Isaac followed Smokeshow as they walked through the slums, hiding his discomfort behind the aloof demeanor that Chains provided. It wasn’t so much the supposed reason for the patrol that bothered him, which was to keep an eye out for trouble and stop it. Unsurprisingly, many of the people who wound up in the slums were violent and had poor attitudes, and the recent – and still rising – tension in the city didn’t help.
His problem was that it made no sense to send the newbie out on patrol with a high ranking person like Smokeshow. While he’d never been in a gang before, he’d learned a bit at least by osmosis and someone like him ought to be relegated to the low-grade scutwork. Not partnered with a tactical-class meta who happened to be the daughter of one of Blacktime’s personal friends.
He could only think of two good reasons. The first was that they were stringing him along, keeping a close eye on the newcomer so they would have him close to hand if they didn’t like what they saw. Something that was supported by the third member of their patrol, Columbuzz, pointing out undercover police officers in an undertone.
“That one’s a plant,” the meta said in his strange, buzzing voice, one not-quite-human hand pointing at someone who looked like a kid in ganger leathers. The guy was just hanging out with a few others and smoking, with nothing to make him stand out to Isaac’s eye. “Star City PD.”
“How do you know?” Isaac grated out in Chains voice, somewhat annoyed with himself for choosing such a gravely tone now that it seemed he needed to actually interact.
“It’s my specialty,” Columbuzz said, tapping his temple.
That was the kind of thing that made Isaac almost convinced they were messing with him, since if Columbuzz could spot an undercover cop, he could certainly spot that Isaac was a fake. But there wasn’t any of the smug undertone that he would have expected, and Isaac doubted that Crash would have bothered with that kind of subtlety anyway. The man wasn’t dumb, but he was well known for brute force.
“Don’t worry, he can’t see who we are,” Smokeshow said, taking a drag of her cigarette. Wisps of scentless smoke trailed around them, Smokeshow’s power cloaking them in an illusion of some sort. Isaac couldn’t tell what it was from the inside, but the smoke illusions were good enough to fool most metas. Hiding the three them from casual observation was easy enough.
Which led him to the other possible reason — that Smokeshow was the one who wanted him to come along. He didn’t have any idea what to think of that, because while she was cute enough and thankfully didn’t reek of cigarettes, she was also a ganger’s daughter and Chains didn’t actually exist. That was a recipe for utter disaster, but at the same time, he felt like he was impelled to act since Chains shouldn’t be so reticent.
At least the discomfort helped sell his brooding demeanor, the metal wrapped around his ganger clothes clinking as he strolled – strutted, really – through the slum. He probably should have felt bad for these people, and maybe for some he did, but he spotted a lot of people strung out on drugs, slovenly and idle. The sounds of people yelling, fighting, and breaking things. The sort of behavior that he’d seen all the way back in foster care and exactly the reason he’d fought so hard not to fall into the habits so many nominal-class metas did.
Isaac had known kids who entirely rejected menial jobs like his; janitor or maintenance technician or even a freelancer, actually preferring the gang life. Even tinkers, despite having all the advantages one could wish for, could get stuck at the low end because they acted like thugs. Admittedly, there was some level of competition between tinkers that Isaac didn’t get, but even dreg tinkers could get a good job doing maintenance and repair.
Gangers were fractious and violent sort, meta or not, so it wasn’t long before they found the kind of trouble that was generally expected in the slums. Two sets of idiot kids yelling and brandishing guns at each other. Isaac winced even if Chains merely began unwrapping his weapons from around his forearms; the belligerents didn’t look to be metas so actually using his power was dangerous. No matter how dumb they were Isaac definitely didn’t want to see any idiot kids die. Although calling them kids might not have been entirely accurate; some of them were older than him.
He started forward even before Columbuzz or Smokeshow said anything, though he knew he’d have to be careful. These were regular folk, not someone who could take a hit from inertially-invested chains. At least he, personally, could take it if someone had an itchy trigger finger.
