Chapter Text
MON FEB 28
I got off the bus at the mall, then started heading north. Tracy lived in the nice suburbs near the commercial area that encompassed Medhall, the Towers, and the mall, among other things. Part of why it was the nice part of the suburbs was because of that proximity, the other being that it was far enough inside the borders of Empire territory that it never really saw the gang fighting like my neighborhood sometimes did. The simple fact was, it was the nicest part of town to live in, besides the mansions up past the Hill, Portsmouth out past the slums, or maybe the Towers themselves. It was clean, with well manicured lawns and fully maintained houses. A few of them literally met the 'white-picket house' stereotype, which always felt so bizarre to see in Brockton.
It felt strange and alien, even more than the part of town Dinah lived. At least there I knew it was the rich part of town, which helped explain it. To me, this was more like someone stuck a bit of an entirely different city in the middle of my hometown. I passed the strip malls lining the area outside the main shopping center, the buildings separating off into standalone structures as I went. These were larger, but often less specialized. Restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, gas stations, all splitting between catering to the part of town Tracy lived, and anyone from the Towers who got tired of the mall life. My senses were already reaching the normal houses, and it took a couple blocks worth of guesswork to narrow down which house was hers, this far out.
I stopped for a couple seconds to focus and make sure my steps weren't throwing off any fine detail. Yup, definitely her. She was home alone, in her house's basement, kneeling by some boxes full of junk and sorting through them. Spring cleaning, maybe? But then why did she feel anxious and hopeful? Maybe she was looking for something. I started walking again, my attention splitting easily between speeding up a bit, keeping an 'eye' on Tracy, and sifting through bodies and buildings in the nearby blocks for anything suspicious or criminal.
Had it taken any effort at all, it would've been wasted. Most people were either still at work, or socializing after classes. At least pointing a goal at the spying helped the violation of privacy feel a little less unjustified. If I really hated it though, I'd go back to normal shoes. The fact that I haven't seems pretty damning, honestly. Don't worry good people of Brockton, Big Sister is benevolent, and absolutely not a voyeur.
I groaned to myself, and went back to wondering what Tracy was up to. She'd gotten a few things out of the boxes and brought them over to the wooden workbench which looked like a later addition to the house. She was fiddling with something that looked a bit like a power drill, clamped down in a vice that was bolted to one of the bench's legs. The shape fit, but it didn't have an outer casing and there were fewer mechanical parts and more electronics than I'd expected. Then again, that seemed to be the trend these days. It felt like if something didn't have a dozen settings and software to manage them, it would in less than a decade. The number of doodads I'd seen since starting at Arcadia that were electrified when they really had no right to be was honestly astonishing. Who needs an electric pen? Apparently the three people in my classes who regularly used them.
Still, I had no idea she liked things like that. Mom would've been thrilled. She might've been an English professor, but she had students from all different fields passing through her class to fill out whatever prerequisites their degree paths had. She always took the time to encourage and support her STEM girls. I knew Tracy already had a sports scholarship waiting for her, but now I wanted to know what major she was planning on. I'd have to ask.
She was still working on it when I made it to her block, though she'd moved on to prodding it with a voltmeter or similar testing device, and was fiddling with the trigger. Her house was nice. Bigger than mine, painted a soft blue. It seemed worn but well-maintained, with clean walls and windows, intact roof, and a manicured lawn. I assumed the turquoise car out front was hers, parked on the road to leave space to get into the driveway and garage, which had me thinking her parents both had their own cars. It looked like the sort of affordable mid-range car that well-off parents would buy their daughter for her sixteenth birthday.
I was musing over the bits of trash in her car, and how they showed more personality to her than she'd let through in the weeks I'd known her, when her emotions turned dark. They started out anxious, then frustrated, before spiking in flares of rage and hatred. She ripped the thing from its vice and hurled it into the far wall, screaming at it. I sped my walk into a jog, then a run. Her mood turned again, to sorrow and loathing, and it felt like she was crying. She stumbled a bit, catching herself on boxes that didn't hold her weight, sending her staggering past them. She whirled in a hot rage again, shoving the stack over with a shout. The force unbalanced her again, and she fell to the floor on her backside. Shock blanked her emotions for a moment, before the sorrow came rushing back, bringing a flood of tears and wailing with it.
By then I'd made it to her house. I tried the front door, but it was locked. The mechanisms on all the ground floor windows also looked shut tight, though the master en-suite's window looked to be a suitable egress of last resort if I wanted to risk looking like a burglar. The garage door had an electric motor, bolted to the center of the ceiling like they usually were. I could feel the emergency release cord dangling from it, and if airbending couldn't catch enough drag then I could always flow the water I had under the door to freeze on it and yank it that way. That sounded better than leaping up on the awning and struggling with the window screen, actually. Still, maybe they had a... there. I found a little plastic case in the tiny ditch between the lawn and patio in the backyard, containing something metal and key-shaped. I dashed over to the fence, idly noting the combination lock on the gate before I hopped it. I tried the door first, a solid front-door type, but it was also locked. Inside the walls were patches where it'd been replaced, though my eyes couldn't tell the difference. If I had to guess, it used to be a sliding door years ago and was replaced because those are trivial to break into if you don't mind the noise and glass shards.
