Saturday morning I have a conversation with my parents that feels historic in its mundanity.

  "I'm going out tonight," I say over breakfast. "Patrol. Planned route, two hours, home by ten."

  Mom puts her coffee down. Dad looks up from his laptop. The silent conversation happens - I can practically see the psychic bandwidth being consumed - and then Mom says, "Where?"

  "Really easy. Just gonna round the neighborhood. Roosevelt--" I point down the road, where Longshore meets Revere, through the front door of the house. "Levick. Frankford, to check in on Mr. Donovan's hardware store. Cottman. Back to Roosevelt. Back home, one big loop. Community presence. Nobody's asking me to fight anyone."

  "And if someone tries to fight you?" Dad asks.

  "On a major road? I run. I've mapped out the safest spots on every intersection--" I pull out the legal pad. I actually diagrammed this. "See, here's the route, and these are the bail points-"

  "You diagrammed it," Mom says.

  "I diagrammed it."

  She looks at Dad. He looks at the diagram. He reaches over and taps a spot on the map with his pen. "There's construction on Harbison between Cottage and the boulevard. Fencing went up Thursday. It's going to narrow that alley to about three feet."

  "Good to know. I'll adjust."

  Mom takes a breath. "Home by ten."

  "Home by ten."

  "Text us when you're heading out and when you're heading back."

  "I will."

  And that's it. No tears, no ultimatums, no slamming doors. Just a negotiation between people who love each other and have accepted the terms of the situation they're in. I think this is what functional looks like. It's weird. I feel my sense of self worth slowly reconstructing - reconstructing? Or is it just... constructing? - brick by brick.

  Saturday evening, 7:30 PM. Megalodon suit on in my room. I check myself in the mirror - a child's superstition about what dates are permissible for this sort of thing kind of discarded once I stopped being able to see all of myself in the frame at once. Blue and white, armored, the helmet's visor reflecting my bedroom light back at me. I look like a cape. I've always looked like a cape, but, I don't know. This one has flash. Bloodhound was scary. Grim. This one is... I don't know. It's more heavily armored and yet I feel lighter than air.

  I climb out the window - force of habit, and also because walking out the front door in full costume feels like it would break something in the parent negotiation we just established - and drop into the alley behind the house. The March air hits clean and cold through the suit's ventilation. Moon's almost full and all the streetlights are on and most of the snow has started melting clean. Good visibility. I find somewhere that doesn't look very exposed and get my helmet and voice modulator on.

  The patrol is quiet. I walk my route at a steady pace, not rushing, not lurking. Visible. That's the point right now - Megalodon exists, Megalodon is here, this neighborhood has someone watching it. A couple walking their dog sees me and the woman nudges her partner and points. I wave. They wave back. This is so different from Bloodhound it almost gives me whiplash. Bloodhound was a shadow. Megalodon is a presence. Which is funny, because bloodhounds operate in packs, and sharks, uh, usually do not. I think?

  The center isn't on my route, so I just send a quick text to Tasha to see if she isn't so busy doing other things that she can't check the outside of the community center real quick. She says sure, she's just doing SAT prep.

  Ah, shit, I should probably get on that at some point.

  From the drone photos she sends, it looks like the female Songbird contingent is gone for the night - they keep daytime hours, which is interesting, suggests they're either genuinely committed to the appearance of being a normal protest or they don't feel safe out here after dark either. The building is locked up, lights off except the security lamp Patricia leaves on. No damage, no graffiti, no signs of tampering. Good.

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  Mr. Donovan's hardware store is down Frankford, rounding the corner. The window is... fixed? Which was pretty fast. I guess all the window guys know hey, come to Northeast Philly, lots of business because guys are going around robbing the shit out of everyone. I can see him through the window, sitting in the back with a newspaper and what looks like a bowl of soup. One or two shoppers is just kind of ambling around between the shelves. The sticker has been gingerly reapplied to his window. I stand outside for a second, considering, and then I knock.

  He comes to the door with a baseball bat, which is reasonable, and then sees the helmet and puts it down.

