Tombstone's office — upper floor
Tombstone had called it the same hour his men reported back from the docks, and everyone in the room knew that wasn't a good sign.
Shocker stood near the window, one arm still bandaged from the fight. He hadn't bothered changing out of the damaged costume. Maybe he thought it made a point.
Tombstone sat behind his desk and looked at him for a long moment without speaking. Then he said, quietly, "Herman Schultz." He let the name sit there. "You told me you had a plan. You told me you'd bring it in." He tilted his head slightly. "You came back without it. And with that." He glanced at the bandaged arm.
Shocker's face turned ugly. "Your intel was garbage. Nobody told me it could do what it did with those crystals — the shields, the ground spikes, none of it. I walked in blind and you're sitting there acting like that's my problem."
"It is your problem," Tombstone said in a calm voice. Just flat and certain. "You said you could handle it. I took you at your word."
"Then your word-taking needs work," Shocker said.
The room went very still. The men along the walls kept their eyes on the floor.
Tombstone looked at Shocker for another moment. Then he turned away and looked out the window at the city below. The conversation was apparently over as far as he was concerned, which was somehow worse than if he'd responded.
Shocker didn't say anything. He grabbed his jacket off the chair and left without being dismissed
Tombstone stood at the window for a while after the door closed.
He thought about the cost. Every operation disrupted. Every crew taken apart. Three weeks of something moving through his city like it owned the place — finding his shipments, dismantling his setups, bleeding him steady. He had footage of it. Three different forms, each one different from the last. Crystal. Red. Blue blur. One thing wearing all of them, and none of it his to control.
Not yet.
He turned from the window.
The men in the room looked up carefully.
"We've been playing defense for too long," Tombstone said. "Protecting shipments, setting traps, waiting for it to come to us." He walked slowly around the desk. "That's done. We're not doing that anymore."
One of his lieutenants waited.
"I want the city to cry," Tombstone said. "Not one operation. Not two. Everything, all at once. Banks, transit, public spaces — every crew we have hits something tomorrow. Simultaneously." He stopped in the center of the room. "If that thing wants to protect this city, make it protect all of it at once. Spread it thin. Run it into the ground. Force it to be everywhere until it can't be anywhere properly."
The lieutenant nodded slowly. "And if it can't cover everything?"
"Then people see their hero fail," Tombstone said. "And that's worth something too."
He let that land. Then he looked slowly around the room, from face to face.
"No one lives well by getting in my way," he said. "Anyone who doesn't follow through tonight —" he paused, just long enough — "finish them off."
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
He walked back to the desk and sat down. "Get it organized tonight. I want confirmation from every crew lead before morning."
The men moved.
It hit the next day like a switch had been flipped.
Three banks in separate boroughs, simultaneous. Armed crews, fast and coordinated, in and out before the first response units were even dispatched. A subway line held up during morning rush, passengers evacuated onto the platform. A shopping center in midtown cleared by a gang that fired twice into the ceiling and started taking registers while people ran for the exits.
Police scanners overloaded within the first twenty minutes. Dispatch was routing units in four directions at once and pulling resources from everywhere to cover ground that kept expanding. By midmorning the mayor's office had called an emergency session and schools across three districts had been shut down and sent home.
The city was loud. Exactly as ordered.
And somewhere across all of it, the jack was already moving — fast and constant, jumping from one incident to the next, buying time here, stopping something there, never quite fast enough to be everywhere at once.
In his office above the city, Tombstone poured a glass of water and sat down with the incident reports coming in from his crews. He read through them without rushing.
Most had gone cleanly. A few had been interrupted. The numbers were acceptable.
He set the reports down and looked out at the skyline.
Somewhere out there the crystal alien, the red one, the blue blur — whatever it was — was running itself ragged across a city that was burning in a dozen places at once. And it couldn't stop all of it. Nobody could stop all of it. That had never been the goal.
The goal was exhaustion. Overextension. Mistakes.
And tired things made mistakes.
Tombstone picked up his glass. "Take your time," he said quietly to no one. "You'll run out of it eventually."
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