I grabbed the key and unlocked the door, not sparing the sparse if expensive looking décor any eye-time on my way to the basement. The door opened almost soundlessly, and I crept down the stairs, stopping a third of the way down when I came into proper view of the room. I found Tracy huddled under the bench, hands around her legs while her head pressed into her knees. If I didn't know how massive she was upright, I might've thought she looked small right now. I continued down the steps, spending less effort on silence as I went. By the time my feet hit the floor, I was walking normally and she still hadn't heard me. If she was that lost in her wallowing, it could be a while before she caught on. So as much as I'd have preferred to let her notice me on her own terms, I cleared my throat. "Uhh, Tracy?"
Her head snapped up, wide red eyes catching mine. "T-Tay...?" Her gaze drifted upward, first toward the stairs, then about lining up with the front door of the house. She seemed to be in a daze, her emotions shifting from shock to confusion as she drifted off into thought. When her head slowly dropped to look my way again, her face was still scrunched up with how perplexed she felt. "Did... you break into my house?"
"Uhhm... I didn't break anything?" I shook my head at the stupidity of my words, quickly switching track. "Kara asked me to check up on you, so I came by and... I heard screaming. Are you okay?"
She swallowed thickly. "I'm f-" Her voice cut out as she choked on the lie. Her eyes started watering, and I could see her arms tightening around herself. "I... I don't know."
I glanced around the room for something to shift the topic to. It looked like a normal handyman's basement, with the wooden workbench and racks of tools on the wall under the little fogged glass vent-style windows. There were a few boxes, but they looked like recent additions now that I had eyes on. There was no dust and they hadn't had time to sag into each other. One was full of bits of wire, another had a few loose circuit boards and chips, a third half-full of old power tools like what she'd been working on... It looked like makeshift parts bins.
The thought of what she'd been working on lead me to actually glancing over to where it'd fallen earlier. While the basic shape looked like an electric hand drill, the bits left exposed looked more electronic than mechanical like I'd expected. It honestly looked a bit like those toy ray guns that phased out of popularity while I was still too little for them, looking too much like-
My eyes widened, and I turned back to her. "You're a Tinker." I muttered quietly.
She flinched at the word. "I'm not..." Her emotions were going wild. "I can't..." Her eyes misted over, face pulling tight, then she raised her hands to cup the sides of her head. "I'm..." Her voice trailed into a keening sound as she began to sob.
Oh goddammit, this was going to be a thing, wasn't it? I took a moment to resign myself to the fact that every cape friend I made was going to cry on me eventually, and started slowly creeping closer to her. I closed within a meter before she noticed and started scooting further into her little cubby's corner. "Hey," I muttered softly, crouching further and reaching out to her. "it's okay, I'm here to help." I took it as a good sign that when I crawled in with her and started gently rubbing at her back, she neither flinched away nor tried to fight me off. "It's alright, let it out."
Tracy leaned into me after that, muttering between bouts of wracking sobs. About how she was a bad tinker, a bad friend, a bad person, and I gently refuted them even when she repeated or reiterated them. She said that she was broken, and I replied, "Everyone's a little broken. It doesn't make you bad." That had her crying harder for a bit, but I could feel her emotions shift to a less negative mixture.
It took somewhere between ten and twenty minutes for her to calm down, enough time that I'd counted nearly four dozen traffic shifts indicating intersection light changes since I'd started counting, just to have something to take my mind off the attractive girl ugly-crying in my arms. She slipped and slid down my side and front, and all scooting away did was land her head in my lap instead of on the floor. With nothing else I could think to do, I started awkwardly petting her hair in an attempt at soothing her steadily evening emotions.
After a couple minutes of this, she whined and curled tighter. "I want to be small..." She muttered in despair.
Ahh, body image issues. At least that was familiar territory. Very few boys liked being the smaller half of their relationships, which meant my height worked against me in a lot of cases. That Tracy dwarfed even me meant the issue was even worse for her. She stood out in whatever group she was in, even if she didn't want to. The thought of never being able to hide was honestly terrifying, to me. "I'm so sorry..." I murmured, and she nuzzled deeper into my lap.
I gave her another couple minutes to calm down, watching her emotions even out. She was starting to realize she'd have to get up soon, and confront whatever happened, which had an anxious thrill building within her. "So," I coughed, trying to head off another mood spiral. "you're a Tinker." She grimaced and slowly pulled away, still hunched to present as small a profile as possible, which had her looking up at me despite being so much taller. "It's okay." I said to cut off another budding denial. I held out my hand and a small flame flickered to life in my palm. "I'm a cape, too."
