12

Chapter 12: Disillusion 2-3

Disillusion 2.3

Lisa gave me a broad smile. "Nice to meet you — again."

"Um, yeah. Nice to meet you."

"Here, hold on."

She unclipped the clasp on her satchel and reached inside, and a moment later, she pulled out a plastic box — a lunchbox, I realized — with a picture of Alexandria on the side, posed heroically. After adjusting her grip and redoing the clasp on her satchel, she held it out to me in offering.

"Here," said Lisa.

"What's this?" I asked as I took it. The contents shifted around with the motion, and I froze. Was this…?

"Two grand," she replied, confirming my suspicion. "Straight from Lung's coffers. That's part of my share of what we grabbed during the Ruby Dreams fiasco about five weeks ago."

"You're…giving me money?"

I wasn't sure I understood what was happening. My thoughts were whirling about in six or seven different directions, and grasping at a single one of them was like wrestling with the air.

Lisa titled her head a little. "I did say that the kiss was down payment, remember."

"I mean…yeah." I vaguely remembered the kiss she'd planted on my cheek and the comment she'd made accompanying it, but I'd never thought that she meant something like this. "But, ah, well… Two thousand dollars?"

She shrugged. "It's about as much as you can put in the bank at one time before it starts raising eyebrows, or else I would've put more in there. Used to be ten-thousand, but they lowered it in the early two-thousands on account of Thinkers and guys like the Elite taking advantage of the system."

"That's…" Not really what I was worried about.

"Is it about where it comes from?" she asked. "Because I'm sure you need it more than he does, and you'll probably put it to better use, too."

"That's not really…very comforting."

This was stolen money. It came from drug dealers and sex peddlers and crime lords. It was probably soaked in more blood and debauchery than I could imagine.

Lisa sighed. "Remember what I told you last night? There's only so many ways independent heroes can make any money, and taking spoils from villains is one of them. If it really bothers you that much, then do the exact opposite of what Lung was going to use it for and donate to charity or something. It's up to you. But I won't be taking it back — that part, I won't budge on."

My mouth snapped shut and whatever I'd been about to say remained unsaid. After another moment or two of indecision and conflict, I took the box and stuffed it into my backpack. I'd figure out exactly what I was going to do with all of that money later on.

"Alright," said Lisa, "now that we've got that out of the way, what do you say we head over to that coffee shop I mentioned? This isn't exactly the best of neighborhoods."

I glanced around almost on reflex, because what she said was true: even the buildings that hadn't been touched by my fight with Lung were ramshackle and rundown, and last night, most of them had been without power — even the streetlamps had been out.

"Uh, sure."

"Great!" She offered me a bright smile. "Come on, then. Follow me."

She started off, and a few moments later, after a second or two of hesitation, I fell into step beside and slightly behind her. The flat, heavy sound of her footsteps drew my eye down her long legs, where I discovered that she was wearing thick-soled boots rather than something more distinctly feminine, like high heels.

She led me out of the Docks and in the direction of the Boardwalk, the Bay's tourist destination, where all of the best (and most expensive) shops were located. We weaved through the streets and the alleyways with the expert precision of someone who knew the Docks like the back of her hand, and it occurred to me, while we were walking, that Lisa must have lived somewhere around here to be so familiar with the area.

As we went, the festering decay of the Docks started to give way to cleaner, nicer buildings, and before I knew it, the Boardwalk was starting to come into sight. Then, Lisa suddenly turned and led me down a side street — pretty upscale, nice; not quite spotless and polished as the Boardwalk tended to be, but far and away better than the Docks we'd left — and stopped in front of a small, quaint little coffee shop made of dull, red brick. The large, somewhat stylized golden letters that stretched all the way across its front said, AHNENERBE.

Beneath that, in much smaller font, was, Server of fine teas and coffees since 1941.

"This is it," said Lisa. "I found it a couple of months back. Best coffee in the city, hands down."

She reached for the door and pushed inwards, and it swung open with the jingle of a bell. I followed her inside into an old-fashioned feeling café: the walls were a deep, honey yellow color on the upper half and exposed brickwork on the lower, with dull, hardwood floors that looked aged but well-kept. When I looked up at the ceiling, there were two sets of thick, wooden beams crisscrossing above my head: one set built into the ceiling, and then a second set about two feet below that. The lights that lit the café hung in glass fixtures from rustic, black chains that reached up to the ceiling, casting the place in a dim, yellow glow that added to its charm.

