With the afternoon traffic of people heading home from work, it took twice as long to make it back to my house as it had to get out there to Brian’s apartment in the first place. We mostly avoided the worst of it, thankfully, but by the time we were pulling into the driveway, the shadows had grown long, and the sun was well on its way to setting. The autumn chill seeped into our fingers, gnawing at the joints and robbing as much warmth from us as it could.
It was negligible, but still enough to chase us inside the front door as quickly as we could manage. Just because Brockton Bay rarely ever got cold enough to be called freezing didn’t mean the weather was perfectly balmy all year round, it just meant that the temperatures only occasionally swung to the extremes, so even when it snowed, you could usually get away with a medium weight jacket and a scarf instead of bundling up in six different layers.
Hell, if you weren’t expecting to be out for very long, a hoodie might be enough to keep you comfortable.
It was fortunate that the utilities hadn’t been completely shut off at the house, however, because that meant that all we had to do to kick the furnace on was to set the temperature to 69F — “Heh,” Rika chuckled impishly — and let it do its work. In the meantime, Emiya materialized and immediately headed for the kitchen to start preparing dinner.
“So what was that all about?” Rika asked as we settled back in. She threw herself back on the couch, sinking in with a sigh. Mash and Ritsuka were a bit less careless reclaiming their seats. “I thought we were going out to check on your old friends, Senpai, but all we did was visit a warehouse and an apartment building and stare at them from afar for a minute or two.”
I should’ve expected that would come up fairly quickly.
“That factory was supposed to be the Undersiders’ hideout,” I told her. “But when I went looking, I found that no one has been there in weeks, maybe months. Whatever’s happened to them, they’re not staying there any longer and haven’t been for a while, so there wasn’t any point in sticking around. And if anyone’s watching it to check for people coming after the Undersiders, then we would’ve stuck a giant neon sign on our backs if we went in to start combing through the place.”
I didn’t see that as particularly likely, but Coil wasn’t the kind of person you underestimated.
Rika nodded. “Okay. But what about the apartment?”
“Would you have been particularly accommodating if you came home to find half a dozen strangers camped out on the couch of your apartment?” I asked pointedly. “Even if they said all they wanted was to talk?”
The three of them grimaced, and Rika had to admit, “Uh, no, I guess not.”
“But couldn’t we have left a note or something?” asked Mash.
I shook my head. “Still would’ve freaked him out. Random strangers asking for a meeting? Best case, he assumes it’s a prank and ignores it. Worst case, he thinks the E88 are targeting him and gets spooked. Brian’s too careful to take a risk like that, especially with Aisha in the apartment with him.”
The twins shared a look, but whatever it was that had gotten their attention in there, they didn’t say and let it slide. Instead, Ritsuka asked, “So I guess that means we’re giving up on the Undersiders as a lead?”
“No,” I said, “no, we’re not.”
His brow furrowed and he leaned forward in his seat. “But you said that they wouldn’t be able to help us.”
“Not the way we were hoping they would,” I clarified. “There’s still a few things I could learn about the state of the city just by talking to Brian, it’s just that…the Undersiders as a topic are going to have to be off-limits. Coil, too, at least directly. If I want to find out anything useful, I’ll need to be subtle. Talk to him like a normal person and strike up casual conversation, maybe pretend to be coming back from a months’ long trip out of town and ask what’s changed while I was away.” I paused, and then added, “Alone.”
Surprise rippled across the group. “Wait, you mean, like, without us?” asked Rika. She sat up straight. “Is this another thing like with Accord? Super crazy guy with super specific kinks and all? Because I can totally do subtle, Senpai, you just have to say the word.”
A grimace pulled at my face; I ignored Ritsuka choking down a laugh. “Nothing like that, no. Just that it’ll be harder to come off as natural with a whole entourage accompanying me.” I stretched out a hand, and as though summoned, Jackie appeared beneath it, hair threading through my fingers. “I’ll take Jackie along in spirit form and have Arash watching from a distance, but there’s no telling whether Coil has any Servants watching them, so it’s better to keep as low a profile as I can.”