Her eyes stayed locked on the fire for a few moments, before they broke away with a shake of her head. "Are..." She croaked, then cleared her throat, continuing hesitantly. "Are you Circus?"
"What? Who? No!" I snuffed the flame before my indignant frustration could fuel it becoming something more dangerous than a candle-light. "I'm Terraform."
"Oh." She muttered awkwardly. "I... haven't really looked into any capes since just after I..." She fidgeted. "I didn't know you could..."
"Classical elements." I supplied as she trailed off. "It's weirdly broad, no one expects it, even when I keep saying it." She curled in on herself a bit more, and I caught flashes of envy peeking through her melancholy. "Hey, what's wrong?" She stayed silent, though her far-off look hardened into a glare at the floor. "It's okay. Tinkers are supposed to be weird, right?"
It took a few seconds, but she started talking again. Her voice a droning near-monotone, the words carrying a note of rote recitation. "Tinkers are the most eclectic of the rating groups, capable of nearly anything so long as a device can be built to do so. Each is notable for having a theme or specialty, and the further 'off-brand' the device, the harder it is to build." She took a breath and shakily released it, her voice gaining a bit more life to it. "Tinkers like Armsmaster have a specialty, and others like Leet have a limitation. The wiki didn't have any information on limit-tinkers, but PHO did."
"I thought his stuff was just unreliable?" I asked, to keep her talking.
She shook her head. "He can build anything. Absolutely anything, but only the once. Even components used to make something count. The more parts he's used before, the less reliable the device becomes."
I thought back to all of Uber and Leet's escapades I'd heard about, and even the few shows of theirs I'd watched in the past. Each one had some new gimmick or toy they were playing with, from a couple to a dozen or so new inventions. With dozens of outings, even half a dozen new gadgets each... hundreds of devices, with thousands of parts. "I never thought I'd feel bad for Leet of all people..."
Tracy nodded. "I think... I'm like him. Nothing I make works, and I don't know why."
"That doesn't make sense." I muttered, then spoke a bit louder. "You're sure that you're a Tinker. There had to be something that convinced you, some intuition or something that worked, proving it."
She nodded, then her mood firmed into determination, and she nodded more vigorously before hopping to her feet. I followed her out from under the bench, but waited in the middle of the basement while her long legs ate the stairs three at a time. She went to her room upstairs and grabbed a little block of plastic and electronics off her bedside table, before hesitating and stopping by the bathroom for a plastic cosmetics bin on the counter. She then came back down, and showed me the absolutely normal-looking remote control in her hand. "This is the only thing I've made that works." The surety of her tone and lack of falsehood to her tells stalled any doubt from creeping into my features as she continued. "It still works just fine with the TV, and the batteries don't seem to run out now, but..." She set the little green tray on the bench and snatched a tube of lipstick from it. In one fluid motion, she uncapped the thing, rolled it out a bit, and then swiped a lightning zig-zag up one cheek, a squiggle over her brow, and a crescent down the other cheek. I struggled to keep the wince from my face at how mad her 'look, see?' serious face made her seem in that moment. Then she grabbed the remote, held down a couple of the buttons on it, and swiped the front of it a couple inches from her face, a few times.
Everywhere it passed, in a line with the thin body of the thing, the schmutz on her face disappeared. My face slacked a little, as she did her best to beam at me through the anxiety and shame she felt at the display. "It's a... skin cleaner?"
She twitched, fighting back a grimace. "...makeup remover, I think." I motioned for her to continue, and she sighed and took a moment to gather herself before complying. "I didn't even mean to. I was watching TV, thinking about how much trouble scrubbing it off was... Started taking the remote apart to have a look at the insides. Doing that made sense to me, at the time. Then I put it back together... with bits of my alarm clock added in. I didn't even notice anything odd until I'd already used it." I raised an eyebrow, and she looked sheepish. "It... was a very bad day."
I nodded with a sad little smirk. "Yeah, bad days are... kind of a thing with capes. I get it." Her smile grew a little brighter. "Are you okay, though? It's dangerous to be a lone cape, especially a Tinker."
The smile faded. "I'm..." She shook her head, glancing sadly down at her remote. "Who would want me? I can barely even prove I'm a cape. Someone could say I just bought this. The junk remotes all either didn't work, or broke after I tried to make them do something new." She was growing more despondent by the second, lip trembling and hand shaking as it gripped the plastic casing. "I'm just... stupid make-up-remote girl."
"Hey, it isn't stupid." I moved closer, reaching out to touch her shoulder. "It's marketable! ...I think. And you said it yourself, Tinkers don't have just one thing they do. You'll figure it out." I smiled as brightly as I could. "We could even help, if you'd like?"
