The video call wraps up with vague plans to regroup tomorrow, once we have a better sense of what we're dealing with. Tasha's painkillers are clearly kicking in harder because she starts talking about how the bandage guy looked like "a mummy but sad" and Lily has to mute her.

  I text Davis while everyone's saying goodbye.

  Me: hey. you wanted to talk about the music hall? where/when?

  The response comes back almost immediately.

  Davis: My office. Can you come by this afternoon? Say 2pm?

  Me: yeah. you ok?

  Davis: No. See you at 2.

  Well. That's not ominous at all.

  I check the time. 11:17. That gives me a few hours to figure out if I can actually walk that far without my ribs stabbing me to death. It's maybe a mile and a half to City Hall from here. Doable. Probably.

  Mom tries to convince me to rest more but I tell her I'm meeting Davis and that becomes "oh, well, that's important" and suddenly I'm allowed to leave the house. The power of having an actual legitimate authority figure vouching for you.

  I walk slowly. Partially because I'm hurt, partially because I'm trying to see if anyone's following me. They could be. The Kingdom knows where I live. That's been clear, but my block is probably a surveillance hotspot for at least five federal agencies by now. Every few blocks I stop to tie my shoe or check my phone, looking for surveillance. Don't see anything obvious but that doesn't mean much.

  The tracker app shows the blue dot still stationary. Fourteen hours and counting.

  City Hall's familiar now. I've been here enough times - press conferences, council meetings, that time I publicly called out Richardson about Duvall. The security guard at the entrance knows me by sight, which is either convenient or concerning. Probably both.

  "Ms. Small. Councilman Davis is expecting you." He waves me through without making me empty my pockets or go through the metal detector. "Fifth floor, office 507."

  I take the elevator because stairs sound like torture right now. My ribs are already complaining about the walk over.

  Davis's office is at the end of a hallway that smells like coffee and printer ink and the particular brand of exhaustion that comes from municipal government work. The door's open. He's at his desk, drowning in paperwork, and when he looks up I actually do a double-take.

  He looks like shit.

  I mean, not terrible. Still wearing a button-down and slacks, still professional. But there's stubble on his jaw - barely there, but enough that I notice it - and his eyes are bloodshot. In the two years I've known Jamal Davis, I've never seen him anything less than perfectly composed. Even when he was telling me about Liberty Belle's time left, even when he was proposing the community center, he always looked like he'd stepped out of a magazine spread about successful local politicians.

  Now he looks like he forgot to sleep.

  "Sam." He stands up, gestures to the chair across from his desk. "Thank you for coming. How are you feeling?"

  "Like I got thrown through a wall." I sit down carefully. "You look tired."

  "I am tired." He sits back down, rubbing his face. "I've been on the phone with the police, the NSRA, our legal department, Mr. Feldman, three different insurance companies, and the Mayor since six this morning. Everyone wants to know what happened at the Music Hall and why. It's a historically important building. Things happening to it kicks up an entire beehive. Kick up. Whichever it is."

  "What'd you tell them?"

  "The truth. That two teenage volunteers for my community outreach program were attacked by an unknown assailant with superhuman abilities while conducting inventory of the building." His voice is even but there's an edge to it. "That one of them was seriously injured. That the building sustained significant damage. That I want answers and I want them now."

  I nod slowly. "What'd they say?"

  "Police are investigating but have no leads. NSRA says it's outside their jurisdiction unless we can prove the attacker was a registered metahuman operating illegally, and not a random non-powered criminal. Our legal department wants to know if we're liable. The insurance companies are arguing about whether this counts as an act of superhuman violence or vandalism or terrorism." He pauses. "And the Mayor wants to know why I'm pushing so hard for emergency funding for a condemned building in Maya Richardson's district."

  There it is.

  "It's in her district," I say carefully.

  "Yes." Davis leans forward, elbows on his desk. "Which means she gets to decide how this narrative plays out. If she wanted to, she could frame this as evidence that vigilante activity attracts violence. That young people with powers need more oversight, more restrictions. That her legislation was right all along."

  "Is she going to?"

  "I'm going to make damn sure she doesn't get the chance." There's something cold in his voice now. "The Music Hall renovation is my initiative. The volunteers who were attacked were working on my program. This is an attack on city-sponsored youth outreach, not vigilante activity. I've already drafted the press release."

  Stolen story; please report.

  I blink. That's... aggressive. For Davis.

  "Won't she push back?"

  "Let her." He opens a folder on his desk, pulls out several pages of printouts. "Argus Corps has already contacted my office. Patriot wants to investigate. See if there's any evidence of illegal metahuman activity at the scene."

  My stomach drops. "Shit."

  "My thoughts exactly." Davis slides the papers across the desk to me. Emails, mostly. Official letterhead, professional language. "He's within his rights. Argus Corps is one of our city-sanctioned superhuman response teams. It's within their jurisdiction, and they'd probably move even if it wasn't."

  "But?"

  "But I've been very clear that this is an attack on a city program, which makes it my jurisdiction first. I've requested they hold off on any investigation until the police finish their initial sweep. That buys us maybe a week." He looks at me directly. "What do you know that I don't?"

  I hesitate. How much do I tell him? How much does he want to know?

  "Sam." His voice is quieter now. "They attacked Tasha. A civilian." He stops, and I can see him physically collecting himself. "They didn't attack you. They could have waited until you were alone. But they attacked when you had someone with you who couldn't fight back. Someone they could hurt to send a message."