There was a bar at the back end, complete with high-backed stools, and along the side of the building that faced the street, there were a bunch of tables set in front of the windows, rather than the booths a more modern coffee shop might use. The rest of the floor was taken up by more tables, old, square things that had no fancy designs or ornamentations, complete with chairs that looked as though they'd been made by hand.

It wasn't very crowded. Most of the tables were empty, but they'd probably have been full a few hours ago, and they might fill up again before Lisa and I left with students getting out of class.

"Why don't you go and find us a table?" Lisa asked, glancing back at me. "I'll go grab us a couple of drinks — Earl Grey, no cream, three sugars, right?"

"I, uh, yes," I said, blinking. How did she know my preferences?

Lisa smiled that Cheshire grin and said, "Be back in a jiffy."

She turned away and went over towards the bar, where a bartender was standing next to a bunch of tins that I had to imagine contained loose leaf tea and coffee grinds. For a moment, I just stood there, watching her, then I turned away and started wading through to find a table in the back of the shop, far from the rest, where we wouldn't be heard talking about cape stuff.

On the way, I passed a pair of girls sitting together. One of them had long, blonde hair and her eyes closed as she sipped from a mug of what smelled like coffee, and the other, whose back was to me, was dressed in a red leather jacket that looked incredibly expensive and had equally long, dark hair that fell in curls around her shoulders and back — it looked so familiar that for one heart-pounding second, I thought I might be looking at Mom.

The second girl turned slightly to look at me over the rim of her mug, and her deep brown eyes, so deep and so dark that they seemed almost to suck you in, met mine for a fraction of a second.

Not Mom.

I tore myself away and kept going. Of course she wasn't Mom. Mom had died almost three years ago.

I found a table near the back corner, isolated and alone. There was no one else nearby, so it would be safe to talk about whatever we liked without the risk of being overheard. There were four chairs arranged around it, two on either side, and I took the chair that was very nearly wedged into the corner where the two walls met. It gave me a good view of the rest of the café, so I'd be able to see anyone trying to get close and eavesdrop.

Lisa kept me waiting only for about five minutes, although it felt more like fifteen. When she came back, she held a silver tray — or maybe it was aluminum; Nicolas would have known, but I wasn't enough of an alchemist on my own to tell just by sight — that carried two steaming mugs and a pair of…some kind of baked good whose name I didn't know. A crumb cake of some kind, I thought. With a red fruit spread — raspberry, maybe? Strawberry? Cherry?

"Here we go," Lisa said, setting one of the mugs in front of me. "One Earl Grey, three sugars, no cream."

She slid into the chair across from me, spinning the tray around so that it stretched longways over the tabletop.

"And," she added, grinning cheekily, "one raspberry crumb cake each. You have to indulge every once in a while, after all."

I hesitated for a moment and looked down into my mug. I'd always thought it funny that a "black" tea was actually red in color when brewed, and when I was younger, I'd found it even funnier that a black tea that came out red when brewed was called Earl Grey.

"Well?" said Lisa, smiling. "Go ahead. Try it. Best tea you've ever tasted, I promise."

I hesitated for a few seconds longer, then looped two of my fingers through the mug's handle, lifted it upwards, blew on my tea one, two, three times, as was my habit, and tentatively, I took my first sip.

My tastebuds exploded with flavor — the sweetness of the sugar, the tang of the Earl Grey that enhanced and complimented it, and the almost fruity smell assaulted my nostrils and laid siege. It was, indeed, the best tea I'd ever tasted, sharp and strong and tailored to my liking, and for a single instant, I was a little girl again, drinking the mug of tea my mother had made for me on a cool Spring morning as she smiled at me over the rim of her own mug.

Mom had always preferred loose leaf tea. Said the flavor was stronger, purer than when you bought the preprocessed teabags that everyone liked to use. It was expensive, though, and the last time I'd had any in the house was when Dad bought me some for Christmas.

I felt my eyes moisten, and I shut them to give myself a moment to regain my composure. A single pair of tears made their way down my cheeks.

"Too hot?"

Lisa's voice brought me back to the present, and when I blinked my eyes back open to look at her, she had a sad, knowing little smile on her face. She knew about Mom and about why I had nearly started crying, just now, I knew she knew, even if I didn't know how she could, but she was giving me an out, a way to avoid the subject entirely.

"No," I said a little shakily. I reached up with my other hand and thumbed away the tears. "No, the tea's perfect. It just…"

"Yeah," she said quietly. "I…lost my brother, so… I kinda know how you feel. It was actually part of… Well. You know."

Her Trigger Event. Her One Bad Day.