“Daniels! Levi! You cut that shit right now and go home!” Smokeshow shouted as Isaac approached, getting their attention and that of their respective groups. Isaac didn’t want to be arrogant, but even with seven people involved he didn’t think they really posed much of a physical threat to the three metas, so he wasn’t worried when the guns turned his way.
“Hey, bitch! You don’t get to—” The ganger cut off as Isaac whipped his chain down, slamming it into sidewalk between the quarreling idiots. It gouged a long tear in the concrete, sending chips flying and a puff of dust rising into the air. Isaac had to breathe very carefully not to choke on the dust and so ruin his own intimidation.
“The Iron Nails keeps the peace here,” Smokeshow said in a bored tone, strolling up behind Isaac and putting a hand on his shoulder. “And unless you want Chains to beat you senseless, take your people and go home. We’ve got enough problems here without you starting a shootout.”
Daniels – or Levi, whichever one it was – looked like he was about to say something, but a bit of smoke plumed out between the two groups, and the kid changed his mind. The two groups dispersed with audible grumbling, but they went different ways regardless. In all, the encounter wasn’t much — but it was better than people killing each other.
“Good job,” Columbuzz said. “Blast Fist and Hard Edge are usually rougher.”
“Just demonstrate power, and people like that fold,” Isaac said. “Violence is what happens if someone shows weakness.”
“You sure you haven’t been in a gang before?” Smokeshow asked, tapping the ash off her cigarette, the other hand still resting on his shoulder.
“I have observed,” he admitted, not even lying. The only reason he knew how to act was that he had been close enough to the ganger areas to watch dozens of confrontations. Though the Iron Nails at least kept it from turning into all-out warfare — that and the fact that even if there was tension between low level groups, at the top there was only Blacktime.
“Well, it’s a lot less trouble,” Smokeshow said.
“Hard on the sidewalk,” Columbuzz pointed out, though there was a certain base level of disrepair around anyway. Which, oddly, meant that there hadn’t been any serious super fight there lately. The various construction metas in Star City tended to resurface entire areas when there was damage, since it was actually cheaper than piecemeal maintenance.
“Sidewalks can be repaired,” Isaac said with a shrug as he began to wrap his chains back up, but stopped as Columbuzz made an odd, insectile noise, his entire body pivoting around to look off along the slums.
“Something’s headed to the base,” he said, and took off running. Smokeshow followed, and Isaac took up the rear, wondering how with such super-senses Columbuzz hadn’t figured out Chains was a ringer. Or if he had, what the game was. The attack certainly wasn’t a game, as when they rounded the corner to the street with the base, Isaac recognized the shiny spheres dodging energy blasts from the building’s defenses.
“Mechaniacal,” he said, and both Columbuzz and Smokeshow whipped around to look at him. “His tech, anyway. Stolen.”
“Oh, well if it’s just that,” Smokeshow said, breaking out into a rare smile. Relief at not having to deal with a sovereign-class nightmare. “Come on!”
Isaac really didn’t want to get into a super-fight with tinker creations from one of the most terrifying men history had to offer, but at the same time, Chains had no choice. Nor did Isaac, as helping defend the base might well be his ticket into unsupervised access — or an excuse to barge through, depending on how things went. The only reassurance was that nobody at the hospital had been hurt, the drones not having mayhem on their mechanical minds.
He gathered his chains into his hands, pelting after Smokeshow and Columbuzz, and actually able to get ahead of them simply because he was taller. Even as he approached, he invested his clothes and, in the thinking he’d had since the super-fight, reduced the inertia of his body in order to hopefully have the best of both worlds. There were six of the spheres, one large and the others smaller. From what Isaac could tell, the drones were systematically stripping away the building’s fa?ade, ripples in the air impacting the wall and making patches of it vanish. A chunk of stone was already gone, but the armor underneath seemed to be made of tougher stuff.
