There were some sections of the city library that Perfect was less acquainted with than others, and it was to these that she turned in hope of making up some of the gaps in her knowledge.
She’d run into a plateau in her attempts to crack the Portalien communication codes. No, not just that… she’d hit a wall, hard. She’d had some good insights, but that wasn’t the same thing as stumbling across a Rosetta stone.
Really, there were limits to how much she could accomplish in one day, especially with the few really clear examples of Portalien chatter she could find on the internet. When it had become frustratingly apparent that she wasn’t going to get any further than establishing the genetic basis of the tones, she’d decided to switch gears… put another problem on the front burner for a while and let this one simmer.
She couldn’t go around shaking down criminals in broad daylight, and if Ray had any further thoughts on mystical lines of inquiry to pursue he wasn’t sharing them with her. She couldn’t deny that she lacked his experience in such matters… but that would never change if he kept shutting her out. She thought that if she did her homework well enough to show him that she meant business, he’d relent.
Not that she expected to find too much practical information among the stacks… most scholarly work on magic treated it either as a matter of simple superstition or—in the case of the handful of publicly known wizards and sorcerers–superpowers and fancy gadgets dressed up in superstition.
But she had to begin somewhere. She’d do her best to sort out as many tidbits of truth as she could glean from the sources that were available, and move on. Once she was armed with a little more knowledge, she could… well, the next step would present itself in the course of her studies.
If she hit a wall here, she’d go back to the Portaliens.
It hadn’t helped anything that Professor Fluffykins kept insisting that she was overthinking things… she was trying to translate an alien machine language. How was it possible to overthink that?
“And he wonders why I never take him anywhere,” she muttered towards her bag, from which Mr. Buttons stared unblinkingly at the rows of books. She held the bag up and turned it while she scanned the titles, murmuring as if in response to his advice and pulling books from the shelf. When she had as many as she could carry in one arm, she went to the desk to request the use of a study room.
“Your usual?” Bernice, the librarian, asked.
“I’m not picky,” Perfect lied. “But… if it’s free…”
“Of course you’re not, honey. I’ll let you in.”
Perfect followed her to the row of doors, where the librarian unlocked and opened the second on the left, reached in and turned on the lights and then held the door for her.
“Don’t forget we close at five now,” she said.
“I’m not going to be here that long,” Perfect said.
“I’ll knock on the door five minutes before,” Bernice said.
Perfect resisted the urge to share a look with Mr. Buttons, instead stepping into the room.
She swallowed the urge to gasp at the sight of the black-clad figure trying very hard to look shadowy in the corner of the not-particularly dim room.
“Thanks,” Perfect said to Bernice, reaching to gently disengage her hand from the doorknob so she could pull the door closed. “I do have a lot of studying to do, so…”
“Right,” Bernice said. “See you at five.”
Perfect got the door closed.
“Either you’re following me, or there’s more to you than you let on,” Perfect said.
“Why would I follow you?” the Dock Shadow asked.
“I’d like to know. Your interest is flattering…”
“I am interested,” he said. “But why would I follow you when the Department is doing it for me?”
“4B is still watching me?”
“Your tax dollars at work. Mine, too. As long as I’m paying for the surveillance, I might as well get the results.”
“And 4B knew I was going to come in here?” she asked, eyebrow raised. Then she realized that Bernice had known she always used the same room, and so would anybody who’d spent any time learning her habits. “Do I need to start rotating reading rooms?”
“You’re a woman of habits,” he said. “You should be aware of that, at least.” He threw a print-out of a digital photo on the desk. “What does this mean to you?”
Perfect leaned forward, looking at it without picking it up. It was of a tattoo, showing a stylized Japanese dragon with a spear stuck out of its flank and a dark green drop hanging down from the wound.
“Poisoned Dragons,” Perfect said. “A martial arts street gang, employed by the late Opal Song. Disbanded following her reported death, after a brief power struggle among her lieutenants. When was this taken?”
“Today.”
“Here?”
“In the Harbor.”
“If it was on a single perp, it could mean nothing,” Perfect said. “I’m sure not all the Dragons retired when the gang broke up, and a tattoo like that would probably carry a lot of cred. I’d be surprised if nobody ever tried faking one.”
“It’s been tried,” Shadow said. “In the two years after Opal Song’s fall, a few bodies turned up with fresh dragon tattoos that had been crossed out with a knife.”
“The originals protecting their brand,” Perfect noted.
“Exactly.”
“Was this a lone perp?” Perfect asked.
“No,” Shadow said. “There was a warehouse full of them. Dead, by the time I got there.”
