***David Manchin, Mayor of Washington City***

“He’s WHAT?” David demanded, scowling at his assistant.

“He’s gone to ground, along with Chase Currant. The four handlers assigned to bring Chase in are in the hospital. The other two supers on Paradox’s team are in custody, and responding well to Minder control. Chemestro had to have his fantasy tweaked to be significantly more…exercise oriented, but it’s still holding.”

“I don’t care about them, why is Paradox still running around in my city with impunity!?” David demanded.

“According to M-43’s handler, the super has an unusually powerful mind that makes him difficult for a single Minder to tackle, which made M-43 balk at the meeting point. This was corroborated by the other Minders present. However, the report also states that he’s exited his armor and is currently unprotected, and his distinctive mind makes him especially easy for a Minder to identify at a distance.”

“Alright, form up some squads with our most powerful supers, use the Minders as hunting dogs, and bring this squirrely bastard in so we can send him packing.

“Sir, in the hours since his disappearance, the bureau has done some further digging, in case Minders prove to be ineffective.”

“Eh?” David grunted.

“These are his team-mates six months ago. This is a pregnant woman seen coming out of Paradox’s mid-town motel.”

She laid down the two pictures. The hair and body was exactly the same as Wraith, who’d taken a leave of absence from super work for unknown reasons.

I guess they’re not unknown anymore, David thought, considering.

“These three form the core of Paradox’s team,” She said, pointing to the two tinkers and the shapeshifter, “so it’s likely that the baby is Paradox’s.”

“How sure of that are you?”

“Here’s another picture with manitian servants who work for Paradox Zauberer’s grandmother exiting the new house belonging to Heather Skinner, the woman presumed to be Wraith. This is strong evidence the baby is his.”

“What kind of idiot uses his real name?” David muttered, reviewing the pictures.

“If we send Paradox a message that we know where his baby is, he should back off-“

“Activate an asset in Franklin and get that shapeshifter,” David said decisively. She wasn’t a goddamn Sweeper class or anything, and people went to mush as soon as their loved ones were involved.

“…Sir, there’s a…culture…around super’s private lives in Franklin City.” Elise wheedled, glancing away, “Targeting a super’s family in their civilian identity is-“

“Do I look like I give a shit about his ‘culture’? Just get control of his baby and we’ll have him by the balls. It’s really fuckin’ simple.” David said, tapping the rich wood of his desk with a stubby nail.

“Yessir.” Elise nodded.

RIIING

The landline on his desk went off, and David picked up.

“Paradox is causing trouble at the bureau. I’m handling it.” Bill Grove, the head of the Bureau of Investigation said.

“I’m sure you are, Bill,” David sighed, rubbing his temples, frustration mounting as people continued to not do the simple things he asked of them.

“I’m moving the plan forward and wash our hands of the civilian androids as soon as possible. I’m currently purging any hard evidence from the server.”

“Get it done, Elise. NOW.” David said, covering the receiver and glaring at his assistant, who seemed to be hesitating on the edge of saying something.

“Yessir,” She turned and left, her back ramrod straight.

David talked Bill down from his panic attack. You’d think the head of the Bureau would have a stiffer spine. David himself was no stranger to ungodly amounts of stress. He actually reveled in it. That was why he was the Mayor and everyone else was a political stooge.

Moments after he hung up, the phone rang again.

“I swear, Bill,” David growled as he picked up the land line.

Instead of Bill’s panicked flighty-ness, there was only a deep, rumbling breath that sounded like tectonic plates shifting.

David’s skin went cold.

There was a harsh squeal directly into his ear, like the phone itself was in pain. David winced and dropped the phone, which promptly melted into his desk, the plastic receiver collapsing into a puddle. The puddle began to glow from within, resolving into a picture.

Two slitted bronze eyes stared back at him from a black void.

“DAVID! HOW’S LIFE TREATING YOU? HOW ARE THE WIFE AND KIDS?” An inhumanly deep voice spoke through the smoking remains of the phone, rattling his ribcage and the office as a whole. The delicate glass desk kitsch hummed in pain.

“Fine, fine, it’s fine, they’re fine.” David said, his heartbeat skyrocketing, grabbing the sides of his desk to conceal the tremors in his hands as his fight or flight response screamed at him to run.