From behind, a column of smoke zipped forward to surround the drones. Smokeshow’s power not only let her control smoke and turn into it, but it was the stuff that made her illusions. Even if he hadn’t seen the actual visuals, he’d seen the results before, like how the car got away from the super back during the heist. Invisibility was just the start. He couldn’t tell what Smokeshow was trying to show them from the outside, but the pulsing of the destructive beams paused for a moment, and one of the defensive turrets sticking out of the building scored a hit. A red bolt of energy glanced off the silver sphere, ricocheting into the air and zipping off into the sky.
The big sphere seemed to pulse, a visible shockwave rolling through the smoke surrounding it, and behind him Smokeshow shrieked as the haze vanished. Isaac risked a glance back to see the girl crumpled on the ground, clutching her head in her hands. Columbuzz slowed, and given that he only had super-senses, Isaac waved him back, still gripping his chains.
“Help her!” He shouted backward, crossing the last few feet to where the big central sphere hovered. It was just above head height and, now that he was close to it, he could see that it was a good six feet across, much larger than he’d thought. Isaac whipped the chain over his head, trying to push extra inertia into the already-saturated chain as it tore through the air.
The sphere pulsed again, and this time the wave hit him. He flinched reflexively, but instead of what happened to Smokeshow, a sudden numbness washed through the metaphorical muscle he used to apply his power. Isaac blinked, and then felt his arm dragged down as the chain continued to move, unable to resist the motion as he was now beholden to all the extra inertia he’d given it.
Metal hit metal with a deafening boom, the drone’s shell groaning as several tons of force slammed into it with the profile of a relatively small chain. The machine dented, then gave way as the chain scythed downward, only failing to rip his arm out of its socket by virtue of the fact that it was mostly tugging on the inertia invested in his sleeve. But he was trapped, unable to move as he was pulled over.
The chain finished cutting through the sphere a moment later, slamming into the ground as Isaac fell forward, fear spiking through him as he struggled against the prison of his clothing. As he tilted over, all he could think of was how Cayleb had fallen, only Cayleb hadn’t had inertial tons of clothing surrounding him. Isaac’s own power was going to crush him flat.
Something inside the bisected sphere clicked, sighed, and failed, and just as Isaac hit the ground his power returned. His head hit the asphalt and stopped, the low inertia meaning he stopped dead rather than actually impacting, but his clothing didn’t crush him. The two mangled halves of Mechaniacal’s drone thumped to the ground a moment later as their levitation decayed, far too close for comfort, and Isaac pulled himself out of a cracked depression in the road, somewhat dazed.
The remaining spheres hummed and then flew away as he watched with bemusement, then looked down at the broken pieces of the machine he’d destroyed. The exposed interior was filled with fine gears, some still spinning uselessly, others jammed, bent, and destroyed. Just looking at the intricate mechanisms filled him with an unnamable dread, as if he were glimpsing something not meant for mortal man.
Yet, there were bits that looked familiar. Pieces of scaffolding and bracing, and the color of the odd blue metal used in its construction. His hazy mind connected it after a moment; he’d seen much the same in the ripped-out guts of the scanning device that had been damaged in the attack on the hospital. He’d lived with tinkers long enough to recognize the unique fingerprint that meant they had the same source.
He was too muddled to think much about that at the moment, and when he tried to turn away from the mess, the chain still wrapped around his arm stopped him, embedded as it was in the ground. A few desultory tugs failed to free it and, rather than figure out how to retrieve the thing, he just divested it of all the extra inertia and unclipped it. Then, as he was thinking about it, he pulled all the extra inertia from his clothes and chains. Just for now; he didn’t entirely trust things at the moment.
“What was that?” Columbuzz asked, crouching next to Smokeshow, who was still holding her head. Despite what media said, leaking blood from the eyes or the nose – or worse, coughing it up – was generally a sign of serious injury, so he was glad to see none of that.
“Power inhibitor,” Isaac grunted, though he’d only heard of such things in comics. In the real world, there wasn’t some special magical way to stop people from accessing their powers, given the huge range of ways they worked. Hell, the inhibitor hadn’t removed the inertia from his chain or his clothes, so it clearly wasn’t perfect.
