Monday night, I'm on a rooftop in Kensington watching a corner that Deena mentioned.

  The Remora suit is comfortable under my winter coat, the grippy fingerpads letting me hold onto the frozen fire escape without my hands going numb. I've been here for four hours. A normal person would be hypothermic by now. I'm just bored.

  The dealer on the corner is maybe twenty-two, skinny, wearing a Sixers jacket that's seen better days. He's not moving much product tonight - too cold, too late, too much police presence after a shooting three blocks over yesterday. But I'm not here for him specifically. I'm here to watch who supplies him.

  At 11:47, a car pulls up. Honda Civic, gray, dented rear bumper. The dealer walks over, leans in the window, exchanges something. Quick and professional. The car pulls away.

  I drop down the fire escape and follow on foot, keeping to the shadows. The Civic heads south on Front Street, then west on Lehigh. I lose it at a red light, but I've got the plate number memorized. That's enough for tonight.

  Tuesday, I'm back at the station for a shift. Three Jump calls in six hours - two mild, one bad. The bad one is a woman in her forties who took Jump to help her get through a double shift at the warehouse. Her blood smells thin and wrong, the same signature I've been tracking.

  "Same batch?" Hector asks quietly while Deena handles the IV.

  "Same batch," I confirm.

  She's from South Philly. Point Breeze, specifically. That's the third bad reaction this month from that neighborhood.

  Tuesday night, I run the plate through a database I'm not supposed to have access to. One of Liberty Belle's old tricks - she had contacts in the DMV, people who owed her favors. It was a long and involved process that involved getting Derek to show up at the DMV in costume with me on the phone. The Bloodhound stuff buys a lot. The Liberty Belle connection bought more.

  The Shrike stuff, apparently, bought the last bit. A lot of people don't like Nazis. Anyway, the car is registered to a Miguel Santos, address in Fishtown.

  I don't go to Fishtown. That's not where the tainted Jump is coming from - that's just where one link in the chain lives. I need to follow the chain further.

  Instead, I spend three hours going through Liberty Belle's notebooks again. She had a whole section on drug distribution networks, how they're structured, where the vulnerable points are. The street-level dealers are the most visible but the least informed. They get their product from mid-level distributors, who get it from suppliers, who get it from... whoever's at the top.

  The tainting is happening somewhere in the middle. Has to be. There's no way Rogue Wave would let it get this bad if they knew it was happening, or if they had a way of stopping it. Monkey Business and Rush Order and all of them have too much professional pride as ideologues. But too low and the pattern would be random, not clustered. Someone is intercepting specific shipments, modifying them, and releasing them into specific markets.

  South Philly keeps coming up. Point Breeze. Grays Ferry. The neighborhoods near the old refinery.

  Wednesday after school, I take the bus to South Philly.

  I'm not in costume - just jeans, winter coat, the Remora suit underneath for warmth and mobility. I look like any other teenager, maybe cutting class, maybe visiting family. Nobody looks twice at me.

  I walk the neighborhoods for two hours, building a mental map. Corner stores with protection stickers, or at least what look like protection stickers, along with "Secured by Vector Security" signs or whoever handles it down here. Or maybe I'm getting paranoid and assuming random stickers in the windows mark protection from criminal roughhousing. Shoes thrown onto electric wires.

  The blocks where guys are standing around with that studied casualness that means they're watching for something.

  The alleys where transactions happen.

  By 5 PM, I've identified three locations that feel like distribution points rather than retail operations. A laundromat on Snyder that has way too much traffic for its size. A auto body shop on Porter that never seems to actually work on any cars. A row house on Mifflin with blacked-out windows and a rotation of visitors who never stay more than ten minutes.

  I don't approach any of them. I just note the addresses and leave.

  Wednesday night, another shift. Two more Jump calls, both from South Philly. One of them is a kid, maybe fifteen, who took Jump because his friends dared him to. His power manifested as uncontrollable heat generation - by the time we got there, he'd given himself second-degree burns on his hands and arms.

  His blood smells like the same batch. It's not the same as normal Jump. All Jump is orange and fizzy and wrong and a little thin, but this has something else. It's cut with something. Ritalin? It... bloods... a little bit like my own blood when I cut myself shaving my legs. I try to run through the laundry list of things I'm on at any given moment. Lithium, Concerta, Zofran as needed, Prasozin, Desvenlafaxine... No, none of those would be useful for cutting except maybe Zofran and... Concerta?

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Jump and stimulants don't mix well. Okay. Noting that down.

  "Where'd you get it?" I ask him while Deena treats the burns. "There's some guys going around giving out bad product. I'm not going to turn you in, but you should strongly consider trying a different dealer if you want to do this again."

  He's scared, in pain, not thinking clearly. I feel a little bad at how easy it is to get scared people to tell you things. "Some guy. On Porter."

  Porter. The auto body shop. "Don't worry, we'll get you patched up," I tell him, looking for some burn gel.

  Thursday, I skip my afternoon classes and stake out the auto body shop from a coffee place across the street. The Remora suit's grippy pads are hidden under fingerless gloves, and I've got a textbook open in front of me like I'm studying.

  Over four hours, I count seventeen people going in and out. Most of them are young men, late teens to mid-twenties, the demographic that uses Jump most heavily. A few are older - working-class guys who probably use it to get through physical labor jobs. One is a woman in scrubs who looks like she hasn't slept in days.

