Lisa POV

  The bleach sting still lingered in the air, even after she’d cracked a window and lit the good incense. Lisa Wilbourn pressed her palms into her temples, trying to massage away the dull throb. It was going to be one of those headaches—the ones that crawled behind her eyes like centipedes and refused to leave. She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t, really. Not with everything her power kept screaming at her. Not after what she’d seen.

  She’d expected a recon job. Watch the ABB, keep tabs on Lung, maybe poke around the docks. Standard Coil assignment, nothing fancy. Then things had spiraled.

  Bug girl. Sword boy. And a sky on fire.

  She let her eyes drift to the center of her laptop screen—paused video footage from a traffic cam three blocks off Kingfisher. A blurry shadow took off like a missile, a barely visible swarm trailing after him like smoke. She rewound again, frame-by-frame, stopping at the moment the rooftop fight had started.

  There. Flash of metal. Someone—something—had stabbed Lung. The dragon himself. Lisa’s breath hitched slightly, even now.

  She tapped the edge of her mug, ignoring that the tea inside had gone cold. She hadn’t even taken a sip. Too busy pulling every angle—PHO threads, dashcam archives, hospital records, insect patterns logged by the EPA, hell, even traffic sensor pings—trying to map the shape of what had happened. And what it meant.

  Coil would want the usual: classifications, profiles, potential leverage. She’d send something later. The official report.

  But unofficially? Lisa couldn’t stop thinking about the girl.

  No codename yet. Just a shaky voice on a 911 line, trying to do the right thing. A single phrase looped in Lisa’s memory—“I’m going to help.” That was it. Wobbly, scared, young. Not one of the ABB’s pet Masters, no practiced calm, no dramatic flair. Just someone who saw something awful and stepped up. Until the rooftop turned into a horror movie.

  Lisa blinked. Her power slid facts into place: the girl’s bugs hadn’t stung civilians. Not even once. Pedestrians had been surrounded but untouched. That kind of control wasn’t common, even among trained Masters. It required intent, restraint, focus—things you didn’t see in a first-time cape unless they were holding back. Or unless they were terrified of what might happen if they didn’t.

  It raised questions. Not the usual ones about identity and trigger events. Those were easy enough to guess at with enough data and time.

  This one was harder: Why did she lose control only after the dragon went down?

  Lisa scrubbed a hand through her hair, leaned back in her chair, and stared at the flickering edges of her power. Something had changed on that rooftop. She just didn’t know what yet.

  Lisa rubbed at her eyes and flipped to her third browser tab of the hour—an overlay of PHO geotags posted in the last six hours. Keywords: swarm, roaches, locusts, “bugpocalypse.” The board’s tendency to catastrophize made separating signal from noise a pain, but she was starting to see the shape of it.

  Clumps of reports clustered on the eastern side of the Docks, mostly along Shearwater and Tidelane. Some were probably junk—urban legends in the making—but a few mentioned eerily coordinated insect trails or thick layers of ash that city crews hadn’t reached yet. One even included timestamped photos of beetles forming odd spirals near a storm drain.

  Add that to the fact that insect activity had completely dropped off city-wide just after 3:00 a.m.—Bagrat posted it first, and Lisa had independently confirmed it with four other cross-streets—and the likely picture was this: the swarm had collapsed, and its controller had pulled everything back in.

  Lisa leaned back in her chair and tapped the side of her head with the cold edge of a USB drive.

  So. The girl was still in the area. The range had dropped to something manageable again, probably back to normal baseline. No evidence of another city-spanning pulse. That meant last night’s outburst was either triggered—or artificial. Not sustainable.

  Not that it mattered to the news cycle. Right now, every idiot with a keyboard was busy rewriting her story for her.

  “She’s probably a bio-Tinker!” one post had said. “Look at the way the swarm snapped into formation. That’s mechanical control.”

  “New Endbringer?” said another. “Recruit her or kill her. Those are the options.”

  Lisa had skimmed twenty of those, closed the tab, and added a note to her internal list of concerns: “Monitor escalation of civilian fear response.”

  Then she added another: “Prep counter-narrative if needed.”