“How do you know all this?” Columbuzz challenged, helping Smokeshow to her feet. Isaac helped, reaching out to steady the girl on the other side.
“I saw another attack like this,” Isaac half-lied, since he’d seen the footage from the hospital and the aftermath, even if he hadn’t been there at the time. “Someone is stealing Mechaniacal tech. Which could be anywhere.” It was only a guess, but he made a statement since Chains certainly wouldn’t be uncertain.
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“Guh,” said Smokeshow. “QwikMed inside,” she continued, and Isaac exchanged a look with Columbuzz and helped Smokeshow into the building despite its still-active defenses. The guns didn’t swing to target them, thankfully, and the doors opened of their own accord for the three of them. Isaac helped her into a chair in the cafeteria, while Columbuzz rattled through the cabinets before he came out with the healing patch.
Isaac found his hands shaking, so he clasped them behind his back as Columbuzz fumbled out the QwikMed patch and Smokeshow applied it, slapping it against her arm. She sighed in relief, slumping in her chair, then buried her face in her hands. He exchanged an uncertain glance with Columbuzz as her shoulders shook briefly, since he would have thought that the daughter of a crime boss would be used to violence.
Though thinking about it, he wasn’t sure that was entirely true. Her power made her essentially immune to anything physical and maybe even stuff like energy blasts, and with her dad being who he was, nobody would have tried to bully her even when she was younger. For all he knew, this was the first time she’d actually been punched in the face, metaphorically speaking — and the sensation of losing her power might have been far worse for her than it was for him.
“We should check the rest of the building,” Isaac said, lacking any other useful contribution. Besides, he wanted to know how everything was laid out, hopefully to give him some idea of where and how to get what he wanted from Crash. There might not be a better chance, even if he did feel a bit bad about exploiting the situation, gangers or no.
“Yeah,” Smokeshow said, standing up, her dark makeup smudged. “Dad’s not going to be happy anyway, but it’ll be better if we make sure nothing got stolen.” She took a long breath, then nodded at Columbuzz. “Go button us up, I’ll take Chains with me in case there’s anything else up there.”
The fly-man returned her nod and headed off to a door on one side of the cafeteria room, while Smokeshow led him to the other. He kept a hand under her elbow, a habit borne from helping Cayleb get around when they’d both been younger, and while the QwikMed seemed to have worked she let him do so. She lifted one of the many silver chain necklaces she wore and pressed it against the front of the unmarked door, and there was a click as it unlocked.
Smokeshow silently led him down the carpeted hallway beyond, and he glanced through any open doors he saw. It was clearly a converted office building, but some of the former offices had been turned into bedrooms, others into storage with jumbled boxes. Smokeshow opened one closed door and through it Isaac saw guns, both conventional and tinker-made, racked on the walls, but he only got a glimpse before she closed it. An elevator took them upstairs, and Smokeshow finally spoke.
“Well, that was shit.”
“Not fun,” Isaac agreed. “But could have been worse.” He couldn’t help think about close he’d gotten to being pasted by his own powers. Or the lack thereof.
“Yeah.” Smokeshow produced a cigarette from somewhere and brought it to her lips. As usual, it didn’t smell of anything and Isaac had to wonder if it was actually real, or just one of her illusions. “Never felt something like that before though.” She wandered along the upper hallway, opening doors that just had knobs rather than any kind of security arrangement.
“Same,” Isaac admitted. The sudden loss of power hadn’t hurt, but the more he thought about it the more disturbing it was.
“I heard Mechaniacal used to be a big name but I didn’t realize he had that stuff — this is Dad’s room,” Smokeshow said parenthetically, as she opened one of the doors. Isaac peered over her shoulder, trying to commit it to memory. Like the rest of the rooms it had a small, armored window, illuminating a surprisingly neat and clean floor and bed. In the corner there was a large computer console, one of the old micro-vac models with tape drives, with wires leading to a tinker monitor with half its innards exposed and a thick cable winding up to the ceiling. That was probably Isaac’s target, and while he couldn’t do anything about it now, he made sure to memorize the serial number to make sure he got the right type of tape for it.
