The night was cold and I was grumpy. My suit kept me warm, though the internal comfort system could have used a tune-up. I’d been putting that off for a while now, but costs were high and vigilante work didn’t really fill your pockets.

  I jumped. The exosuit jumped with me and made what would at best have been a two-foot jump into a twenty-foot one. This was the most complex part. I had made the suit with my protection in mind. That was its first and primary purpose so my safety wasn’t a concern.

  But this was a five-hundred-pound suit sailing through the air from one concrete building to another. And vigilantes, no matter how accomplished, weren’t protected by the Hero’s Union. We were untethered, technically free from any laws and rules, so with enough property damage, we could get labeled as criminals, if not minor villains.

  And that would come with an arrest warrant, a fine, and a public listing of my identity. That was unlikely for me, after all the public wasn’t even aware of me. Officially, I went by The Crow and the Hero’s Union had a file on me but that was the largest my name ever got.

  The suit pushed out a gust of air and lightened my landing to a soft thump.

  [Scanning Area. Stealth Mode Active.]

  [Incoming call from Mochi]

  “Answer.”

  “How’s it looking, Burt?”

  “Pretty quiet. Why? Did you send me to the wrong spot?”

  “No… it’s something else.”

  I knew that tone.

  “No,” I replied.

  “But you didn’t even hear what I sai-”

  “And I don’t want to. I don’t know why you haven’t shut that number down. I’ve asked you to like fifteen times already.”

  “It’s your only connection to your family, and-”

  “Exactly, it’s my only connection to them, which I don’t want.”

  “Your grandma is dying!”

  “....what?”

  “She called and left a voicemail. She’s giving up on the cancer. Doctors say she’s got six months to live. She wants everyone to come to her house for Thanksgiving-”

  “NO.”

  “BURTON,” the dog yelled at me.

  Yes. Mochi was a dog, a talking dog who happened to live an obnoxiously long life and had a great way with computers. I’d gotten her from a villain attack about four years ago, shortly after I’d left my family.

  “She’s dying. And besides, this is the best thing for you. You should see the family one last time at the very least.”

  I frowned. She was right. She was always right. It’s amazing how emotionally intelligent a genetically manipulated Shiba Inu could be. It made me believe she was meant to be some type of hyper-intelligent pet breed for some billionaire or something, which would’ve been illegal under the rules of the Hero Union. She was legally too intelligent to be kept as a pet.

  “That’s a week from now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Now focus on the mission.”

  I groaned.

  I’d have to see them again mom, dad, grandma, and everyone else. But worst of all, I’d have to see Caleb and Kayla. My ex bestfriend and ex girlfriend. The story wasn’t complicated. Caleb and Kayla were young heroes who started heroing throughout high school, telling no one about their powers till they discovered each other’s secret junior year.

  Then they proceeded to get together behind my back. Two and a half years later, it came out. They were unmasked by a villain and their story immediately set the media on fire. It was a story book romance and the world ate it up, even my family.

  Caleb’s family was dead, taken out by a major villain when he was still a kid and my parents had practically raised him. And Kayla was a childhood friend, the daughter of my dad’s best friend.

  I had always been stupid before that. I’d have to be borderline braindead to not notice the two people closest to me routinely disappearing and hooking up behind my back. I think that was the reason my family was fine with the whole thing. I was too stupid for Kayla and I was less accomplished than Caleb, and he was like their second son.

  They said it was wrong but expected. That I should forgive them for what they’d done. They saved people after all. They were heroes, and when weighed against all they’d done I was ignorable.

  Fuck that.

  I left that day and never looked back. Well, I left that day and tried to kill myself and through a fuckton of luck, I ended up with a genius talking dog and became a genius myself.

  I became a wisher.

  That was what people with powers were called, wishers.

  I attacked a group of villains in a fit of suicidal rage. They would have killed me, but shortly after they caught me heroes attacked and the building started to go down. Then I stood there, shaking and afraid, begging, wishing to be smart, wishing to have been smarter, wishing to have known a way out. Then I suddenly knew how to pick locks and the talking puppy in the cage next to me suddenly knew a lot of things as well.

  I managed to sneak out of that place with the puppy and some loot in my hands while the villains and heroes brought the house down. That’s how I got Mochi and how my life changed irreversibly for the second time within the span of a few months.

  The classification for that power was known as tinkers. And while our power was diverse, it was limited. Even the most well-known tinker, The Wolf, had limits to the types of enemies he could face.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  [Scanning Complete. Thirteen Hits on Facial Recognition. Five Unknown.]

  [One known villain. Daipherius the Flame Lord, Rank D Minor Villian. Has the capabilities of a flamethrower. WARNING. This villain has a lifetime imprisonment sentence and will not go lightly. Killing is permitted if he presents as a lethal threat. Recording is advised.]

  Sounds about right. Usually, the fancier the villain's name, the weaker they were. He had a made-up name and a title. People like that were basically guys with short tempers and large lifted trucks. They were compensating for something.

  The black stiff wings extended out of my back as I looked down towards the scene of the crime. It was about half a mile away and it was as cliched as it could get.