  She had no love for the Protectorate—least of all the PRT—but she knew how quickly a bad public story could sink someone before they even picked a name. If the girl didn’t take the reins of her own narrative soon, someone else would. And then it was only a matter of time before someone with money, guns, or a black budget got interested.

  Lisa hated black budgets.

  She glanced at Brian, who was still sorting through a low-res copy of the fireburst frame-by-frame, and considered how to pitch the next part of the plan. Not because he’d fight it—Grue could be careful, but he wasn’t blind—but because she didn’t want to make it sound like she cared too much.

  Because she didn’t.

  Really.

  She just didn’t want a scared kid with terrifying powers to go unmonitored. That was basic self-preservation.

  And maybe—maybe—she wanted to talk to the only person in the last month who’d looked more terrified than she felt on a good day.

  Lisa twisted the cap off a warm bottle of generic cola and took a swig, grimacing. Flat. Of course. Everything about this morning was gritty and gray—floorboards, light, mood, and now taste.

  She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and stared down at the threadbare rug. Brutus had left a pawprint there sometime last week—still faintly visible, even after two passes with a mop. The faint scent of bleach lingered. At least it didn’t smell like bug husks anymore.

  Behind her, Alec’s phone gave a cheerful blip. He didn’t glance up.

  “Three new threads,” he announced. “One says wing-boy is a rogue from Toronto. Another thinks he’s some kinda thinktank-built weapon. My favorite theory so far is that he’s a time-traveling Skitter from the future.”

  “Creative,” Lisa muttered.

  Brian emerged from the hallway, toweling off damp hair and looking more put-together than she felt. “What’s your best guess, then?” he asked her. “Not theories—your guess.”

  Lisa didn’t answer right away. Her eyes flicked to the corkboard pinned up by the stairs—her usual memory lattice. It held a mess of scribbled notes and cutouts, barely half of them labeled. They needed red string, maybe, if she wanted to go full conspiracy.

  She nodded at the board. “Best guess? He’s not local. Nobody’s seen anything like those wings before. And the aura he gave off—whatever that was—it hit the girl hard, but nobody else reported it.”

  Brian frowned. “A Master effect?”

  “More like Stranger. It wasn’t control, it was… fear. Paralyzing. But focused.” She drummed her fingers against the armrest. “If it was affecting everyone, we’d have seen panic at ground level. We didn’t. So it must’ve been narrow-band. Line of sight? Range-based? Emotional bleed from a more complex trigger?”

  Alec groaned. “This is why I don’t play Thinker.”

  Lisa smirked, but her brain kept running.

  “Still think he’s Trump-type,” she murmured, more to herself than to the others. “The armor changed. The attack on the swarm was completely different from what he used on Lung. Different elements, even. There’s something modular going on.”

  She leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Her migraine was fading, but not gone. Her power wasn’t giving her solid answers either—just loops of context and contradictory impressions. The stranger wasn’t just powerful—he was dissonant. Mismatched inputs. Like someone trying to blend too many puzzle sets at once.

  Brian crossed his arms. “What about the girl?”

  Lisa stilled. That was the harder question.

  “She called it in,” she said. “That 911 call? Her voice. Young. Frightened. But she still climbed that rooftop and tried to help. And after whatever sword-boy did to Lung, she flipped. Hard.”

  “She attacked him?”

  “More than that. The swarm she sent after him… That wasn’t self-defense. That was rage. Terror, too, maybe. But rage.”

  “Trigger event?” Brian asked.

  “No. I don’t think so.” Lisa shook her head slowly. “If anything, she’d already had one. Maybe recently. But what happened after—something juiced her power. Temporarily. I’d bet on an external trigger, not internal.”

  “You think sword-boy did it?”

  Lisa shrugged. “I think she thinks he did.”

  Brian didn’t reply right away, just rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. Lisa knew that look—the slow churn of his worry. He might not be the team's planner, but he knew how to weigh risk.

  “She thinks he messed with her head,” he said finally. “Even if he didn’t.”

  “Especially if he didn’t,” Lisa replied. “Perception is everything. Her reaction wasn’t just fear—it was betrayal. Like he offered help and then tripped some invisible wire in her brain.”

