Isaac drove home slowly, feeling the events rolling along and taking him with it. Just like when he’d finally committed to the Dimetria role, there was a deep uneasiness in his bones but not much he could do about it. He knew he had to go forward, and while he had made some plans he wasn’t looking forward to executing them.

  He’d never wanted to attract attention from the powers that be, not at all. Disposable personas like Dimetria were meant to be the ones that caught attention, while Isaac Hartson continued to be just a janitor and nobody important. That said, he’d sketched out other ideas just in case, because he knew that going up against supervillains – or exposing superheroes – was likely to bring investigation that he might not be able to do anything about.

  So far as he knew there were no completely clairvoyant supers, on either side, but he had heard of magic users who could track with sympathetic resonance, or view the past, or the like. He wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that some mundane disguise would be enough against someone with super-senses, but people with super-senses couldn’t be everywhere and remember everything perfectly. Everyone knew the key was to be unremarkable, and he’d blown that by going to ask about Cayleb.

  That meant leaving things behind. His job, his apartment — things that he had grown used to, even if he hadn’t necessarily liked them. They could be replaced, eventually, but he still hated tearing himself away no matter how necessary it was. At least the logistics were simple enough, given that he had some liquid currency and a willingness to spend it.

  Star City actually had a reasonable number of halfway houses or other temporary shelters, and for obvious reasons. The sight of figures flying in the sky and the occasional distant rumble or wailing sirens often marked the destruction of some building or another, and people needed somewhere to stay while the damage was fixed. Or, alternately, visiting metas – hero, villain, vigilante, or just plain tourist – needed some place to put their minions, followers, or worshippers.

  That would work for a short time, but he’d need to put together a new identity and income stream, and do so without getting too far from Star City. He wouldn’t be able to reach Crash and get real leverage against Blacktime – and ultimately, Glorybeam – if he fled the city, nor could he keep an eye out for Cayleb. It would be safer, but also pointless.

  Isaac wedged his beater car into a spare parking space and mounted the stairs to his apartment, heading straight to his room and starting to pack. Once he was in motion, it was much easier, as he just focused on packing up the boxes of costumes, tools, and materials. Even if he hadn’t had plans for them in the future, he just couldn’t let them go. Besides, some of them were Cayleb’s tinker-work, and way better than anything that could be found in normal stores.

  He folded finished pieces and put them in boxes, stacking them atop plastic containers filled with cloth, leather, and foam. The only thing he kept aside was his next disguise, but everything else went into storage and got carried down to the car — something he didn’t feel the need to hide since he transported costume materials all the time. His old ‘832 Odelle was cramped with all the baggage, boxes shoved into the trunk and piled precariously in the passenger seat, but everything did fit, if barely.

  Then he was back out into the streets of Star City, the ancient radial engine of his car sputtering along as he drove away from the brutalist, mass-produced concrete blocks of the apartment housing and past the gleaming steel-and-glass spires of the more upscale parts of the city. A pair of supers swooped overhead as he waited at a red light, one trailing a glittering rainbow trail that identified her as Sparkle Motion, one of the most unfortunately themed magic supers in Star City.

  Isaac refused to let any panic gain a hold; such things were common enough and he couldn’t jump every time he saw a super or a cop. Instead he just drove normally, heading across town and out past the industrial district to where one of the big self-storage facilities hunkered against the mountainous slopes of the Grabel Range that sheltered Star City’s western side. Once he was sufficiently far from any obvious surveillance, he parked the car in a warehouse rear lot and ducked behind an electrical shed to change.

  Instead of his normal jeans and tees, he donned a brown suit, brown cap, and white gloves – and used a compact mirror as he applied cosmetics to his face. He darkened his face to resemble something like a southerner, someone from the Nasir Kingdom perhaps, just to make sure that whoever was in charge of the self-store didn’t remember some local brat. It probably wasn’t necessary, but better safe than sorry — and frankly, he enjoyed the chance to play a role.

