Volume 2: Chapter 208 — Geometry

In retrospect, Dan had no idea how graphs work. His idea was simple in both meanings of the word, in that it was not complicated to execute, and it was apparently thought up by a simpleton. This is how it played out: First, Dan found himself a rail map of D.C. The city's rail system was shaped like a loose vortex, where a bunch of rails congregated at a central station and then fanned out in all directions. Dan had no idea if this was normal. He'd ridden exactly zero rails before in his life. He was from Texas, and Texas did not do public transportation no matter the dimension. All he knew was that the map somewhat resembled a starfish that had been splattered against a windshield.

He already knew this, technically. He'd seen the layout of the Metro before, in terms of individual lines, but never laid out all at once like this. He'd never even tried to visualize it. Only after laying the map out and getting a good look at the twisted thing did he start to think he'd maybe gotten in over his head. A tiny nugget of doubt formed in the back of his mind even as he stubbornly persisted in his plan, having reasoned that getting everything mapped out would at least be easier to look at.

His doubts assuaged—or at least repressed—he proceeded to step two. He highlighted both rails which he knew the vigilante had used before. This gave him two bright red limbs extruding across the city at something approaching a thirty-degree angle with each other. This was not unusual. It was a pattern that pretty much every other Metro line followed, more or less.

Step three was to weaponize the awesome power of the internet to plot out possible sightings of the D.C. vigilante. He spent a few hours scraping through the most trafficked message board for vigilante sightings and achieved an unsurprising result. There were way too many of them. The vigilante had only been active for a few months at most, yet there were consistent reports of masked figures fighting crime going back years. That was fine, though. There were a few ways he could cull the false reports.

Dan knew, with some variance, the vigilante's power set. He could immediately discard outlandish stories of fireballs being thrown, or blizzards being summoned, and the one weirdly descriptive report of a bunch of trees coming alive and clubbing a mugger into unconsciousness. Similarly, reports of someone dressed in grey spandex mind-controlling a drug dealer to plant evidence in the poster's truck could be equally dismissed.

He eliminated sightings that occurred in the middle of a weekday, going all in on the assumption that this was a student of some variety, and he eliminated all incidents further than 10 miles from a rail station. This removed almost everything in suburban D.C. and left him with only a dozen or so sightings over the last three months, mostly within five miles of Central Station. Dan tagged each with the estimated date and time, just to cap things off.

Job done, he stared down at his incident map and realized he had no idea how to interpret it. All he'd accomplished was drawing a wavy starfish with two red arms, and a bunch of white dots dabbed across its torso area. There were two outliers at the far end of a tentacle, reported over a month apart, which were the sole survivors of Dan's suburban purge. The only reason he kept them on the graph at all was they matched the vigilante's known description and powers almost to a tee. What they added to the graph, he really couldn't say.

The point is: that Dan had himself an incident map, but no idea what to do with it. He drummed his fingers on Carver's desk while leaning back in her chair. His feet kicked up onto the wooden surface, scattering papers and knick-knacks across the floor. His veil idly scooped them up while he pondered the problem. His ponderings mostly consisted of scanning the sad, bare walls of the tiny room he was in. He had taken over Carver's little field office on the edge of the world, while the woman herself was off consulting with some profiler who owed her a favor. They didn't have much to go on, overall, but FBI profilers were scary good at their jobs. The upgrades they wielded often made their speculations more accurate than most people's hard facts. Hopefully, Carver could get something usable.

As if summoned by his thoughts, Carver arrived. Dan's veil picked her up as she entered the building, walking quickly towards her office. He jolted upright, dragging his shoes off the desk. Papers scattered, but his veil snagged each one and deposited them back where they'd started. He willed himself out of her chair and into the guest seat and put the finishing touches on her desk just as she walked through her office door. Dan stuffed his hands into his pockets and whistled innocently, but Carver paid him no mind. Her head was down, eyes scanning a document.

"Did you get it?" Dan asked eagerly, regarding the slim sheet of paper in her hands. He deflated at its lamentable size. "Doesn't look like much."

"Yes, and it isn't much," Carver confirmed. "For our purposes, though, it might serve."