  “She’s not going to come quietly, then.”

  Lisa chuckled, dry and tired. “Did you see the footage? Girl has a will like rebar. Quiet’s not on the table.”

  Alec flipped his phone over and yawned. “So, what? You want to find her? Recruit her?”

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  Lisa hesitated. “I want to understand her. The swarm, the discipline, the self-control… Those don’t come from nowhere. Whoever she is, she’s been holding this power back for a long time. Long enough that she’s scared of what happens if she lets it off the leash again.”

  “She doesn’t need a crew,” Alec said. “She needs therapy.”

  Brian shot him a look. “And if she ends up on the wrong team?”

  “Then we get bugged to death in our sleep?” Alec offered, raising his hands. “Dunno, maybe we deserve it.”

  Lisa closed her eyes. “If someone else finds her first—if they see her as a weapon instead of a person—then things go bad. Fast. So we either make contact, or… we give her space. Quietly. Indirectly.”

  Brian narrowed his eyes. “Protect her?”

  Lisa didn’t meet his gaze. “She reminds me of someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  The silence stretched.

  Alec whistled low. “Wow. You’re actually being cagey.”

  Lisa stood up and crossed to her laptop. “I need clearer range data. Power behavior. Emotional triggers. If I can model how she escalates, I can build a contact plan.”

  “And if she thinks you’re with the wrong people? That you’re there to manipulate her?”

  “Then I go in alone,” Lisa said softly. “No mask. No agenda. Just me. Human contact. Someone who sees her.”

  She wasn’t sure it would work. But the alternative—someone exploiting her, or worse, the PRT treating her like a rogue threat—was worse. A city-spanning Master with a grudge wouldn’t get a second chance. The world didn’t forgive girls like her.

  Brian sighed. “We’ll keep watch, then. Discreet. I’ll talk to Rachel, see if the dogs can help with a scent trail if needed. You… don’t do anything reckless.”

  Lisa gave him a small smile. “Reckless is my middle name.”

  “No, it’s not,” Alec said. “Pretty sure it’s Marie.”

  Lisa flipped him off without turning.

  The discussion was over. For now.

  But in the back of her mind, her Thinker-sense was already working. Modeling movements. Range bursts. Emotional cues. Each thought snapped into place like puzzle pieces in wet concrete.

  And somewhere in the middle of that puzzle was a girl who’d unleashed a biblical swarm for reasons she probably didn’t even understand yet.

  Lisa intended to find her before anyone else could. For the girl’s sake.

  And maybe for hers, too.

  -

  Lisa ducked out of the loft by mid-morning, hoodie up, earbuds in, clipboard tucked under one arm. A list of errands was her cover—coffee beans, canned soup, a few other staples Alec would complain about. She wasn’t here for groceries. She was here for data.

  The streets buzzed with post-crisis tension. People clumped at crosswalks, eyes flicking skyward or to lampposts like they expected another biblical swarm to descend. A few bus shelters were still dusted in a layer of black-gray residue, fine as ash and too uniform to be natural. A sanitation worker in a neon vest swiped at it with a grimace.

  Lisa walked past, phone in hand, pretending to scroll through messages. Really, her Thinker sense was tuned outward, filtering motion patterns and vocal tics. She caught fragments of conversation—“wings,” “flame burst,” “bugs by the millions”—each adding a little more shape to the city’s pulse.

  She ducked into an alley between a shut-down vape store and a graffiti-scarred laundromat. One of her camera drops was still active, perched above a rusted security box. The cheap unit had snagged four hours of local footage before the battery died—more than enough.

  She connected her phone, downloaded the cache, then double-checked the viewing angles.

  A puff of dust startled a pigeon. Nothing moved except trash.

  Lisa resumed walking, looping toward the edge of east dock territory. The trail she’d mapped out—clusters of bug behavior, reports of post-event insect concentration—converged roughly near a row of squat brick tenements. Third story, rusted balcony, window left cracked all night.

  Her power surged. Yes. That was it. The bug girl was there. Had to be.

  She didn’t need a name. Not yet. The street-level data was enough.