  “My name is…” He spoke aloud, trying to adjust his words to the rolling syllables of someone from the Nasir Kingdom. His accent was horrible, but he just had to sound foreign. “Name is Harkem. Harkeem Jural. Harkeeem.” It took him a few repetitions, but eventually he was satisfied enough and walked the rest of the way to the self-storage. His beat-up car hardly fit with the image of a young, professional businessman.

  Considering the bored indifference of the kid at the self-store, he needn’t have bothered. Still, Isaac stuck to the role, handing over a few cred tabs and getting a key, a receipt, and leaving a spurious phone number in case there were troubles. He’d rented one of the large ones, something big enough to fit his small car even if he was, technically, not supposed to use it as a garage.

  It was just a big empty room, with one single outlet and a vertical door that rolled up far enough that he could fit the car through. The inside smelled like cold concrete and old cigarettes, with an undercurrent of moldering furniture, but it was private. Once it was closed he slumped, slowly going through the motions of cleaning off the cosmetics and shucking the suit for more regular clothes.

  This was as far as he’d thought things out, and now he was adrift, momentarily motionless. Everything he owned packed into one storage room, his life in disarray, and without any real way to move forward. He laid on the roof of his car, the curved steel frame still warm from the sun, staring at the ceiling as he tried to think about what to do.

  Originally, Isaac hadn’t wanted to move forward until he had more support from Cayleb. The tinkered workstation and microcomputer alone demonstrated how much of a force-multiplier tinker support could be, and since it was just stuff, Cayleb himself would never be involved if Isaac screwed up. The latter device was one of the few things he’d taken from his apartment aside from the costume supplies, since the bulky clamshell had been adjusted so it didn’t ever look like the same device twice when it connected to a network. It wasn’t as good as Cayleb’s personal setup, which was supposed to be entirely a ghost on the net. That hadn’t kept Star Central from finding him, but there could have been any number of ways they did that, up to and including following Cayleb’s drone home.

  The best thing Isaac could come up with was to try and salvage his original plans, now that he had nothing else left. That would mean going after Crash’s files anyway, and to do that he would have to get into the gang on his own. Or more accurately, just be part of the gang without ever officially joining. He’d heard the stories from people like Kevin, and it wasn’t like gangers kept extensive paperwork or would really question having the support of a low-rank meta, so he could just show up and fit in if he played his cards right. At worst he could get ‘officially’ inducted at some point, though he hoped not to be around that long.

  With a direction in mind, he suddenly felt like he was moving forward once again. Rolling off his car, he unpacked his containers and started to work. One box served as a chair and another a table for his workstation, as he pulled out some clothes and made a few modifications to some to reflect the style of Crash’s gang — The Iron Nails. A black nail on a blue and white field got stitched onto one side of a reversible leather jacket, and he added extraneous pockets to one of his older sets of jeans. It was probably higher quality than most of what the gangers wore, but as a meta he’d stand out anyway.

  What he didn’t want was to stand out as a strength-type dreg meta. Isaac had been given that assessment when his powers first manifested over a decade ago, when he could only enhance himself. Adding inertia to his own body let him throw a mean punch, but since he couldn’t lift anything unusual it had put him down into nominal class. Since then he’d managed to push his power to work on things he touched as well, which would put him into common class at least, as well as slowly build the amount of inertia he could change.

  The way it worked was difficult to understand at the best of times, but his time at the gym had given him a metaphor that seemed appropriate. Just like his muscles, his power had a certain maximum lift, a cap on the amount of inertia he could push in or pull out of an object. Likewise, he couldn’t just hit the maximum lift over and over; he needed to rest after exerting himself too much. But also like his muscles, he’d exercised it enough to improve, and could invest or divest quite a bit at this point. It was nowhere near enough to match up to a higher-class meta, but far more than when he was a kid.

  Still, the ability to apply it on touch could let him fake a different power altogether. The chains motif that the low-ranking Iron Nails favored gave him an idea, but he’d have to visit a hardware store first. He rummaged through his containers to find a notepad and started making a list of purchases, stenciling neat letters onto the lined paper, before moving on to changing his face.

