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Taylor was sitting in an unmarked van a block away from a seemingly normal house. Certainly, it looked like every other house on the street. But inside, it was different; and not just because all of Taylor’s considerable focus was on it.
Inside, away from most of the windows, in the home office, Taylor’s bug clone was sitting under a flag bearing a swastika.
“We have another,” Taylor’s clone buzzed.
Victor looked at her clone hatefully.
“It outs Othala, too,” Taylor explained. “But we believed the threat to your identity was enough. Please correct us if we were wrong.”
Victor gritted his teeth and looked back at the newspaper mockup of the announcement of his secret identity.
“You can’t do this,” he ground out. “It flies in the face of the unwritten rules.”
“I do not believe I have found those rules in any literature?” Taylor’s bug clone admitted. “Enlighten me.” She wouldn’t trust anything he’d say, of course. She knew better than to trust a Nazi.
In the car, she said, “He’s saying something about unwritten rules.”
“It’s the rules that bind all of cape society,” Victor snapped. “The biggest one is about secret identities. You don’t go after a cape’s family or non-cape friends. You don’t approach a cape in their home. You don’t threaten to unmask a cape. You certainly don’t go through and unmask a cape. Got it?”
“I believe it would be ‘it is the set of rules’ or ‘they are the rules’, not ‘it’s the rules’,” Taylor corrected him. “Learn to speak English, Nazi.”
She didn’t care about how precisely Victor spoke English. It was a language of colonization, and all dialects were valid, no matter how far from power they were. But she did enjoy getting a rise out of fascists, and it might lead the Nazis wrong if they tried to find her.
The bait worked. Victor stood up angrily, face flushing.
“Sit down,” Taylor’s clone snarled. “And let me tell you something; I do not care about your rules. I will kill you where you stand if you disobey me, without any thought of whether your face is covered. Do you understand?”
Victor had sat back down, but his face was still wrathful.
“If you broke the rules that brazenly, you would be hunted down,” Victory said, glaring. “Not just by the Empire, but by all the villains of the bay.”
“Like they hunted the Empire after the death of that New Wave member?” Taylor mocked. “I am sure. It is time to make your choice.”
“I’ll do it,” Victor ground out.
“Then get up and do it.”
Victor stood. Taylor allowed him to go to the door of the office. But he paused there, one hand on the knob of the unopened door.
“She’s mine, and I’ve made sure she knows it,” Victor said. “She’s my wife. Her father gave her to me.”
That he believed that was disturbing. But Taylor didn’t have to react, because it was not a revelation to her; she had been watching them long enough to know that Othala was just a possession to Victor. In fact, this whole song and dance hinged on just that fact. If Victor did not see Othala as a possession, he wouldn’t be willing to trade her like one. If he recognized her personhood, he wouldn’t obey Taylor’s commands and fall into the trap.
“I do not care,” Taylor said plainly. A lie, perhaps, but she didn’t need to detail her hatred of and reliance on Victor’s shittiness.
Victor scowled and stomped out of the office.
“Othala!” he called. His voice was angry. Unpleasant.
Othala came running. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel, having nearly dropped the dishes she was washing in her haste to attend to her husband.
“Darling?” she asked. Her eyes lingered on Taylor’s bug clone, which had followed Victor.
“You’re going to be staying with him,” Victor said, gesturing to the clone. “Obey him as you would me.”
Victor was scowling at Othala. Taylor thought he was upset about the situation and angry at Taylor, but would Othala understand that? Or would Othala think he was mad at her? Either way, he had fallen for the trap. Taylor was almost disappointed in him, but she wasn’t surprised.
“Darling? I don’t understand,” Othala said weakly.
She took a step back, and Taylor decided to sweep forward and loom over her.
“You will be coming with me,” Taylor buzzed. “Say goodbye to your husband.”
“I don’t want to say goodbye,” Othala said, shrinking in on herself.
“Othala!” Victor snapped.
“Goodbye, darling,” Othala sniffled.
Victor stomped over to the front door and opened it.
“Goodbye, Othala,” he said stiffly. “Now get out of my house.”
Taylor was pretty sure the last was directed at her clone alone, but it wasn’t completely obvious.
Othala walked out of the door on slightly shaky legs, still clutching her dishcloth. It was the only thing Victor was allowing her to take, which was not part of Taylor’s demands, but she wasn’t going to stop him. The sooner they got out of there, the better. Taylor silently followed.
“On our way,” she said in the van.
