68

Chapter 68

A Darker Path

Part Sixty-Eight: Wake-Up Call

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

9:17 PM Pacific Standard Time, March 2, 2011 (12:17 AM, March 3, Eastern Standard Time)

PRT Quarantine Site 2: Freedom, California

"Pastor! Wake up! You must wake up!"

"Mmph. What is it? A raid? Is the PRT attacking?" He sat up in bed and squinted into the glare of the lantern the young man held, shading his eyes with one hand. There were no shots, no shouts in the cool of the night.

"No. This is something different. I had a feeling that something was wrong, so I was looking at the PHO boards. You must look at this."

The man called Pastor accepted the phone that was handed to him. While he would have vastly preferred to shun the world outside Freedom as it had shunned him with its wall and its guards, to ignore potential dangers was to be unready for them. So, a few trusted members of the Flock maintained a watch on social media for any mention of their enclave.

For so long, there had been nothing. The world outside Freedom could stumble along to its own particular variety of Hell, while inside they had enough to live and thrive, thanks to the bounty afforded from the miraculous abilities of the Flock. However, those charged to keep watch had never shirked their duty, for they were faithful to him and the other members of the Flock.

The young man's face was fearful in the glow of the phone's screen. Pastor wondered why; even when the local politicians called for the downfall of Freedom, it never went anywhere. He was too powerful, his Flock was definitely too powerful, and once they had the votes, the promises faded away like morning fog.

And then he saw the message. The crude, raw threats from the one called Atropos. He had heard the name, but only in passing, not enough to fix it in his memory. Well, it was fixed there now. "Tell me, who is this Atropos? What have they done, to make this threat? Why do you fear them?"

And the boy spoke. The words tumbled from him about how Atropos had set herself against the criminals that infested her home city, and slaughtered their leaders, giving each one until midnight to surrender or leave. The parallel was unmistakeable.

But that was not all. Working alone, or so it seemed, she had confronted the drug trade within that city. An impossible task by any normal metric, and yet she had utterly eviscerated it. The Slaughterhouse Nine—Pastor had heard of them, to be sure—had invaded her city, and she had annihilated them. Then Butcher and the Teeth suffered the same fate.

A week ago, in a place called Canberra on the far side of the world, she had killed the Simurgh. Since then, the false king called Nilbog had fallen to her hand, followed by the abomination called the Machine Army. None stood in her way; even those who were nominally charged with upholding the secular law stepped aside when she approached.

The boy spoke of others, but Pastor no longer cared. Atropos was no ordinary cape. Her powers were not the miracles that Pastor invoked in others, but something far darker. She was a destroying angel, sent by a higher power, and her function was to herald the End of Days. If he stood in her way, his ability to grant miracles would be stripped from him and he would be crucified, not as a way to ascend to his heavenly reward, but as a punishment designed to kill him in great torment.

But what had he done to earn her wrath? Had he not gathered his Flock, and granted them the miraculous abilities that were his Gift? Had he not …

In a flash of divine inspiration, he saw his error. It had been right there before him the whole time, the sin of Pride. But it was not too late. He knew what path he must follow.

"Rouse the Flock. Bring them together," he ordered. "I must address them."

"Yes, Pastor."

2325 Hours Central Standard Time (12:25 AM EST)

PRT Quarantine Site 1: Gary, Indiana

When his position and rank were taken into consideration, Colonel Reginald Frost considered himself an eminently reasonable man. Being the commanding officer of the first quarantine site that the PRT had ever established was a powerful responsibility, so his decisions needed to be forward-thinking and fair-minded. The city of Gary had cut itself off from the rest of the United States, so it was his job to keep it cut off.

Had it just been ordinary, everyday citizens who had rioted and taken over City Hall, then the National Guard response would've been sufficient to quell it. But the riots had been incited and exacerbated by supervillains, working to overthrow the city's law enforcement personnel. When the Guard showed up, they were unprepared for the lethal reception, and retreated in disorder.

The PRT had stepped in then, encircling the city with barricades and allowing citizens to flee through checkpoints. In the early days, outside villains had heard about the 'wide open city' and worked at sneaking in; some had even succeeded. But once the security had tightened up, nobody and nothing got in or out of the city, unless it was through a checkpoint.

