Web of the Weaver Chapter 17.

Slightly late--getting redy for school was a bit more difficult than we'd expected. 

Getting ready took a while. I stayed up late that night working on my cameras, and something else—a tracker. It turned out that burner phones couldn’t be tracked—unless you paid for it, but you didn’t have to give your address.

As a utility it had been advertised as “find out where your daughter is” with another comment talking about keeping track of the wife.

Fairly creepy. But the problem was, I couldn’t run faster than a car, and Green wasn’t likely to shout out the address as he left and the trainyards were big.

So Thursday morning my bugs were going to web the tracker to the bottom of his car. I’d removed the casing, speaker, screen—just about everything and webbed it up in a little dirty bag of web that anyone would mistake for just some cobwebs.

When I was finished, I’d have the spiders detach it.

I was going to have to get some more reliable ways to do things. I had a very bad feeling my habits in burner phones, even in a city as big as the Bay, might attract attention.

But that was a thought for the future.

I also had some other gadgets I’d been working on. Screamers and smokebombs, all purposed out of fireworks. I’d rigged a couple up to dog-whistles, the air being pushed through them. If I ran into Cricket that might slow her down. I had a few ideas for Crusader and Hookwolf, but the main goal was not to be seen.

Just listen, and if I was lucky, get close enough to take shots of the drugs and the serial numbers on the refrigerators.

And I could turn that over to the authorities because I had a feeling that Kaiser might not be legally obtaining them—which meant he might not be paying taxes on them.

And every book I’d read agreed. The IRS was what criminals told horror stories about when they were around the campfire.

And that meant I had to get information, ideally without anyone noticing me.

And I didn’t have a lot of time. Tomorrow was tutoring over at Arcadia, and I couldn’t miss that. I was in no danger of losing out, not with what I’d been able to do, but most of the books I read agreed—investigators looked for people breaking patterns. For Taylor Hebert, girl who had accepted the chance to make up for her failings in school, missing a class might lead to questions.

But as I worked, I had something else to do. I used another phone.

“Hello, Mush.”

“Hey, um, Orb Weaver.”

He still sounded nervous.

“Stay in Thursday night. The Empire will be active in the Trainyards.”

“You sure you don’t want me?”

“What makes you think I’m going in there?”

Much snorted. “You’re going in, but the Empire is scary—Skids was always worried about them.”

“How could you tell?”

“He spent a lot more time telling us how he’d totally fuck them up.”

“Ah. Don’t worry, I’m not Skidmark. I’ll be observing, not fighting.”

“Um… okay. But be careful.”

“I will. How are you doing?”

“Great! I got a new TV for my room.”

“I could have…”

“Yeah, but I bought it myself. So you know, It’s really mine.”

“That’s good. Thought of a new name, yet?”

“Still working on it.”

“Good. Remember, stay in Thursday.”

“Right.”

I hung up the phone and frowned. Mush would stay in, he wasn’t much of a fighter, at least in the sense of wanting a fight, but he deserved the warning.

And he’d bought himself a Tv. I’d thought about what I could do with Mush, but…

If he is fixing his life, do I have the right? I shook my head. I’d think about that later, right now, it was time to get back to work.

*****

The next two days crawled. The tutoring session at Arcadia was boring, and Winslow was worse.

Especially since every time I saw the principal, I couldn’t help but wonder if he knew who I was. I’d underestimated him.

I wouldn’t do so again.

There was an announcement that there would be drawings for new refrigerators. I could see some of the students look happy, others looked glum.

The drawing spots were in parts of the city where minorities didn’t tend to go.

At night I said the bare minimum to Dad and got back to work. I’d added some reinforced plates to my armor, woven spiderwebs holding the cheap plates in place. My heavy cloak was ready, the woven spiderwebs able to stop most small rounds.

Hopefully, I wouldn’t find out.

Once again I launched the excuse about using “A” library and told dad I’d be back by 10.

And then I was off for the trainyards.

I waited, checking for my quarry’s tracker. If Green didn’t show up, I’d have to look myself, which made it more likely I might run into someone.

But before the Sun went down, the app buzzed, letting me know that he was moving. Huh, that book on coding apps had come in handy after all. The built-in system required you to actively request the position of the other phone.

Far end of the Trainyards.

Near the spur line that led to some of the old docks. Long since shut down, but… useful if you were moving stuff in quietly. If any cops dropped by, he had the cover of not wanting a mob to show up hoping to score a refrigerator early.