“Looks clear,” he observed, and Smokeshow grunted, closing the door. She continued on to the end of the hall and opened the door there, revealing what was obviously her room, with posters on the wall for bands – some he’d never heard of, and a few like Moon Prism that were fairly famous – and a bunch of plush magical girl figurines on a shelf. Thankfully she didn’t invite him in; Isaac had no idea what to do if she’d gone that far, but she did lean on the jamb and rub her eyes, further smearing her cosmetics. She looked subtly different than usual, less pale and dark, her usual appearance likely altered by illusion.
“I don’t know if I’m up for this,” she said, not looking directly at him. “Running cover was fine, but getting hit like that…”
“There are other options than this,” Isaac said, not sure if he was really equipped to give advice, but he’d take any chance to try and convince someone away from being a ganger. “So long as you don’t go hero.” Smokeshow took a deep drag on her possibly-fake cigarette and let it out.
“Maybe? Dunno what I’d do. Everyone I know’s in the Iron Nails.”
“You could come to the convention,” Isaac said, mouth betraying him before his brain caught up. He wished he could play it off as just wanting to offer her another option, something other than gang life, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ignore himself. Despite everything that advised against it – or maybe because of it – he was interested in her.
In a flash he realized that he was going to have a pretty rough time going forward, if he was going to try and date the daughter of one of the guys he wanted to bring to account. Or even if he didn’t try, just being in her vicinity was going to screw with his ability to think. It would have been better if he’d not said anything, but he couldn’t take it back now.
“The what now?”
“MetaFiCon,” Isaac clarified, almost feeling things shift as he committed to the course. “Fan convention for metas, real or fictional. Next Wednesday. There’s former supers there, and other metas. Just, people doing something other than this.”
“Huh,” Smokeshow said. “Maybe.” She paused for a moment, studying his face as she took another drag on her cigarette. “I gotta call dad,” she said abruptly. “You should probably get outta here. Just ‘cause he’ll throw a fit and you don’t want to be around.”
“Sure,” said Isaac, and backed away as Smokeshow stepped into her room. Just before she closed the door she stopped and looked back.
“Hey,” she said. “Thanks.” Then she closed the door without waiting for his answer. He shook his head, putting aside the whole interaction with some serious effort, and started snooping on his way back to the elevator. No matter what, he wasn’t willing to compromise on his original goals, and he’d gotten a lot farther than he expected. If he’d had the right tape drive, he would have gone right to Crash’s room, but as it was he’d have to figure out a way to come back.
Since it was a former office building, he found what he was looking for off to the side of the elevator — a janitor’s closet. He was pretty certain that the clean floors downstairs and the nicely vacuumed carpet upstairs wasn’t something that was done by any of the gang members, and judging by the contents of the closet he was right.
There was the usual vacuum, mop, broom, and so on, but most importantly there was a checklist and signoff sheet. An itemized list of to-do items, from a weekly refilling of toiletries to a bimonthly rug shampooing. By the dates, the cleaning crew came on Fridays, so he had a day to get ready. He felt a lot more confident about joining in cleanup than he did about getting access by trying to finesse Smokeshow — and a lot better, too.
It wasn’t just that he was interested in her. Smokeshow had her life decided by supers, the same as he had. The girl hadn’t chosen her parents, but unlike him she hadn’t had a chance to go out and try and make something of herself. Maybe if he gave her something outside the gang, she could escape the trap of being a ganger forever.
He got back in the elevator, poking the button for the ground floor, and by the time he emerged, Columbuzz was sitting in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee. As Isaac watched, the fly-guy dumped six packets of sugar into his drink, stirring it around and then extending a proboscis to slurp it up like a straw. Disturbing, but people didn’t choose their powers or mutations.
“Smokeshow is in her room,” he reported. “She’ll need food and drink for the QwikMed.”