Citizens (or rather, refugees) still got out. Precautions were taken, of course; they were questioned and fingerprinted, just to ensure that they weren't villains attempting to escape. Several had been caught this way, yet still they tried. The recent discovery that MRIs could give a strong hint at whether someone had active powers came in handy there as well.

Nothing else, however, was allowed in or out. Frost suspected that there were capes smuggling supplies into the city, and possibly other capes out, via powers, but it could only be a trickle at best. Cape battles could sometimes be seen or heard, quite likely over resources.

His view remained steadfast: they could always surrender.

But now this new thing had come up. Up until this year, he'd browsed the ParaHumans Online boards once in a while, usually to catch up on information that didn't seem to be available elsewhere. From early January onward, however, a new villain called Atropos had been making more and more waves.

There was no need to gather evidence to determine her exploits; she seemed cheerfully determined to confess all in her own thread on PHO. Each new kill, or group of kills, was a villain of one stripe or another; he'd been moderately impressed when she made it through her first week without dying to the villains she was trying to drive out of Brockton Bay.

When she took down the Slaughterhouse Nine, 'impressed' was far too understated a word.

Then she killed the Simurgh, and that blew all previous expectations out of the water.

He'd been suspecting something more was going to happen when he heard about how the Ellisburg and Eagleton quarantine sites had been rendered inactive, once more by Atropos. But the final icing on the cake had come with her latest post.

Gary, Indiana and Gallup, New Mexico: All villains have twenty-four hours to either vacate the premises or surrender to the nearest authorities (or both). Yes, Hideout, that means you too.

The timestamp on the post put it at just after midnight Eastern Standard Time, or about fifteen minutes ago.

Accompanying it was a direct order from Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown. Disseminate this information, and all available information about Atropos, to the population of Gary immediately.

They had the capacity to do just that. Once in a while, they activated it, overriding all TV signals and internet activity, to remind the villains that the option of surrender and a fair trial, even for the core group that had stormed City Hall and murdered the mayor, was always on the table.

Now, it seemed, the Chief Director had lost patience with the waiting game. Sending Atropos in was, in all ways bar the literal one, the nuclear option. The villains within the city would have twenty-three hours and change to decide whether they wanted to leave the city or die in place; there was no third option.

Colonel Frost had only one thought on the matter: About damn time, ma'am.

He smiled as he gave the order: "Open all channels. Transmit the following information …"

2301 Mountain Standard Time (1:01 AM EST)

PRT Quarantine Site 6: Gallup, New Mexico

"It's not a joke! It's not a hoax! I saw the photos from Canberra! The Nilbog footage! The way she decimated the fucking Machine Army!" Dust Devil's voice rose above all the others, augmented by his aerokinetic powers. "Forget Kaiser and Lung! They're small-time! She waltzed through the fucking Nine like they were a bunch of preschoolers playing cops and robbers! And she's fucking coming here!" He hated the way his voice rose at the end, but that was what it was like when his nuts kept trying to retreat into his chest cavity.

"So, we stay undercover like we do every other time the PR Tiddies do an overflight." Hideout's tone was derisive. "If she can't find us, she can't kill us."

Dust Devil stared at him. "Did you even read the post? Or did you just listen to everyone else talking about it?"

"What the fuck is it to you?" Hideout made a show of pulling a beer out of his shadespace, popping the tab, and taking a drink. "You assholes woke me up from a dream where I was rubbing lotion on Alexandria's back on a nudie beach, an' she was just about to roll over. I can't be expected to read every fuckin' thing around here."

"You want to see this, man." Jury-Rig's suit was only still functional because she specifically needed low-grade materials to make it work. She extended a secondary arm with a trashed Speak & Spell screen attached to the far end. As Hideout peered at it, text began to scroll up the screen.

"The fuck?" Hideout's bestubbled face—to be fair, that described every man there, and some of the women—paled by a couple of shades. "That bitch called me out by name?"

"Uh … dude?" Dust Devil raised a couple of fingers. "According to everything the PRT sent in, she's a combat Thinker who's basically off the charts, plus a strongly suspected precog, maybe a clairvoyant, and definitely a teleporter. Do you really want to fucking piss off someone who can maybe hear what you're saying, and will absolutely fucking kill you if she feels like it?"

Hideout looked around, apparently only just now noticing that everyone around him had moved a few paces away, leaving him in an empty space. "How can she … nobody can reach me when I'm in shadespace! You guys know that! I've hidden all of you at one time or another!"