Some primal monkey instinct when faced with an apex predator told him to let out a wordless shriek, fling the desk over and scamper away as fast as all four limbs could carry him.

David barely managed to stuff it down long enough to speak.

“The Chicago job is going to plan. It’ll be destroyed within the month.”

“WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I DON’T JUST WANT TO CATCH UP WITH MY FAVORITE EAST COAST ANDROID? HOW’S THE WEATHER OVER THERE?”

“It’s been sunny.” David gasped, trying not to hyperventilate as the fear burrowed its way deeper into his mind.

“EXCELLENT! NOW, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I’M PLEASED YOU’RE BEING A SELF-STARTER ON THE CHICAGO JOB, BUT IF YOU FAIL… IT’S NO BIG DEAL. THESE THINGS HAPPEN. YOU’RE MORE VALUABLE TO ME THAN THAT. KEEP THAT IN MIND AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF…AND YOUR POSITION. IF YOU WEREN’T THE MAYOR OF WASHINGTON, I, WELL…I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’D DO.”

“…okay…” David wheezed, his lungs seizing in his chest as his vital organs tried to play dead.

“LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE AT YOUR LIMIT, I’LL TALK WITH YOU LATER, DAVID. SAY HI TO HELLEN FOR ME! THAT PORK JERKY RECIPE WAS DIVINE. I USE IT ALL THE TIME.”

Tiny claws scraped against the inside of the opaque puddle of the receiver, crimson veins began to grow inward, towards the center. The tiny clawed hands seized the edge of the puddle of plastic and pulled it down into the desk, disappearing a moment later, leaving nothing behind but the rich stained wood.

David sat there for several minutes, slowly regaining his ability to breathe.

“I need a new phone,” David muttered, resting his trembling fingers on his forehead as he slumped over the desk.

***Elise Stevens***

“Are you sure?” The voice asked over the phone.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Elise said, entirely unsure. “Call me back when you have her.”

“You got it, I hope you know what you’re stepping in.”

God, me too. Elise thought, hanging up. Their asset on the other side would destroy his burner and get back into contact with them on his own terms. There was no calling it off now.

She straightened from her desk and stretched, taking deep breaths to try and control the stress. Motion from the side caught her attention.

Teresa Fuller stood beside her, causing Elise to flinch.

“Terry, what are you doing in here?” Terry had always been dismissive of Elise’s decision to go into politics rather than something cooler, like the Bureau, but the two still got together for drinks sometimes to practice their one-upsmanship.

This wasn’t a slow weekend though, this was all-hands-on-deck situation, and Teresa being here was odd.

VERY ODD.

Panic spiking, Elise snatched the phone up. In a fluid motion, Teresa closed and locked the door to her office, just as Elise realized there was nothing coming from her office phone.

Not even a dial tone.

***Paradox***

When interrogating, nothing says you have to use just one trick to figure out if someone’s lying. Perry had been watching Teresa’s expression, monitoring her vitals through his suit, browsing through Teresa’s work emails, reviewing her private emails, watching her soul…and lying his ass off.

He didn’t know they were after the civilians until he lied with perfect confidence. The statement penetrated her poker face and made her heartrate skyrocket.

And that meant Perry had to save Spangle in a timely manner so he could get to the civilians before the people in charge decided to cut their losses and disappear them.

He tried to use his suit to hack into the B.I. across the street, but the closer he got to critical information, the better and more…alive the defenses became. Perry was forced to sever the connection to the B.I. server when it tried to fry his suit.

It makes sense a technopath would’ve had a hand in the encryption. They’re integrated into the government. An unexpected roadblock.

Perry couldn’t contend with a technopath on their home turf, so in order to find the find out where Spangle was being held, Perry had to resort to a less…glamourous method than ‘hacking the mainframe’.

In this case, trawling through personal emails.

Perry got into individual B.I. employee’s low-security personal emails, whipped up a quick search program and had it highlight and compare sort any mention of black sites, including codewords and euphamisms….

It actually turned out to be easier than he thought.

Out of a hundred and sixty thousand personal emails from all the employees of the B.I., he hit no less than five hundred mentions, and of those five hundred, twelve had hints about their locations. From those twelve hints, Perry backtracked and found a further eighty six related emails located in that area that his program hadn’t identified as being coded.

