Chapter 7: The Locker That Won't Happen
The meeting with Tattletale could wait.
I'd texted her that morning—the Boardwalk bench, noon, we'd set it up—and told her something came up. Family emergency. She'd responded with a single emoji: 🤔. No argument, no demands. Just that knowing little face that said she was filing away my cancellation as another data point.
She could wait. Taylor couldn't.
I parked Danny's truck across the street from Winslow High at 11:47 AM, engine off, window cracked. The school looked exactly like I remembered from the web serial descriptions: red brick, chain-link, the architecture of institutional surrender. Underfunded. Understaffed. The kind of place where bad things happened because no one was paid enough to prevent them.
The lunch bell rang at 11:50. Students poured out of the building like water from a broken dam, spreading across the courtyard and parking lot in clusters of social hierarchy. I watched them move—the athletes near the gym entrance, the stoners by the back fence, the invisible kids who drifted between groups without belonging to any.
Taylor was one of the invisible ones. I spotted her near the bathrooms, hunched shoulders, head down, moving with the careful efficiency of someone who'd learned to predict where the predators would be.
She wasn't alone.
Emma Barnes appeared from the east entrance with Sophia Hess and Madison Clements flanking her like bodyguards. Red hair, confident stride, the smile of someone who'd never been told no by anyone who mattered. In the web serial, she'd been Taylor's best friend before something broke between them. The betrayal had been detailed across multiple arcs—Emma's assault, her meeting with Sophia, the twisted logic that turned friendship into warfare.
I'd read those arcs twice. Seeing it in person was different.
They cornered Taylor near the bathroom doors. I couldn't hear the words from across the street, but I could read the body language: Emma leading, animated and performative; Sophia hanging back, coiled and physical, the muscle in a three-person operation; Madison playing innocent, the witness who'd swear nothing happened.
Taylor made herself small. Shoulders in. Eyes down. Survival mode.
My hands clenched on the steering wheel until my knuckles went white.
The locker. In the original timeline, the locker was coming—a few days, maybe a week, the exact date fuzzy in my memory. They'd trap Taylor in her own locker with used tampons and biological waste, leave her there until she triggered, and the most dangerous parahuman in Brockton Bay would be born screaming in darkness and filth.
I was going to stop it.
The Brockton Bay Public Library was three miles from Winslow. I found a computer terminal in the back corner and started digging.
Public records. Staff directories. Complaint histories. The information was scattered across municipal databases and school board minutes, but I was patient, and I knew what I was looking for.
Winslow High School was negligent by design.
Budget cuts had stripped it to the bone—one guidance counselor for eight hundred students, security officers who rotated shifts so often they never recognized anyone, administrators who'd learned that looking away was easier than paperwork. The complaint system was a black hole. Parents reported bullying; nothing happened. Teachers documented incidents; nothing happened. The pattern was consistent across five years of records.
Going through channels wouldn't work. The system was broken, and Taylor didn't have time for me to fix it.
I needed leverage. I needed something that would make the bullying stop without requiring anyone at Winslow to actually do their jobs.
Sophia Hess.
Shadow Stalker.
Ward.
I pulled up the Parahuman Response Team's public roster on another terminal. The information was sanitized—cape names and classifications only, no civilian identities—but I didn't need the PRT's website to tell me what I already knew. Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, a Ward on probation for excessive violence, assigned to Winslow as part of her community service.
The bullying wasn't just allowed. It was protected. No administrator was going to discipline a Ward, especially one whose handler at the PRT probably didn't know—or didn't care—about her extracurricular activities.
But Sophia's probation was conditional. One wrong move, one violation serious enough to make headlines, and her deal with the PRT evaporated. She'd go to juvie, or worse.
I was about to become that violation.
The library parking lot was empty when I finished my research. I sat in the truck with the engine off and thought about Taylor.
The locker. I'd read the scene a dozen times, but reading wasn't the same as imagining. The darkness. The smell—rot and copper and things that should never touch skin. The claustrophobia of a space too small to turn around in. The panic building until something broke inside her mind and powers emerged as the only escape.
Taylor survived the locker. She became Skitter, then Weaver, then Khepri. She saved the world and lost her mind and maybe died at the end of the story, depending on how you interpreted the finale.
But she didn't have to go through the locker. That trauma, that breaking point—I could prevent it. I could give her a chance to become someone who wasn't shaped by that specific darkness.
The math was simple. Sophia was the key. Remove Sophia's protection, and the bullying stopped. Remove the bullying, and the locker never happened. Remove the locker, and Taylor's trigger event might be different—or might never come at all.
That last part scared me. Taylor's power was essential to the story. Without her bugs, without her multitasking, without the ruthless efficiency she developed fighting villains and Endbringers, Gold Morning might go differently. Might go worse.
But I couldn't leave her in that locker. I'd read the web serial twice, but I'd also looked into Taylor's eyes at the breakfast table. She was real now. Her suffering would be real.
Some things mattered more than timeline preservation.
I started the truck and drove home, planning how to confront a Ward about her hobby of tormenting my sister.
Danny was working late. Taylor was in her room, door closed, doing homework or cape research or whatever she did in the evenings when she thought no one was paying attention.
I stood in the kitchen and wrote three bullet points on a napkin:
Sophia Hess = Shadow Stalker. Ward on probation. Can't afford exposure.Handler at PRT. Probation terms include "no vigilante activity." Bullying qualifies.Cornered predators fight. She'll try violence first. Don't flinch.
The last point was the important one. Sophia was a cape. I was a baseline human with one resurrection under my belt and a system that wouldn't make me dangerous for another four or five deaths. If she decided to solve her problem with shadow-form and a crossbow, I'd die.
But I'd come back. And when I did, the anonymous package would go to the media anyway.
I held the napkin over the stove burner and watched it catch. Orange flame, not Lung's fire, but my skin still prickled at the memory. The phantom heat from my first death was almost gone now—just an echo when I wasn't expecting it.
The napkin turned to ash. I washed my hands and started dinner.
Tomorrow, I'd wait outside Winslow's back entrance at 3:15 PM. Sophia always exited alone—she didn't have friends, just co-conspirators, and she didn't walk with Emma after school.
Tomorrow, I'd tell a predator that I knew her name. And I'd see what happened when the leash got yanked.
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