"Unless you know how," Jury-Rig pointed out. "And, you know, combat Thinker. She took apart the Nine in less than an hour, and most of that was walking time. She knew their weaknesses, sure enough. Wanna bet she doesn't know yours?"

Hideout fell silent, sucking on his beer like it was momma's milk. If the argument was a game, he looked like he didn't want to play anymore.

"Okay," said Dust Devil. "Cards on the table. We've all done bad shit. We surrender, we're doing hard time, no two ways about it. But would we rather go down fighting, or just walk out and let them slap the cuffs on?"

As he scanned the crowd, not even he knew which way the vote would go.

6:20 Eastern Standard Time

Stafford, New Hampshire

As the sun rose over the small town, in a ruined house not improved at all by the gaping hole that had been blasted out through one wall, a woman paced back and forth, arguing with herself.

If anyone had been watching her, they would've had good reason to assume she had mental problems. Even on good days, her emotions were all over the place; on bad days, she had to actively work at not shredding every idiot who accidentally bumped into her on the sidewalk. Her mental situation was not in a good place.

But what she didn't have was dissociative personality disorder, even though her background was ripe for it. My mind is all in one piece, thank you very much. Every thought was sharp as a tack, and they all followed on from one another in perfect sequence. The trouble was, she still had the problem where they veered from one point to another like a drunk driver on an icy highway, and wrestling with a life-changing decision such as this wasn't helping in the slightest.

"I've always wanted to be a supervillain," she reminded herself, stomping from one end of the dingy living room to the other. "Kick ass. Take charge. Wreck shit any time I feel like it. Not have to answer to anyone, ever."

"Yeah, and how's that turned out?" she countered, on the way back. "I'm totally living the high life now. Squatting in abandoned buildings, living off PRT charity. Oh, yeah, that's taking charge of my life."

Turnabout. Stomp stomp, the floorboards vibrating underfoot. "It's not charity. Charity means pity. They don't pity me. They're scared of me. They've been paying me to not go out as a villain."

She slapped the wall with her open hand, in a way that would've risked an accidental blast forty-eight hours earlier. Now, no such thing happened. Back across the floor she went. "I'm barely on their radar. Pay for my internet and my electricity, drop off food, detail a couple of B-list heroes to babysit me?"

This time she punched the wall, not quite hard enough to split skin. She was angry, not stupid. Her knuckles still stung, but she refused to acknowledge it. "If I was such a low priority, they wouldn't even be doing that. I've killed people. I destroyed the Woad Giant. They might've driven me out of Boston, but I fucked up Blasto's little toy monster on the way out. Fuck him."

On the way back, she kicked the chair out of the way. "With everything else that's happening, I'm not a huge priority. That's a fact I have to accept."

She changed direction and kicked the wobbly chair this time; it clattered across the floor, the loose leg coming off. "Damsel of Distress is somebody. If I wasn't, then Atropos wouldn't have come to me. She wouldn't have put that effort into fixing my hands. She knows what I can do."

Stopping at the good chair, she sat down in it, staring at her upturned hands. They looked the same as they always had, but nothing could be further from the truth. "What the fuck did Atropos get my hands fixed for? What did she think she was going to get from me?"

She cupped her hands together, gently releasing the energy to build up in the cage of her fingers, going no farther, until the crackling, snarling energy within felt like it ate up the light in the room. If she let it go now, the detonation might destroy the house. But she didn't do that; instead, she let it leach away back into her hands, the darkness dwindling away.

For the past day, she'd been vacillating over the problem. It wasn't a simple case of a debt being owed; she'd neither asked for the surgery nor offered a payment for it. In her mind, that slate was clear.

But Atropos had made an offer to pay her well to do what she was good at, in a city where she was unlikely to encounter villains from her past. There would be therapy too, which she recognised she probably needed. Best of all, there would be comfortable surroundings that she could call her own, and food from stores that she strongly suspected would never run short of her favourite snacks at the worst possible moment.