She quirked a brow, trying to return the smile. "We?"
"My team! There's me and four others right now, you know the Dallon sisters? Them and two other girls, so far. I'm sure they'd be willing to help even if you didn't join up, which..." I leaned a bit closer. "I really want you to consider. It's dangerous to be a lone cape, especially a Tinker." She glanced away, biting at her lip. "Even if you didn't want to, I've been talking to the PRT a lot, lately. I could set up a meeting with the Wards, if you'd prefer. I just don't want you to be alone. I'm sure…" Actually, from what I'd gotten from Kid Win, Armsmaster didn't seem like the greatest Tinker tutor. He was still a great hero, but no one was perfect. "Gallant and Kid would love someone to talk shop with." Something was tickling the back of my mind, though… "Wait, shit. You're 18, right?" I chuckled. "You'd jump straight to real hero, then. They'd just stick me with the kid jobs, no matter how strong I am."
She ruminated for a few moments. "I don't… think I want…" She took a breath and released it. "I don't like attention, especially if… I just look stupid."
"Ahh, yeah. And the Protectorate would start crowing about their new hero, just to try and scare crime rates lower with the extra numbers. That's part of the argument that kept me out of the Wards when I talked to Dad about it, even."
She blinked and boggled. "Your dad… knows?"
I barked a short laugh. "Some days it feels like I might as well not have a secret identity, even though it's just Dad, Gram, the team, and, uhh…" The gang of anti-gangsters I still wasn't entirely sure how to present to people. "… some friends that might, maybe, count as minions or henchpeople, if I was a villain? Is there a good heroic equivalent?" We stared at each other for a couple seconds, nothing coming to mind. "Ugh, support crew I guess. It's not actually that many people who know my secret identity, it just feels like it."
"It's good." She said, her voice soft and her emotions sad and envious. "That you have people you can trust with it, I mean. My parents…" She shook her head, and I gave her the time to pick her words. "I know they love me, but… they love the idea of me, more than who I am. As long as I'm popular and talented, as long as I stand out, they're happy."
No wonder she was a mess. "I'm so sorry…" I glanced around. "If you don't want them to know, what about your workshop?"
Tracy let out a deep and bitter laugh at that. "Oh, I don't think either of them have been down here since they set this up. They don't care that it's functional, just that it looks the part. …just like everything else." She muttered the last part, before shaking herself and continuing. "My father likes to think of himself as a handyman, but he's never really tried to fix anything." She shrugged and waved over the tools. "Just props that happen to work."
I reached out and ran my hand along her shoulder. "You know we'll help however we can, right? Me, Kara, everyone else? If you need to get away, or need help getting through to them, we'll do whatever we can. It's what friends are for."
She pressed her eyes shut. "…even Vicky?"
"She misses you." I didn't know for sure, but that was just the type of person Vicky was. "They thought you stopped hanging out with them because you didn't like her aura."
Tracy turned back to stare at me, her shock giving way to growing horror. "That's not… oh god." She cowered again, and I helped hold her upright and in place. "I thought they'd hate me by now, for abandoning them."
I pulled her in for a hug. "No, silly. Hey, how about we have lunch tomorrow? Just the four of us: you, me, Vicky, and Amy? Give you a chance to reconnect and… maybe tell them you're a cape?" She looked down at me, shocked and fearful. "I really want you to join my team. I'm sure they'd be happy to have you, too. Please?"
She glanced away, fretting, but considering. "I wouldn't… have to show off?"
"I didn't talk about the other two because they don't want anyone to know about them yet, either. It's perfectly fine."
Tracy gnawed her lip again, before she nodded. "Alright."
"Yes!" I cheered, hugging her more tightly. This had the unfortunate side effect of pressing my chin into her bust, reminding me that I was holding a very appealing figure. I hopped away sporting a blush, hoping she'd take that as a sign of excitement rather than arousal or embarrassment. "Anyway," I stuttered out. "welcome to the team. We can start planning and figuring things out tomorrow, if you're up for that lunch? We still need to figure out a lot of how the team actually works. I'll make sure there's a place for behind-the-scenes support out of the spotlight, but we haven't actually nailed down the details of what that'd entail, yet." I paused as a shudder of horror passed through me. "We don't even have a name yet, but we haven't gone public, so..." The both of us shared a nervous smile. "We've got time."
I glanced around again, for something else to say. My eyes strayed over the thing she'd been making, and the boxes. Her eyes followed mine, and she felt a spike of anxiety and sadness. I thought she felt lonely. "Do you... want to get out of here? I was going to go training if nothing came up, today. So... want to check out the bay with me? I kinda' want to see if any of the boats might be good for a secret base."
"The Boat Graveyard?" She asked with nervous confusion.
I waggled my hand. "More or less, I meant heading under the water to get there. I can just make a big bubble of air and we could walk along the bottom. Might need boots and flashlights, but I'd keep you dry."
