Web of the Weaver: Chapter 21

“Taylor, can I speak to you?” the teacher asked.

I paused as I gathered my books from the tutoring session, and in the walls, my bugs froze.

“Yes?”

“You don’t need this. Clearly, your educational issues were tied to the problems you were facing at Winslow. He said.

Arcadia tended to swap out teachers for the tutoring session. It wasn’t a major issue, but I’d listened in—and it was because they wanted to get a good read on the students who might be arriving in the coming year.

Wise.

But I’d kept my improvement to what Taylor could have done, so why was I being…

“Am I being dropped from the program?”

“Far from it. At Arcadia, we like to challenge our students.”

“And what would that be like?”

“You’re calm, you’re focused, and that means that you’d be ideal to help tutor Ms. Laborn.”

Wait. What?

“Aisha?” I asked. I’d seen her… officially in class once or twice, not counting our actual first meeting, but she had a habit of skipping. But she was still here, sitting in a chair, folding her arms, a grumpy expression on her face.

“Yes. Ms. Laborn has, after talking to her brother, decided that education is truly something she needs to focus on.”

“Jerk” Aisha muttered.

“Why me?” I asked.

“As I said, at Arcadia, we like to challenge our students and your social interaction is giving a little cause for concern.”

WHAT?“I work with the other students.”

“Work. Yes.” He shook his head. “Without going into everything, we think a little social interaction could do well for you, and your principal at Winslow agrees.”

“Why me?” I repeated.

“We tried an earlier tutor for Ms. Laborn. You’re less likely to flee into the night.”

I glanced at Aisha and she grinned back at me.

Right.Resisting would be another unusual factor. Taylor was polite and did what the teachers said.

“Fine. We’ll start now.”

“Wait, what?” Aisha shot upright. “You’re kidding, right, You heard what he said about that little pink puffball.”

“I’m not a puffball,” I told her. “We’ll take the bus to the library.” After all, I had some of my bugs set up in the basement, reading some books that to anyone’s view had just fallen off the storage shelf and happened to be open when they hit the ground. Once I was there, I’d have enough warning if anyone went down to scatter the bugs that I’d used to read them.

“Good. Enjoy your work and Aisha, remember that I’m going to be reporting your progress to your guardian.”

“Great Bro’s gonna be on my back all the time.” With that, she got up and walked out of the room. “Gonna walk there, or are we gonna catch the bus?”

I glanced at the teacher, who was consulting his books. Why did I get the feeling this was a test? And was it a test to out me or for something… else? I shook my head and followed Aisha.

On the bus to the library I tagged everyone with bugs, as usual, the movement of the bus seeing insects entering and leaving my control. Not much was going on. We were in a good part of town, and it wasn’t night yet.

And I’d probably have to cut some of my work short, while I was dealing with Aisha. Had they set me up to fail, or did they not want me to have any preconceptions? From my studies, that was a common issue with law enforcement, reading a report and making its conclusions yours.

“So, your brother wants you to focus?” I asked.

“As if. He’s got his new job and he convinced his boss to make me take this dumb tutoring.” Aisha leaned back. “Like it’s gonna help.”

I paused. I remembered that tone.

I’d been the one using it, not too long ago, after all.

It wasn’t just a fear that something would happen, it was an expectation that it would happen.

“You went to Winslow,” I said.

“Yeah, then I got kicked over here with the…” Aisha made an expression. “Mom grounded me because I went out to a party… Oh, look, I can float!”

I raised an eyebrow. “I doubt Victoria was grounded.”

“No, it was one of her posse.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I’d watched Glory Girl, here, where she wasn’t aware who I was, but I didn’t think she had a posse.  She just tended to accumulate people, pulled into her orbit by an enthusiasm that honestly could be a little exhausting.

But Aisha had a point. The people here… they were from middle and upper middle class neighborhoods, where a toothache meant an immediate trip downtown to a dentist, not holding on until the paperwork was done.

Where the police responded promptly, and most homes didn’t have bars on the windows. Like where the Barnes lived.

“You know, half of ‘em look at me like I’m a Merchant.” She snorted. “As if I’d try that shit. Mom does enough.”

“Why don’t you think tutoring is gonna help?”

“Really?” she asked. “Half the teachers at Winslow just let me do whatever.”

“Half the teachers at Winslow couldn’t teach a rock,” I told her. I wonder if you were in Quinlan’s class?  Black, sassy, poor attention span—all of the things Quinlan would expect. Someone to ignore until they just went out and became a petty criminal.

Just like it was easier to ignore me.

“And wouldn’t it be nice if you could rub it in his face?” I asked. “They expect you to fail. They know it. Aisha Laborn will be a welfare mother by the time she’s 17.” Granted I’d expected to use this for interrogation, getting under someone’s skin. But maybe it would work here.

“Well I—“

“And you do better and make them eatthose words. Come back to a reunion in a fancy new car, with a good family, and a better job than they ever had and be polite while they have to swallow everything they were going to say.”

“Come back to a Winslow reunion?” Aisha stared. “I was only there part of a year and…”

“I’m not going to be there next year,” I said. “But I’ll come back to the reunions. After all, none them bothered to help Locker Girl.”

“Shit…” she said. “I wasn’t, you know, gonna bring that up.”

“Why not? It happened. I survived. I’m going to rub that in their face.” Not by coming back to a reunion, but by showing them that the city they abandoned can be so much more.

