Mr. Hill grumbled and grunted, but he didn’t challenge my decision. He was more thinking about the logistics of the move.

He’d been to New York City before, of course. It was the largest of the East Coast cities, and it had money and ambition, which meant it hired mercs. Murican ruthlessness and tons of people who didn’t mind working around the law at all meant hiring out expensive Powered Bricks was definitely an option in other places.

All that naturally meant crossing the border of the Mississippi.

The river made for a great natural border, naturally enough. It was broad enough that large forces couldn’t cross it quickly, and assembling the vessels to do so would be so obvious that moving to counter would be easy enough.

For all that, there were bridges crossing the Great River in a dozen places, which often astonished a lot of people, and there were trains regularly going back and forth, along with a fair amount of motorized traffic.

For all that, there wasn’t a lot of spying and sabotage anymore, at least from the Muricans. The Tribes seemed to have the ability to sniff out threats to their nation, and sending spies and criminals over the border was often the equivalent of tossing them into a wastebasket, never to be heard from again. It happened with such distressful regularity that it was basically considered a death sentence to even try it.

Honest traders and merchants had no problems. Smuggling also wasn’t much of an issue from the Tribal side, although there were tons of things the Muricans had taxes or bans against that the Tribes thought were absolutely stupid, like most of the illegal drugs. In the Tribes, the drug trade was regulated and the end-users were slowly cleaned up and retasked, which basically evaporated the market for them.

Drug dealers got in trouble for creating new addicts, often forcibly or with new strains, not for supplying stuff. When caught, addicts got some forced treatments to remove their addictions, often making them nauseatingly allergic to further doses, and so the market for overdosing and the societal cost was much, much lighter in the Tribes, for everything from alcoholism to zygom-sniffing.

In the States, the rampant capitalism and self-reliance meant that the average person couldn’t see that controlling drugs was better than creating drug cartels, and so the States had a major drug problem, among other things.

The stuff wasn’t grown in the Tribes, but it sometimes came through there on the way from Mexico, but only in sealed shipments. Still, it was one more thing for the donkeys to bray about when they stopped shipments that came through the Tribes untouched, as if it was some mad success.

The Tribes had offered to stop and unseal every shipment bound for the States from Mexico many times. For some reason, that offer kept getting turned down.

Tribal products also tended to have hefty tariffs applied to them, which didn’t bother the Tribes all that much. Murican products, in return, didn’t have much following in the Tribes. Some of the Natives claimed you could smell the greed on Murican-made, and it turned them right off. It was a fascinating show of unity in the face of low quality, and even if they had cheaper prices, the Tribes didn’t Buy Murican much.

Raw materials, sure, they’d suck them up. But the trade balance was almost always in the favor of the Tribes, simply because they made better stuff, and they exported a lot of quality food for the larger Murican population.

For all that this really, really miffed Murican capitalists, and they employed all sorts of tricks and shenanigans to keep out the Tribes, there were plenty of Tribesmen who took advantage of the crazy Murican permissiveness towards incorporating and had set up businesses in the States that were considered pillars of the economy there.

Really, once I dug around, it was plain that most of the quality and competitive corporations in the States had Tribal money behind them. The truth of that made more Muricans twist in the wind, but they could only whine and complain and point fingers as the Tribes beat them at their own games.

Murican views on the Powered were all over the map, of course.

They treated their own Powered like heroes, of course, especially normal men who stepped up into Powered status, like the Shielders, and Armored Heroes. Even if they had to rely on Russia to make them, there was no doubt the Shielders were all loyal and patriotic Muricans.

Foreign Powered who had any affiliation with governments were often treated like super-villains, about to go off on good and proper Muricans at any moment. That Muricans tended to act like arrogant idiots didn’t help matters in terms of how other nations saw them, either.

It certainly didn’t help the national psyche when their next-door neighbor had more Powered and Cored people than anywhere else in the world, and those people were perfectly willing to fight when the Muricans started shouting nonsense again.

Unite the countries? Canada was a tithe of what it had been, and the US didn’t have half the continent and all those natural resources, depended on Tribal wheat, and was still militarily inferior after all these years.

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Both sides had atomics now, but only the Tribes had the power to deal with atomics.

Furthermore, when natural disasters, alien invasions, magical events, raids from below, and other crazy stuff happened, more often than not the Tribes had to come in and set things right before it became a global problem. The Muricans hated the fact they would do it and couldn’t stop it; hated it more because they really shouldn’t even try to stop it; and really got angsty that they couldn’t deal with such problems themselves.

American exceptionalism in this world simply wasn’t there, and their societal woes and population pressures didn’t help things.

------

The vampire leapt at me in total, supernatural silence. No tremor of wind, no sound of clothes, no hint of breathing. Perfect assassin technique.