“We’ll protect Mommy,” Jackie promised with a smile.
Aífe appeared, too, leaning against the wall with her arms folded. “And the rest of us? While you’re occupied, what are we meant to be doing?”
A good question. Given that the only other member of the Undersiders I was confident I could hope to find on my own happened to be Rachel, sending them to every dog shelter in the city to check for her was liable to provoke a fight from her, and that wouldn’t accomplish anything I wanted.
My lips curled into a small smile. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t do exactly the same thing I was, with just a…bit more of a chance of some hands-on investigation.
“How do you guys feel about going out on a date?”
Mash, Ritsuka, and Rika’s eyes went wide, and red slowly crept across Ritsuka and Mash’s cheeks and down the tips of their ears as Rika let out a slow, high-pitched squeak not too dissimilar from air being let out of a balloon. An octave higher than normal, she asked, “J-just what do you mean by that, Senpai? I don’t care what the manga says, Onii-chan and I don’t have that kind of relationship!”
What? No, of course not.
“I meant him and Mash and you and Emiya,” I told her, and then added, “and not for real anyway. I mean a pretend date, something that’s obvious and meant to grab attention. You’re going to be trying to find out the same things I am, just from a different angle.”
The tension bled out of them, although Mash and Ritsuka’s faces were slow to go back to normal. “O-okay,” said Ritsuka. “That s-sounds…um, a little more normal for you, Senpai. What…what are you expecting us to find out?”
If we were lucky? “The state of the gangs in the city. If you want to group up and stick together — like on a double date — then you can wander around downtown in the E88’s territory and see if someone decides to cause some trouble. With Emiya and Mash there, you shouldn’t have any problems, even if one of the heavy hitter capes decides to get involved.” I glanced at Mash. “Although we’re going to have to get you all more normal looking clothes to dress in. Mash especially can’t go out looking like that forever. We probably should’ve picked something up for her back in Boston.”
“Oh,” said Mash. “That won’t be a problem, Miss Taylor.”
She closed her eyes for a brief moment, and then, with a flash of light, she was sitting there in her normal outfit, down to the glasses perched atop the bridge of her nose. She offered me a faint smile. “See?”
It was normal enough, I guess. A little unusual, but not as eye-catching as her leotard, stockings, and gloves, all so skintight that it was a wonder she didn’t worry about showing off embarrassing details to the casual onlooker. She could pass for normal like that.
The twins, however…
“We’ll have to find something more normal for the three of us, then,” I told them. “Our mystic codes should still have our swimsuit configurations, so we can just pick something to wear over those.”
Rika’s eyes lit up, even as her brother grimaced. “So you’re saying we’re going clothes shopping.”
“For one outfit each, yes. Nothing fancy, just some casual clothes that don’t look like a uniform.”
“I could project something,” Emiya offered from the kitchen. “It’s no extra trouble.”
For a moment, Rika’s face fell as relief swept across Ritsuka’s.
“I don’t think any of us want to take the risk of it disappearing if your concentration slips,” I replied, “so no. It’s better if we just go out and buy some clothes to wear.”
“Not quite how that works,” he said, “but if that’s what you want, fine.”
And he went back to cooking.
“Depending on how that goes,” I continued, “you can eat at a restaurant in ABB territory and see if anyone there tries to start anything. I won’t promise authentic Japanese cuisine, but it’s probably better than whatever American-run restaurants advertise, so you might manage to find something to your liking.”
The twins exchanged a glance. “So,” Rika began slowly, “what are we supposed to do if we do get accosted, Senpai? I’m all for a little senseless violence against gangbangers in gaudy colors, but that’s not really why we’re here, is it?”
“Are we just asking them questions,” Ritsuka agreed, “or…?”
“If you can, yes, capture one and interrogate him,” I said. “I’ll be heading to the library to see what I can find on the gang situation here in Brockton tomorrow afternoon after I meet with Brian,” something I should have had Rika do down in Boston while she was looking up Accord, the Teeth, and the Undersiders, “but if Bakuda is still in play, then that’s something we’ll have to worry about in the future. It’ll pay to know beforehand where she is or what she’s doing.”
