Vivian made her way back toward San Francisco slowly and thoughtfully. The problem she thought she’d been tracking had been revealed now as a completely different issue - different enough that she wasn’t sure what was actually going on anymore. The next logical step was to investigate HyperCorp - if there was anywhere Castor’s shadow hung over most, it was there - but it felt like poking the bear, picking a fight she didn’t need, this time with corporate suits and high-powered lawyers.

She was all but certain there’d be a terminal somewhere on HyperCorp premises where the right prompt would give her access to detailed system information. Finding it was likely to be a challenge, especially when she couldn’t admit how she knew.

She toyed briefly with claiming her android systems allowed her to easily scan and hack computers she was near. The main thing which stopped her was that it wouldn’t stop at one person; it would make it online, would become something known about her, would lead to awkward questions later on.

There was probably a better way to do all this, one she’d know by this point if she’d gone the good girl route from the start.

Of course, when she’d started, the very phrase good girl would have received only disdain from her, rather than an excited squirming she had to try to hide in costume.

She was almost inside city limits before the idea hit her. It stopped her in her airborne tracks, hanging there thoughtfully for a few moments as she turned it over in her head.

It would also raise a number of questions. It would probably be a strain.

It was a bad idea, but it was tempting. But…

Vivian sighed. She might, she thought, head back to Master in the evening. This whole case was making her feel more uncomfortable than she’d anticipated it would.

She could always save the idea for later, and give herself a little time to think of something first, something that would mean she didn’t have to turn to it.

…Except it didn’t have to be her who thought of it.

She worked her jaw against her helmet again, opening communication channels. Heroines got to pool information, share knowledge, workshop theories. It was villains who always had to examine anything they got that way carefully, in case there was some kind of trick buried inside it.

She was going to learn that properly, one of these days.

*

She’d been hanging there, a quarter mile if that from city limits, around thirty feet from the ground, for nearly half an hour. A motorcycle was approaching her, off-road, and it clearly had no problem with the uneven waste industrial ground it was navigating. From time to time a particularly large outcropping sent the cycle into the air.

The closer it got, the clearer it was that the rider wasn’t in bicycle leathers, they were in costume.

“Someone’s coming,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

“I shall continue to monitor the situation,” D.A.N.I.E.L.’s perfectly modulated tones informed her. Vivian ended the call. She raised one hand in greeting; no point in avoiding the conversation someone was clearly intending to have.

She let herself lower to the ground and the biker, having eased up on the throttle slightly after Vivian waved, rolled to a halt a couple of yards away.

Belatedly, she recognised the new arrival. Hooded Hawk. She and Paladin worked as a team sometimes, but they almost never left the city, Paladin slightly more often than the Hawk. She’d had a - well, they’d called each other friends - who regularly clashed with Paladin. Nemesis had vented about them both from time to time, enough that when one of them had been featured on national news, Vivian had paid attention.

The bike was probably custom, then. No wonder it handled uneven ground so well. The speed she’d seen from it would be a fraction of what it could handle.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be able to reach you,” the new arrival said. “But it’s weird seeing somebody hanging in the air like that.”

“So you came to investigate?”

“Actually I came to see if you could use a native guide,” the Hooded Hawk answered. “After I spotted you, that is.”

“Spotted me?”

Hawk gestured back over her shoulder in the direction of the city. “I set up some cameras around here a while ago,” she said. “I don’t have the power some people do, but I need them worried about me as much as the other locals. Appearing to have eyes in the back of my head helps.

“When I set out I was wondering if you were a new villain, honestly. No offence but I haven’t seen you on the news enough to recognise your look first time. I remembered on the ride over.”

“And now you think I could use a guide.”

Hawk’s mask only covered her head from the nose up, disguising it under a beak; her dimples came out as she smiled. “Not every team-up needs to start with a fight,” she said.

“I guess not.” Vivian was glad the mask concealed a smile of her own; she found herself liking this woman, but something at the back of her mind was unhappy with this. Why place cameras here? “I’m Mercy.”

“Hooded Hawk. What brings you to San Francisco?”

What to answer? “I started chasing one case,” she said. “Right now I’m more concerned about the Ophidian Circle.”

Hawk nodded. “That’s… big.”

“Afraid so. And I don’t know where to look next; I ran into them alongside Hornet, but that nest will be cleaned out.”

“You think they’re still in the city?”

“I think they’re probably debating whether they can get away with lying low right now.”