  Lisa crossed to the far side of the street, leaned against a bus pole, and pretended to read a flyer for a missing cat. Her Thinker sense reached again—slight body weight on floorboards above, pacing like someone couldn’t sit still. A radio flickered on. A kettle whistled, then stopped. Footsteps again.

  She was up. Awake.

  And not running.

  That was a start.

  Lisa stepped away and continued toward a payphone she’d marked earlier. It was stupid, but it helped to retrace the girl’s steps. The 911 call had come from here. Lisa ran her fingers over the buttons. The cord was half-ripped, but the mic still worked.

  She could almost picture it—some scared teenager, clutching the receiver with shaking hands, breath ragged, resolve steeling mid-sentence. I’m going to try something.

  The girl had meant to make a difference. And she had. Lung was down. The swarm obeyed. The city survived a night that could’ve gone nuclear.

  And yet…

  Lisa chewed the inside of her cheek, turned away from the phone, and began walking again. Her Thinker sense hadn’t told her everything yet, but it had told her enough:

  The girl didn’t regret the swarm. She regretted what came after.

  Lisa had always liked patterns.

  Even as a kid, she’d seen the little threads tying people together—how Mrs. Warner at school always coughed before lying, how the guy at the deli counter used meat prices to signal bets to the bookie two doors down. Her power had sharpened that instinct into a scalpel, but the instinct had always been there.

  That’s why the bug girl stuck with her. Because even without knowing her name, Lisa could feel the outline of her pattern… and the moment it broke.

  This wasn’t just some cape getting in over her head. This was a plan that went sideways. A calculated risk met with something unexpected—something personal.

  She thought back to the footage, the storm, the sword. The timing of it all.

  Lisa had assumed, like a dozen others online, that Lung had come for them. The Undersiders. They were in his territory. They’d been making waves. The conclusion was easy.

  But her power whispered otherwise.

  No. They weren’t his target. Not this time. Lung had been focused on someone else entirely. Someone smaller. Isolated. Not on his radar until she made the call.

  Lisa had gone over it again and again, and she knew it now with a certainty that made her teeth clench.

  The kids Lung sent his men to kill weren’t them.

  They were just kids. Actual kids. Civilians, probably. Maybe someone the bug girl knew. Maybe not. Maybe she just couldn’t stand to watch another tragedy unfold without stepping in.

  That was what made her dangerous. Not the bugs, not the swarm—but the impulse to act.

  Lisa could work with that.

  She boarded a bus headed east, the same line she and Brian had taken earlier. Her hoodie was pulled low, earbuds silent. She wasn’t listening to music. Just cataloging voices, snippets of conversation, posture shifts. The way people talked about the bug girl now—it wasn’t all fear. There was awe, too. Mystery. A thread of hope tangled in the confusion.

  That scared her more than anything.

  Because hope was fickle. Hope turned on a dime. If this girl made one wrong move—got caught, panicked, retaliated—those same hopeful voices would demand her head on a pike.

  Lisa shifted in her seat, watching block numbers tick by. Three stops from the tenement. Two.

  She wouldn’t approach today. That was too much, too fast.

  But she could plant a seed. A flier on a corkboard. A note slipped under a door. Something benign.

  Something human.

  The world was already trying to decide what kind of monster this girl was. Lisa wanted her to know that someone out there still saw her as a person.

  Even if she hadn’t quite figured out how to say it yet.

  Lisa got off two blocks early.

  Better to approach from the side, not straight up the street. Even if she wasn’t being watched—and she usually was—habits like that kept her alive. That, and making herself look like just another college kid with earbuds and a grocery list.

  She ducked into a narrow side street lined with cracked concrete planters and old storefronts, many long shuttered. A corkboard stood outside a community center with sun-faded flyers curling at the corners. Lost cats, piano lessons, rent-to-own scams. She picked one near the bottom and slid a new slip beneath it:

  Found: Schoolbooks in East Docks, possible science notes. Contact L. 555?3221. No questions asked.

  The number was a burner, of course. Brian had raised an eyebrow when she bought it, but hadn’t asked.

