Chapter 22: Sharpening the Edge
The gym floor was marked with tape—blue lines forming the rough dimensions of the bank lobby, red X's marking security positions, yellow circles indicating the vault access corridor.
"Entry through the main doors," Brian said, walking the team through the layout. "Grue's darkness fills the space in three seconds. Bitch holds the entrance with Angelica and Brutus. Regent handles crowd control—keep them scared but manageable. Tattletale moves to the vault with the manager. Revenant covers the windows and calls incoming threats."
I stood at the tape line representing the front windows, spatial awareness already mapping the practice space. The proportions weren't exact—the gym was narrower than the actual bank—but close enough.
"Spacing's off," I said. "If Bitch positions here, her dogs block the sight line to the manager's office. She needs to shift two meters left."
Brian studied the layout. "Show me."
I walked through it, pointing out the angles. "Vault access is through the manager's office, which is behind the teller line. If the dogs are here—" I stepped to Rachel's marked position "—then anyone in the office can't see the entrance clearly. Move them here, and we have continuous visual coverage."
Rachel grunted. Not agreement, exactly, but acknowledgment.
"Good catch," Brian said. "What else?"
"The extraction route." I crossed to the side of the gym representing the rear of the bank. "Current plan has us going through the service corridors. Narrow passage, single-file movement. If we get caught in a chase, we're funneled."
"You mentioned this before. The parking structure."
"Thirty extra seconds, but multiple exit points. Vehicles, pedestrian access, service tunnels." I traced the path I'd memorized from the modified blueprints. "More options if things go wrong."
Brian considered it. "Lisa?"
"He's right," Lisa said from the bench where she'd been observing. "The parking structure gives us flexibility. I should have caught it myself."
Her tone was neutral, but her eyes were on me—calculating, as always. She'd noticed that my suggestions came too quickly, too smoothly. More data points for her ongoing investigation.
But she didn't push. Not today. Not with the job this close.
"Parking structure it is," Brian said. "Run it again. Full sequence."
The afternoon brought a different kind of preparation.
I sat in the storage room with Ward dossiers spread across the floor—printouts from PHO, PRT press releases, anything Lisa had assembled on Brockton Bay's young heroes. Most of them were standard: Clockblocker's time-freeze, Vista's space manipulation, Gallant's emotion blasts, Aegis's adaptive biology.
Shadow Stalker's file was thinner. Her public profile emphasized "reformed vigilante" and "crossbow specialist." Nothing about the girl who'd pinned me against the Winslow wall, who knew my civilian face, who'd filed a PRT report about a possible Thinker operating near her school.
My mask covered everything below the eyes. The dark jacket obscured my build. But height, movement patterns, the way I held my shoulders when facing a threat—those things were harder to disguise.
I needed another layer.
The hardware store on Third Street had what I was looking for: a cheap voice modulator, the kind people used for costume parties or amateur theater. Forty-three dollars, cash, no questions asked.
Back at the loft, I tested it in the bathroom mirror.
"Testing." The word came out distorted, mechanical—a stranger's voice from my own throat. "Revenant here."
The modulator wasn't perfect. Anyone listening closely might catch the underlying tone, the rhythm of speech patterns. But it was better than nothing.
I stared at my reflection. Half-mask in place, voice altered, cape gear ready.
One more layer between Evan Hebert and the person he was pretending to be.
"We need to talk."
Lisa found me in the kitchen, late afternoon, while the others were occupied with their own preparations. Her expression was different from her usual analytical sharpness—something more direct underneath.
"About what?"
"About whatever you're hiding." She leaned against the counter, arms crossed. "I've been testing you for weeks. Running probes, watching your reactions, cataloguing every slip. And I still don't have the full picture."
"Is this where you threaten to expose me?"
"No." Her voice was flat, genuine. "This is where I tell you that whatever you're hiding, make sure it doesn't compromise the job."
I met her eyes. The cold war between us had been built on moves and countermoves, each of us trying to gain advantage. But this wasn't a move. This was professional concern from someone who'd seen enough of my capabilities to respect them, even without understanding where they came from.
"It won't," I said.
Lisa held the look for three seconds. Then she nodded—once, short, accepting the answer without believing it was complete.
"Good." She pushed off from the counter. "Because if this goes wrong, we all go down together."
She walked out without another word.
I stood in the empty kitchen, listening to the sounds of the loft—Rachel feeding her dogs, Alec complaining about something on his phone, Brian's footsteps overhead.
Tomorrow, we'd hit a bank. Tomorrow, the Wards would respond. Tomorrow, Shadow Stalker might recognize the boy who'd threatened her outside Winslow.
I finished my coffee and went to check my gear one more time.
The night before the job, I laid everything out on the bed.
Mask. Jacket. Combat boots. Earpiece. Voice modulator.
The metal-sense fragment tracked each item—the zipper on the jacket, the grommets on the boots, the tiny screws holding the earpiece together. Even mundane objects registered now, the world rendered in metallic geography.
I closed my eyes and reconstructed the bank from memory.
The spatial awareness fragment painted the lobby in invisible lines. Teller stations at twelve feet from the entrance. Manager's office behind the divider at twenty-seven feet. Vault corridor extending forty-three feet to the reinforced door.
The parking structure exit added thirty seconds to extraction. My modified route passed within forty feet of the building I suspected was Coil's surveillance hub. If I was right, I'd have visual confirmation by this time tomorrow.
If I was wrong, I'd still have completed the job.
Plans within plans.
I opened my eyes and started repacking the gear.
Tomorrow. May 1st. The bank.
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