She did not in fact escape the bullshit.

Taylor was halfway through math when she got an alert on her systems that sent ice down her spine. It was a generic message directed at each of her connections to the repeater, and a single word from the same sender.

Dragon.

“Hello.”

It was such a simple message, but one that carried more meaning than anything she had ever seen. Dragon had noticed her. Part of her was excited at the prospect of the arguably greatest Tinker in the world having taken the time to message her, but the realist side of Taylor knew that it wasn’t a social call.

Well, ignoring Dragon wasn’t an option, and the best case scenario would be more heroes bothering her. Worst case scenario she might inform Hero himself. She immediately pushed aside any thoughts of trying to hide or cover things up and decided to send a return message.

“Greetings.”

The reply took a few moments to come, and Taylor felt her anxiety rise with each passing second.

“My attention was drawn by an unusual amount of traffic from Arcadia, am I safe to assume you are the source of this traffic?”

“I am,” Taylor answered. “I am a student and a Tinker that grows deeply uncomfortable without network access. Cutting me off from the network would be akin to removing one of my senses.”

“Interesting,” came the reply. “I was unaware that sharing cat pictures was so important.”

Deciding to have some fun, Taylor smirked as she sent her next message.

“Nothing is more important.”

Taylor accepted a question sheet while waiting for the next reply, which took a few moments longer. “Can you accept audio communications without being conspicuous?”

“I can. One of the perks of my abilities allows me to split my focus rather effectively.”

Barely a beat after the message had been sent, an audio call came along her primary connection, the one she shared with Lisa and Amy. Well, that certainly told her something of Dragon’s abilities in of itself.

“Hello again, young Tinker,” Dragon, the Dragon, said. “Are you aware of how illegal your method of internet connection is?”

“Is it?” Taylor asked, though outwardly no sound was heard. Projecting her voice mentally through her cyberbrain was one of the most useful features of her inbuilt phone function. “I am simply taking advantage of unused bandwidth. No users are affected, and the carriers lose nothing either.”

“You have almost five thousand independent connections to the local cellular network,” Dragon said incredulously. “Don’t try to give me such flimsy justification.”

“You didn’t even notice until I routed them through Arcadia’s repeater,” Taylor said, sending a chuckle along with it. “I’m not hurting anyone, Dragon. I’m just a Tinker that opted to not join the Protectorate given they caused my Trigger.”

“Explain,” Dragon said sharply.

“I was crippled by an attack,” Taylor said, making sure none of her anger seeped into her digital words. “Then the heroes come along, take over the investigation, then use that and my health as weapons to force me into the Wards. I refused and the absurdity of it all, how even the vaunted heroes had abandoned me, that was too much. I triggered because the last vestige of goodness in my mind was crushed.”

Silence reigned in Taylor’s mind, but the signal remained open. Her hand was clenched around her pencil, which she was surprised hadn’t snapped under the strain. What was Dragon doing with the silence? Taylor could easily answer that question by backtracking their connection, hacking into Dragon’s systems.

She was reasonably certain her own ability to launch multiple measures simultaneously was a bit ahead of Dragon’s own capacity. The woman hadn’t made any efforts to shut her down, or attack in any way, so Taylor would respect that, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t throw the hypocrisy of the heroes back at her.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“The investigation remains unsolved,” Dragon said after a moment. “The PRT has it filed as pending an interview with the victim.”

“An interview they won’t offer unless I come to them as a Parahuman,” Taylor said, her anger flaring. “Extortion, plain and simple.”

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

The pencil snapped as the bell rang and Taylor stood up, not bothering to collect the broken pieces. “If this is what the heroes are, then I want nothing to do with them.”

“I can’t blame you,” Dragon said. “That doesn’t excuse your phone scheme, and I encourage you to find a better tech solution, but I won’t pursue matters for now. It seems a PRT investigation requires my more immediate attention.”

“Forgive me if I find those words hollow,” Taylor said, ignoring Amy’s concerned looks as she made her way out of the school.

She fired off a message to Lisa to meet up and added a note to her files to ask Toybox about a communications Tinker to compare notes with and see if she could come up with something more advanced. She had taken a seat on the bus heading for the mall by the time Dragon responded.

“Words are meaningless if actions fail to follow,” Dragon said and the connection dropped.