For when Coil inevitably betrayed us. I…wasn’t sure if it was a guarantee otherwise — I was self-aware enough to realize that my perspective on him was skewed by personal experience — but the instant he found out that he was dead in proper history was the instant he became our enemy for sure. I didn’t need to know him at all to know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
If he had poached Bakuda from Lung, then that was going to be a major problem.
“And what if none of the fish bite?” asked Rika. “Come to think of it, what are the odds something like that even happens, Senpai? I mean, unless you’re telling me everyone in the city belongs to one gang or another, then I’ve got entirely different questions. Like, why? And, how? And how is this city still standing?”
“I’m not sure.” Not the least of which because I wasn’t sure if Coil had used the Servants working for him to clean house, which is something I wanted to find out. “You’re Japanese, which should theoretically get the attention of both the E88 and the ABB for entirely different reasons, but that doesn’t mean they’ll start going after you on the spot. If nothing happens by the time you’ve eaten and made your way back here…”
Then I guess we were just going to have to rely on whatever I managed to find between Brian and the internet.
“…we’ll figure something out.”
Rika groaned and flopped back onto the couch with a sigh. “This is a whole lot of effort for something that sure doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with finding the Grail and fixing this place.”
“I kind of agree with her,” said Ritsuka. “Senpai, I know this is your city and finding out what happened to the people you care about is important to you, but how does this help us get the Grail that we know is somewhere to the west?”
It wasn’t a bad point, but —
“We’re trying to figure out Coil’s position in all of this,” I told them. “The state of things in the rest of the city will tell us a lot about how Coil is running it and what to expect from him going into the meeting the day after tomorrow. That’ll tell us more about what kind of aid we can expect from him in retrieving the Grail and how badly he can screw us over when the time comes to actually go after it.”
“Oh,” said Mash. “We’re doing research on a potential enemy.”
I nodded her way. “Exactly. Right now, Coil doesn’t know anything more about us than what Accord told him and the only way he has of fixing that is to meet us himself. We, on the other hand, can look around and find out what he’s been doing since he became the de facto leader of the eastern US, what sort of local allies we could make to oppose him if it comes down to it, and what sort of negotiation tactics he might employ against us when we meet with him.”
Ritsuka grimaced and Rika pulled a face, mouth curling and nose wrinkling with disgust. “Allying? With Neonazis?”
“When the alternative is the incineration of human history and all of mankind with it? Yes.” She didn’t look pleased by that, although she didn’t reject that truth out of hand. “We had a term for it here, Rika. We called it the Truce. For things that were too big or too important to turn away help, no matter who was giving it. No squabbling, no grudges, no taking advantage to settle a score. You fought side by side with people you might have been fighting against yesterday for the sake of protecting the place you called home. And everyone respected it.”
For the most part, at least. I knew better than most that it wasn’t perfect and not everyone observed all of the niceties all of the time.
Since none of them looked like they liked that idea, I decided to throw them a bone. “It’s all hypotheticals right now anyway. If there’s no E88 and no ABB, then there’s no one to ally with, is there?”
“I guess not,” Ritsuka said, and reluctantly, allowed, “and it’s not like we haven’t teamed up with some…people that have done some pretty terrible things.”
“Yeah, except Jalter doesn’t spout racist, xenophobic doo-doo all the time,” Rika grumbled.
And Mordred, despite being hot-headed and gruff, was actually pretty loyal, as long as you treated her right. I might not have been all that unused to the idea of working with so-called ‘villains,’ but even I wouldn’t have thought I would be teaming up with such an infamous one when I first joined up with Chaldea.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” I said. (“Or burn it down,” Rika muttered.) “For now, we’ll have dinner, and later on tonight, we’ll check a few other places to see if we can find a few more clues about what’s going on here. Not the Undersiders, this time. I think first, we should see if we can’t do things the simple way and bribe Faultline for information.”
“Faultline?” said Ritsuka.
“Oh,” said Mash. “She’s the mercenary, right, Miss Taylor?”
