I put the drill back on the hook.

  I don't know why I'm doing this. The two guys are zip-tied on the floor, one of them still spitting curses at me, the other one quiet and seething. The store is trashed. Glass everywhere, shelves knocked askew, a puddle of something - paint? solvent? - spreading slowly across the linoleum. And I'm standing here with a DeWalt power drill in my hand, looking for the right peg to hang it on.

  "You're dead," the loud one says. He's the one I zip-tied to the shelf, arms spread like he's being crucified by hardware. "You hear me? You're fucking dead. We're gonna--"

  "Shut up," I say, not even looking at him. My voice comes out flat through the modulator. I find the peg, hang the drill, move on to the next thing. Box of screws. Where do the screws go? There's a whole wall of screws, organized by size, and I can't figure out which slot this box belongs in.

  "You think you're tough? You think this means anything? We got people. We got--"

  "I said shut up."

  He doesn't shut up. He keeps going, a steady stream of threats and profanity that washes over me like background noise. His friend, the one I left slumped against the shelf with his wrists bound in front of him, is smarter - he's watching me, trying to figure out what I am, what I want, whether there's an angle he can play.

  There isn't. I just want to put the screws back.

  My hands are shaking. Not a lot, not enough that anyone would notice, but I can feel the fine tremor in my fingers as I slot the box into place on the wall. Adrenaline crash, probably. Or the start of shock. Or just my body catching up to the fact that I took a wrench to the shoulder and the stomach and the neck in the span of about thirty seconds.

  I move to the next item. A hammer, lying on the floor near the overturned display. I pick it up, and for a moment I just stand there, feeling the weight of it in my hand. The loud one is still talking. The quiet one is still watching. And I'm holding a hammer in a trashed hardware store at 11:20 PM, wondering why I can't seem to make my feet move toward the door.

  Dissociation. That's what this is. I've read about it, talked about it with Dr. Desai back when I was seeing him regularly. The feeling of being slightly outside your own body, watching yourself do things without quite being in control of the doing. It happens after trauma, after violence, after moments when your nervous system gets pushed past its normal operating parameters.

  I should leave. The cops are coming. I can hear sirens now, faint but getting closer. I should be gone before they get here, before anyone sees me, before I become a name that gets attached to a police report.

  Instead, I hang the hammer on its peg and reach for a fallen box of nails.

  Footsteps on the stairs.

  I turn. The stairwell in the back of the store leads up to the apartment - Mr. Donovan's apartment, where he lives above his business like a lot of the old-timers in Mayfair do. The door at the top is open now, and there's a figure silhouetted against the light, moving slowly down the steps.

  He always looks slightly older than I expect him to look. Sixties, maybe seventies, with a bald head and a gray mustache and the kind of thick arms that come from decades of manual work. He's holding a baseball bat in one hand and a phone in the other, and he stops halfway down when he sees me.

  We stare at each other.

  "Who the hell are you?" he asks.

  "Someone who heard the break-in," I say. The modulator makes my voice sound like someone else's. Good. "These two were robbing you. They're not going anywhere now."

  Mr. Donovan looks at the men on the floor. Looks at the yellow bandanas. Looks at me, in my shark helmet and blue-and-white armor, standing in the middle of his store with a box of nails in my hand.

  "You a cape?"

  "Yeah."

  "New one?"

  "Yeah."

  He grunts. Comes the rest of the way down the stairs, bat still in hand, and walks past me to look at the zip-tied men. The loud one has finally shut up - something about Mr. Donovan's presence, maybe the bat, maybe just the reality of being caught settling in.

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  "I don't know them," Mr. Donovan says. "They're not from around here."

  "No," I agree. "They're not Songbirds either. The bandanas are a costume."

  His eyes narrow. "How do you know that?"

  "If they were, they'd be calling me a lot more slurs," I point out. The quiet one's face goes red. I hear his heartbeat accelerating in my blood sense. You can stay quiet all you want, but your body keeps the score.

  Mr. Donovan is quiet for a moment. Then he says, almost to himself: "I paid those bastards."

  I don't have to ask which bastards. The white pawn sticker is right there on the door, visible even from here.

  "Protection's supposed to mean protection," he continues, and there's a bitterness in his voice that goes deeper than tonight. "I pay every month. On time. Never complain. And they send guys to - what, teach me a lesson? Remind me who's in charge?"

  "I don't think they sent these guys," I say carefully. "I think these guys are freelancing. Or someone gave an order that wasn't supposed to be given."