She still felt nervous, but shook her head a moment later as determination surged forth. "Sure. Let's try it."
I waited for her in the living room, after sending her off to change into boots and warmer clothes, and grab at least one flashlight for herself. I passed the minutes actually inspecting the place. Everything looked nice, shiny and expensive. Fancy furniture, impressive entertainment center, exotic-looking potted plants, family photos in glossy frames, an entire shelf dedicated to trophies and awards... Even with the signs of habitation like scuffs in the carpet and smudges on the coffee table, it still felt oddly sterile. Like a show house, rather than a home.
Tracy came downstairs in a fashionable coat lined with fluffy-looking fur, a thin sweater under it, hiking boots, and baggy pants that hid the long-johns and knee-socks she could never know I watched her put on. She then handed me a little LED torch, which I recognized as one of the brands that touted 'all metal and plastic' construction for unspecified but painfully obvious reasons. She showed me hers so I wouldn't think she didn't have one, but didn't mention the pack of batteries in her pocket that she'd grabbed from the same survival kit the lights were from. On our way out to her car, she explained that the others around the house were either too bulky to easily pocket, or might be missed and she didn't want her parents asking about them. She had another palm-torch like these in her car, but felt bad about only having the one. Hence raiding the survival kit under her bed.
We got in and I told her to head to the beach, where exactly didn't matter. Just somewhere she felt safe leaving her car. Partway there I got a text from Dad.
'Taylor, were you punching Nazis Saturday? I just got a call from the police.'
I cringed, thinking back and not finding any memory of telling him about that. Whoops. 'Had Amy for backup, and they deserved it?'
A few minutes later, long enough for me to worry a little, I got another text. 'I am very proud of you. Also very worried for you. Did you call anyone to let them know? Did you have time to do so?'
Ugh. I felt a little guilty. Technically I could have been on the phone while keeping up with Amy. 'Could have. Didn't. Feel stupid.'
'Remember the option, please. You could have called the police, new wave, or one of your friends. It doesn't have to be me as long as someone knows you might not be safe.' A part of me wanted to defiantly claim that I was perfectly safe against normal people, but I knew he'd shoot the idea down, and that it was technically possible I might not have been.
Thoughts of the police and friends to call in had my mind drift back to Sally, who'd offered to bring the cavalry if I ever needed it. I really should call her more often. I frowned and dug out my cape phone, flicking through its contacts. Screw letting myself forget again, I'd just ask her now. That's what the damned cell phones were for.
'Hey, dad is mad that I got into a fight over the weekend and didn't call for backup first, even though I was totally fine. Is it okay if I call you, even for normal things?' Aaand send, before I can chicken out.
To Dad, I sent: 'Working on it. Asking around.'
'Thank you.' He replied.
"Are you okay?" Tracy asked, her eyes darting between me and the road.
"Yeah." I groaned. "Just... forgot to tell Dad about a fight, and now he's asking about it and giving safety tips. Feel kinda' stupid."
"I'm sure he means well." She stated softly.
"Oh, no. They're good ideas, obvious in hindsight. That's the problem. I feel stupid."
She hummed and chewed on her thoughts for a moment. "Well, what was the idea?"
I sighed. "Call someone on the way to a fight, rather than after. I mean, he didn't say it like that, but he doesn't know I can run and yell into a phone, and still move faster than most capes."
"Well, you could call me?" She suggested, instead of worrying over how impulsive I was, like I'd expected. "If you're busy fighting, I can help by calling people."
I shrunk down and fidgeted a bit, still not used to people just... being nice and offering to help. It felt better than I thought it should. "Well, it would be nice having someone to light the signals, if it came to it." I tried to swallow down the bit of blush at how dorky I felt. "Hey, if you feel up to that lunch tomorrow, that'd be a good time to get you a bunch of numbers. I should probably have more of the New Wave numbers down than I do."
She chuckled. "Alright, fine. We'll have lunch together."
Now I felt a little worried. "Sorry, was that too pushy? You just... always seem so alone, when I check on you."
Her face drifted to a painfully blank neutrality for a couple minutes. We were nearly to the bay by now, pulling through lots near the Boardwalk until we drifted into one of the parking spaces, and the car shut off. "I don't feel alone." She said quietly. "Lonely, but not alone. I know there's people who care, and would help, but..."
"I think I get it." I said when she didn't start again. "There's lots of reasons not to ask for help. I think I was too stubborn. It felt like admitting I was weak, like I'd lost. So I just... didn't, for more than a year."
"I feel like I'm not worth it."