  She stepped back, checked the placement. Subtle. Easy to overlook, easy to pretend she hadn’t meant to find anyone if things went south. Just enough of a hint that someone was paying attention in the right way.

  Because that’s what Lisa needed to be—the right kind of attention.

  Not a recruiter. Not a spy. Not even a cape.

  Just someone who understood what it was like to be fourteen and terrified of what you could do.

  Lisa pulled up her hood again and moved on, eyes flicking to third-story windows. Curtains twitched once—nothing concrete—but her Thinker sense prickled. Someone was home.

  Someone who hadn’t left since the swarm broke apart. A girl who’d drawn half the city into a panic spiral and then curled up in a nest of guilt and second-guessing.

  Lisa could imagine the shape of her, hunched at a desk, watching PHO threads scroll by, hoping not to see her own face, but checking anyway.

  She remembered that feeling. Not from Coil, but from before. Long before. The sense that any second, the world would figure her out and spit her back out again.

  Not everyone who triggered felt like that. But enough of them did.

  Lisa turned a corner and looped back toward the main road. A PRT van rolled past, antennas twitching, sensors scanning. She kept her head down. The drivers wouldn’t recognize her, but her profile might ping if Armsmaster’s new crawler software was better than she’d accounted for.

  Twenty seconds passed. No alarms.

  Her phone buzzed. A message from Alec.

  rachel says dog won't eat breakfast unless the bowl is facing east now. you broke him.

  Lisa huffed a laugh through her nose and replied with a skull emoji.

  Then she pocketed the phone and crossed the street.

  Today was prep. Observation. A test run.

  If the girl came out, Lisa would let her pass.

  If she stayed hidden, Lisa would let her be.

  But the next step… the next one would require more. A voice. A name.

  Something real.

  She just hoped she could find it before anyone else did.

  She caught the next bus back toward the loft, slumping into a rear-facing seat. The vinyl was cold through her jeans. Her hood was still up, earbuds still in, but she wasn’t listening to music. Just noise-canceling silence and the weight of the morning pressing in on her.

  Outside, the city rolled by in streaks of rust and brick. Posters for missing pets had been taped over with fresh ones calling for witnesses. “Seen something strange? Call the tip line.” A flyer flapped loose in the wind, caught on the corner of a mailbox.

  Lisa leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

  Her Thinker-sense wasn’t actively pushing. Not now. She let it idle—just background hum, like a fan left running. Her mind needed the space to breathe.

  There were so many angles still unresolved.

  Sword-boy, for one. His aura had rattled her in a way she couldn’t put into words. Not fear, not exactly. Something older. Primeval. A disruption to instinct.

  And the girl…

  Lisa thought about the pulse of bugs she’d tracked. The dry, controlled command that had kept civilians untouched. The precision of a swarm that could coat buildings without stinging a single bystander. You didn’t get that kind of control by accident. You earned it. Through repetition, effort… restraint.

  She thought about the fact that no one else seemed to care how much discipline that must’ve taken. They only saw ash, headlines, and mystery.

  They didn’t see the girl standing at the center of it all, trying to hold back a tide with bare hands.

  Lisa exhaled through her nose. Too many people in this city wrote others off too quickly. As threats. As monsters. As problems to be solved instead of lives to be understood.

  The bus hit a pothole. Lisa barely felt it.

  She opened her eyes just in time to see a familiar intersection flash past. Another reminder of how close they’d all come to catastrophe last night—and how quickly the city was already trying to forget.

  The loft came into view five minutes later. She tapped the stop request and stepped off without speaking. The air was thick with the scent of asphalt, ash, and too many exhaust fumes.

  Inside, she found Brian awake, seated on the couch with a laptop balanced on one thigh. He didn’t look up.

  “How bad?” she asked, dropping her bag.

  He clicked once, paused. “No new sightings. PRT still circling the docks.”

  Lisa nodded and headed for the bathroom. She needed a shower. Then food. Then a few solid hours of building models for an outreach scenario that probably wouldn’t work.

  Still… she had to try.

  Because somewhere out there was a girl with too much power and too little trust.

  And Lisa knew, better than anyone, what happened when someone like that was left alone too long.