I cleared my throat. "So. You…said there was something you still wanted to talk about?"

She gave me a quick, half smile to let me know that my attempt to change the subject really was that transparent and that she was glad I'd done it.

"Yeah," she said. She reached for her crumb cake and tore off a part of it. "I know you did some research into capes after getting your powers. Honestly, it's the only sensible thing to do, and more capes should probably do it when they get theirs. Did you come across the PRT rating system?"

She popped the piece of cake into her mouth and started chewing. I decided I might as well try it and did the same thing, stopping halfway to dip it in my tea.

"Yes," I told her. "Blaster, Striker, Shaker, and all of that stuff, right?"

Lisa swallowed her food. I took a bite of mine and had to stop a moment to savor the taste — raspberry, and fairly sweet. Good tea and good food? Just who the hell was running this place?

"Right," she said. "First, you should know that there are two categories that get left out of the official page, on account of their potential for abuse and the bad press they generate: Stranger and Master. They're pretty on the nose, name-wise. Strangers are those guys with powers that affect the way people perceive them. Turning invisible, taking on someone else's face, making you feel like he's your best friend you've known your entire life, that sort of thing. Really good at infiltration, really scary for information security."

Like Hassan, I thought, swallowing. He couldn't exactly turn invisible, at least not the one I'd used last night, but he could erase his presence so thoroughly that you wouldn't notice him unless he was standing right in front of you in a well-lit room.

"Isn't there some way around powers like that?"

"Right." Lisa nodded. "It's called Master-Stranger Protocols. The PRT uses them whenever one of their members or one of the Protectorate is under suspicion of being influenced by one or the other. Which brings me to the second one, Masters. Arguably, they're even scarier: they can take control of people. Not all of them, of course. Some of them just use some kind of projection or take control of things like animals or something. The ones you really have to worry about, though, are the ones that affect people — you heard of Heartbreaker?"

I scowled. "Who hasn't?"

Once I'd gotten my powers and really started to figure out how they worked, it had occurred to me that I might be one of the few who could take him down from a far enough distance not to be affected by his power. One or two of my archers could take the shot from halfway across the city, if they had a clear enough line of sight.

One of the things that stopped me was that it meant killing someone. Staining my hands. The idea of actually taking someone's life, no matter how much they deserved it, wasn't something I thought I could do.

"Yeah. He's pretty nasty." Lisa took a sip from her mug. "That kind of Master is the PRT's worst nightmare. It's part of the reason why Paige Mcabee — you know, the singer, Canary? — is getting railroaded up north."

"Railroaded?"

"You haven't heard about that?" Lisa asked.

"No, can't say that I have."

"Apparently, her ex-boyfriend tried to harass her after one of her concerts. When she told him where he could shove it, it seems that her power affected him and he…took it a bit literally. Tossup on whether it was an accident or not, but my bet is that it was."

I raised an eyebrow. "You really think so?"

Lisa shrugged. "Look at her history. She's a singer, not Hookwolf. Powers are poorly understood enough as it is, and even the eggheads up at University of Whatever studying them can only say, 'I don't know,' when it comes to how they work or what the general limits are. So, yeah. My money is on the whole thing being an accident. Doesn't change the fact that they're gonna toss her in the Birdcage."

I straightened up. "Wait, what? The Birdcage? For a first offense?"

The Three Strikes policy was a hotly debated topic on PHO, from how valid it was to how it was applied to whether or not it should even be a thing. Some people thought it was useless and some people thought that it should be enforced more strictly, to prevent wrongly convicted or minor offenders from being shut in the hellhole that was the Birdcage with no way out and no possibility of parole.

Me, I thought it mostly did its job. Petty thieves who didn't even have a body count shouldn't be locked away for the rest of their lives in an unregulated hellhole like the Birdcage, but for guys like Lung and Heartbreaker and other unrepentant murderers, if you couldn't keep them in even the highest security prisons, then the Birdcage was really the only option.

"Yup," said Lisa, smiling grimly. "The judge and the prosecution are trying to set up precedent, sort of a message of, 'If you have Master powers and use them against other people, this is what will happen to you.' As far as setting an example goes, I personally think that it's tasteless and excessive, but then, I can't really do anything about it."

I frowned and looked down into my mug.

"Yeah…"

I reached for my crumb cake and tore off another big piece of it.

Paige Mcabee was going to be thrown into the Birdcage on a first offense, because the prosecutor and the judge were trying to make a political statement. It left a sour feeling in my gut, because it also felt like what was happening to me at Winslow, only quite a bit more serious. It was hard not to see the parallels; her situation was essentially mine, writ large.