  At 3:30, a van pulls into the garage. White, unmarked, no visible plates from my angle. It stays inside for about twenty minutes, then leaves heading south.

  I pay for my coffee and follow on foot, which is stupid, but the streets are crowded enough that I can keep pace for a few blocks before the van pulls away. It's heading toward the river. Toward the old refinery district.

  Thursday night, I'm back in my room with a map of Philadelphia spread across my desk. I've marked every bad Jump reaction from the past three weeks in red - the ones from my EMT shifts, plus others I've heard about from Hector, Deena, and anyone else at the station who'll talk to me. Hector and Deena think I'm making a map to give to PIs or the cops. Everyone else thinks I'm doing a report for school, I'm not sure why, but I let them believe it.

  Either way, the pattern is clear now. The tainted batches are radiating outward from a central point in South Philly. Not Kensington, where the drug problem is worst. Not Temple, where the college kids buy. The contamination is entering the supply chain somewhere near the Bellwether District, then spreading through the normal distribution networks.

  I trace the streets with my finger. Passyunk. Penrose. 26th Street. The old refinery land that's being redeveloped, all those empty warehouses and construction sites and nobody paying attention to what happens in the gaps.

  That's where I need to go. But not alone, and not blind.

  Friday morning, I spend most of school not paying attention to it. There is a perfunctory exam in my science class I expect to get a C+, B- in anyway. I pay attention just enough.

  Some of the teachers will bite my head off for being on the phone. But for the ones I can get away with it, I research. The Bellwether District is a 1,300-acre redevelopment project on the site of the old refineries, the ones that have been abandoned since shit blew up, the ones where...

  The site's been under construction since then - warehouses, logistics facilities, life sciences buildings. Eventually it's supposed to create 19,000 jobs. Right now, it's mostly empty. A few completed buildings, a lot of construction staging, and acres of land that used to be one of the most polluted industrial sites on the East Coast.

  It's perfect for someone who wants to run an operation without being noticed. Trucks coming and going wouldn't attract attention - that's just construction traffic. Empty buildings provide cover. The contaminated soil and ongoing remediation means most people stay away.

  I pull up satellite images, construction permits, anything I can find about what's actually happening on the site. Most of the activity is concentrated on the eastern side, near 26th Street. But there's a cluster of older buildings on the western edge, near the river, that don't show up on any of the development plans.

  That's where I'd put a drug operation, if I were running one.

  Friday after school, I take the bus to South Philly again. This time, I'm not just walking the neighborhoods. I'm getting closer to Bellwether, scouting approaches, identifying sight lines and escape routes.

  The western edge of the development is exactly as empty as I expected. Chain-link fencing with construction company logos, warning signs about contaminated soil, the occasional security patrol that's more about liability than actual security. Beyond the fence, I can see a cluster of older industrial buildings - remnants of the refinery era that haven't been demolished yet.

  I find a spot where I can observe without being obvious - a bus stop bench with a clear view of the access road. I sit there for an hour, pretending to wait for a bus that comes every forty minutes.

  Three vehicles enter the site during that hour. Two are clearly construction - flatbed trucks loaded with materials, workers in hard hats. The third is a white van with no markings.

  Same van I saw at the auto body shop.

  It disappears behind the cluster of old buildings and doesn't come out.

  Friday night, I'm lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about what comes next.

  I've found it. Or close enough - I know the general area, I know the supply chain, I know how the tainted Jump is getting from point A to the streets. What I don't know is who's running the operation, how many people are involved, or what kind of security they have.

  I could call Ford. Give her everything I've found, let the FBI handle it. That's probably the smart play. The legal play. The play that doesn't end with me getting shot in an abandoned warehouse.

  But Ford is federal. Federal means slow. Federal means warrants and jurisdictions and interagency coordination. People are dying every week while the tainted batches keep hitting the streets. How many more kids like the one on Thursday - burning themselves alive because someone decided to poison the drug supply?

  I think about Hector's words. *It'd be a waste of good EMT talent.*

  I think about the community center, the kids in the program, the families who are trying to build something better in a neighborhood that's being squeezed from every direction.

  I sit up, looking at the map still spread across my desk. The cluster of old buildings on the western edge of Bellwether. The white van that went in and didn't come out.

  I'm not going to do anything stupid. I'm not going to kick down doors or pick fights. But I can get closer. I can scout the buildings, figure out the layout, identify entry points and security patterns. Information gathering. Recon. The stuff Liberty Belle drilled into me before she ever let me throw a punch. Then I can convert it into actionable intel for as many people as are willing to listen. The Titans. The Pals. The DVD, even Argus Corps - I can launder it through Miasma and have the Kingdom fighting itself through Maya.

  Yeah. That's clever. But not now.

  Tomorrow night. Late, when there's less activity, when the construction crews have gone home and the site is quiet.

  I pull out my phone and check the weather forecast. Cold, clear, no precipitation. Good visibility, but that cuts both ways.

  I start making a list of what I'll need. Dark clothes - the Remora suit under a black coat. Binoculars. A burner phone with the camera ready. A route planned out, multiple exit options memorized.

  No weapons. No backup. Just eyes and ears and patience.