I nodded. “Right. If she won’t take our cards for the money, then I have answers to a few questions she’s been asking. We might be able to barter with her for that.”
At the very least, dropping hints about Cauldron should be enough to get us in the front door.
“So how do we get into contact with her and her team?” asked Ritsuka.
“She owns a nightclub downtown,” I answered. “The Palanquin, a few blocks off of Lord Street. As long as she’s there, we should be able to get an audience.”
“And after that?” Ritsuka asked. “What do we do if they aren’t there, or if they refuse to meet with us, no matter what? Or even if they do meet with us, but can’t tell us everything we want to know?”
Hopefully, she could tell us everything we needed to know, but whether she did or not, there was still another place I wanted to check off of the list before we called it a night and came back here to go to bed.
“No matter what happens with Faultline, there’s at least one other place we’re going to investigate tonight,” I told them. “Unless something has changed, I know where Coil’s underground base is, so we’re going to see if he’s still using it and whether or not he’s captured Dinah Alcott.”
I was willing to bet he had, but with Servants and how they might mess with precogs, it wasn’t anything near a guarantee.
“Dinah Alcott?” the three of them parroted. Rika asked, “Who’s that? I don’t remember her in the briefing.”
“A powerful precognitive,” was the answer I gave. “A Thinker who sees the likelihood of possible futures as percentages. If he recruited Servants first, then Coil might not have bothered with her, but in proper history, he kidnapped her, kept her locked in his basement, and plied her with drugs that he himself had addicted her to so that he could use her as his own personal forecaster. She should be about twelve years old right now.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Varying looks of disgust and horror crossed their faces. “Okay,” said Rika, “why is it that we might have to choose between a psychotic creep who kidnaps young girls and the literal Neonazis?”
I didn’t like it much either, and I could freely admit, if only to myself, that a decent chunk of the reason we were investigating Coil like we were was so that I could find proof of when and how he was going to inevitably screw us over. Even so…
“Because when the bigger threat is worse, you can’t be picky about your allies.”
None of them looked happy with that. Ritsuka might have swallowed a lemon for how sour his expression was, and Mash stared down at the floor, grimacing and frustrated. Rika looked personally insulted, like the world itself had conspired to do its best to put her in the crappiest situation it could, and I empathized. There were plenty of times I’d felt like that myself during my career.
“Not everyone we’ve worked with are…the best of people,” Mash mumbled miserably. “Jeanne Alter… Sir Mordred…” She glanced Jackie’s way, but deliberately avoided mentioning her name. “Even Captain Drake and Cúchulainn have…done some things that weren’t…” She sighed. “But still…”
“Yeah,” Ritsuka agreed quietly. He sighed, too. “I can’t say I like it either, but if we need their help to solve this Singularity, then I’m not sure…”
Story of my career, Ritsuka, I thought. So much of my time as a cape had been dictated by teaming up with people I would normally be fighting for the sake of dealing with a larger problem. Lung and the ABB, Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine, Echidna…
That subdued atmosphere carried with us through dinnertime, and we ate in the quiet, silently enjoying the meal Emiya had made for us as our silverware clinked against our plates. Without a TV going and with everyone lost in their own private thoughts, it might as well have been thunder for how starkly it pierced the atmosphere.
Outside, twilight slowly gave way to nighttime, and when we retired back to the living room while Emiya washed the dishes again, we had to turn on the lights to see. It was almost nostalgic, how familiar that felt, how much it reminded me of times long gone. But neither Mom nor Dad was here now. The only one left to remember cozy evenings cuddled together on the couch — with me squished comfortably between them — was me.
Despite the warmth of our food settling in my belly, a chill gripped my insides, shaped like loneliness and grief. It was not so easily dispelled.
Once we’d had about half an hour to sit around and digest, however, it was back to work, and we used a familiar runic array to stabilize a connection to Chaldea so we could update everyone on what we’d found and what our plans were going forward.
Marie, predictably, was disturbed to find out that my younger self was dead. Enough so that finding out Jackie had snuck into the Singularity with us had been put aside in favor of it.
“You’re certain about this?” she asked me, looking the way I’d felt when I found out Coil was running everything here. “It’s not a mistake?”