Or she could seize her own destiny and strike out as a villain, showing the world that Damsel of Distress was back in a huge way. With the modifications to her hands, her blasts would never go astray and she had far better control than ever before. The mortifying malfunctions that had transpired before would never happen again. She could gather minions and henchmen around her who would truly respect her …

Right up until someone skated them out from under me. She still seethed, in the long lonely watches of the night when her mind wandered back to such things, about her ignominious departure from Boston. The people she'd recruited and talked into supporting her, who had then melted away at a few honeyed words from the other would-be crime-lords of Boston, among them Accord.

She'd never been good at the mastermind shit. Manipulation and subterfuge weren't anything like her forte. She preferred problems she could look in the eye, and maybe blast the crap out of if she needed to, not sneaking or backstabbing.

If she was honest with herself—really honest with herself—that was why her efforts in Boston had come adrift. She'd been building an empire, spreading outward, but not putting any effort into sinking firm foundations. Very much a case of 'you work for me and I pay you'.

But the Clockwork Dogs and Blastgerm and the others had been gathering support behind the scenes, so when it came to a confrontation, half the people she'd thought were solid had been given good reasons not to work for her, and the other half chickened out when the first half deserted her. She'd had no firm foundations, which meant that her entire organisation had crumbled at the first shove. Reduced to the one person she could depend on—herself—with all her potential hires working for someone else, she'd done the smart thing and retreated from Boston. Staying would've meant either dying or working as someone else's underling in whatever capacity they chose, and she had no taste for either.

Her powers becoming more reliable would undoubtedly help her revamped criminal career, but the damage had been done. No matter what the truth was, the word would be spread that Damsel of Distress was broken, flawed, unreliable. As with everything else, in the criminal world it took a thousand successes to erase one failure, and she couldn't bank on her henchmen not abandoning her again at the first setback.

She rose to her feet, pacing again, but silently this time. All the arguments had been spoken out loud and repeated enough times that her ears still rang with them. Now she had to sift through them and find her reality, going forward.

If I go to Brockton Bay—

She stopped that thought right there. To go to Brockton Bay as a villain would mean her death. She knew it, as readily as she knew her powers would no longer betray her. When she'd gone before, she knew Edict and Licit hadn't called ahead to alert Atropos, because she had called them. And yet, the masked spectre of Brockton Bay had been waiting for her and put a shotgun to the back of her head.

If I go to Brockton Bay, it will be on Atropos' terms.

Would that be so bad?

She paused and thought that over.

The favourable side of it would be that she would have good pay (she had no idea what a shot-firer made, but it was apparently a skilled job, so more than a normal wage) and free accommodation, if she was willing to settle for 'unimaginative'.

She'd settled for a hell of a lot worse, in the last few years.

Comfortable accommodations with clean sheets and regular meals was something she actually hadn't had very often over the last few years, but she could definitely make a damn good try at getting accustomed to. Being paid to destroy shit was also a distinct bonus. No doubt they had other capes who could zap stuff with their powers, but nobody could fuck anything up like she could.

And then there was the downside. She'd be getting paid, which meant she would be working for someone. People would be telling her where and what to blast. As an employee, she wouldn't be totally in control of her own destiny. She'd be an underling.

Compounding on that, she would be required to undergo therapy. Atropos had been very firm on that point. One more element of control that she'd be forced to give up.

But …

She'd spoken with Jessica Yamada, whom Atropos had left alone in the house with her. Mrs Yamada had been empathetic, asking her what she thought of all this. She had cared.

Ashley wasn't used to people caring. In her experience, people ordered and they took. Sometimes they manipulated, but it was with tricky words and it always ended up worse for the people they were talking to.

Mrs Yamada had explained in her gentle way that therapy wasn't an instant fix. It was a process, designed to assist people to work out coping strategies, and to keep them on track with those strategies. They hadn't had long, but she'd coaxed Ashley into sharing some of her circumstances, and making a few suggestions here and there. Minor things, but more than anyone had ever done for her before.

She knew she was volatile and had a hair trigger. It was kind of her thing. However, it had also worked against her more than once. She'd gotten pissed off, allowed someone to provoke her at the wrong moment, and shit had gone sideways.

The epiphany burst on her all at once. If therapy could help her learn how to not be provoked by assholes, that would totally be a net benefit to her future career as a supervillain. After all, she didn't have to work for Atropos forever. And she would totally be working for Atropos, not anyone else, because Atropos was the one supplying the money. The ones telling her where to blast, they would be underlings also in Atropos' pay.