Columbuzz gave him a thumbs-up in reply, continuing to slurp his coffee, and Isaac walked out of the building. There were a couple of normal gangers already examining the crushed and severed halves of the device, and they looked guilty as he emerged. It really wasn’t his business, but Isaac hiked a thumb at the building anyway.
“Crash will return soon. Stow that inside or in a garage,” he told them, then walked away down the street. Once he was out of sight, he started jogging, wishing he had some form of transportation for Chains, since he was getting tired of having to run a couple miles every time. At least he was getting exercise.
After a quick change at the self-store, he went out as Harkeem, the fussy southerner being a solidly neutral and forgettable persona for making a variety of random purchases. A tape drive and extension of the right make for his own computer and set of backup tapes, some extra cleaning supplies, a refill on cosmetics. He even went and looked at a bicycle for Chains, but couldn’t see it meshing with the gruff ganger’s personality. Chains needed a motorcycle or monowheel, but those were far and away too expensive, even if he bought a used one somewhere.
The trip let him listen in on the radio from various stores where the news was playing, and he bought a couple of newspapers from a stand. Before, he’d get most of his news from Cayleb or from gossip at the hospital, but now that he was off by himself or hanging around the slums, he had to resort to more conventional means of informing himself. Mostly, he was morbidly curious if the whereabouts of one Isaac Hartson were being sought, but according to the papers there had been other glimpses of Mechaniacal’s machines in other parts of the Five City Alliance. Perhaps even further abroad, but getting news reports from foreign kingdoms or city-states was a little tenuous.
Before, he’d thought that maybe Blacktime was involved — whenever anything large was stirring, that was the first and easiest assumption. Of course, he had his own personal grudge but it was just a fact that Blacktime ran most of the crime in the area. But with the attack against Crash, that was out, and worrisome. Isaac forced himself not to fret over it too much though; he was still just a nominal-class meta, even if he had somehow managed to take out one of the drones. Probably thanks to whoever was messing about with them being vastly inferior to the real Mechaniacal.
He didn’t go back to the slums. Partly because he didn’t want to be interrogated by Crash, partly because he didn’t want Chains to be associated with the cleaning crew even slightly. Mostly because he was all ganger’d out, and didn’t feel like facing even a hint of violence. Chains was aggressive and decisive, but that was stressful when Isaac didn’t really know what he was doing most of the time.
Instead he spent the down time finishing details on Ravdia’s armor and weapon. Some wire and extra padding, to reinforce it and make sure that it wouldn’t squash him if he were somehow deprived of powers once again. Then, since he had spare time, he kept at it and added some bits and pieces to Lou’s toolset. Pencils and screwdrivers, old wrenches from a scrapheap in the industrial district, some cough drops, duct tape. Nothing that would imply any skills Isaac didn’t have, but he did know how to at least turn a valve or fix a light switch. Not that he needed to do it, but he had to keep himself busy to stop from dwelling.
Both costumes got packed into a sectioned duffel, along with the outfit for Chains. Under the circumstances, he needed to have all his personas available when he went out. There was no point in creating and establishing them if they weren’t going to be at hand when he needed them. Not that he was looking for a fight, but the city was uncertain at the moment.
He headed over to the slums early in Lou’s costume, but dressed overtop that as a generic ganger. A bandana covered Lou’s bald cap, and big thick eyebrows along with a permanent sneer altered his face. In a way it wasn’t much of a disguise, but changing the way he walked and the details around his eyes and nose tended to be enough to prevent any casual scrutiny. Besides, he wasn’t intending to interact much. He simply swaggered through the slums in the pre-dawn light, with essentially nobody around, and when he reached the street with Crash’s building – which still had swaths of stone missing to reveal metal underneath – he went and ascended one of the fire escapes on the other side of the street.
If it weren’t for the super-fight alongside Smokeshow he wouldn’t have thought of it, but in hindsight the roof perch was obvious. Too obvious, most likely, which was why he didn’t take one directly across from Crash’s building, but rather down the road, closer to the edge of the slums. A commercial cleaning crew would probably come from the better area of town, so he could hopefully catch it that way.