“Take a left on the sidewalk,” Taylor’s bug clone ordered.
Behind Othala, the door slammed shut. Victor, shaking with rage, didn’t seem to notice the half-dozen black widows hiding in his hair biting him. He stayed standing, furiously pacing in front of the front door, until well after Othala had turned left on the sidewalk. Then he fell and died.
“Victor is dead,” Taylor announced. Cheers, quiet but genuine, met her human ears.
Taylor set a small team of roaches to dragging the newspaper mockup out of the study. Soon, it would be torn to pieces and scattered through the house’s walls.
“Do you see the van, there?” Taylor asked Othala. “The white one?”
“Yes, sir,” Othala said quietly.
“We will get into it,” Taylor’s clone said. “You do not need to speak to anyone in there.”
“Yes, sir,” Othala confirmed.
Taylor wanted to console her. Othala sounded so small and confused and Taylor wasn’t heartless. But she knew she couldn’t. The character she was playing wouldn’t.
“Open,” Taylor’s human body said.
The door to the van slid open as Othala approached, operated by Kurt. Masked and silent, he helped Othala in and pointed her to a seat. Kurt directed Othala to strap herself in and then closed the door after the last of Taylor’s bugs were inside.
The moment Kurt sat down, Taylor tapped the dashboard, directing the Ed to drive. Smoothly, the van peeled off the curb and rolled away.
Othala swallowed and looked around. Taylor knew she wouldn’t see much she would find of interest. The van had been stolen from an Empire aligned business. The team was comprised of Kurt and Ed, both normal-looking white men in masks, and Taylor, who was also white. With her hair hidden under a hood and wearing the same uniform of black clothes and masks as the men, Taylor would probably seem like just another man or, at most, a boy. Taylor didn’t like the idea of being mistaken as a guy, but they had discussed the necessity and Taylor knew that everyone there besides Othala knew she was a girl. But it was important that they confuse matters as much as possible. Right now, it looked like it could be an inside job by a strange faction. Even having a woman or girl on the team would throw everything into question.
“Your husband didn’t introduce me, but my name is Swarm,” Taylor buzzed. “You have a very important mission ahead of you. You will be serving as a sleeper agent in the Protectorate. Pretend to be repentant, and when I contact you, do as I say. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Othala said.
She seemed overwhelmed.
“You will give the Protectorate your true secret identity; unfortunately, there is no way to keep it secret. But this sacrifice will benefit the Empire in ways you cannot comprehend,” Taylor buzzed. “Expect to report back details of the Protectorate’s strategies against the Empire and other groups.”
Othala nodded silently.
The rest of the drive was silent. Finally, all the way out of town, the van stopped again. Kurt slid the door open and Taylor had the clone stand up.
“This is our stop,” it told Othala.
Soon, the van and everyone in it rolled away, leaving Othala and the bug clone standing in front of an abandoned gas station with a pay phone. They had checked, and the phone still worked.
“I will be in touch soon,” Taylor promised. “Do you see that payphone? Call the Protectorate from there.”
“Yes, sir,” Othala agreed. Her voice was dull.
Taylor dispersed the bug clone. Othala just stood there for a couple of minutes, staring blankly. Finally, she turned and walked on unsteady legs to the pay phone. Taylor smiled slightly as she watched Othala press the numbers for the PRT hotline. She listened from the distantly parked van as Othala told them where and who she was, and that she was turning herself into the Protectorate.
“Go,” Taylor said the moment Othala confirmed she would wait there.
“It’s done?” Kurt asked, as the van smoothly slid away. It would be dumped and stripped of parts soon. Its fate would be nearly impossible to discover.
“Yeah,” Taylor confirmed.
The Protectorate would not be able to resist having the only healer in the Bay. They would accept Othala. Taylor and her bug clone would have to keep contacting Othala to keep her pacified, but they could use that chore as a chance to get dirt on the Protectorate.
The Empire would want their monopoly on healing back. But with Victor dead and Othala seemingly switched sides, the chances they would succeed were slim. If worst came to worst, and the Empire managed to get Othala back, they would still be down a cape, and Othala would spread confusion and suspicion with her story.
Taylor sat back and laughed delightedly.
“Keep your cool. It’s not totally over yet,” Ed warned her, though his tone was warm and amused.
“Sorry,” Taylor apologized. “I just… we did something. Something big, something real. Something that should help everyone.”
“I know, kiddo,” Kurt said. “It’s exciting, isn’t it? I remember the first action I participated in…”