  "Yeah." My voice sounds smaller than I want it to. "They said - he said - that every time we keep digging, someone we care about gets hurt. That eventually people will ask if it's worth it."

  Davis is very still for a moment. Then: "What were you digging into?"

  I tell him. Silverstein's licenses, the shell companies, Crescent's ownership structure, Nina at the bar seeing Richardson meeting with people upstairs. The timeline - how we'd been researching for hours before the attack, how they must have been monitoring us somehow. How Maya Richardson sent my grandfather to torture my family, and when and why, and that they probably knew I was poking when I called his workplace.

  When I finish, Davis sits back in his chair. He's quiet for a long moment, staring at nothing.

  "I can't prove she's Mrs. Zenith," he says finally. "Federal law and moral decency prevents the use of scrying for this sort of thing without unimpeachable evidence already. We're not allowed to ask an esper to help build a case unless we already had a case. And I don't want to consider what would happen if we established the precedent that we could."

  "I know."

  "But they sent someone to fuck up a community center and hurt a dispatcher." His voice is very quiet now, and somehow that makes it worse. "They crossed a line."

  I don't say anything. I've never heard him drop an f-bomb before.

  "I'm done playing nice with these people," Davis says. "I can't prove Richardson is Kingdom. But I can make her life very, very difficult. Emergency funding for the Music Hall means oversight. Investigations into the attack means scrutiny on her district. Press coverage means questions about why violence is escalating in her area." He looks at me. "I'm going to make it expensive for her to operate. Politically expensive, and financially."

  "That's dangerous," I say. "For you, I mean."

  "Everything about this situation is dangerous." He picks up one of the papers, sets it down again. "The insurance companies are fighting over whether this counts as superhuman violence. I'm told Mr. Feldman had the good sense to take out a superhuman activity rider when he found out his abandoned property was being used as a base, but the water damage complicates things. The building's over a century old. The wood's going to rot if we don't get it dried out soon, and that's going to take time and money and specialists."

  "So we can't use it."

  "Not for months, at minimum. Maybe longer." He looks genuinely apologetic. "I'm sorry. I know it was important to you."

  It was. The Music Hall was ours. Not the DVD's, not some borrowed space, not someone's basement. Ours. And now it's gone.

  "What about the community center plan?" I ask.

  "Still happening. Faster now, if anything. This proves we need it." Davis pulls out another folder. "I've already got three different grants lined up. Federal money for youth programs, state money for historic preservation, city money for community development. I'm going to stack them, pull every string I have. The Music Hall will be a proper facility. Safe, legal, equipped. But it's going to take time."

  "How much time?"

  "Best case? Two months before it's usable again if everything lines up. Six months before it's finished." He sees my face. "I know that's not what you want to hear."

  It's not. Two months is forever when you're in the middle of a war. Six months might as well be never.

  "In the meantime," Davis continues, "you need to be smart. They're watching now. And so is Argus Corps. And so is Richardson." He leans forward again. "I can provide cover, resources, information. I can run interference politically. But you need to be careful. I think it's clear now that you've become enough of a liability that they're willing to bring out the big guns."

  "What if I already have leads?" I ask. "What if we already know where one of their people is?"

  Davis is very quiet for a second. "How good is the intelligence?"

  "We tracked him. BugTag, fourteen hours stationary at an apartment complex in East Falls."

  "Is that Maya's district too?" Davis says quietly. Then: "I didn't hear that. And if anyone asks, we definitely didn't have this conversation." He picks up a pen, writes something on a post-it note, slides it across the desk. "But if someone were to anonymously tip the Delaware Valley Defenders about suspicious activity at that address, they'd have to investigate. And if that investigation happened to turn up evidence of other crimes... well. That would be unfortunate. For the suspects."

  I look at the post-it. It's a phone number. Anonymous tip line.

  "You're giving me permission to call in a SWAT team?"

  "I'm not giving you permission to do anything. I'm a city councilman, not your handler. And you don't know if it's a safehouse or his address or just some random place that he dumped the tracker. If you feel confident that it's a lead, I recommend you get it into the DVDs' hands. If you think it's going to be traceable back to you, I recommend you not do that. Either way, I recommend you tread lightly. I know this may not seem it given your... career, but you're slowly escalating into the big leagues, Sam. You have to be cautious. More cautious than Belle ever was."

  I pocket the post-it.

  "Anything else?"

  "Yes." The almost-smile fades. "They attacked Tasha to send you a message. They attacked support staff because they think that's a vulnerability. They're not wrong." He looks at me steadily. "You need to decide how far you're willing to take this. Because they've decided they're willing to hurt anyone around you. And next time it might not just be a dislocated shoulder."

  I know. I've been trying not to think about it but I know. They could've killed Tasha. Could've killed me. He was pulling his punches, making a point instead of ending things. Next time they might not be so generous.

  "I'll be careful," I say.

  "No you won't." Davis picks up his pen again, goes back to his paperwork. "But try anyway."

  I don't know what to say to that, so I just nod my head.

  "You know how I feel about superheroes. Child superheroes especially. And you know how I feel about your damn-near suicidal antics," he says, and for a second I feel like he's about to excoriate me (like, verbally rip me apart, that's what that word means). "But," okay, good, "I'm glad that the person that's in your position is you. We can make a difference. We just need to get these bastards out of the way first."