Humans will always be the weak link for security.

Cross-referencing the information within the emails., Perry located four black sites. After finding them, he dug through the building’s histories and their paperwork cloaked in secrecy and obfuscation, then applied an algorithm to find commonalities with other locations in the city.

He found three more.

Perry then figured out which black site was the most likely to house Spangle based on its security protocols, recent activity, and most telling: Serenity dragging a wiggling bag into the black site’s secret tunnel entrance six blocks away.

Instill fear into the hearts of your enemies, Paradox. Sometimes…rarely, it’s best to let them see you coming. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

Thanks, gramma, Perry thought, rolling his eyes as he randomly remembered one of his babysitting visits to gramma, sitting on her knee while she spun tales of magic and conquest.

This does seem like the sort of situation where a little fear will season them up nicely. Long story short, these people were being assholes, and they were about to get straightened out.

Minutes later, Perry stood in front of the public façade of the underground government torture site, where they contained medium risk supers and Minders while beating them into obedience.

The surprising depth of the institutional corruption was…frankly, pissing Perry off, so he might have been a bit more theatric than entirely necessary.

Perry directed the Pernicious Prison to his hand. The inky black tar traveled out from under his shirt and coalesced into a cane, giving him a crisp clack against the asphalt as he crossed the street into the Vietnamese restaurant that was a front for the black site.

God, I hope I’m not wrong, and just terrorizing some civilians, Perry thought to himself as he crossed the street, entering the slightly run-down restaurant above the secret entrance.

Clack. Clack.

DING… The automatic doorbell informed them a customer had arrived.

Clack. Clack.

“Good evening!” a middle-aged woman said, emerging from the kitchen. “Sit wherever-“

She froze, taking in Perry’s expression along with the obviously magical cane in his hands.

“I’d like a couple egg rolls, and the prisoners in the basement,” Perry said, resting his weight on the cane.

The woman lunged forward, reaching for something behind the counter – presumably an alarm – and Perry directed the spell forward, wrapping around her body and puppeting her beneath her clothes. Perry quickly limped around the desk and found both the alarm and another button.

Perry stepped back around the desk and used the spell under her long sleeves to force the woman to press the button.

Now let’s see if the guard was paying attention.

BUZZZZ.

A buzzing sounded a moment later, approximately the amount of time someone would have taken to glance away from a cartoon re-run, cast a brief glance up at the security cam to make sure everyone was standing where they were supposed to be standing, then press the ‘accept’ button reflexively like a trained animal.

You don’t put your best and brightest on ‘Watch the door’ duty. Sad but true.

With a soft hiss of released air, one of the decorative side panels opened up, revealing humorless concrete walls.

“You may wish to run,” Perry said, retrieving his spell from beneath the woman’s clothing and turning away, walking towards the black site’s entrance.

Clack. Clack.

He glanced over his shoulder and spotted the old woman aiming a trembling submachine gun at him.

“But if you’re gonna stay, I really do want some egg rolls.”

Something in Perry’s expression must’ve convinced her pulling the trigger was a bad idea, and she went back in the kitchen.

Ten feet or so inside the secret entrance was another gate, where the inattentive security guard sat inside his bulletproof glass enclosure. He glanced up and frowned at Perry, his eyes widening briefly.

Paradox’s Pernicious Prison formed a needle-thin spike and pierced the glass before wrapping around the guard’s neck, yanking his head forward and smashing it against the wall, rendering him insensate.

Whistling, Perry used the spell to push the button to open the next security gate, walking into the black site unimpeded less than five minutes after learning of its existence.

The guard had thirty-two screens to pay attention to, and one playing daytime cable television to distract him from all of them.

Perry located the room Spangle was in, looking slightly worse for wear.

Room thirty, huh? Nearly at the end of the hall. Security room beyond her.

There were a bunch of other rooms, with other things going down in them. Some of which nearly made Perry’s stomach turn.

Well, let’s make their day.

Perry rummaged through the guard’s possessions and found a hand-held radio that linked to the P.A. system.

He clicked it on, and started whistling as he began limping down the long concrete hall, his inky black cane providing the beat.

Clack.

Clack.