“Poisoned?”
“I don’t have a toxicology report,” he said. “But the gunshot wounds argue against it.”
“Guns,” Perfect said. “That doesn’t quite prove that they were real Poisoned Dragons, but it’s a strong argument against the idea that their killers were.” She looked up at the vigilante’s cowled face. “But I can’t tell you anything you don’t already know and you didn’t come to hear my theories. You think they’re the real deal. You’re here to warn me.”
“You’re right. What do you know about Opal Song?”
“She’s supposed to dead,” Perfect said. “Supposedly, she’s descended from Jade Song, the 19th century opium queen and alleged alchemist credited with inspiring both the ‘yellow peril’ and ‘femme fatale’ stereotypes in dime novels. Her daughter, Ivory Song, was thought to have died childless before Opal came on the scene a century later claiming…”
“Ancient history,” the Dock Shadow said. “And mostly speculation. What do you know about Opal?”
“She deals… dealt… drugs,” Perfect said. “Laced with unique compounds that heightened the effects and the addictive properties. Her customers were customers for life, guaranteed… without a counteragent, withdrawal was fatal in twenty-four hours.”
Shadow nodded, so she continued.
“She used her tainted drugs to destabilize other criminals’ holds on their territory… steal their customers and their soldiers, turn them into her slaves, or corpses,” Perfect said. “The Poisoned Dragons were her elite enforcers, using performance enhancing chemicals without the toxic side effects of her other wares. Once her drugs had softened the region up, they’d move in and take control.”
“It was a brutally effective M.O…. and one that resulted in a lot of collateral damage,” Shadow said :The media throws around the word ‘archvillain’ any time somebody with a costume and more than one accomplice gets arrested, but there are people in this world who’ve earned that title. Baron Von Stahl. Rhyme.”
“Harbormaster,” Perfect added.
“No,” the Dock Shadow said. “He was my worst enemy. He was the reason I put on the mask and he was the most dangerous man in Star Harbor. I want you to understand that. I want you to know it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And I want you to listen to me, when I tell you that he wasn’t a tenth as dangerous as Opal Song. Not him. Not Boss Pitt before him. They were just men. Managers, like the Webmistress. But Rhyme, the Baron, Opal… they’re monsters. If one of them is in town, it changes things.”
“Have you established that she is?” Perfect asked. “This could just have been a reunion tour for her old henchmen. Or maybe somebody decided to lure them together and wipe them out.”
“That’s possible,” Shadow said. “It’s definitely an angle I’ll be checking out.”
“I could help,” Perfect said.
“I want you to stay as far away from this as you can,” he said. “You’ve got a case already. Keep working it, but keep a low profile. Stick to research for a while. Stay off the streets.”
“Hold on,” Perfect said. “You’ve helped me out, but I don’t work for you, so let’s hold off on the orders.”
“It’s advice,” he said. “Whether Opal’s alive or not is beside the point. You aren’t ready for Poisoned Dragons.”
“Do you know for a fact that there are a bunch more Poisoned Dragons in town, still alive?”
“I don’t. But a single Poisoned Dragon is deadly, Perfect.”
“You know what else is deadly?” Perfect asked. “Bullets. You know… the things that killed a whole warehouse full of her ninja goons. I’m already risking my life every time I go out the door in my fighting togs. If some of the bad people out there are going to be trying to hit me with spears and gas pellets instead of little pieces of metal flying at nine hundred meters a second, I call that catching a break.”
“If you think a mook with a gun is more dangerous than a Dragon, that just proves you aren’t ready to face them,” he said.
“Opinion noted,” Perfect said. She sat down at the desk and started arranging her books.
“I didn’t just come here to warn you,” he said.
“No?” she said, opening the first and not looking at him.
“There’s a man flying in later today that I want you to meet. Tonight.”
“Is this a diversion to keep me occupied while you make sure there aren’t any more too-deadly-for-me bad guys crawling around?”
“Yes,” the Dock Shadow said. “But you’re going to want to meet him anyway. So much that you’ll give up the chance to go prowling around downtown looking for them to prove me wrong.”
“Is that a fact?” Perfect asked, trying to sound bored. Was it more her imagination than usual, or was Mr. Buttons perking up his ears a bit, expectantly? She didn’t care. The elder vigilante was being paternal almost to the point of being patriarchal.
She was no damsel in distress. She wouldn’t be distracted, coddled, or protected.
“It is,” he said.
“And why do you think that?” she asked.
“Because the things you’re trying to learn aren’t anything you’ll find out about in a public library.”
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