  "What's the difference?" He turns to look at me, and his eyes are hard. "I pay. They don't protect. That's the deal broken, isn't it? One way or another."

  I don't have an answer for that. He's right. Whether this is Kingdom policy or Kingdom incompetence, the result is the same: a man who paid for safety didn't get it.

  The sirens are closer now. A minute out, maybe less.

  "I need to go," I say. "The cops will take it from here."

  "Wait." Mr. Donovan steps closer, studying my helmet, my suit, trying to see through the mask to whatever's underneath. "What do I call you? If anyone asks."

  I hesitate. The name is new. I've never said it out loud to anyone except myself. It already sounds stupid in my head.

  "Megalodon," I say.

  He nods slowly, like he's filing it away. "Right. I can see the... shark thing," he says, waving his hand like there's not two zip tied criminals on the floor. Like he's part of some sort of presentation. The angry one cusses again. I gently kick him in the shins - not enough to matter, but enough to agitate him. They've both been double-ziptied by now.

  "Like the shark," I echo back at him. "Maybe step outside and knock on a neighbor's door. I don't know if they have knives on them and zip ties are cuttable."

  "Okay." He steps back, gives me room. "Okay, Megalodon. Thanks for--" He gestures vaguely at the store, at the tied-up men, at all of it. "Thanks."

  I don't know what to say to that. So I just nod, and then I'm moving, out through the broken window, into the alley, gone before the red and blue lights turn onto Frankford Ave. I throw him one last glance, out on the sidewalk, walking over to bother a neighbor. A siren gets loud enough that I hear the sound wave burst into the same parallel as me.

  Four blocks north, I find an alley dark enough to stop in.

  I lean against the brick wall and let myself feel it - all of it, everything I've been pushing down since the fight ended. The shoulder throbs with a deep, grinding ache that tells me something's cracked in there. The ribs protest every breath, sharp little stabs that make me want to take only shallow sips of air. The stomach... yeah. That's going to be a problem.

  I pull off the gauntlet first, then the glove underneath. My fingers are clumsy, thick with cold and residual adrenaline, but I manage to get the first aid kit open and spread its contents on a nearby dumpster lid. Bandages. Tape. Antiseptic wipes. A few single-use ice packs that won't do much but might take the edge off.

  Assessment. That's what Hector taught me. Before you treat, you assess.

  Shoulder: limited range of motion, pain on rotation, no visible deformity. Probable hairline fracture of the clavicle or scapula. Treatment: immobilization would be ideal, but I don't have a sling and I need both arms to get home. Ice, ibuprofen, and hope my regeneration handles it overnight.

  Ribs: tender on palpation, pain with deep breathing, no crepitus. Bruised, maybe cracked, but probably not fully broken. Treatment: nothing to do but wait. Broken ribs heal on their own, and mine will heal faster than most. No compression. No bulletproof vests until they're healed. I need to take a break of at least a day or risk further damage.

  Abdomen: diffuse tenderness, some guarding, no rebound. Internal bruising but probably no organ damage. I'll know for sure if I start pissing blood, but for now I'm calling it a contusion. Treatment: don't get hit in the stomach again for a while.

  Neck: sore but functional. The armor took the worst of it. No treatment needed.

  Verdict: I'm fucked up, but I'm not dying. I don't need an ER. I don't need to explain to some overnight resident why a seventeen-year-old girl has injuries consistent with a bare-knuckle boxing match. I just need to get home, eat everything in the refrigerator, and sleep for about twelve hours.

  I crack one of the ice packs and press it against my shoulder, hissing at the cold. The pain doesn't go away, but it changes - becomes something sharper and more manageable, something I can compartmentalize and set aside.

  I give myself two minutes. Two minutes to sit here in the dark, breathing carefully around my bruised ribs, letting my body start the long process of putting itself back together. Two minutes to feel the weight of what I just did.

  I stopped a robbery. I caught Kingdom running a false flag. I have evidence on my phone and a name on my lips and a suit that fits like it was made for me.

  I said it out loud tonight. To a stranger, to a victim, to someone who's going to tell the cops and maybe the news and definitely his neighbors. By tomorrow, there's going to be a new name in Mayfair. A new cape. Someone who showed up out of nowhere and stopped a break-in and disappeared before the police arrived.

  I stand up, wince, adjust the ice pack, and start walking. Four blocks home. I can make it four blocks.

  The night is cold and quiet and empty, and I feel - despite everything, despite the pain and the exhaustion and the knowledge that everything is about to get worse because it always gets worse, forever, until we stop it at the source - I feel good. I feel like myself again.