CHAPTER 36: LISA KNOWS
The storage room was quiet except for our breathing.
Lisa set her tablet on a crate and stood with her arms crossed, blocking the only exit. The echolocation painted her posture—confident, prepared, the stance of someone who'd planned this conversation in advance.
"I've been compiling evidence," she said. "Since the bank job. Since before the bank job, actually—since Cavalier."
I said nothing. Waited.
"You reacted to that name like you knew the full story. Not just that he existed—that you knew what happened to him, how, why. The same way you've reacted to a dozen other details you shouldn't know." Lisa pulled up a file on her tablet. "I've been keeping track."
She scrolled through the list, each item a data point in her investigation.
"The bank robbery. You weren't surprised—not about the plan, not about the Ward response, not about anything except Shadow Stalker's solo infiltration. That one threw you. Why? Because something changed from what you expected."
Another scroll.
"The E88 fracture zone. You suggested route adjustments that were tactically brilliant—too brilliant for someone who'd never operated in that territory. You knew the patrol patterns before we scouted them."
Another.
"Coil's surveillance hub. You looked at that building for exactly four seconds during extraction. Not scanning—cataloguing. You already knew what you were looking for."
She set down the tablet.
"And then there's the deaths. Lung. Oni Lee. Hookwolf. Stormtiger. Cricket. You don't die randomly. You shop. You evaluate targets before engaging, position yourself for specific confrontations, and accept deaths that maximize your fragment yield."
The silence stretched. Lisa's heartbeat was steady through the echolocation—she wasn't nervous, wasn't uncertain. She'd run the calculations and reached a conclusion.
"You know things about this world that no one should," she said. "Not precognition—something else. The timing is wrong for precog. You know the past and the future, but you also know alternative versions. Things that didn't happen here but happened somewhere."
Her eyes met mine.
"You've read the script."
I could have denied it. Could have deflected, distracted, deployed the same evasions that had worked for weeks.
But Lisa's power had already filled in the gaps. Denying now would just confirm her conclusions through the patterns of my lies.
"Partial credit," I said.
"How partial?"
"I don't have precognition. What I have is... detailed knowledge. Of events, people, outcomes. Things that are going to happen—or were going to happen, before I started changing them."
Lisa's expression didn't change, but her breathing shifted slightly. Processing.
"The Winslow intervention," she said. "Shadow Stalker. You knew who she was before you confronted her. You knew her civilian identity, her schedule, her vulnerabilities."
"Yes."
"The bank robbery. You knew the Ward response timing, the extraction complications, everything except Shadow Stalker's solo move."
"Yes. That diverged from what I expected. She's more aggressive in this timeline—I made her that way when I confronted her."
Lisa sat down on a crate, tablet forgotten.
"This is the most terrifying thing anyone has ever told me."
She said it with the same tone she used for jokes—dry, controlled, the gallows humor that served as her armor. I recognized it because I wore the same kind.
"How much do you know?" she asked.
"A lot. Major events, key players, power interactions, timeline." I paused. "But the knowledge degrades. Every change I make creates butterflies. The more I alter, the less reliable my predictions become."
"Bakuda's bombing campaign. You know how it ends."
"I knew how it ended. Before the butterflies. Now..." I shook my head. "The general trajectory is probably similar, but the details are shifting. She's three days ahead of schedule. That changes things."
Lisa was quiet for a long moment. Her power was probably working overtime—verifying what it could, flagging the gaps, building a model of what I was and what I knew.
"Why tell me?" she asked finally.
"Because you were going to figure it out anyway. Controlled disclosure is better than forced revelation."
"You're quoting me."
"I'm learning from you."
She almost smiled. Almost.
"What do you want?" she asked. "What's the deal?"
I'd thought about this. The conversation had been inevitable since she first caught my Cavalier reaction, and I'd spent weeks preparing for the moment it arrived.
"You become my validator," I said. "I share predictions. You cross-reference against your power. We identify where my knowledge is still accurate and where it's drifted."
"And in exchange?"
"I give you Coil."
Lisa's expression flickered—the first real emotion I'd seen since she started the confrontation. Not surprise, exactly. Something closer to hunger.