  "Megalodon," he says, and he says it like it's a real name, like it belongs to a real person. "Come in, come in. You want coffee?"

  "I can't stay long, Mr. Donovan. Just checking in. How's business?"

  "Slow. But not because of the--" He waves a hand vaguely at the sticker on his door. "Just slow. March. Nobody's doing home projects yet. Give it two weeks when the weather turns and I won't be able to keep drywall screws in stock."

  "Anyone give you trouble since the break-in?"

  "Not a peep. Whatever you did, it worked. Those guys in the yellow bandanas - the fake ones, you said - I told the cops everything. They were real interested in the sticker. Asked me a lot of questions about who put it there, what it means, how much I'm paying. I told them what I could."

  "That's good. That's exactly right. Keep talking to the cops if they come back."

  "You know, my granddaughter looked you up online. There's nothing. No CapeWatch page, no forum posts, nothing. She says you're a ghost," he says. Trying to fish for a shark.

  "I'm new."

  "You're new." He chuckles. "Well, new or not, you're welcome in this neighborhood. I told everyone. Donovan's is shark territory."

  There's something about the way he says it - proud, almost proprietary, like he's claiming a share of something - that makes my throat tight for a second. This old man with his baseball bat and his soup and his slow March sales just adopted me into his block's mythology. I'm not sure I deserve it yet. But I'm going to try.

  "Thank you, Mr. Donovan. Lock up behind me."

  "Always do. You be safe out there, Meggy."

  I finish the loop. Nothing happens. Nobody jumps me, nobody runs, nobody screams. I'm home by 9:40, twenty minutes ahead of schedule. I text Mom: Home. All quiet. Heading inside. She texts back: Door's open.

  I come in through the front door this time. Dad's on the couch reading. He looks up, sees me in the suit, and his expression does something complicated.

  "You look like a superhero," he says.

  "Don't get emotional on me, Dad."

  "I'm not emotional. I'm making an observation." He absolutely is emotional. His eyes are doing the thing. "There's leftover stir fry in the fridge."

  I eat stir fry in my bedroom in full Megalodon armor because I forgot to take it off and by the time I noticed I was already three bites in and it felt stupid to stop. This is probably not how real superheroes operate.

  Sunday is rest. Real rest. I sleep until ten, which is decadent. Bagels and lox for brunch because Mom went to the good deli on Bustleton. Dad is watching the Sixers and providing commentary that suggests he understands basketball significantly less than he thinks he does. Mom's on the phone in the other room with someone from the coalition - I catch fragments, something about a state legislator who's reconsidering their position on the powered youth protection act. Then another person who's name I only barely catch snippets of - something something Gilly. Patty Gilly? Who names their kid that?

  I do laundry. I clean my room, which needs it desperately. I read the Odyssey for school. The persistence of doing it anyway because the alternative is giving up and you're not the giving up kind.

  In the afternoon I sit on my bed with the laptop and I open a folder I haven't touched since January. The Silverstein files. Two seven-hour surveillance tails from back when I was sleeping in Miasma's safehouses and eating gas station food and desperately trying to find something, anything, to use against Maya's network.

  David Silverstein. City Councilman. Seen at the Crescent with Maya Richardson. Office building downtown with tenants I never got around to researching. Shell companies. Zoning approvals that went through suspiciously fast. The kind of boring, paper-trail corruption that doesn't make anyone's blood pump but puts people in prison when prosecutors get motivated.

  I've been so focused on the big plays - Bellwether, Ford, the confession, the Inquirer - that I forgot about the boring ones. But boring is what gets people in the end. It's always the taxes. It's always the paperwork. It's always the guy who thought he was too small to notice. That's how they got Al Capone, right? Two meetings at his office that I couldn't get close enough to photograph the visitors. An address downtown that I wrote down and never followed up on.

  Everyone else has their assignment. Ford has Bellwether. Tasha has the Songbird money trail. Jamal has the DVD. McNulty has eyes on the street. The institutional machinery is grinding forward and it doesn't need me. Jordan is cracking the secrets of the universe at DAAS, which may or may not be helpful when the chips are down.

  But Silverstein? Silverstein is mine.