Chapter 2: Sibling Reconnaissance
Taylor climbed into the passenger seat of Danny's truck at 7:45 AM and didn't say a word.
The morning was gray. Low clouds, the promise of rain that never quite delivered. I pulled out of the driveway and headed toward Winslow High School, navigating streets that my hands knew better than my mind.
Three blocks. Five. Taylor stared out the window.
"How's school?" I asked.
She tensed. Subtle—a tightening of the shoulders, a stillness that hadn't been there before.
"Fine."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
I drove. The silence stretched.
In the web serial, Taylor's bullying had been relentless. Emma Barnes and Sophia Hess and Madison Clements, the unholy trinity that had made her life hell. The locker. The tampons and the rot and the panic attack that had given her powers.
But that was three months ago. And whatever Evan Hebert had been doing during that time, it apparently hadn't included paying attention to his sister.
I pulled up to the school. Red brick, chain-link fence, the kind of institutional architecture that had given up on inspiring anything except resignation. Students clustered near the entrance, phones out, conversations happening in the small world way of teenagers.
Taylor grabbed her bag. Paused with her hand on the door handle.
"Why are you being weird?" she asked.
"What do you mean?"
"The driving. The cooking. The—" She gestured vaguely. "You haven't talked to me this much in months."
I considered lying. Decided against it.
"Maybe I should have been talking to you more," I said. "Maybe I'm trying to fix that."
She stared at me. Searching for the catch, the punchline, the inevitable disappointment.
"Whatever," she said finally. She got out. Slammed the door.
I watched her walk toward the building. Watched the way she hunched her shoulders. Watched Emma Barnes appear at the top of the steps, red hair like a warning flag.
Emma saw Taylor. Emma smiled.
I pulled away before I did something stupid.
The Docks smelled like diesel and desperation.
I parked the truck near the union office—Danny would need it later—and walked. The streets here were different from the residential neighborhoods near the Hebert house. Harder. More honest about what Brockton Bay had become.
Abandoned warehouses with ABB tags on the walls. Red and gold, the colors of a dragon. The gang claimed this territory, and everyone who lived here knew it.
I walked the perimeter. Memorized the patrol patterns. Noted the corners where lookouts stood pretending to smoke, the alleyways that dead-ended into chain-link and broken glass, the buildings that still had power running to them despite looking abandoned.
The warehouse district. This was where Lung would hunt the Undersiders in two days. This was where Taylor would intervene. This was where the story began.
I found the spot I was looking for—a recessed loading dock between two larger buildings. Good sight lines. Multiple escape routes. Close enough to the main action to matter, far enough to have options.
If I wanted to intercept Lung, this was where I'd do it.
"And then what?" asked a voice in my head that sounded suspiciously like my own. "You're a baseline human in a world of people who can turn into dragons. What exactly is your plan?"
I didn't have a plan. Not yet.
But I was getting one.
The E88 markers appeared three blocks north. Swastikas and iron crosses, spray-painted with the casual contempt of people who knew no one would wash them off. The Empire Eighty-Eight. Nazis with powers. Kaiser and Hookwolf and Purity and a dozen others whose names I remembered from the wiki.
I crossed through their territory quickly. Kept my head down. Didn't make eye contact.
The territorial boundaries in Brockton Bay were real. Cross the wrong line at the wrong time and you stopped being a person and started being a message. The gangs understood this. The police understood this. The Protectorate understood this and pretended they didn't.
I circled back toward the Docks. Checked my mental map against the reality on the ground.
ABB territory: mostly accurate. The warehouses, the shipping containers, the blocks near the water. Lung's domain.
E88 territory: a few blocks further north than I'd expected. They'd been expanding, probably. Taking advantage of some shift in the balance of power that hadn't made it into the web serial.
Merchant territory: scattered. Less organized. The dregs of parahuman crime.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the Undersiders. A group of teenage villains working for a snake in a suit, running heists and building toward something none of them fully understood.
I wanted to find them. Wanted to make contact before everything went sideways.
But not yet. Not until I had something to offer beyond a stranger's face and a head full of secrets.
First, I needed to survive Lung.
I got back to the house before Taylor. Made dinner again—chicken this time, baked with vegetables I'd bought on the way home. Danny was already at the table when she walked through the door.
She stopped. Looked at the food. Looked at me.
"Two days in a row," she said.
"I'm trying something new."
"Uh huh."
She sat down. Started eating.
Conversation happened in fragments. Danny asked about the union—budget problems, staff cuts, the slow death of an industry that had already died. Taylor didn't volunteer anything about school. I didn't push.
But something was different. Some tension in the air that hadn't been there yesterday.
"I got a B on my history test," Taylor said eventually.
Danny looked up.
"That's great, sweetheart."
Taylor shrugged. But she was watching me, not him.
"Mrs. Knott said I did well on the essay section."
"What was it about?" I asked.
"The French Revolution. The Terror."
I thought about revolution. About the violence that came after, the purges and the guillotines and the way idealism curdled into something darker. I thought about Brockton Bay and its cape population and the war that was coming.
"Robespierre was a piece of work," I said.
Taylor's eyebrows rose. "You know about Robespierre?"
"I know about a lot of things."
She stared at me. Trying to reconcile whatever she thought she knew about her brother with the person sitting across from her.
"Who are you?" she asked quietly.
Danny looked up.
I smiled. It felt strange on this face.
"Just someone trying to be better," I said. "Eat your chicken."
After dinner. After dishes. After the house settled into its nighttime rhythms.
I went to my room. Locked the door. Pulled out the city map I'd pinned to the wall.
April 11. Two days.
The warehouse district. Lung. The Undersiders.
I traced the route with my finger. Three miles from the Hebert house. Twenty minutes at a jog, longer if I had to avoid patrols.
What did I actually know about Lung?
Pyrokinetic. Scaled with conflict—the longer he fought, the stronger he got. At full power, he was a dragon in truth, forty feet of fire and fury that had fought an Endbringer to a standstill. The leader of the ABB. A monster pretending to be a man.
And in two days, he was going to hunt a group of teenage villains because he thought they'd killed some of his men.
I had no powers. No weapons. No backup.
But I had something that might be better: I knew how the story was supposed to go. I knew where Lung would be. I knew when he'd be vulnerable.
And I knew, with the certainty of someone who'd read the web serial twice, that dying to him would change everything.
The thought should have scared me. It didn't.
I'd already died once. Waking up in a stranger's body didn't exactly leave room for fear of mortality.
Tomorrow, I'd scout the site at night. I'd map escape routes and hiding spots and the exact location where Lung would first encounter the Undersiders.
And on April 11, I'd walk into a dragon's territory and see what happened when I pushed my luck past the breaking point.
Taylor said goodnight from the hallway. First time in weeks, Danny had whispered after she'd gone.
I turned off the light and lay in the dark, counting heartbeats that weren't mine.
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