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“Phil,” Techno whispers insistently. “Can you pick up the pace at all?”
“No,” Phil whispers back. “If you’d give me a fucking moment of silence I’d be done by now.” The moment of silence he gets is decidedly tense.
Understandably so, of course. They are actively running from a swarm of cops.
The lock under Phil’s hands clicks open, and Phil mutters, “There.” He opens the shop door, slips through, and pulls Techno after him. “Happy now?”
“Get down,” Techno replies.
“Pushy, pushy.” Phil drops to the floor next to Techno and returns his lockpicks to his pocket. They both lean against a display case of some kind, and Phil hums a low note, pulling the shadows around them.
Outside, the cop cars they’d been avoiding scream down the street. Phil keeps up his power and prays they don’t notice the out-of-place block of darkness in this one store.
A few seconds after the street is quiet again, Phil lets the shadows drop back to their natural places.
“You sound like a microwave,” Techno mutters, but his voice is much less tense than before.
“You’re welcome.”
“What kind of shop did you even break us into, anyway?”
Phil looks around. Between the past-midnight darkness and his veil, he can’t see much, but he spots drawings of bread and cakes on the menu. “A bakery of some kind? What does it matter?”
Techno shrugs. “Just curious.”
Phil laughs. “Alright. We should probably get going, right?”
“Eh, we can wait a bit. Make sure the cops are gone.”
Light flares above and next to them from deeper in the bakery. Phil snaps his gaze around to look at its source, and even though he has a power himself it takes him a moment to reconcile that a young woman is holding a ball of flame in her palm.
She’s dressed in pajamas, but she still manages to look fierce in the warm light. “If you don’t tell me exactly what you’re doing here not only will I burn you both to death but I will scream and my girlfriend will come downstairs to help me hide your bodies.”
Phil holds his hands up and smiles even though he’s wearing a veil. “Hey, it’s alright. No one needs to die tonight. Is this your bakery?”
“What are you doing here? How did you get in?” the woman shoots back.
“Lockpicks,” Techno answers. His expression is unreadable under his mask, but he doesn’t sound afraid. “We just needed a place to hide for a couple minutes, okay? Can we go?”
“Give me one good reason not to call the cops right now.”
Phil stands slowly. “We didn’t break or steal anything. It’s not worth your time.”
The woman rolls her eyes. “Wrong. I recognize you two, and I think it’d be rather worth my time to call in that I’ve found Protesilaus and Zephyrus in my bakery. If I’m not going to turn you both in, you need to make it more worth my time.”
Phil tilts his head to one side, the kind of exaggerated movement he’s had to learn because of his veil.
Still sitting on the floor behind Phil, Techno says, “What.”
“You heard me,” the baker replies. “What can you do for me?”
“We can not shoot and/or stab you.” Techno sounds almost bored, but Phil can tell he’s disguising something more.
“Well if we’re playing that way, I can not set you on fire.”
“If you were gonna set us on fire, you would’ve already,” Techno points out.
The flame flares in the baker’s hand. “You don’t know me.”
Phil holds up a hand to each of them. “Let’s not kill each other? Yeah? What do you want, and we can negotiate from there.” He’s inclined to believe Techno that if this woman was capable of burning people to death in cold blood they’d be dead by now, but he’d rather not push that.
“Protection,” the baker answers immediately. “Can’t run a bakery on an unsafe street, and all the copycats of you two make this city unsafe. I want you two to protect this area.”
Phil hums, pretending to consider. It’s a reasonable ask, all things considered. “That’s not a one-time favor, mate. If we protect your street specifically, we want something in return.” The baker raises her eyebrows. “An informant.”
The baker considers for a moment. “Yeah, okay. I’ll want concrete terms, though.”
“Can you do that later?” Techno interrupts, standing. “I get that you two are negotiatin’ or whatever, but it’s the middle of the night. Can we go?”
Phil nods. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you an email to reach me at and we’ll arrange terms?”
The baker fishes behind the counter and pulls out a notepad and small pencil, never letting the fire in her other hand die. Phil scribbles down the business email he’d set up a while ago to avoid the traceability of phone numbers and social media. And Techno said it was dumb to conduct villain business over email. The baker looks at it, then nods, satisfied.
Techno’s already opening the bakery door. Phil holds out a hand to shake with the baker. “Pleasure doing business…” He realizes he doesn’t know her name and trails off.
“Niki,” the baker supplies. Her handshake is firm and subtly unnaturally warm. “My name’s Niki.”