“You think you can do that?” She looked around. “Mom sort of fucked me up. I mean, she wasn’t a Merchant but every time she got morning sickness she’d take something new.”

“They wouldn’t stick you here just to fail,” I told her. “And you could always rub that fancy car in your Mom’s face.”

“Shit, no. She’d want to know where I got the money. I’d just vanish. Let her fuck her life up, she ain’t gonna take me an Bro down with her.”

I raised an eyebrow. That was… a surprisingly smart attitude. I wonder if Aisha would have let Emma get to her, or just written her off?

“I think I can help you,” I said. “At least enough to keep your brother… off your back. As long as you help me.”

“Okay…”

Then the bus was stopping, and inside the library my bugs got to work. I’d mapped out all the books in the repository under the library, and now I was changing my reading list. Spiders and roaches worked in tandem, pulling a book off a shelf, and letting it tumble to the floor, where it lay open.

I had been expecting to read another book on organized crime. But this book…

PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION FOR SPECIAL NEEDS CHILDREN

Yes. I could use that. Although it’d take me a while to understand, so for today we could just finish the work we’d been given.

But if I was going to do this.

I was going to do it well. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t a teacher, nobody would ever compare me to Quinlan.

*****

On the way home, I got off before my stop, made a quick purchase at a grocery store, before heading to one of my caches, this one for Orb Weaver. I got costumed and headed into the Empire’s Territory.

There was a store there, military surplus, and pawnshop. I had walked past it a few days ago, and now I was going to make a withdrawal. I waited, just in range, as the owner finished his work and went out. He opened and closed the safe, the numeric pad safer than a tumbler lock—unless someone had put mites on it, his fingers crushing them and letting me know what the code was. Then he walked out the back door, armed the alarm—except he hadn’t, because I had jammed it with web. My one risk was that he’d check it, but I noticed that routine often left people casual about making certain about their procedures.

If he didn’t, I’d just come back later because, by the time a repairman got there, my bugs would have removed any evidence. The same went for the lock. He had a fancy keypad lock, where you didn’t have to worry about someone making a new key.

And it was just as vulnerable to my work as the safe.

A few moments after he left, I entered the store from the rear. There were cameras, aimed at the front door and directly in front of the cash register.

I would avoid those, especially since he’d emptied the till.

My bugs spread out, and soon I found what I wanted. The keys to the cabinets. I gloved up and opened the stand-alone safe and frowned. There were guns in it, it, as expected. Almost certainly legal. Still, I got pictures of their serial numbers.

Then I went through the records, paper mostly, taking pictures of them. Sales lists, purchases, exactly the way you’d launder money. Moving money from one part of the empire to another, and in a city like the Bay, with a large informal economy, I doubted it would have been detected  even without the local police corruption.

Lastly, I went to the place I’d detected. A space under the floor, with a locked hatch. Unconnected to any alarms. This had a manual lock. Moments later, I had some cheap wire and dental tools, and had studied how to pick locks—but more importantly? I sent small insects into the lock, getting a vision of what it looked like. Where most thieves had to go by feel… I knew.

Fifteen minutes later, my confidence had taken a hit. C’mon you stupid… finally with a click, it came loose.

I was going to have to practice. A lot. I carefully opened the hatch and there it was. Four pistols, serial numbers erased. Several packages of white powder that my bugs identified as cocaine. As well as bundles of 20-dollar bills.

My, I thought the Empire stood against the scourge of drugs.

I shook my head and went still. Someone was walking outside the store. But he kept going.

After all, I wasn’t using any light, not after I’d finished taking pictures of the records. I could sabotage the guns…

No. As rewarding as it would feel, it could make the Empire aware of an outside enemy. Instead, I could keep to my original plan if I found drugs. I carefully opened every package, pouring it into the plastic bags I’d bought, keeping them within the bag so no betraying cloud of drugs would fill the air, and incidentally get me high. Once they were emptied, I took the other item I’d bought—a bag of flour and refiled them with the white powder. I closed them, wiped the exterior down, and then closed the hatch. I also removed some of the twenty-dollar bill bundles. Two thousand dollars a bundle, just as the Federal Reserve mandated.

I didn’t take all of them. All would be a theft. Some being left behind would be embezzlement. And the only people who could embezzle would be Empire members who had access to the stash.

I had one last job. Heading to the rear office, I stopped by his computer. An older model, it was hooked up to the internet.

Good. I inserted a USB stick into it, and turned it on, before holding the keys to boot into DOS. This wasn’t just my power—so many people put viruses on the computes in Ms. Knott’s class that sometimes it was needed to get the computer running.

In this case, I quickly keyed in the commands as the USB modified the MBR. A few minutes later, and I was done and removed the USB.

The program wasn’t much. It would, as part of the shutdown process, save a TXT file of every email, sent or received, as well as any passwords, and send that information as an attachment to a dummy email I had created. I could have added a component to infect other computers, but the Empire wasn’t stupid. I had to assume that their higher-level people would be more careful with their security.

So for the next few days, at least until the owner came up short on his drugs, I’d have a look into the Empire’s methods of trading.

One not connected with Green.

And if the owner came to a bad end?

Well, if you threw in your lot with Nazis, I was not going to be overly sympathetic when you got a taste of just how loyal they really were.

With that, I left.

It was odd. I had barely been in a fight, and yet I felt a sense of accomplishment. Now it was time to head home, with a quick stop to dump about four kilograms of cocaine in the sewer.