Well, no. A good assassin would have tried to shoot me from a safe distance, and the Red Eyes were staring at the threat, letting me know someone was there for the past couple minutes, and they gave me a whole second of warning when he chose to act.

That was like fifteen seconds of warning to a normal person.

I anchored my feet to take my momentum, Repulsed myself off to the side, and flicked three glowing Cards into my hand.

The shocked vampire’s extended claws slashed through nothing but air, and I didn’t even look like I’d broken stride. I’d just sort of shifted left, and now he was standing right next to me, kinda stretched out in an awkward position.

I flipped my wrist, and the Cards flicked out, driving themselves into his head. They only stayed steely hard for a second or two with my ki, but that’s all I needed. I could drive them into oak blocks, so a skull, even one hardened by necromancy, was no problem.

Naturally that wouldn’t stop a vampire… but the Explosive Runes of Radiance would.

The sun flashed at two AM in the running park, and the vampire barely got to hiss in pain before it was devoured completely. Its fashionable silk clothes and jewelry fell to the ground, and I came to a halt to pick them up.

I paused when I almost touched the ring with the onyx set in it, looking down at it.

It had a Div-lock on it. The being at the other end had just felt this vamp die, and knew something was up. However, I was Astral Warded, a V Slot I tied off and expended every single damn day, and it couldn’t sense me unless I physically grabbed it, breaching the Ward.

Red Eyes rose, letting me know I was being physically watched. This guy had backup, who definitely wasn’t going to come running out here to face a Sun On Command.

I used the opportunity to get a perfect Scry-read on the person who was on the other end of the ring. It took them a minute or two to realize that someone was reaching back towards them through the ring-link, and it was terminated hastily once they did, snapping the link with enough force that they probably took some backlash damage.

It was fine. I had a direction and a distance, and I could get a triangulation without too much problem. Unless they fled immediately, I was going after them tonight.

Red Eyes gave me more warning, and I jumped into motion a half-second before the sniper shot cracked past to my right, indicating he was directly behind me. Without thinking about it, I zig-zagged back and forth erratically across the full width of the running trail. His next shot was ten feet wide, nowhere near me, and I was pulling away very quickly while he tried to shoot.

I’d found Chopsaw’s missing shooter. Actually, he was the one who’d led me here.

There’d been retaliation from the vampires, but the merc captain was experienced and took action and precautions with his men. Unfortunately, one of his boys didn’t take the warnings of inviting people in, staying inside at night, and staying with friends seriously enough, and vanished one morning without any sign.

I’d offered to help hunt the vampires down, and Chopsaw had hired me after Mr. Hill mentioned I had experience at it.

Whatever the undead were planning, they weren’t expecting someone who could Detect Undead at V. It didn’t matter if they looked like normal folks, were hiding as wolves, perching as bats, skulking as rats, or even roving around as mists, they still blared big red warning signs to me.

There were half a dozen of them monitoring Chopsaw’s men, looking for chances to take them, and they had Drinkers picking up the surveillance tab during the day, although his men were good enough that the minions didn’t try snatching them during daylight.

I pointed the Drinkers out to Chopsaw, who was more than competent and angry enough to deal with that problem.

The vampires themselves I removed, one by one.

It was three days after the missing shooter had vanished, so, yeah, vampire risen from his grave.

The public bathroom was up ahead, and I veered behind it, making sure I wasn’t being watched by a third party, and I went Invisible. I then headed directly back along my trail, following the Red Eyes glowering at the threat that was sliding past me repeatedly as the shooter made sure I wasn’t going left or right, and had to make the difficult decision to come at me up close, circle around my position uselessly if I was inside, or leave.

He was about two hundred yards back, resting in a tree with the supernatural strength and poise of a vampire, easily able to maintain an unmoving, unbreathing sniping position with a long rifle without needing to brace it.

He had just made the choice to circle right and was preparing to leap away when I popped in next to him. His head flinched my way in shock, his red eyes meeting mine through my Dealer mask, recognizing me, and I said, “Goodbye, Chavez.”

The Sun Runes lit off in the tree, a dash of light in the night that was going to seriously confuse the plant as to what time of day it was, and I grabbed his harness and long rifle before his whole kit could fall to the ground. Fingers flicked, wriggled back and forth as multiple streams of webbing formed a thin net of it below me, and all the falling clothes and gear were caught in it.

I yanked on the cord still connected to my hand, and the web became an impromptu sling bag with all Chavez’ remains in it.

I texted Mr. Hill, who just dry-tapped me back, his big fingers having problems with most phones.

---

Five minutes later, I opened the back of his Excavator van, dropped off the loot as I climbed inside, and worked my way up to the passenger seat in front.

“Where to, baws?” he asked with a chuckle, especially after seeing the Crow Long Rifle I set down.

“The master vampire is on a line that way.” I pointed for him towards Beryl Hills. “We need to triangulate for a fix.”