She paused as she reached her desk and looked down. Dan tensed for a moment, ready for a scolding, but Carver reached down and snagged his incident map.

"Oh, now isn't that interesting?" she murmured, plopping into her chair now holding a paper in each hand. Her eyes darted continuously between them as if she couldn't decide which was more important.

Dan had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

"You see it too?" he bluffed, hoping the answer was yes.

"Yes. This will narrow things down significantly," Carver said, failing to elaborate. She passed over the single, sad piece of paper containing the criminal profiler's initial thoughts. Dan glanced over it for about five seconds before concluding he was way out of his depth.

"You read it?" he asked instead and got a nodded confirmation. He channeled his inner Anastasia. "Summary?"

"We were right about the age." Carver gestured vaguely at the page, rattling off, "Teenage female, fifteen to seventeen. Mutate. Single-parent household, probably lower-middle class. Probably lost a parent or loved one to gang violence at a young age; too young to actually remember it. She chose vigilantism as a way to honor this loved one, but it's more a rebellious expression of personal freedom than any kind of real crusade. Just an excuse to use her powers and be herself. She's keeping her mutate status to herself, obviously, so she treats it as a sort of release."

Dan blinked as he took it all in. That was quite a bit from not very much. Good news, too. Something important stuck out to him, and he clarified, "So less a zealot and more a kid on a power trip?"

"That does seem to be the case." Carver cleared away the papers on her desk and logged into her computer. Dan watched as she navigated to the upgrade registry for D.C. and opened up a search. She typed in the upgrade parameters and then started to filter it by attendance records.

"What schools are you starting with?" Dan asked, giving up any pretense of understanding.

Carver shrugged and circled a spot on Dan's incident map with her finger. It was all of it. Just, the whole entire central area where all the rails intercepted each other in a twisty, gnarly mess. To be fair, it was where all the dots were, but Dan had thought there would be something more complicated than that.

"Where else?" Carver asked, still typing away without even looking at him. "It seems fairly clear our vigilante attends school during the day, then picks a random Metro line to ride out on in the evening." She indicates the wild distribution of dots, most all within five to ten miles of each other. "She rides it out for a ways, then goes on patrol in the direction of the next closest rail. She beats up any criminals she finds on her way, has herself a good time, then takes the Metro right back to Central, and from there, to home. Possibly somewhere in this area, assuming these sightings are accurate." Carver indicated the two outlier dots, which just so happened to be situated smack in the center of middle-class suburbia. "She's a kid, so time is her limit. It's suspicious to see a teenager out and about too late. That's why the dots are so clustered. She can't go far. And she has to leave directly from school because, again, anything else would take too long."

She had a backpack, Dan recalled from the video. Just like a kid would take to school.

"What about the weekends?" Dan asked, more to test the theory than anything else.

"Every incident was on a weeknight," Carver replied, gesturing to the map again.

He hadn't known that, but he nodded anyway.

"Makes sense."

Carver nodded distractedly at the acknowledgment and got back to work. It was fascinating to see how much of the process was already automated, and how easy it was to access. Fascinating and a little disturbing. Carver had no warrant to justify these searches, no probable cause, and no directions from her superiors. Through her own initiative, she accessed and compared what were essentially private medical records of thousands of people, including many who had never committed a crime. Juveniles, mostly, because she was filtering her search through high school attendance records. Although Dan couldn't explain why, something about the whole thing felt deeply wrong.

He supposed it was easy to forget he lived in what was effectively a surveillance state, especially when his personal connections rendered that fact mostly irrelevant to him. He felt a brief bout of insanity, where he considered tracking down whatever database held all this information and destroying it, but that was just silly. It was probably backed up in a thousand other places.

Deep breaths, Dan. Know what you can change and accept what you can't.

Carver finished the search and Dan watched as the results collated themselves on the screen. There were still dozens of hits, but they could use the profile to narrow things down from there. He watched as each school was listed, and a series of names followed. One of the names jumped out at him. Not of a student, but a school. He recognized it.

It took Dan several seconds to puzzle out why he knew the name of a random school in D.C. There was only one way, in the end. There was only one school he'd seen in this city.

It was the school that Nikolos Andeno attended.

What are the odds, Dan thought, and decided he didn't like the answer.