What the hell could I do about it, though? A whole lot of nothing.

"Anyway," said Lisa, waving about a bit of her crumb cake. "That wasn't really what I wanted to talk about."

"Then what?" I asked.

She took another sip of her mug, then set it back down.

"Have you heard of the Unwritten Rules?"

"The what?"

"I thought not." She ate the piece of cake she'd been gesturing with. "PHO's got a lot of data on it, but this is the kind of thing capes don't really talk about much, so no one who isn't one has actually heard more than rumors. I'd be really irresponsible if I didn't tell you about them, though."

She took another moment to sip at her mug again, and I got the feeling she was using the time to order her thoughts and figure out how she wanted to talk about this.

"Alright," Lisa said, "think of it like a kind of gentleman's agreement. It's this general understanding that capes have with one another, and if you know what's good for you, you follow it. The only ones who don't are those who don't care, like the Slaughterhouse Nine, or those who are strong enough to ignore them without consequence, like Lung."

"You talk about them like they're some kind of law or something," I said. "One that even villains will obey?"

Wasn't that a bit…counterintuitive? Villains, by definition, were criminals. Ignoring rules and laws was kind of part of the package.

Lisa shook her head. "It's not like it's official policy or anything. It's not some legal thing that can get you into trouble. Like I said, it's a kind of general understanding capes have with each other — heroes and villains. Capes tend to follow them because things can get…messy, when they don't."

"Messy?"

"For instance," Lisa began, "one of the Unwritten Rules is not to target civilian identities. If your id falls out of your pocket or something, that's one thing, and that's fair game, because you screwed up and got yourself outed. Otherwise, though, heroes don't try to find villains' identities and villains don't try to find the heroes' identities. Capes need that safe zone, that ability to unwind and decompress. When you try to take that away, things start to escalate — a cape without a civilian id has nowhere to escape to, and therefore has no reason to retreat if a fight gets more heated than usual."

My brow furrowed. "Even the Protectorate…"

"Even them," she affirmed. "A villain backed into a corner has no more reason to hold back, after all."

In some ways, it felt wrong, because it made it easy for villains to hide just by taking off the mask, but in others, it was a relief. One of the things that had worried me about being a hero was that I might get found out and someone would try to attack my house or take Dad hostage or something.

"What about families?" I asked.

"Off limits. You don't go after Kaiser's kids, Kaiser doesn't come after your dad. It's not…perfect. Like I said, if they think they can get away with it, they'll do it, but generally, capes follow the Unwritten Rules so that things aren't chaos in the streets."

Suddenly, I was very glad that I hadn't just stopped at fixing the broken front step with magic.

"Speaking of chaos in the streets," said Lisa, "that's another part of the rules. It kinda goes hand in hand with the rest of them: don't escalate. If you start pushing harder, they'll push harder back. It's one thing to fight better or whatever, but the first person to resort to lethal force tends to not be the one who makes it out alive. That's why a lot of cape fights tend to just be guys bloodying each other up until one team retreats. Less messy, that way."

She took another sip from her mug.

"Like I said, though, some guys just ignore the rules or pick and choose the ones they follow. Guys like Lung and Hookwolf. Those are the guys who'd just as soon kill you and be done with it, even if they respect the rest of them, for the most part. Someone as strong as you can probably handle them just fine either way, but if it comes down to it, don't think for a minute that they'd flinch at the idea of cutting you to ribbons or making your insides your outsides."

I grimaced. Yeah, I'd figured that out pretty well last night. Lung certainly hadn't had any qualms about trying to kill me, and from what I knew of Hookwolf, I couldn't imagine he'd have any problems with it, either. You don't get body counts like the one he was rumored to have by being squeamish, after all.

"Most of the rest of them are things that apply to villains only, but there's one that you might argue is the most important." She set down her mug and looked me in the eyes. "Respect the truce. If there's a meeting in neutral territory, you don't attack the people attending it. If there's an Endbringer fight going on, you leave any problems you have with anyone else behind, or else you don't attend. Especially with the last one, there's actual laws in place for it. It's that serious."

For a moment, I just sat there, mulling over everything she told me as I ate more of my crumb cake. Lisa seemed to have run through everything she wanted to say, or else she was waiting for my response, because she didn't say anything else after that.