I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong, but stopped myself. She probably knew it, the same way I knew playing Emma's game and trying to 'win' or 'not lose' was stupid. The difference between knowing it and feeling it, though... Nothing I thought of sounded better than any of the other platitudes. "I'm going to find a therapist. I don't know what I need to do to help everyone, just hiring someone to see the whole team sounds like a mess waiting to happen, but parahumans..." I shook my head. She knew what I meant. It seemed like every cape was a dumpster fire, even the ones good at hiding it. "If I helped you find someone too, as Tracy, would you try for me? I want to help, and I can tell you you're worth it a dozen times a day, but I'm not trained to teach you how to believe it. Please?"
She thought about it, staring down at the steering wheel. "Would my parents have to know?"
"You're an adult, I'm pretty sure what goes on between you and your doctors doesn't have to involve them at all, anymore." She nodded in response, so I held up my phones. "I'm going to take a sec to coordinate some stuff, okay?"
First I checked my cape phone, which had a couple texts from Sally. 'Ofc. Safety is #1 priority.' and a minute later 'Unless I'm getting shot at.'
I snorted and typed back, 'Understandable.' I'd hardly expect her to drop her gun for her phone.
Swapping phones, 'Hey, got a newbie. Lunch meet tomorrow? Can Vicky do sneaky?' went to Amy, and 'Hey, got a newbie. Lunch meet tomorrow? Can you get away from the crowd without being too obvious?' went to Vicky.
'China shop pretty quite when its all dust' Amy shot back, and I was torn between snorting at the image and correcting her typo. 'Can do lunch'
With her taken care of, I waited for Vicky's reply. 'I ditch lunch all the time' I had a feeling it was supposed to sound more indignant than the plain text conveyed. 'Who and where?' Came a second after the first message.
'Surprise, and Arcadia. I'll text you a room number when lunch starts?' I motioned to Tracy and held out my phone for her to read over the conversation. I watched her eyes track over the lines, then glance at me. I raised a brow inquisitively, and she shrugged and nodded. I wasn't sure if she didn't care, or didn't see the point of avoiding names and secrets over phone network messaging.
'Ha ha. C u tmrw.' Vicky seemed a tad frustrated at the secrecy, or maybe she was just being playful? Ugh. Emotions were so hard to read in texts.
I was about to put my phone away, but glanced down my recent contacts. I bit my lip and considered, then opened up my text chain with Cassie. 'Hey, lunch thing tomorrow. You busy?' And since I was going down the list anyway, I started a message to Kara, too. Then I deleted the version saying everything was fine now, and started over. 'Talked with Tracy. Figured out what's wrong. We're handling it.' I showed this one to Tracy before sending it. Her eyes narrowed, face firming into a stern countenance, emotions anxious but determined. She nodded again, and I sent it.
I waited for a minute or so, to see if Cass would reply. Kara did, sending me a block of 'thankyou' repeated about sixteen times, but nothing from Cassie. I figured she must be busy today.
"Okay, I think I'm set." I left my bag as we got out of the car, and Tracy double-checked all the locks. "We need to get to the water. What do you think, north side pier?" She gave a quick assent in reply, and we headed toward the Boardwalk proper.
It was pretty obvious even without my senses that we were turning heads as we went. A pair of tall, athletic girls like us, especially with the eye-catching shade of Tracy's hair? There was no way my usual 'morose slump' stealth could compare. I considered asking if the hair had been her choice, since I knew she hated all the attention. It seemed a bit rude though, and it was possible it was a way to own the spotlight she couldn't evade either way. Instead, I tried to distract her with window shopping. Clothes weren't a great conversation piece, as neither of us were very interested. Cute nick-knacks and books were better at piercing the silence.
There were a few times boys tried to stop us, to talk or invite us along with them. I'm pretty sure I actually missed the first couple of them, misinterpreting them as people who knew Tracy and were saying hello. She would affect this airheaded mien and greet them back, quickly apologizing and saying we were busy, or that someone was waiting for us, or that we'd already ate and didn't need to be taken to dinner... The full female experience, now that I wasn't skulking around looking like a homeless boy or a shady druggie, depending on if my hood was up. I thanked her for running interference, after I'd figured it out. She just smiled and demurred, though she did feel a bit of joy and pride which I took as feeling happy to be helpful.
Our slower pace had us to the north end of the Boardwalk almost an hour after we'd arrived. This section was a bit older, built around pier-style docks on the waterfront, rather than the newer quays of the south. The buildings built on it were shorter and thinner-walled. The sidewalk here was painted over and gritty, both to hide the wood and to prevent injury given New England weather. We came to a break in the buildings, hopping a short locked fence that didn't actually stop anyone, and ducking down a small stairwell to the sandy beach below. The wood down here looked its age, dark and encrusted with barnacles and invasive clams. I'm not sure there was a single support post either of us wouldn't cut our hands on if we weren't careful. That made it an unpopular place for anything but shady deals that were usually headed off by the Enforcers chasing people away. Speaking of, I pressed my hand against the cement block wall beside the stairs, watching the suited man who'd been watching the gate start our way.