Hawk looked around the detritus around them. This area had been derelict once, Vivian thought. It was probably going to be rebuilt inside the next year, given it had been somewhat knocked down, put back to use by a city where international corporations could always use more land. “You don’t think they’re near here, do you?”

“I have no idea where they’d be.”

“Okay.” Hawk looked back at her. “How about you show me where they’ve abandoned, and we can see if we can work it out?”

*

It seemed like the woman could just see things Vivian couldn’t. Her strength had been needed to get them both into the hidden inner sanctum - they’d turned what had been a corporate basement into an underground bunker, reinforcing the ceilings and putting in a thick steel door with a heavy locking mechanism - but once inside, it took the Hooded Hawk to put the picture together.

Most of the equipment the Ophidian Circle’s pawns had been running had been torched, superheated and even burned out to make it as unrecognisable as possible. Some had clearly just gone; there were too many places where space stood empty that would naturally have been one of the first places to fill, too many abandoned power cords, and the like.

Some had been too heavy, or simply easier to replace, and it had been burned out so that their purpose couldn’t easily be reconstructed.

That much, the Hooded Hawk couldn’t help with. Otherwise, though, the simple efficiency of her examination stood out. She had pulled several sets of fingerprints, feeding them into a computer system through a scanner that unclipped out of her combat padding. The system, elsewhere, had let her identify a number of individuals.

There were four members of the Circle themselves who’d been here, confirmed by their own fingerprints; Queensnake, Taipan, Moccasin and Lancehead.

Just as importantly, there had been thirteen biologists, all with wildly differing specialities, whose fingerprints had also turned up. Not all were US residents. Surprisingly, only four had been reported as missing.

“So the others are… what? Cooperating of their own free will?” Hawk had speculated aloud, and Mercy had snorted amusement.

When the Hawk looked at her, she’d said simply, “With the Circle, ‘free will’ is a relative concept.” Strange how much more loosely she found herself saying things as a heroine. The bluntness Macabre had favoured, from what Vivian could tell, just wasn’t in her any longer.

“Either way,” the Hooded Hawk acknowledged, “some of these are presumably reassuring whoever’s waiting at home or their usual place of work that they’ll be back as soon as… whatever… is done.”

“It would be good to know how long they’d been here,” Vivian said. It was the Hawk’s turn to chuckle, Mercy’s turn to tilt her head quizzically for an answer.

“You don’t reinforce a place this way unless you’re in for the long haul,” she said. “This isn’t a short term project they can dress up like a conference. It’s something bigger.”

“So if we check and see how long they’ve been away from their usual haunts…”

“Right. That’ll take a bit of time to get an answer, though.” Hawk smiled. “In the meantime, we can safely assume whatever they’re here for involves human experimentation, neurochemistry, and probably research into the nature of instinct.”

“Instinct? My thoughts went straight to brainwashing. But a lot of the Circle do that as a matter of course anyway, and instinct feels… I don’t know… off? For that?”

“I’m no scientist,” Hawk shrugged. “There are a few fields I follow, if only in the summaries. But I think you’re right, this isn’t for brainwashing individuals.

“My guess would be they want to build an army, and they want to use instinct and muscle memory to bypass all that pesky training time.”

Vivian pulled a face, then remembered the other heroine wouldn’t be able to see it. “Doesn’t sound good,” she said.

“No. Mind you, while this is all helpful, none of it is exactly what we came for,” Hawk said briskly. “We need to be able to find where they’ve gone, right?”

“Right. Don’t suppose you had any cameras watching this area?” Vivian asked drily.

“Can’t say I did.” If the other woman noticed anything beyond the surface level, she didn’t show it. “The trouble round here tends to be very obvious, so I take a different approach to surveillance. But we’ll find something, don’t you worry.”

She turned away to examine one section of the room, then paused. “Or simulate worrying. Whichever you do.”

Vivian let that one pass. She turned away herself, skulking about the place, trying to think like a member of the Circle.

If the lair had been intact, she reflected, she’d put money on herself to find a lead before Hawk. Think like a villain to find their hiding spots.

But the place had been gutted, and any clues were going to be things they’d overlooked, things they’d forgotten. Unimportant things. To make sense of those, loath as she was to admit it, you needed a detective.

The Hawk came through just a few minutes later, making her way over to Mercy. “I have an area to start looking in,” she said. “And I think I can narrow it down before we get there.”

“Go on.”

Hooded Hawk held up a stained napkin, clearly dug out of one of the office trashcans. Under the staining, a logo was clearly visible. “This place is too far away for a lunch run,” she said, “but there’s more than a few of them in different bins. They can’t all be from the same guy getting breakfast on his way in.”