And once I've saved up enough of a stake to kick my career over properly, I quit the job all nice and proper, and leave Brockton Bay far behind me. Go be a villain elsewhere. Show those assholes what Damsel of Distress can really do.

Yeah, that was totally a plan. She smiled and went to her bag. The card with the number of the Brockton Bay Betterment Committee was at the top, and her phone was freshly charged.

"This is Damsel of Distress. Ashley Stillons. Atropos gave me this number." Get her cards on the table from the start.

From her lack of reaction, the lady on the other end of the line might well have gotten calls like this every day. "Good morning, Ms Stillons. We were told to expect your call. The ticket will be waiting at the bus depot by the time you get there."

She blinked. "Oh, uh, thank you." The words were a little foreign to her, but they kind of fitted. "I'll be there."

"That's good to hear. There will be someone waiting to pick you up at the Port Authority building here in Brockton Bay. Do you have any questions?"

"No, uh, I mean, no, I should be fine." She absolutely had questions, but wasn't sure how to phrase them. Anyway, she was good at picking up things as she went along.

"Then we'll see you when you get here, Ms Stillons. Enjoy the bus ride."

"Yeah, um, bye." She ended the call, feeling a little weirded out. The lady on the other end had known who she was but was still perfectly okay with talking to her. That was rare in her experience.

Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she decided what else she was going to take with her. The pillow and blanket were grungy as fuck—the house didn't have a working washing machine, and the last time she'd tried to wash something like that in the bath, she'd destroyed the bath—and there was no way she was going to lug the TV all the way to the bus depot and then carry it on the bus.

I should've asked if 'comfortable' meant 'has a TV'.

Fuck it. I'll deal.

There was enough of the food left from the supply Atropos had left behind that she'd be able to snack on the bus ride to Brockton Bay, so she took that too. And finally, she took up the twisted chunk of matter that she'd salvaged from the Woad Giant's corpse. It was the trophy from her biggest fuck-you, and she wasn't about to leave it behind.

She walked out the front door, leaving it wide open. When she got to the sidewalk, she gave the house the finger. Her shelter it may have been, but it was a shitty shelter.

Turning away from her old life, she set out for the bus depot. It would mean a few miles of walking, but she knew where she was going now.

Brockton Bay, here I come.

7:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

PRT Quarantine Site 5: Flint, Michigan

The announcement boomed out across the city at regular intervals. TVs and computer screens, what few that remained active in the city, repeated the information. Soon, all who cared to know about it would be fully informed about their encroaching doom.

They definitely knew who they were. She'd told them that if they didn't cut that shit out, she would come over there. The message had gotten through.

However, within the barricades that had excised Flint from the rest of the nation, more cape abilities festered and plotted than in any other place on Earth. Each and every one of them had power, and it is the very nature of power that the hand grasps readily but releases reluctantly.

They knew that if they cast aside their gruesome talismans, they would lose what had made them special. And it was the nature of the sunk cost fallacy that not one of them could countenance going back to merely normal.

Even as the various gangs intrigued and strove against each other, not one dared raising the idea of spurning the golden goose and surrendering to the PRT. The mere suggestion would see them ridiculed and ostracised, and anyone actually attempting to do it would be murdered on the spot.

As the day wore on, Flint emulated its namesake and stood obdurate.

8:00 AM, Brockton Bay

En Route to Winslow

Charlotte leaned back against the window of the bus, idly scrolling through PHO. She noted that there was a new Atropos thread up and opened it, her eyebrows raising as she read the comments. The footage afforded her a few minutes of entertainment, though she wasn't that into action movies, so she went back to reading what people had to say about the demise of the Machine Army.

When she got to the part where Atropos had pledged to clear out four separate quarantine zones in twenty-four hours, she frowned. How's she going to pull that off, all at the same time? Those places are all the way across the country from each other.

That was when her phone rang. Worse, the caller ID said Atropos. She hadn't even known her phone possessed a font like that. It took her two tries to flick the accept icon.

"H-hello?"

"The answer is, with smoke and mirrors. That's where you come in, if you're still willing."

Her breath caught in her throat and her heart rate seemed to double. Looking out the bus window at the familiar scenery passing by helped to steady her, but not by a great deal. She'd done an extremely stupid thing not so long ago, posing as Atropos to scare off a burglar who was hitting local mechanic shops. The burglar had turned out to be a Tinker, and Atropos herself had showed up behind her after he'd fled to turn himself in.