"We don't have long." I glanced about, but couldn't see or feel any cameras. It just wasn't worth it to stick electronics in dark spaces this close to saltwater. "C'mon." I waved her down to the water, but stopped her before she could run into it. I held my hands palm-upright just under my ribs, taking a deep breath and then rotating them in a circle, letting the breath out as my now palm-down hands pressed downward. The sand compressed under us until it was proper sandstone, the wet sand below that pressing out of the way as the platform descended a couple feet per second. When we were about three meters down, I stopped the pressing motion, waving a hand above us to close the pit off with more sand.
Tracy glanced about nervously, the beam of her light shining against the damp sand around us, up at the precarious ceiling, and then back to me. I was still holding the sand above us with an outstretched hand, my other held vertical in front of my sternum, holding the walls and water where they were. "This is... eerie." She muttered.
I panicked, a little. "Oh geez, you're not claustrophobic, are you?"
She shook her head. "No, I'm fine. It's just... buried alive in a lightless pit... little bit horror movie."
I snorted out a short laugh. "That's fair." I pressed my arms outward, expanding our little bubble in the sand, and then started digging diagonally down toward the bay. I kept one hand above to hold up the space, while I made scooping motions with the other to push car-sized masses of soggy sand out of our way. I swapped hands every time, leading to a slow circular motion that felt a lot more flowing than most earthbending. Then again, I was earthbending and waterbending, at the same time. We leveled off after my ears popped again, probably ten meters down? However deep we were, I knew the bay was deeper, so we just had to keep heading east until the 'cave' opened out into the water. The sand got noticeably wetter-looking as we went, until I swept the last of the sand aside and the beam of light speared out into murky water.
Tracy gasped as we stepped out into the water, glancing around as I expanded our sphere a little more. "Okay, now we just head north until we hit boats."
She'd clicked her light off, and now we were seeing by the bit of dim light that made it through the natural murk of the bay, and all the sand I'd kicked up. "You're not worried about getting lost down here?"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Even if my senses weren't at their best on sand, I could always dive through the sand to bedrock to find my way, or pop to the surface. "We could check, if you want?" I asked, pointing up. She thought about it for a moment, before nodding. I swiped a hand down, pulling a bit of the saltwater into our space before freezing it into a shallow bowl of a platform. "Hop on." I led the way, holding my hands out to keep the water pushed back. This was the tricky part, it was less about pulling us up, and more about not letting the natural tendency of ice floating push us up too fast. I let a little of the water in under the platform, pressing it down to slow its rise with one hand, managing our bubble of air with the other. The world got brighter and brighter, until our bubble broke the surface and became more of a cylinder than a sphere.
"Stay down, I don't know if anyone's going to notice." I gathered up my hair in little ringlets of water while she knelt down, making my hair a bit less distinct. Then I shaved a roughly face-sized chunk of ice off our platform and poked eyeholes through it with one hand. I glanced up, watching the water rise and fall around the gap I'd pierced through it. "This might get a bit queasy." She nodded, and I let us rise until my head was just poking into the bottom of a trough between waves. I held the rough mask in front of my face, and we started to flow with the water's surface, bobbing a bit until my head was poking out above the peak of the wave. I gave a quick spin, spotting the Rig looming ominously maybe a mile to our right, Medhall and the Towers poking up to our back-left in the distance, and the lighthouse near where the Graveyard met land roughly ahead of us. I started pushing us back down with a bit of forward diagonal added in, tossing the ice mask into the bay and pulling a larger sphere of air maybe five meters across with us this time. "Yup. Straight north-ish."
"So... you do this often?" She asked when we were maybe halfway down.
"This in particular?" I shook my head. "Second time under the bay. Last time I was down here it was later in the day, I couldn't really see anything. That's why the flashlights. I'm hoping I'll figure out a good way to get rid of some of the ships, maybe break them up for salvage. Wouldn't mind an intact hull we could set up a secret base in, though. Aaand I guess since I have a Tinker along, maybe your power will point out any good salvage, assuming it's not all rust?"
She blushed and shrugged. "I... maybe? I usually just grab things I think might be useful later. I only get hints of how to modify parts when I've got an idea already, those tend to come from situations I want a solution for... and parts aren't always at hand, then."
"So, things that might come to mind now…" I glanced up at the bay around us. "Some way to breathe underwater, maybe?"
Tracy shrugged. "Rebreathers, diving helmets, armor with self-contained life-support…" She stumbled a little when I caught sight of the sand below us, slowing us to landing rather than collision speeds. I apologized, and she shook off the shock and continued. "All of that, it… still feels off, though. At this point I'm not sure if it's my power telling me it won't work… or me, assuming nothing is ever going to work."
I backed up until I could nudge her shoulder with mine. "You're great without powers, but we'll still figure them out." I could tell she didn't quite believe it, but she nodded with a hopeful smile. "That does sound frustrating, though."