Well, it wasn’t like she expected anything to come from that, if Armsmaster had failed her, why should she expect better of Dragon?

----------------------------------------

Lisa greeted her with a much needed hug.

Taylor clung to her desperately, not a word needed between them for which she was incredibly grateful for. Lisa was good like that, sure, it was a power thing that let her know when something needed to be said versus not said, and she wasn’t about to complain.

Pulling apart, Lisa gave her a kind smile and led her over to a pastry shop where a half dozen donuts were acquired and promptly torn into. By the third donut Taylor was starting to feel better. She sipped her tea and let her mind drift off a bit, enjoying the pleasantness of just being with a friend who is there for her.

“Better?” Lisa asked. “I haven’t seen you that upset since the bus, which told me it likely involved cape stuff in your civilian life again.”

Taylor nodded. “Dragon contacted me.”

Lisa sat up a bit straighter. “Oh shit. That’s either good news or extremely bad news.”

“She noticed my breach of Arcadia’s Faraday system to maintain my network connections,” Taylor said, tearing a donut in half as she did. “Speaking of, I need a phone I can spoof with my civilian line, just so people don’t ask too many questions.”

“Oh good, at least that’s an easy problem that can be solved with retail therapy,” Lisa said with a roll of her eyes and a fond smile. “Dragon however, is far from easy, just ask her Beard.”

“Armsbastard has a crush on her, doesn’t he?” Taylor asked, biting into the torn pastry.

Lisa shot coffee from her nose.

Taylor quickly isolated that footage and filed it away for later embarrassment of her friend. Good-natured, of course. Even as Lisa coughed, she shot Taylor a betrayed expression, likely having figured out exactly what was going on in her head. It took a few moments, and a few sips from Taylor’s own tea, to calm her enough that Lisa could speak.

“I’ve only gotten to listen to two of their conversations using the software you sold my boss,” Lisa said, wiping her face and cursing her smeared lip gloss.

Taylor was just going to give her the software, but Lisa told her that selling it to Coil was the better option, and Taylor’s own back end into the systems meant that she could access any device running it and get into even a secure network. The downside, Coil actually had bought it just for Tattletale, never running it on any of his own hardware that had any network connectivity.

That alone was suspicious, as he would have needed to be an experienced coder as well as a top tier Tinker just to notice such a thing. She had asked the Toybox Tinkers to look it over and only Harry caught the hidden code.

“He either knows I bugged it, or actually has good op-sec,” Taylor said after taking a moment to get her own laughter under control.

“I’m fairly certain Coil is former special forces himself, or at least has experienced some field work,” Lisa acknowledged. “He likes his mercs too much to be anything else.”

“That’s an idea,” Taylor said. “I could present my new shell as a mercenary passing through Brockton. He might even hire me for some work.”

Taylor would have to create a record to be tracked and link her identity to several past actions in doing so. All fictitious but would only be flagged if someone tried to find paper records of the events. She would likely need Number Man’s services to do it correctly.

“That would be a way to get on his good side,” Lisa said. “We will have to make sure nobody knows the connection between your identities.”

“Should be easy enough,” Taylor said, sitting back with tea in hand. “It will suck not being able to hang out in my new shell though.”

“He is absolutely aware of you, and who you are,” Lisa said after a moment. “He wouldn’t be afraid of using you as leverage against me either.”

Taylor nodded, finishing off the scrap of a donut. “So keep playing his game, keep each other in the loop and bide time.”

“Doesn’t stop us from being able to hang out now though,” Lisa said.

“Nope,” she agreed. A quick check of show times told her they still had an hour to kill before the next movie started. “Phone first?”

“That’s the best option,” Lisa said, standing as she put a twenty under the donut basket. “If we went to the bookstore first it would be a fight to get you out before showtime.”

“I’m not that bad,” Taylor said indignantly.

Lisa paused, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Actually, why do you still buy physical books given your ability to view anything digital?”

“Physical feedback,” Taylor said. “It helps ground me. It can be easy to get lost in the digital stream, to just lose myself in the net. I like holding a book in my hands for that reason, not that I don’t read digital copies, but I have my preference.”

Lisa smiled softly and took Taylor by the hand. “Fair enough, Tay. Now, let’s find a good decoy phone for you.”

“Lead the way, Lise.”