  A little bit of putty created a cheap, reusable nose alteration, and he had the proper dyes to change his hair from black to brown. Then, the gel to shape it back into ganger style, plastered against his skull. Finally, he sculpted in a scar down from his ear along his jawline, carefully recording the entire disguise with his instant camera so he could reproduce it in the future.

  After hiding the bulk of his credsticks at the bottom of one of the boxes of fabric supplies – he didn’t trust the self-storage to be really secure, but nobody would be that interested in taking old rags – Isaac slipped out and headed for the edge of the self-storage, vaulting over the fence and strolling out through the industrial district. Despite the stink of smoke and chemicals, the area was actually nicer than the near-slums of his apartment, or at least cleaner. He didn’t have to travel far to find a small hardware store, advertising cutters and wrenches, and ducked inside.

  Isaac had kept his jacket under his arm, so he didn’t look entirely like a ganger, but the old man behind the counter gave him a long look from under bushy eyebrows as he strolled into the store. It didn’t take long for Isaac to find the lengths of chain, of all kinds of grades, and pulled off a variety of lengths from the shelves, from one to eight feet, and a few accessories like carabiners and snaps. Some were normally metallic silver, but the higher grade chain was gold and that seemed better for the aesthetic. The man at the cash register grunted at him, and Isaac grunted back, but no other words were exchanged as the proprietor rang up the items and Isaac passed over the required cred tabs.

  Accessories in hand, Isaac returned to his self-storage by the same route and finished up his costume. The chains got clipped onto his clothes, and especially wrapped around his forearms. He worked the snap on one, testing how it unwound and trying to get it to slip into his hands rather than swing around randomly. Not that he needed to be particularly competent with them, nobody would expect that from a low class meta. He just didn’t want to look like a complete idiot.

  Only then did he close and lock the self-storage, heading over to Crash’s territory on his own two feet. Subtly lessening the inertia of his own body made the heel-and-toe express a lot more tolerable, and there was a reason that he hit the gym on a regular basis. It didn’t take that long to get back to ganger territory, and from there keep an eye out for the places where the ganger metas hung out.

  The normal gangers gave him a wide berth, considering his upscale duds and the chains wrapped around his arms, waist, and ankles. They clinked in a superbly irritating way, but he turned that into part of his swagger, as if he were using it to announce his presence. The kind of performative confidence he saw from young gangers was easy enough to imitate, even if he occasionally winced internally at how stupid it was.

  To get his acting down, he’d taken to observing people very closely, and he’d seen the results of false bravado all throughout foster care, at the hospital, and even in the gym. The people who really came out the best were the ones who almost never shouted or swaggered, and while they might have a hard edge, they were quite often very unassuming. Something to aspire to when he was older.

  He knew generally where to look from prior research, and it didn’t take too long to spot the hangout for the gang’s metas — mostly because he recognized Kevin from a distance, the bladed forearms flashing in the evening sun. Isaac took a moment to adjust his gait and mutter a little under his breath, just so he didn’t seem too familiar to Kevin. The lifts in his shoes combined with the rest of his costume disguise should be enough, but if he didn’t mask his voice it might well give him away completely.

  It was a seedy bar with a sign reading Lovely’s in no-longer-functional neon. The ganger at the entrance to act as bouncer, despite being no more than sixteen or seventeen, let Isaac pass without a second thought. The dim room smelled of stale beer, cigarettes, and the tang of more esoteric drugs. Isaac had to fight to keep from coughing or wrinkling his nose. Blacktime kept a very tight ship, by all accounts; Crash clearly did not.

  Aside from Kevin, there was a guy with a bald, bright-orange head and scaly skin, a humanoid fly in a rumpled trenchcoat, and a girl with ample top portions but an emaciated face with black pits for eyes. Two more young men shooting pool didn’t have any visible deformities, but they were still clearly part of the group of metas. There was one person in the bar, though, who was clearly separate.