I moved through the darkness, the old, abandoned buildings standing up like decayed tombstones, a few buildings that were still occupied, closed up for the night.

The streetlights here had been owned by the port authority and were long since dead. The only light came from the moon when it peeked through the clouds above us, a brisk wind from the east moving them along.

That was good. I’d read that full dark wasn’t actually the best time to be hidden—the eye tended to gravitate to anything unusual. But weather like this, alternating dim and darkness depending on the clouds, complete with the nose of the wind and papers being blowing around?

Many things could be dismissed as a trick of the light.

The biggest problem was the fact that my bugs were sluggish. As I walked through the streets, I took control of them, sending some into the sewers where the air was warmer, and put others into tight balls, the vibrating of the bugs warming them up. They’d be ready when I needed them.

And I would need them soon, as the lit part of the trainyards started to get closer.

I checked a building overlooking the place where the train had moved in and nodded.

Nobody was in it. There were guards, but they’d been put in position to check the streets.

I bet they’d searched the buildings first. Now, nobody could get into them.

Except someone who could tag a guard with a fly and wait until he had walked around the corner.

I moved into the building. It was dusty and I sent my bugs ahead of me, using their bodies to feel for holes in the floor as I moved up the stairs, avoiding the termite-eaten parts.

Unfolding my shotgun mic, I prepared for a long night. This was the dangerous point. I didn’t know if the Empire had a parahuman with enhanced senses. If they did, it’d be smart to keep them secret. But I’d know if anyone came into the building.

There were about fifteen people there, a train with four boxcars sitting on the siding.

Actually, one of the little moving yard locomotives, so they’d probably brought the boxcars in on a regular freight run from Boston, and then switched out these cars.

And then I prepared.

Groups of bugs flew up from inside, while spiders wove little carry points along the cameras. It would have been safer to do this earlier, but I didn’t know precisely where they were coming to drop off the merchandise.

Now I did. The sound of the locomotive engine and the movement obscured the sound of my bugs, and everyone was focused on the their work or the streets, not noticing the little whispy forms of my bugs as they emplaced the five cameras on walls and street lights.

When I got home, I’d have to collate the footage, since they were all recording. I didn’t want to risk someone down there having a device that might detect transmissions, after all.

I settled back, checked my thermos full of warm tea, and waited as the men got to work.

*****

Before long, I was bored.

Bored. Bored. Bored.

It turned out people working to move illegal merchandise didn’t talkabout illegal merchandise. They talked about the game last night, or getting a ticket to one of Hookwolf’s rings, and that man didn’t even say where it was. Packs of drugs were unloaded from the refrigerators and put into car trunks.

They had numbers on the packets, so on a momentary thought, I waited until everyone’s back was turned, and sent insects running across the ground going into the trunks to read the numbers the same way I had read my books.

I was tempted to destroy the drugs. They were only…

No. The Empire wasn’t the Merchants. If someone destroyed the drugs, they would know they had been compromised. I would wait and get the infor—

Really? Did he have to go into thatmuch detail about the sex he had last night?

I felt a little bit of me die inside as I realized I’d have to listen to this again when I was putting together the recording to get the useful stuff.

Bleh.

But at least I was getting videos, faces, names, no capes but—

Suddenly, at the very fringe of my awareness, my bugs were disrupted. Several large animals, moving fast, but they didn’t… taste like normal animals, not to the flies and moths I sent fluttering down.

And they were big.

Nearly rhino-sized… what the hell?

And then they hit the perimeter, and I heard a guard scream, and moments later, three rhino-sized… things hit the lit area, one smashing a car to the side.

I knew them, of course.

The Undersiders, with three of Hellhound’s dog-monsters, and what looked like a humanoid ironclad riding on one. I didn’t know who that was. But now the entire yard was dissolving into chaos, as the Undersiders started to…

Wreck the refrigerators?

That made no sense. They were ignoring…

No. It makes sense. Kaiser is using refrigerators as a way to make PR points. Wreck them, and his event dies.

But why the Undersiders? They were petty thieves. The last time they’d gotten In trouble was trying to rob a casino…

But right now, they’d made my situation muchmore dangerous. Especially if the Empire had any capes close by.

It was time to—

I heard something else. Motorcycles.

They’d been outside of the unloading area, beyond my bugs' reach.

Reserves, far enough away nobody would see them, close enough they could get here quickly.

I’d been wise not to overtly interfere.

Now I had to decide if I was going to save the Undersiders from the consequences of their actions.

And maybe find out what had possessedthem to do this.