“I didn’t dig up the grave to check,” I allowed, “but it fits with all of the other information we have so far — like why Kurt reacted the way he did and why Theo didn’t recognize me. The…Undersiders’ cell phones being disconnected and the Loft being abandoned are still throwing me for a bit of a loop, but it’s too soon to say how that might be related. Brian and Aisha, at least, are definitely still alive.”
Marie scowled, chewing on her bottom lip as her brows drew together. “It just doesn’t make sense,” she murmured. “Why go to all that trouble to thank you for defeating Scion, only to turn around and make a Singularity that overturns that very thing?”
I wished I had an answer for that myself, but for now, I thought Da Vinci’s theory about how this was actually Solomon’s attempt at taking care of Scion himself, just repurposed for me now that Scion was gone. “I don’t know. Has Da Vinci had any luck with that rifle? Or anything about that stretch of missing road we encountered on the way up here?”
Marie’s lips pulled tight, but she didn’t push the issue.
“It’s better if you hear it from Da Vinci herself. Here.”
And the frame shifted, showing Da Vinci now. “Hello, everyone! It’s good to see that you’re still doing well — and that you managed to find a place to stay for the night! I’m assuming those little magic cards I gave you are working as intended?”
“Oh my god, yes,” said Rika. “The only reason we didn’t buy out the whole store earlier was because there was no way we could take it all back with us! And…you know, that would probably set off all kinds of alarms and stuff.”
“I imagine whatever remains of the IRS would begin paying very close attention if someone were to buy the entire stock of a grocery store,” Da Vinci agreed cheekily. “Good. I’m glad that those are working correctly. They might not have much use outside of this Singularity, but it should at least make things a bit easier on you four for now.”
“Da Vinci,” I interrupted, “have you had a chance to look at that rifle?”
“Ah, yes. Some,” she said. “You likely already realized, but the base for the rifle itself is a long rifle from the era of the American Revolution. Everything else is what you might call an aftermarket modification, although it was integrated so smoothly that you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Emiya’s initial assessment was correct, by the way. It is indeed a form of coil gun, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain to you that such a thing wouldn’t have existed in even the most basic form in the late eighteenth century.”
“So it’s definitely the work of a Tinker,” I concluded.
“With the caveat that I have only two other examples of such a thing,” Da Vinci hedged, “yes, that seems to be the case. I hesitate to call it desperation, but I can’t imagine any other reason why someone would go through the trouble of modifying such an old firearm except that they needed to arm those militiamen with something that was both familiar and yet far more potent in order for them to even have a chance.”
Basically as we’d thought, then. But why put coil guns in the hands of eighteenth century militiamen in the first place? What was the situation that you were desperate enough to be forced to rely on soldiers who were otherwise more than two centuries out of date? And how did this all relate to the enemies out west that now had the Grail?
“I don’t understand,” said Mash. “Why put these rifles in the hands of those militiamen instead of relying on more modern firearms in the hands of modern soldiers?”
“Why send Celtic warriors with bows, swords, and spears out to fight them?” Da Vinci asked pointedly. “The obvious answer is that they’re working with what they have. What that means for either side, well, that’s the part you’ll need to find out for yourselves.”
“And the road?” asked Ritsuka. “Why did it just suddenly…change like that?”
Da Vinci sighed and gave us an apologetic smile. “That one, I’m afraid, I have even less of an answer for you. It seems obvious that it must be related to the fluctuations somehow, especially since I checked the map and — aside from the obvious modifications made to bridge the two disconnected sides of the road — it was otherwise a match for our records of the area circa 1783. What it means that a portion of land from back then invaded a stretch of highway from 2011 is difficult to say.”
“Should we expect to see more of that sort of thing?” I asked.
She looked at me and said frankly, “I think you already know the answer to that one, Taylor.”
I held back a sigh. Yeah. Concord and Lexington were just further proof of that, and there was no telling where more of those anachronisms might pop up. Hell, maybe DC had been replaced, and that was why the government seemed to have collapsed, leaving Coil to pick up the pieces.