What she said made at least some sense, based on what I'd found out on PHO. Aside from guys like Lung, Oni Lee, and Hookwolf, it didn't seem like capes killed each other all that often, or even killed civilians. Leet and Über were in and out of jail as petty thieves, and aside from that one stream where they beat up a hooker, I hadn't heard about them actually hurting anyone. The E88 routinely put people in the hospital, if not the morgue, but aside from guys like Hookwolf, who actually had a serious body count, I couldn't recall hearing about their capes killing anyone.

Lung was different, but then, Lung was powerful enough that no one could tell him what he could and couldn't do. Oni Lee…I had no idea, but what I had heard of him made him sound like a hitman rather than a fighter.

The way she described it, though, almost made it sound like…

"So what you're saying," I began slowly, "is that this is basically a giant game of cops and robbers?"

"To a degree, yeah," Lisa replied. "It's not that simple, and there are guys like Lung who take it too seriously. But for the small time crooks and the thieves, like Über and Leet? For the C-listers and the B-listers, who do mostly street-level stuff like robbing banks or getting into fights over territory? There's a reason why the PRT holding cells are called revolving doors."

It wasn't that I couldn't see what she was saying, but…it sounded wrong, somehow. Like a paper thin façade to hide the ugly truth, that villains hid behind these rules when it suited them and discarded them when they got in the way, and the heroes, meanwhile, had to hamper themselves so that the villains didn't start going after their friends and families.

"That still seems a bit…"

"Look," said Lisa, "I'm not going to claim it's neat and clean and everyone follows the rules all the time. I wish I could, but the world isn't that nice. As long as they respect the rules, though, you should, too. Anyone who doesn't, feel free to take the gloves off."

"Take the gloves off, huh…"

Like I had with Lung, she had to mean. Pull out the trump cards. Stop holding back.

My lips pursed and I glared down into my tea.

No. Not just that. The full weight and power of an Install was way too much to use casually. Last night had proven that — Lung and I had destroyed an entire street, and if I hadn't managed to keep it contained, who knew how much worse it would have been? To use the kind of strength and power that had taken down Lung against guys like Über and Leet or people who were, aside from their powers, just as squishy as any other person off the street, that was overkill in the extreme.

"Hey." I blinked and found Lisa leaning forward towards me. "You looked like you were getting lost."

I shook my head. "Sorry," I said. "I was…just thinking. About… Did you see the street?"

"Ah." Lisa leaned back. "You mean all that damage you and Lung did."

"Yeah."

"That was kinda awesome to watch, honestly," said Lisa. "From a safe distance, of course, but still. Not often you see two guys on that level duking it out."

I frowned and opened my mouth.

"I know," she cut me off. "You're worried about doing that kind of damage all the time, right? Especially in parts of the city that are more occupied. That's a really good attitude to have."

She smiled. "All the same? I'm glad you hit Lung as hard as you did. You saved my butt, remember."

I flushed.

"I, uh, yeah."

What do you even say to that sort of thing?

She laughed and finished off her crumb cake.

"Alright," she said. "I think that's enough of the seriousness. Unless you've got something you still want to talk about?"

A couple of things, actually, but I thought those were probably things I needed to figure out for myself. Lisa couldn't give me answers for everything, and I wasn't sure I wanted her to even if she could.

"Not…really, no."

"Then what do you say we get out of here?"

I blinked. "Huh?"

"C'mon." She drained the last of her mug and set it down on the tray. "Let's forget about all of this heavy stuff for a while and go do something mindless and stupid. I hear Parian is having one of her shows, today."

For a second, I hesitated again. It was one thing to meet with Tattletale because she still had something she needed to talk to me about, but it was another thing entirely to go out and do casual things with her, like she was…

Like she was my friend.

Maybe I was scared. The last friend I'd had was Emma, and she'd turned on me out of the blue for no apparent reason. She'd taken all of the secrets I shared with her and she used them against me, doing so much more damage than Sophia and Madison could ever hope to. She'd dropped a years-long friendship for a stranger she'd met during the scant months I was away at summer camp.

And after that, how could I trust anyone not to do the same, if the girl I'd thought of as a sister could betray me so thoroughly?

I looked down into my mug, at the last remnants of the tea which had been tailored specifically to my liking. I thought about everything Lisa had already done for me, the things she'd taught me about capes out of the kindness of her heart. She didn't seem to have any ulterior motives and she'd been nothing but nice to me, so far.

Did it matter, in the end, if she knew things about me she shouldn't be able to know, when she was using that knowledge to be a…a better friend?

I favored Lisa with a smile.

"Sure."

I decided that it didn't. At least for now, I'd take this leap of faith.

Even if a part of me worried that this was too good to be true.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —