring heroism, or the exciting, dashing life of villainy?"

Emma had to grin at the contrasting descriptions. "Wow, if I didn't know better, I'd almost think you were biased."

For her part, Sophia looked Marquis in the eye. "I will totally think about it, and give you my answer later. But right now, we just want to go home. Okay?"

Marquis offered a slight bow. "And that's totally fair. I'll even provide a car. I bid you good night and safe travels."

"Thank you," said Emma. But the upbeat tone was a lie; as she walked out of the building with Sophia, she sagged against her friend.

"You okay?" Sophia's arm was around her waist, supporting her.

"Yeah." Emma felt the shakes coming on as she climbed into the back of the car.

Sophia slid in beside her and closed the door.

As the car drove off, they snuggled into each other's arms.

[A/N: For the record, trauma is a thing. No shipping here.]