  Off in a corner was a pale-skinned, black-haired girl with dark makeup and a spiked collar, the full goth look, sneering at everyone from behind a cigarette. With her small round face and an undeniable elegance despite her leather jacket, she could have been one of the poster superheroes if she were in another setting. Instead, she was lounging against the wall with a smoke and a soda, not part of the main group.

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  He sauntered forward like he owned the place, even if he’d never been there before, stepping around a puddle where someone had spilled something and not cleaned it up. His entrance got the attention of the orange guy, who turned around to glare at Isaac’s approach. Kevin followed the orange guy’s lead, turning and copying the scowl — which showed why he’d been so easily cowed by Isaac. He was already a follower.

  “Who the hell are you?” Orange demanded, drawing himself up, bulk visibly expanding as he planted himself in front of Isaac.

  “Chains.” The voice for this persona was low and rough, delivered matter-of-factly and without much emotion.

  “Yeah? That’s a stupid name, and you’ve got a stupid getup there,” Orange said, taking a step forward as Isaac reached to unclip one of the chains around his forearms, unwrapping it and letting the links pool in his hand. “We’re the Iron Nails, we don’t need—”

  Isaac let the metal links drop, having flexed some inertia into the chain while Orange was ranting. The sound of the impact echoed through the bar and cut Orange’s words off cold. They’d hit the ground as if they were more like five hundred pounds than one or two, and splintered the wooden floor. If he hadn’t had the attention of the other gangers before, his stunt had certainly gotten it.

  “Chains,” Isaac said succinctly, and undid the inertial investment before pulling the chain up and wrapping back around his forearm.

  “Hah!” The girl with black pits for eyes laughed and smacked the nearest table, causing it to ring oddly, like a gong. “Yeah, that’s great! Chains it is. So, new guy, who turned you on to the best gang in Star City?”

  “Kleppy,” he said shortly, which was a risk but not a major one. It wasn’t likely anyone would check, and even if they did, Kleppy would probably prefer to claim credit for recruiting a meta even if he hadn’t.

  “Great, yeah.” The girl nodded, then waved around at the people. “So this is Hard Edge, Blast Fist, Columbuzz, and I’m Black Banshee.” She started with Kevin, working her way around to herself. “Those two are the Smack Twins, and ignore the frozen bitch in the corner. That’s the boss’ daughter, so, you know.” Banshee shrugged. “Too good for the rest of us.”

  “Mm,” Isaac grunted, glad that he’d decided to be exceedingly taciturn with this persona. The voice would start hurting his throat if he tried to hold a normal conversation.

  “Have a drink!” Banshee said, waving behind the unmanned bar. Isaac had no idea where the stock came from, or how long it had been there, but he didn’t even trust the water. Instead of taking one of the bottle he just grunted in reply and leaned against the scuffed wood, watching the other metas. If all they did was hang out all day and drink and take drugs, it was going to be incredibly tedious to get a line on Crash himself.

  For a moment he felt very old, no matter that he had at most a year or two on anyone else in the room. It was just that they were acting like angsty teens – something he’d gotten over back when he’d gotten his first job – rather than actual adults. More disconcertingly, the goth girl was eyeing him, but he was hardly in a situation to appreciate it. It was nice to get some attention when, as a janitor, nobody had looked at him twice for years, but gangster women were too much.

  When it became clear he wasn’t interested in conversation, Black Banshee switched back to her previous conversation partners. Isaac half-listened to her complain about some friend or another while trying to figure out how to ask after Crash without breaking character. Some part of him was sour and twisting in nervousness, but being in character buried his worries, giving him at least the appearance of someone who knew what he was doing. Even if he was mostly playing it by ear.

  By sheer fortune, it turned out he didn’t have to wait long. After perhaps thirty minutes of increasingly inane conversation from Banshee’s group and an increasingly intense stare from the goth girl, the door opened again and an older man leaned into the bar.