Enlightenment dawned. “They have to come from a location that’s already in use.”

Hawk nodded. “Good news is, we’ll be able to find the Circle there. Bad news is, our guesswork based on this location might be too limited. This could be just one piece of the puzzle.”

“It could,” Mercy answered. “But it could also be a production facility. The next step from what’s been done here.”

That earned a flashing smile from the Hawk. “Let’s hope so,” she said. “Although if it is, I’m going to need your help dealing with the soldiers.”

Vivian couldn’t help it. She laughed.

*

The robot was growing on her.

The Hooded Hawk was almost sure that her personality was based on someone; the gaps where she fell down, the amusement where she had insight, even something about the patterns of what she did and didn’t know, it all spoke of a real person rather than something constructed of a database. Logic said she’d be based on a heroine, but it was difficult to say.

All the same, she was surprisingly pleasant company. Far from self-effacing, there was still something unassuming in the way she carried herself. She knew her capabilities, knew she was capable, but had no embarrassment at all in the areas where she was weak.

That did make Annie think she was more likely to have certain key insights, but she was already focusing more on the case in front of her. She always had done, really; it was one of the reasons she’d been so willing to help Ms Hathor out with her husband in the first place. Results were what mattered.

She had been for some time almost completely sure that Hathor’s unofficial activities were a net gain for the people of the city, which was at the heart of why she’d never told her mother-in-law that she was routinely given illegal tasks to carry out and then ordered to forget them later. Telling her would create drama that was doomed to fail so long as Mistress still owned the control rod.

Annie was also very aware that her husband Milo wasn’t being used in the same way. She didn’t think Mistress realised Annie knew any of this, but was keeping quiet. She could see a decision ahead of her, one she didn’t especially want to have to make.

She had yet to admit to herself that the robot factored into those plans.

She also had yet to settle on an explanation of why Milo wasn’t also being used as a covert supercriminal. Her leading hypothesis was that it gave Mistress a thrill to use Hornet in that way which she simply didn’t get from Milo.

Annie didn’t like to follow that chain of thought much further.

She glanced sideways at the robot again. It was a good job, she thought, that it was a robot and couldn’t be turned to their side. Otherwise the vague plans she was turning over wouldn’t just be ones she shouldn’t have; they’d be fully unthinkable, in a very literal sense.

They had relocated to a position about two hundred yards from their new target address. It had been leased at the same time as the facility they’d found, and while they didn’t have the same company name attached to their leases, she hadn’t been able to find any trace of either company genuinely existing anywhere else.

Now they were carefully watching before they risked going in. It would be embarrassing to be wrong; it could also be a much bigger problem if this address was a trap, or just bait on its own. And while Annie was as confident as she could be that it wasn’t a trap, she would always lean toward caution.

“What do you make of it?” she asked.

“The whole thing’s a mess,” Mercy answered. “Not really even what I came here for, but when you run into something like this, your priorities have to switch, right?”

“I guess.” It sounded like an opening, and she was about to pry further, but the robot kept talking. “What concerns me is the theme.”

“What theme?”

“The snake theme.”

“...There is no snake theme,” Annie pointed out, unsettled.

“That’s what’s concerning me,” Mercy said. “These guys always have one somewhere. Even when they’re basically a cash in or a power grab.”

Annie was silent for a few moments as she turned that over in her head, looking for weaknesses to the argument. She couldn’t find any, and that was a real problem. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Where are the snakes?”

“Never treat the Circle like a random crime syndicate or M.A.L.I.G.N.” the android said. The simulation of emotion in her voice, Annie thought, was pretty much perfect. “They take their gimmick seriously. We’re missing somewhere that snakes enter the equation.”

“This place was rented the same time as the other,” Annie said.

“Right. That’s how we found it.”

“It’s a second research facility,” Annie continued. “Not production. Because we have a whole side of the case that we know is missing, and because you’d probably want to set up your production complex once you knew what exactly you needed.”

Mercy nodded.

Annie turned her left arm palm-up, started typing on the keyboard thus revealed on her wrist. The output was delivered to the lenses in her mask. “And what do you know,” she said, “some researchers into snake genetics are missing, too.”

“Which means they’re in there,” Mercy said.

“And that means,” Annie looked at her significantly, “that someone’s recently plugged a whole bunch more custom-built technology into whatever power supply they have down there.”

Mercy nodded, but didn’t move. Didn’t otherwise react.

Annie kept looking at her.