"It can be, though usually I can recall the ideas later."
I was about to ask more questions, when the first hulking shadow started to drift into view. It was small as far as ships went, but the fishing cutter we passed was still taller than either of us despite having years to sink its way into the sea floor. The wheelhouse stared down at us from even higher up, and I couldn't help but find it eerily accusing of our presence. The rigging had all rusted or rotted away, and there was no way anything inside was still airtight after this long. "Nothing useful here, let's keep going."
It didn't take long for us to cross paths with a tugboat, then a small coast guard boat. A bit further and we found the start of the Graveyard itself, ships piled atop other ships, forming a rusting mockery of a reef atop the shipping channel. This was where the real beasts rested, the shipping vessels, ocean-going fishers... nearly every ship that'd been in the bay at the time, a few from nearby cities' raided docks, with the monumental bulk of the now-iconic oil tanker run aground atop it off to the east.
We walked straight up to the hulls, our sphere of air deforming against the grimy, rust-pocked wall. If I had to guess, it was an actual damned whaling ship in front of us. I paced up, gently resting my palm against it. Honestly, I was just expecting it to be the sort of scene my inner melodramatic egotist insisted I indulge in now and then, completely useless otherwise. I was shocked at how the world seemed to explode forward from my hand. Every creak and sway sending ripples through the husks and the buckled points where their weight compressed them together. I could sense through the metal? Maybe it was the rust throughout making it a bit more 'earth-y', or the fact that unlike the bus and car chassis, they're mostly stationary like stone… but that didn't make any sense. I saw using vibration, not in spite of it. I removed my hand and tapped fingers against the metal in a few different places, but it didn't seem to be a fluke…
"Are you okay?"
I glanced back at Tracy and blushed, realizing how silly I must look. "Oh, yeah. I'm fine. Hey look, I think there's a way up over there!" I pointed to her left, and sure enough one of the smaller hulls had dug its way into the ground, such that we could walk up the steep incline of its deck. I stared at it for a couple of seconds, before freezing a stairway made of ice on it, partly because I didn't want Tracy to slip, but mostly because I could. I tapped the side of the cargo ship at the apex of the stairwell, and saw that the cargo doors on its deck had long since collapsed. There was no point trying to keep it watertight, so I used swift streams of water to slice furrows in the metal and shouldered the roughly-hewn panel inside. It accelerated down into the space between the hulls, banging off support struts on its way down. I repeated the cutting on the inner hull, a bit smaller this time and pulling it with waterbending to join the other one, then froze a little bridge across.
Our bubble of air was big enough to fill most of the rooms we checked. The cargo holds, not so much. We didn't actually find anything amazing in our search, either the companies came back for their valuables, or the containers had been cracked by looters, or they hadn't been watertight in the first place and time did its thing. Tracy's mood picked up a bit now that we weren't in the open water anymore. It was weird, you could swim straight up in the bay and be fine. Here I'm not sure she'd be able to make it out and to the surface if my powers failed, but the building-like familiarity must have been fooling her. Occasionally she'd start humming something, and I'd either recognize it or ask, and it always wound up a theme or ambiance piece from some horror series or another.
As we passed from ship to ship, we gave up on useful items and focused more on the materials. There was certainly no shortage of steel, the vast majority of the hulls were comprised of it. I noted a few spots in my senses that weren't, small fiberglass boats that were marginally less easy to see into. There was also a bit of aluminum and regular iron scattered within the ships. Anything small, light, or easy to salvage that had been worth it was gone, like all the copper and any propellers that were easily accessible. What we did find were the massive engine blocks or turbines that couldn't easily be moved, and the denser-metaled drive shafts connecting them to those propellers. If we had a way to melt them down, our little team would be set on tungsten for possibly years. A tall ask, considering the properties Tracy kept rattling off about the different metals. Things besides the metal with the highest melting point of any basic element would be easier to process, like some of the engines.
We decided to approach the city via the Graveyard, following along until we hit the shore and heading into town from there. Easier to duck away at night when it was harder to see, we'd only have to worry about spotters from the gangs instead of anyone who happened to be around on top of them. And I did see a few people with unusual interests in the beached ships, though no one bothered watching constantly. I couldn't imagine staring at boats through binoculars all night, probably on shifts that would themselves have gotten routine by now, was all that riveting. Two groups, one more studious in their checking than the other, both spending most of their attention on killing time with cards or conversation. There was a third that might have been supposed to be on watch, but might have just been shooting up instead. Not every suspicious group near the Graveyard had to have gang ties, after all.
It was faster to catch a late-ish bus from the north docks than walk the whole way, even if the nearest stop to the car went a bit past and swung around, necessitating a bit of northward backtracking. Then she dropped me off at home, where I could tell dad was up waiting for me.