  “Crash’s ready to see you,” he said, and the goth girl jumped up, flicking her cigarette to join a jumble of others in a cheap plastic ash tray.

  “C’mon,” she said, and made for the exit without seeing if anyone else was following. By the way the otherwise lackadaisical metas jumped to follow, it was clear that Crash, at least, had their obedience. Isaac joined them, his apparent coolness hiding the worry that came from knowing Crash could absolutely destroy Isaac, if the gang leader suspected something.

  The group meandered down the street in a loose gaggle, fetching up at an apartment block that was considerably nicer on the inside than the outside. Gone was the grunge and decay of the slums; instead the interior was clean, well-lit, and had visible security. Isaac had to stop himself from staring at the bubbles of turrets in the ceiling — the barrels weren’t pointed at him, but little lights winked on the casing of what seemed to be a pocket-sized minigun, and that was just what was obvious.

  Isaac had been fooled by the gang aesthetic and the apparent sloppiness of the area, but Crash was still a supervillain, and one of Blacktime’s at that. Of course he wasn’t just some random gang leader with powers. For a moment Isaac considered whether he should just abandon the entire attempt, maybe even go to Star Central and see what they thought of his powers — but then he thought of Cayleb and Glorybeam. He didn’t know what was going on there, but supers weren’t to be trusted either.

  Nobody else even blinked at the turrets or security gates as the girl led them into what looked like a cafeteria, where Crash himself leaned against a counter by a microwave. The supervillain looked like a bald wrestler sculpted out of metal, and he might as well have been — he was a tactical-class toughness and strength super, and even at full empowerment, Isaac’s chains wouldn’t have even scratched the guy.

  He also was wearing a getup that showed the goth girl came by her fashion honestly. Enormous spiky shoulderpads, spiked armbands, belts, and even anklets. The only difference was that he was in blue and white instead of black. When they arrived he was chatting with a woman with pink hair, who had at least a dozen guns strapped to her – at most – four-foot frame. Pinkieboom, a mercenary that Isaac only knew about because of the pinups Cayleb had ordered that one time. Not quite a supervillain herself, but she often ran in those circles.

  “Great, you’re all here!” Crash said enthusiastically as they filed in, his voice normal enough except for the volume being pinned to yell. “’Cept you, who’re you?” He pointed at Isaac.

  “That’s Chains.” Banshee spoke up before Isaac needed to. “Kleppy sent him over. He’s, well, he’s got super chain powers or something.”

  “Wish people would tell me these things,” Crash groaned. “Chains, then. You tough? Enough to take a hit?” Isaac inclined his head and charged both himself and his clothes with inertia, not saying anything. He wouldn’t have trusted his voice anyway.

  Without warning, Crash crossed the distance and landed a fist in Isaac’s gut. He could feel it, even through clothes that were practically armor, as he slid back a few inches. He didn’t topple, though, and merely stood upright, lifting his chin and raising his eyebrows at Crash.

  “Woo! Yeah!” The supervillain bellowed, giving Isaac a thumb’s up. “That’ll do, kid. You’ve got great potential.” Isaac merely nodded, though he was sure that Crash had given him basically a light tap, relative to what he could do.

  “Right, then!” He slapped his hands together with a sound like an anvil ringing. “We’ve got an armored truck to hit, it’s got something Blacktime wants. Pinkieboom tells me that they’ve got some metas as protection, just common-class, but that’s enough that you gotta be careful. Normal groups for you two, and Smokeshow, I’ll put the new kid as your bodyguard.” Crash pointed at the goth girl, and Isaac had to wonder exactly who had come up with that nom de guerre. It was terrible.

  “Thanks, dad,” Smokeshow said, in as dry a voice as Isaac had ever heard. If it was sarcasm, Isaac agreed. He would rather have her annoyed at him than trying to flirt; if nothing else, he didn’t want an overprotective Crash breathing down his neck. Not that he was planning to stick around or get involved with anyone. He just wanted enough of a run of the place to rifle through Crash’s stuff, and then he could ditch Chains and figure out his next move.