"What do you know about Coil?"
"His power. Timeline splitting—he experiences two parallel realities simultaneously and chooses which one to keep. Every decision he makes, he's running two versions and picking the winner."
"That's—" Lisa stopped. Her power was working, testing the claim against everything she knew about their employer. "That's terrifying. And explains a lot."
"His civilian identity. Thomas Calvert. PRT consultant. He has legitimate access to Protectorate intelligence, which he uses to run his criminal operations."
Lisa's face went still. Her power couldn't verify that directly—not without more data—but she could see the shape of it, the way it fit with everything she'd observed.
"And his next major play," I continued. "Dinah Alcott. A twelve-year-old girl in Brockton Bay. Precognitive. He's going to kidnap her and use her power to optimize his timeline selection."
"When?"
"Soon. Days, maybe a week. After the Bakuda situation resolves one way or another."
Lisa stood up abruptly, pacing the small room. Her movements were sharp, controlled—the physical expression of a mind running calculations at dangerous speed.
"You're giving me enough to burn him," she said. "Why?"
"Because he's going to betray you eventually. All of you. The Undersiders are tools to him, and tools get discarded when they stop being useful."
"And you?"
"I'm planning to be more useful than he expects. Useful enough that when the betrayal comes, I'm positioned to survive it."
Lisa stopped pacing. Her eyes found mine.
"You're playing a longer game than anyone in this city."
"I'm trying to. The problem is, the game keeps changing. Bakuda's ahead of schedule. Leviathan—" I caught myself. "Future events may shift. The timeline I'm working from is becoming less reliable every day."
"Leviathan." Lisa's voice was flat. "You know about Leviathan."
"Mid-May. Brockton Bay. The city gets devastated." I paused. "In the original timeline. I don't know if my changes will affect that."
Lisa sat back down, heavily.
"How do you function?" she asked. "Knowing all of this. The bombs, the gangs, the Endbringer. How do you get up in the morning?"
"I died five times." Six now, but she didn't know about Cricket yet. "Dying gives you perspective. So does coming back."
The silence stretched between us. Lisa's power was still working—I could see it in the micro-movements of her face, the way her eyes unfocused slightly as she processed information.
"Okay," she said finally. "I accept the deal."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that." She picked up her tablet. "I've been trying to figure out what you are for weeks. Now I know—or I know enough. You're an asset with insider information, and you're offering to share that information in exchange for validation and support."
"That's a cold way to put it."
"It's an accurate way." She met my eyes. "I don't trust you. Not completely. But I trust that our interests align, at least for now. That's enough to work with."
She moved toward the door, then stopped.
"The Dinah Alcott thing. I'm going to verify independently. If you're right—"
"I'm right."
"If you're right, we'll need to discuss how to handle it. Coil's not someone we can move against directly."
"I know. But having the information gives us options."
Lisa nodded once and unlocked the door.
"Get some sleep," she said. "Tomorrow's going to be complicated."
She left. The door closed behind her, and I was alone in the storage room—the anchor room, the place where I'd set my respawn point weeks ago.
The echolocation tracked Lisa's footsteps through the loft, her heartbeat steady and controlled. She was already planning, already calculating. The Coil intel would change things. How much, I couldn't predict.
Alliance formed, I thought. One secret partially breached. The game continues.
I pulled up the system interface, checking my status out of habit.
[DEATHS: 6][TIER: 1 — KILLER'S ECHO ACTIVE][FRAGMENTS: 3/3][ALLIANCE STATUS: LISA TATTLETALE — STRATEGIC PARTNER]
The last line was new. The system was tracking relationships now, or at least acknowledging them.
I closed the interface and lay down on the floor of the anchor room, letting the echolocation paint the loft in sound. Lisa's movements in her room. The dogs settling in Rachel's corner. Brian's footsteps—pausing outside the storage room door for a moment, then moving on.
He knew I was in here. Knew Lisa had wanted to talk. Chose not to interrupt.
Warmth and secrets, I thought. The currency of this life.
Sleep came slowly, and when it did, I dreamed of bombs and timelines and a twelve-year-old girl I'd never met.
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