After a few more moments of silence, the robot looked back. “I feel like you had a point to make there,” she said, “but it’s not one I get. What’s important about that?”

*

Before they opened the door into the warehouse, before they descended into the underground to wrench open the reinforced steel door, Annie shorted out the power.

She had nightvision built into her mask lenses. Mercy’s sensor suite, she’d been assured, could cope in darkness.

Cutting the power before going in wasn’t SOP in raid situations only because it alerted your targets that something was happening, making it a target you used cautiously.

Of course, if you’d recently placed some significant extra drain on an already strained electrical supply, nobody could tell the difference.

They went in together confidently, knowing their opponents would be disoriented, unsure. Easy prey.

She pulled some stunclaws from the concealed cache in her armour and started deploying them. Annie didn’t favour the utility belt. There had been an incident, early in her career, when hers had been a problem.

*

Sergeant Sin had recently arrived in San Francisco, where he was running a series of diamond heists. It would later turn out that he’d been paid by one local business to hit a number of their key competitors so they’d have the majority of the sales going into Christmas and on to Valentines’ Day, but at the time it had just looked like he wanted money for some other project.

He was kind of a D-lister, in Annie’s opinion, but of course she hadn’t fought him before. Nonetheless she knew that for whatever reason he rarely seemed to run up against superhuman costumes, almost always clashing with folks like herself who were or who were believed to be unpowered.

She figured his D-lister status contributed to that. Everyone knew he’d be no threat to someone like Bulwark unless he sourced some very special bullets.

He was still robbing shopkeepers in her usual beat, though. Annie was determined to catch him in the act so he could stand trial and spend some time off the street for just that reason.

The initial moments of the confrontation went perfectly. She’d arranged herself so she had a clearer sense of what was happening than he did, given herself the element of surprise. Then she’d gone in aggressively, hit him from the side with a scything crescent kick while she was still in the air, his attention on the front door and the customers, not on her. Which gave her a head start.

Sarge was a D-lister, but he had a lot of experience, and he was tough. So while her kick must have rattled him it was far from enough to put him down, and as she continued on past him, using her momentum to flip gracefully backward so she could land on her feet, he even managed to bring his elbow up, driving its point into her thigh. She spun slightly in midair.

She landed on her feet but not quite where she’d aimed to be, took a quick and immediate step backward to steady herself, and in that one fleeting half-moment he acted, thrusting forward with his other arm, coming in under her guard while her brain was still more concerned with keeping her balance than monitoring to block.

He grabbed her by the belt buckle.

Time seemed to stop.

She started to move backward, combat training teaching her to roll with an impact, but realised after a heartbeat that there hadn’t been an impact in the first place. Brought her hands together in a guard, but she was looking up at him, too, her eyes wide with surprise.

Annie didn’t have her modern cowl back then. Her eyes were visible. As they met his she saw him smirk, knew he’d been waiting for her reaction. Instinct, not experience, told her he’d held off acting long enough to see if she knew what he was going to try, what the counter would be.

“You got this in St Cloud, right?” he asked, and grinned. “Tell her she needs to buy better buckles.”

He twisted with his hand and her utility belt snapped loose of her form. His motion continued, scything out to his side, and the force of the belt going with her spun her, not much, but a half-turn was enough. He stepped in close, bringing his other arm up, and that arm was now behind her, and while she knew it had to be an attack, was already turning and ducking and bringing up an arm, it was too late.

He caught her where the shoulderblade segues into the shoulder. Even today, with her suit containing purpose-designed armour plates, it’s a weak spot; it has to be, as freedom of movement for the joint is too important to limit. There was a spark and a jolt and with a startled cry, Annie dropped forward onto her knees, her body protesting.

Sergeant Sin loved his gadgets. They were all bought off the open market and modified. He used to boast about that, about how it took a little know-how and experience to turn something anyone could buy into a far more effective tool. His stun gun would have been calibrated against a previous victim; what would it take to bring an athletic, physically fit combatant on an adrenaline high down with one shot?

Her arm was aching and numb as she felt him grab her other arm, the one which had suffered less, and secure the two arms together with four sturdy loops of her belt, fastening it with the buckle he’d so easily defeated as (she presumed) a moment of personal mockery.

The keys to her escape - several different ways to untie, pick, or cut any restraints - were right by her hands, but wrapped up tight enough she couldn’t access them. Frustration burned in her.

She struggled to free her arms, even though she knew in advance he wouldn’t have made the mistake of leaving them loose enough to give her wiggle room. That didn’t work.