  “Right, so the truck will be coming through around three in the morning — don’t oversleep!” He glared at the Smack Twins, who looked uncomfortable under the scrutiny. “Chains, we meet up here at two.” He glanced at the clock, and Isaac followed his gaze. It was only six, so it was a good eight hours until the deadline. “So you’ve got until then.”

  “Got it,” Isaac ground out, holding back a cough from the gravel he put into his voice. Hopefully it sounded a little less obnoxiously put-on from the outside — or maybe it was fine if it did. He was supposed to be a punk kid, one way or another.

  “Now remember, we want the truck, and its contents, intact. Just drive off or incapacitate the mercs. Blast Fist, try not to kill anyone,” Crash warned the orange meta. “We don’t need that kind of trouble and Blacktime doesn’t like paying wergild.”

  “Yes, sir,” Blast Fist said, his attitude entirely different when talking to the metal man, but the warning matched Isaac’s first impression. The kid was spoiling for a fight, though if he was already a killer then he wasn’t exactly a kid anymore. And not someone Isaac really wanted to make friends with.

  “Right. Be back here at two,” Crash said, and waved them out. Isaac strolled unhurriedly after the rest of them, only to find Smokeshow waiting for him. She pointed her finger at him, and then beckoned for him to follow her a short distance away from the rest of the kids.

  “I don’t need protection,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him.

  “I know,” he said. It was obvious. Nobody was dumb enough to give an unknown babysitting duty, especially for a high-value individual like Crash’s own daughter. If anything, she was babysitting him, from Crash’s perspective.

  “You— oh?” Smokeshow looked surprised, as if she’d expected him to argue. And some teenage punk high on his own power probably would have, but Isaac had been a janitor for years, and he and Cayleb had seen enough super-fights that he had no illusions about what he could do.

  “Crash wants you to test me,” he said, letting one hand toy with the chains wrapped around his arms.

  “Guess you’re not just muscle,” Smokeshow muttered, pulling another cigarette from her cleavage and sticking it in her mouth. It lit of its own accord and she took a deep drag. Despite the smoke pluming into the air, he didn’t smell the characteristic bitterness that usually came with it. “Yeah, the point is to make sure you’re not the type to break and run when things go down. Or throw down with the other side.” Isaac mentally revised the danger level that Smokeshow represented up a notch.

  “Got it,” was all he said, and Smokeshow snorted.

  “Yeah, fine, whatever.” She shooed him away with one hand. “Get lost until tonight.”

  Isaac headed off, though part of him wished he could ask where everyone else was staying. Hanging out at the self-storage wasn’t exactly comfortable, and without any actual income he didn’t like the idea of renting out room at a hotel. The money from the softchip heist was significant, but he’d spent too long being frugal to feel anything but faint panic at seeing his cash reserves dwindle.

  He was tempted, very briefly, to call and inform Star Central about the hit on the armored truck, or convoy, or whatever it really was. But he’d already been Dimetria, already done that himself, and it didn’t seem like it was that terrible a thing so long as it was just a smash and grab and not murder. Then there was the fact that everyone would know right away that he had done it, and that’d not only burn the identity of Chains, but he also really didn’t want to piss off Crash. So all he did was get himself prepared, took a nap, and headed back to the slums in the early morning hours.

  The moon was just a crescent, but there were occasional flashes from the dark area where the ongoing Lunar Rebellion clashed with their masters. From what Isaac knew there were supers that regularly went between the Earth and the Moon, despite the empyrean crystal that englobed the world, but most people couldn’t make the trip. Sometimes it was just bizarre to think a war had been going on there for over a century, but it wasn’t like it actually affected Earth much — apart from that one exiled princess who was a superhero over in the Muscott Kingdom.

  Nobody bothered him as he walked down the street, even if there were far too many people loitering for that time of night. Or rather, nobody bothered Chains, the big, obviously meta ganger who had clearly been seen in the company of the gang’s other meta types. Instead he was on the receiving end of the sort of half-awed, half-jealous attention that he’d given his idols when he was younger. Isaac hated it, since Chains was definitely not someone to look up to, but just by having a power he was in the elite for any gang.