Atropos hadn't been too angry with her, and had even shown a little interest in allowing her to do it again sometime. Her exact words had been, 'if I need your help screwing with people's heads, I'll let you know'.

Now, it seemed, she was letting Charlotte know.

There was only one answer she could give. "Y-yes. What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing dangerous. Not as dangerous as confronting Chariot, anyway."

As Atropos explained what she wanted done, Charlotte listened very carefully indeed.

If they pulled this one off, Atropos was going to screw with so many people's heads.

Relevant Side-Story: Reputation, by Masterweaver

"Okay." Trevor gathered up the last of his haul, looking over his shoulder. "Okay, we're good, this is good. It's fine, she won't find me, I'm not hurting anybody, it's fine." He dragged the machine parts out of the store, starting to head home-

-but a figure in a black suit and fedora stepped out of a nearby alleyway, crossing her arms.

Trevor inhaled sharply. "Come on, seriously?! I'm not hurting anybody! They're insured!" He pointed at the shop. "And already profitable, and I didn't even take a lot!"

The figure continued to stare, eyelessly, wordlessly, accusingly.

"Look it's not like I want to be a criminal," Trevor tried. "But I'm a Tinker, I need parts! And I can't just leave town, I'm not even old enough to drive, let alone move out!"

A simple gust of wind set the long, straight locks fluttering in the breeze.

"I-I can't even go home, after Coil got killed-I mean, I didn't know he was a villain he just promised to bankroll me and then the PRT-I'm just trying to survive! Nobody's being hurt! It's not a problem!"

Slowly, the figure reached behind her back, a gloved hand begining to pull out a pair of gardening shears-

"ALRIGHT!" Trevor screamed in a panic. "Alright, I'll turn myself in! I'll go legit I swear! I'm sorry!" He turned and ran on his fast skates, leaving his ill-gotten goods on the sidewalk.

After a long moment, Charlotte let out a relieved breath, putting the sheers away and taking off her hat and mask. "I can't believe that worked!"

"It was pretty impressive," Atropos agreed.

"Yeah, I OHGOD-!" Charlotte practically jumped out of her shoes, backing away quickly. "A-a-Atropos! H-h-h-hiiii, uh, I-" She wrung her hands, then realized she was still holding the mask and hat and tossed them aside. "S-so! What, what are you doing, you know, out here, at night-oh god I don't want to know do I."

"Oh, you know, preparing." Atropos cleaned her shears off casually. "There's always one idiot who just doesn't get the memo."

Charlotte swallowed.

"So... what are you doing out so late?" the cape asked idly.

Briefly, Charlotte considered lying. Briefly, in the same way she would briefly consider throwing herself off a cliff.

"Okay so there was this thief robbing a bunch of mechanic stores around the place and my friend's dad got hit and it was actually kind of terrible for them and I thought 'man I wish Atropos would do something but this isn't important enough for her' but then I thought maybe I was about the right build to fake it and it wasn't like I'd be in any real danger and I didn't expect the thief to be a tinker but he was so I just stared him down and I swear that's all I did I promise-"

"And how did you know you were about my build?"

Charlotte cringed. "I... go to Winslow," she explained meekly. "Keep my head down, try not to attract attention..."

Atropos sheathed her shears quietly.

Charlotte shut her eyes and whimpered.

"On the one hand, you did try to use my image without my permission. I have this whole thing about diluting my brand, you know. On the other... I was going to have to deal with that guy eventually," she considered. "You managed to handle that problem for me..."

Charlotte, cautiously, opened one eye.

"...And now that I think about it," Atropos mused, "there are a number of things I could pull off if I had a... willing... body double."

"...um. I... could do that?" Charlotte offered. "I, I mean, I don't think I could kill anybody, but... uh... distraction?"

"...tell you what. This was your first offense, so I'll call it warning number one. And if I need your help screwing with people's heads, I'll let you know."

"Yes. Okay. I'm good with that."

"You should get home," Atropos told her. "I hear there's a serial killer on the loose."

"Okay yes I'm going home have a good night I won't tell anybody about this-" Charlotte stumbled on her words and her feet as she rushed back to her house.

"Hm." Atropos shrugged, tapping something on her arm, and fading away.

End of Part Sixty-Eight