But where the hell was the PRT and the Protectorate in all of this?
“Thanks, Da Vinci. You’ll let us know if you find a maker’s mark or something on that rifle?”
“Of course,” she promised, and then she ceded the camera to Marie again.
“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to be careful,” she told us all. “However he became the leader of the east coast of America, whatever role he might be playing in restoring proper history, Coil isn’t someone to be trusted lightly. No matter what, your lives are still more important.”
“I mean, he’s a supervillain, Boss Lady,” said Rika. “That kinda goes without saying.”
My cheek twitched, but I said nothing. What would Rika think when she found out I had technically been a supervillain for a while there, too? Working for Coil himself, even.
The moment passed before I could decide to say anything about it.
“We’ll be careful, Director Marie,” Ritsuka translated.
“Make sure you do,” was Marie’s last, imperious command, and then she glanced at Jackie with a hard stare and said, “We’ll discuss the issue of Jack the Ripper following you against orders later.”
The connection cut.
“The Director is mad at me,” Jackie mumbled.
Yes, she was. “Your punishment will have to wait until this is all over, Jackie. For now, we need to focus on the Singularity and solving it.”
“So our next stop is the…Palanquin, right?” said Ritsuka.
“Right.”
“Weird name for a nightclub,” Rika commented. “But then again, I’m Japanese and I’ve never been to one, let alone in America, so what do I know? Closest thing would be a karaoke bar, which I guess isn’t that different.”
“Only that you don’t need ID to get into a karaoke bar,” Ritsuka said wryly, and then he stopped, eyes widening. “Ah. Senpai, we don’t…”
Oh. Yes. ‘Ah,’ indeed.
“You won’t need it,” I assured him. “We’re not getting in the normal way, remember? In fact, ID would kind of defeat the point.” I gave him a little smile. “Or did you think my ID from two years in the future would get me in either?”
Let alone my Chaldea employee card from four years in the future.
He blinked. “Well, when you put it that way…”
As the night wore on, we made whatever minor preparations we needed to get ready for a meeting with Faultline — Rika wound up bemoaning the lack of makeup options, meaning she was going to have to go to her first nightclub looking like a plain Jane, and I silently laughed to myself, because not with that hair. Arash got dressed back up in the clothes he’d swiped back in Boston while Emiya projected his own set of casual duds, choosing something that looked a little more appropriate for a night on the town.
Jackie, of course, slipped back into spirit form once it was time to go, and if it wasn’t so convenient to have an invisible, undetectable Assassin following me around, it might have been nice to get her some casual clothes of her own so that she could walk around without drawing attention. Aífe, too, so maybe we could find something for them to wear that wouldn’t immediately scream ‘Servant!’ to those in the know and ‘cape!’ to everyone else — when things were calm and we weren’t expecting a fight, at least.
We left around 8:30, climbing back onto our bikes after we locked up the house and riding back out into downtown. That late in the evening and with the autumn chill chasing everyone back indoors, we didn’t see anywhere near as many people out and about on our way as we had earlier, which meant less attention for all of us, but especially Mash, as well as a faster trip than our drive to Brian’s apartment.
It still took us about half an hour to get there, and as the Palanquin slowly fell under the range of my powers, I discreetly led the twins and Mash to the nearest parking lot, where we could find a spot under the cover of all the other cars to let our bikes vanish.
“So how are we playing this?” Rika asked, a little jittery, as we walked the rest of the way. “We going in a side door? Dropping in from above? Slipping in through the window? Bribing the bouncer?”
“You’re close with that last one,” I answered. “Although whether he’ll lead us in the front door or tell us to go around the side, that part I can’t tell you.”
She nodded. “Right. You’ve got the deets on a burning question these humble mercenaries want answered.”
I glanced over at her. “Are you okay, Rika?”
She nodded again. “Fine, fine! Just…” She grinned a little anxiously. “My first time in a nightclub, you know? Never been! And somehow, I don’t think John Wick’s gonna come in midway through the night and turn the whole place into a warzone, which is about as much as I know about actually being in a nightclub!”
John Wick? Another movie reference, I guess.