  When he arrived, Smokeshow and Columbuzz were already there with Crash, which Isaac knew meant something, but he wasn’t sure what. The fly-person was clearly more important than just muscle, though Isaac didn’t want to take the time to investigate the entire structure of Crash’s gang. The top man himself and his documents and communications were all Isaac cared about, and Chains was taciturn enough that a lack of social engagement was perfectly in character.

  “Early,” Crash boomed, slapping his hands together with that anvil ring noise. “Good, just stick with Smokeshow. We don’t know how you fight yet so I’d rather not put you in with the others. Just make sure you keep anything from hitting her.” Isaac inclined his head in a nod, content with that and frankly not looking forward to hitting an armored car anyway. It had been nerve-wracking enough the first time, and he’d only had to deal with normal guards.

  Everyone else filtered in over the next fifteen or twenty minutes, with Blast Fist being the last to arrive. Crash said nothing about it, but Blast Fist looked more than a little nervous to notice everyone else was there. Not that there was much of a tactical meeting; Crash just outlined a time and a place, and assignments on either overwatch or assault.

  “I’ll be making some noise somewhere else, as a diversion,” Crash concluded. “Keep Star Central from dispatching someone with some real power your way.”

  Isaac wasn’t sure how well that’d work; besides Glorybeam as the resident sovereign-class hero, there were several tactical and strategic-class types that technically could get to something like an armored car hijacking in short order. Though it wasn’t like Star Central’s manpower was actually unlimited, and the powerful supers often had far more important demands on their time than hijackings and robberies. The fight on the moon was just one small aspect of what the truly powerful supers dealt with.

  They all filed out of the meeting room and into waiting cars. Like Crash’s building, the cars looked beat-up on the outside, but the engines – ichor implosion by the distinctive chiming sound – ran smooth and powerful. Smokeshow drove, and he noticed that neither she nor the car smelled like smoke at all. There was just the strange, cold tang of chitin from Columbuzz and the scent of leather. Unlike what Isaac imagined, she kept a sedate and careful pace, so presumably aggressive driving was reserved for the getaway.

  Smokeshow parked the car on the side the road, and everyone got out. Himself, Columbuzz, and the Smack twins; everyone else was with Black Banshee. The Twins ran off toward the target intersection, while Smokeshow showed her powers for the first time, turning into smoke and pouring herself upward to a roof above. Which was annoying, because mobility was definitely not something either Isaac or Chains was good at. Instead, he was forced to ascend a fire escape and haul himself onto the roof, a task only made possible by the fact that he did go the gym all the time. His inability to deal with gravity was absolutely his greatest regret about his power.

  He managed to make it to where Smokeshow was standing, her cigarette already lit as she looked down onto nearly-empty streets illuminated by mostly-working streetlights. As Chains, he very clearly couldn’t complain about being left behind so he merely took up position next to her and waited. The superpower showed why she wasn’t worried about a physical threat; she could probably choke him to death if she really wanted, while being utterly immune to anything he could do. But, only if she were in smoke form, so protection from bullets was a genuine issue.

  The quiet actually gave him time to consider whether he really wanted to hit the armored van, but Crash specifically issuing orders against anything lethal assuaged most of his worries. Though he had to wonder what exactly Star City was shipping out in the dead of night that had Blacktime interested. Unless Crash was going to send it out right away, Isaac might do well to take it at the same time he grabbed what he could from Crash’s records.

  He was still chewing it over when the convoy appeared, an armored van with a pickup truck ahead of and behind it. Obvious, but at that time of night, only obvious to people looking for it. Smokeshow flicked her cigarette over the edge of the building, reaching up to tap a pin on her leather jacket that Isaac only belatedly recognized as a comms device of some sort.

  “Showtime,” she said, and smoke flooded the intersection.

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