Isaac waited. There was, unfortunately, no telling when the crew would show up, since that hadn’t been helpfully recorded on the sheets in the janitor’s closet, so he settled in for the long haul. He had bottled water and granola bars, and a blanket to sit on, so he hoped he wasn’t already too late to catch them.
The idea wasn’t as stupid as it might seem at first blush. He’d long found that people had a certain visceral dislike of being around strangers cleaning up, and tended to make themselves scarce. Coupled with the fact that Smokeshow spent most of her time hanging around Loveley’s and Crash was mostly away, there wasn’t likely to be anyone to trip him up other than the cleaning crew — and given the damage, he was planning to just present himself as extra help from the gang.
Even if the cleaners didn’t know exactly who they were working for, it was obvious enough by the surroundings the kind of person, so it wouldn’t be outlandish. And if they didn’t buy it, he wouldn’t push. He could always try again later some other way.
Isaac didn’t own a watch, but by the radio someone had on in the distance, it was just past nine – as marked by The Morning Show with Hal McKinley – when a branded van drove down the road and turned into the garage nearby. The mop and bucket on the side of the vehicle made it clear what it was, so Isaac hastened to finish his change to Lou, with the overalls and the moustache, dialing his inertia down to the minimum as he jumped off the side of the building with the magnetic tape in his pocket.
With no inertia, he just stopped at street level rather than properly landing, and restored himself before hurrying across to lounge in front of Crash’s building. Just in time, too, as a quartet of similarly-attired people came up the road, the man lugging a wheeled trash can and the three women carrying small bags. The woman in the lead frowned at Isaac, putting her hands on her hips.
“Who’re you, then?”
“I’m Lou!” Isaac said, tapping his scuffed and faded name badge. “Just got sent to do some scutwork, you know? Pay off some debt. I can do whatever you need me to. Vacuuming, toilet cleaning, whatever.” The woman looked skeptical for a moment, but before Isaac could panic it turned out her concern was of a very specific nature.
“We don’t have to pay you, do we?”
“No, I’m on my own hook,” Isaac said, giving them his best hapless smile from beneath Lou’s moustache, hunching slightly with his hands in his overall pockets.
“Hate scrubbing toilets anyway,” the woman grumbled, and opened the door. Isaac wasn’t entirely certain how the security worked, but none of the weaponry targeted them as they went inside. They got to work immediately, cleaning wrappers and discarded napkins from the tables and counters, refilling sugar and coffee packets from the supplies, and of course mopping and wiping things. Isaac was sent off to take care of the bathrooms, which was fine. So long as he was let into the upper floor he could manage.
It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was doing, and it was obvious what places were off-limits. The locked doors he’d seen Columbuzz and Smokeshow open before remained locked, save for the first door out of the cafeteria. It made sense, as it was just a step too far to get a commercial cleaner for the security station or armory.
The cleaning chemicals stung his nose as he worked away, doing his best not to worry. Either he’d get upstairs, and be able to do his thing, or he wouldn’t and the worst he’d have done is lose a morning. Both acting and cleaning were easy enough for him, so he was able to just focus on the work.
Thankfully, there were bathrooms upstairs, too, so maybe thirty minutes in he joined the man – whose name he hadn’t gotten – in the elevator and up to the second floor. His hand almost went to where the tape was in his pocket, but he stopped himself just in time. No need to make any suspicious moves where others would notice. Isaac stepped out onto the second floor, following the other guy to the janitor’s closet.
“I’ll vacuum,” he volunteered, hands in his overalls. “Need a break from the chemicals.”
“You’re still doing the bathrooms,” the guy told him.
“Yeah, sure,” Isaac said easily, in Lou’s cheerful voice, and took the vacuum he’d been handed. He flicked it on and tuned out the whine as he started on the carpets, running the thing back and forth and getting ever closer to Crash’s door. He was almost there when he heard a voice behind him. A raised, familiar voice.
“Hey,” said Smokeshow.
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