“It’s really not going to be that exciting,” I warned her.
“I know, I know!” she said. “But still! An American nightclub — and I’m gonna get in, even though I’m four years too young!”
“Shh!” Ritsuka shushed her. “You’ll get us in trouble!”
Rika giggled helplessly. “With who? The police? In a city run by a supervillain?”
Nonetheless, when he lanced her with another glare, she mimed zipping her lips, even if she couldn’t quite smother the broad smile.
A few minutes later, as the low, throbbing beat of music began to vibrate deep in my chest, our destination came into view, and crawling the opposite direction of us, a line of people stretched back around the other end of the building. Above the door, a plain, simple sign said ‘PALANQUIN’ in glowing yellow, understated and ill-fitting the venue it advertised.
“Should’ve brought earplugs,” Rika muttered to herself. Privately, I agreed with her, and I could only hope that Faultline would take us to a soundproofed room to talk so that we didn’t have to scream to hear and be heard.
As we approached the front door, I stretched out with my swarm and did a careful inspection of the interior of the nightclub. It wasn’t immaculate, but it was surprisingly clean for what it was, and between that, the weather taking a turn for the colder, and me trying to be subtle, it made looking around inside harder and slower than I would have liked it to be.
The doorman paid us only a short glance at first, but when we made a beeline straight for him, he was waiting to tell us, “No cutting. You’ll have to go to the back of the line like everyone else.”
“We’re not here to party,” I told him, raising my voice just a little over the background hum. “We’re here to talk to your boss.”
He snorted and didn’t even look over at us as he let the next group in. “Sure. You have any idea how many times I’ve heard something like that?” He paused long enough to look over and rake his eyes up and down each of us once. “You kids even old enough for a place like this? If you try the old fake ID bullshit, I’m just calling the cops.”
“I told you,” I said as I stepped closer, slipping my hand into my pocket; the doorman stiffened, then relaxed when I pulled out a piece of paper, “we’re here to talk to your boss.”
I had to practically shove it into his hands, but he did take it, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else.
“And I told you,” he began, but the words died in his throat when unfolded that slip of paper and looked down at what was drawn on it.
Nothing more than a single, stylized letter ‘C.’
“We have some information that she might find important,” I continued. “And we were hoping that she might be able to answer a few of our questions, too.”
Slowly, the doorman folded the paper back up and slipped it into his own pocket. “Sorry to tell you this,” he said, and he was all business, no mocking, “but the boss has been out of town for the last several months. If you were wanting to talk to her, you came at a bad time.”
What?
“Out of town?”
The doorman glanced around, and when he leaned towards me as though to whisper a secret, I leaned towards him, too. “You didn’t hear it from here,” he murmured, hot breath tickling my cheek, “but the boss smelled the way the wind was blowing back when you-know-who took over. Figured she didn’t want to go the way of the ABB, so she got going while the getting was good.”
I wanted to call it a bluff, except the more I looked inside the club, the more it seemed he was telling the truth. I redoubled my search, taking the chance to be a little less subtle with my bugs, especially in the private sections that weren’t available to the public, but there was no sign of the massive Gregor the Snail, no Labyrinth in her wheelchair, no Newter or Spitfire or Shamrock. Of Faultline and her crew, there was no sign at all. Even those very same private rooms and offices on the floor above the club proper were empty, and there wasn’t even a mask hidden away in some secret panel in the desk.
There were still papers and folders, a vault for the club’s daily take, the usual trappings of a small business, but not a single solitary hint of Faultline or even the presence of any cape at all. If I hadn’t known any better, I might have thought the place was run entirely by regular civilians, completely disconnected from Brockton Bay’s chief export.
And if Faultline really had left the city, then I guess, in just about every way that mattered, it was.
“Thanks for the information,” I muttered back, and then I straightened back up.
“I can tell her you came calling,” the doorman promised at a more normal volume. “Who should I say was looking for her?”
Skitter, Weaver, Taylor Hebert — Faultline knew none of those names, and they would mean nothing to anyone here on this twisted version of Earth Bet. There was no point in even leaving them, and there probably wasn’t even a point in leaving a name for Faultline to search for, because even if she got in contact with us later, her information was way out of date.