Still, her head was clearing. She brought one foot up, so she was on only one knee instead of both.

She started to stand.

Sergeant Sin pushed a pair of top-grade headphones down over her cowl, flattening the fabric ears in the process.

The cowl Annie would go on to wear later had various audio baffling and filtering technologies built in, allowing her to hear as well as she could while still trying to strain basic subliminal messaging out.

Her original cowl was a toughened fabric, and offered no such protection. Immediately her thoughts began to fill with a male voice, synthetic but not grating, “Serve. Submit. Obey.”

The delivery was flat, affectless, completely empty of any implication except the words themselves. “Serve. Submit. Obey.”

She pushed herself up on to her feet, surprised by how hard it was to stand when her arms were tied down and unable to help her balance, and turned to face the Sergeant, aiming a kick at him. “Serve. Submit. Obey.”

He caught it easily, turned it aside with his forearm. Showed no signs of really feeling the impact, either. The synthetic voice was joined by a second, this one feminine. “Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

The two voices were overlapping now, and while they were not loud, they seemed to echo in her head, some quality of the headphones no doubt.

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

She was losing, she realised. Running would be a kind of surrender, an admission of failure. But it was also the right thing to do here - not the smart move but perhaps the only move.

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

She feinted a shoulderblock toward the Sergeant, and as she’d hoped he went to sidestep her. Annie accelerated, running out of the shop at a dead sprint, her cheeks red, burning with the frustration and humiliation of the defeat.

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

She heard no running feet behind her. No sign of pursuit. But there was no escape from the words in her head, words she now seemed to feel growing in her mind rather than hearing them directly.

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.” It felt like her own mental voice. She shook her head, defiant.

But she wasn’t defiant.

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

If she had defied him, she wouldn’t have been restrained. She would have been free. He would have been defeated. She had fled. Had surrendered.

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

Shaking her head did nothing to empty it of the words, of her own insidious thoughts creeping in. She whimpered.

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

She had already given in. She just hadn’t accepted it.

“Docile. Obedient. Unquestioning.”

She was chanting the words along with the feminine voice. That was why it sounded so much like her own. How long had she been doing that for?

“Serve. Submit. Obey.”

She found herself turning around, pivoting on the spot, and emerging back out of the alley in which she had briefly sheltered onto the street.

Startled passers-by watched as she walked, back straight, head high, wrists still bound behind her back with the belt to her own catsuit, toward the jewellery store again.

Sergeant Sin hadn’t left yet. From the smirk on his lips as she re-entered, still chanting, he’d been waiting for her. His handgun, a malicious machine pistol in shining chrome, was back out and he was using it to keep the customers under control, but he’d been watching the front door.

He lifted one hand, beckoning her closer, and she walked across to him. He plucked the headphones from her head, and her echoing of the synthetic submissive died away the moment she couldn’t hear another syllable. “Docile. Obed-”

He unfastened her utility belt. Let it slide from her arms now it was loose and fall to the floor. She did nothing to stop it. Without prompting, there was nothing she could do.

“Grab that backpack on the floor,” he commanded, “and start filling it with jewellery.”

“I obey,” she answered, glassy eyed, and marched to do as she was told, heedless of the glowering of customers and staff alike.

*

Everything the Hooded Hawk now was built on the things she’d learned from her toughest battles, those she’d won and those, like her first encounter with Sergeant Sin, that she’d lost. (When she’d finally had a rematch with him, cleaning his clock had been as satisfying as it possibly could be, avenging the memory of the two days she spent as his Boot.)

She had never quite lost her taste for an ambush, though. As with the Sergeant, sometimes they didn’t work the way she wanted them to; however, used right they kept civilians safer and gave her the advantage.

The raid on the second Circle facility was going well. She was moving fast, and while there were a small handful of guards, most of the personnel were the researchers. Some were probably under mental control, so she was just tagging them with a stunclaw and moving on, a little light caution but no more needed. She got the drop on Taipan, stunned and cuffed him, and moved into the next room, where she saw an overturned table and an unconscious Queensnake.

Annie grinned. Adrenaline was high and they were clearly winning. She pressed on.

In the next room she saw Mercy standing, feet wide apart, arms by her side, head tilted, swaying. There was no trace of combat readiness in her stance. There was barely any indication of awareness.

Over Mercy’s shoulder, Annie recognised Lancehead, his eyes glowing a soft yellow, a fingertip held up just below them, moving from side to side at the same rate that Mercy was swaying.

I thought you couldn’t hypnotise a robot, Annie thought.