“Just a handful of stargazers from Chaldea,” was the answer I decided upon.
I stepped back and turned away, starting back towards the parking lot we’d just come from. The others hesitated for a moment, glancing back at the doorman, and then followed after me.
“That’s it?” asked Rika. “We’re not going inside?”
“I thought we were going to talk to Faultline, Miss Taylor,” said Mash.
“Did something happen?” asked Ritsuka.
“She’s not here,” I told them all, and despite doing another sweep of the nightclub, it just proved all the more true. “She and her team left town when Coil took over.”
It was another dead end.
“I…guess that makes sense, doesn’t it?” Ritsuka said thoughtfully. “If she wanted to avoid getting attention from Coil’s Servants, then of course they wouldn’t stay here.”
“There’s something else, too,” I corrected. “The doorman said that she didn’t want to go the way of the ABB, so Coil did something to them, which would explain why we haven’t encountered anyone from there.”
Ritsuka looked my way. “Do you think he…wiped them out?”
“If Faultline was afraid of suffering the same fate, then that would seem to be the case, wouldn’t it?” Emiya mused.
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. All we had just then was speculation, which was just shy of useless. “But it tells us that something did happen, and it was a big enough deal to spook Faultline and send her running out of the city, so coming here wasn’t a total waste.”
“We just didn’t get all of the answers we were looking for,” said Arash.
“No.”
“Aw, man,” Rika complained. She glanced back over her shoulder at the Palanquin and promised, “Next time.”
Mash giggled quietly.
“We’ll keep an eye out for any trace of the ABB,” I announced, “but if we don’t find any of them while we’re looking into Coil’s base, then we won’t head into the Docks to go looking tonight. This isn’t about picking a fight, remember. We’re just trying to find out what happened to them and how Coil is involved.”
“I can get behind that,” Rika agreed, “although I kinda wanted to deck this guy in the schnozz for kidnapping a little girl, not going to lie.”
“Me, too,” Ritsuka added.
You might still get that chance, I didn’t tell them.
Once we were back in the parking lot, we went over to the spot we’d picked out — hidden perfectly from both security cameras and any other onlookers by its position between a handful of other cars — and got back on our bikes, and then drove away again. We left the disappointment of the Palanquin and Faultline behind, and I led the team away in the direction where I knew the underground base to be.
Fortunately, we were already downtown, so it was much closer than going all the way back to the Docks, and it only took us another five or ten minutes to come within visual range. The skeleton of a half-finished highrise loomed out of the dark with steel girders stretching upwards like gossamer strands of spider web.
Just as I remembered it, with locked doors shut so tightly that even my bugs couldn’t squeeze through to investigate.
We dismounted next to the sidewalk that stretched out below the chain link fence that surrounded the entire site, and I wasn’t at all surprised when I strode up to the gate and found it secured by a large padlock and a length of heavy chain. This time, there was no Tattletale there with us to produce a key and let us through.
“This is the secret base?” Rika asked, skeptical.
“Close,” I said. I pointed across the sea of gravel that coated the ground beyond the fence and towards the bright yellow sign, nearly invisible in the dark until Ritsuka turned on his flashlight and swung the beam out to focus on it. The hatch below it was predictably closed. “It’s down there, beneath the ground, hidden under the rest of the building.”
There was a beat, a moment of silence, and then, as I should have expected, “Oh my god, he’s got a Bond villain lair!”
Yes. Yes, he did.
So this one got away from me a little bit. I had to chop the end off, because it felt a little disconnected from the rest of the chapter. That's why this got renamed.
In any case, there are some more hints about what's been happening inside the Singularity since the divergence, how a certain someone made it to the top of the dogpile when everything was said and done, and where certain people are and what they might be doing ("moldering in the ground" was always an option). There's still a lot for you guys to find out, however, so we're not done dropping surprises on your heads just yet.
"Oh, nothing so ominous, Okita-san. This one is merely doing his duty, that is all. That is, the just work of the heavens."