  A small truck had its back opened while a group of men kept carrying crates out of a warehouse and into the truck. The villain, Daipherius, was keeping a lookout like a moron.

  I say moron because worldwide privacy laws made this a fair and legal thing that no one but the local government could investigate. Privacy Laws were the foundation of the masked lifestyle. If any nation refused to allow heroes and villains to their right of anonymity, they’d be abandoned by heroes and plagued by villains.

  Ever since the Great Upheaval when wishers came into existence, they had never had a pleasant relationship with the government. They, or rather we, were imprisoned and experimented on by the thousands, and a lot of wishers faced untold cruelties under the hands of various governments.

  That was when the first world-ending disaster struck. A small kid who had been experimented on got double wishes and gained an extremely complementary power. He became too powerful to contain and he eventually busted out of prison and killed tens of millions while freeing all the other imprisoned wishers.

  And a lot of them followed in his footsteps, creating an army of villains. The Hero’s Union eventually dealt with all that though and helped enact international laws of privacy to help any and all masked wishers maintain their secrets. And eventually, those rules trickled down to the general populace as well, guaranteeing everyone some form of anonymity.

  That was all to say, this guy should have just stayed hidden and hired fresh henchmen without records to do the loading. With this many criminals, anyone with facial rec would have a more than valiant reason to investigate, even me.

  “Mochi, you know what those things are?”

  “Nope. But I know those pallets. High-grade shockproof containers. They each go for about fifty grand and have a resale value of forty-five grand. And they’re supposedly impossible to unlock without the correct key or equipment.”

  “If they’re electric, could you just get a shocker to zap them out or something?”

  “Not unless your shocker can create forty ten million joules of power over six seconds.”

  Well, that was rare, I think.

  “How many shockers can do that?”

  “Majors only and majors above C rank at that.”

  “Fuck,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Fifty thousand for the box alone means what’s inside is much more valuable.”

  “They could be selling the boxes.”

  “No. They could sell the boxes legitimately. It is a legal product. And if it was stolen there’s the local black market. Either way, pretending they’re legit and dealing with a moving company would have been an easier choice. How are the drones? Any heroes? Villains?”

  “No one so far. Relatively quiet night.”

  I frowned. That didn’t make sense. This was a warehouse district and while it wasn’t connected to the port it was still bound to have some criminals running around. I should know, I lived here.

  Villains weren’t running amok at every hour, but you could generally hear Cobra and her crew making noise.

  “Stealth call, Jackson.”

  [Calling Jackson. Voice changer active. Signal rerouting active. Privacy protocol active.]

  “Man, fuck you,” Jackson spoke.

  “No thanks. Don’t roll that way,” I replied.

  “The fuck you want anyways? Calling at two am got no damn sense do ya?”

  “Cobra with you?”

  “No, the fuck? She’s my boss, I’m only with her when I’m paid to be. No more, no less.”

  “Right. So you wouldn’t happen to know where she is would you?”

  “Man, what the fuck I look like knowin-”

  “Send me her blackline.”

  There was a pause and audible breathing on the other end of the call.

  “You want me, a henchman, to send you, a vig, my boss’s contact?”

  “It’s either that or I tell her about all those times I caught you skimming off the top of her stash.”

  “Man fuck you!”

  The line went dead. Then a few seconds later I received a message from him containing a set of characters and I saw Cobra’s contact be added to my call system.

  Blackline was a beautiful thing. The best form of anonymous communication was originally made by a tinker back when the government hunted us down but now it was widespread and the most common form of communication. You couldn’t hack it, you couldn’t trace it and almost all of its process, even the hardware stuff, was run by AI.

  The company itself was based somewhere up on the moon and had a ludicrous amount of money to hire the strongest wisher mercenaries to defend themselves, though they were open to multiple audits of their internal systems by the Hero’s Unions and various world governments.

  They were a lynchpin in the world economy and almost everyone relied on them in some way or another, meaning they also got their fair share of villain attacks as well, and while they could handle most of it, they did rely on the Hero’s Union from time to time.

  Still, it was the most private form of communication, sending only audio, video, and text at their basic price.

  “Stealth call Cobra.”

  Still, I took precautions, rerouted calls through various servers, and made myself as anonymous as I could. Not most vigs could do that. Hell, the term tinker had actually come from the word thinker. A tinker could be talented at anything, chess, chemistry, biology, physics, or even literature.

  I happened to be talented in the engineering and robotics department. Doing fast calculations and applying them in the moment and all that.

  That was all to say that I was one of the few tinkers in the masked business. Most of them build stuff or did research for major corporations. And of the tinkers in the masked business, I was one of the few in the vigilante profile.

  “Crow,” a voice spoke.

  “Cobra,” I replied. “Jackson warned you?”

  “He asked me for permission,” she replied.

  “How loyal.”

  “Please,” she snorted.

  Heroes and Villains were portrayed as polar opposites by the media, but that wasn’t exactly the case. If a villain managed to not do too much harm and were worth less trouble captured than they were free, then they were usually left alone. Cobra was a great example of this.

  She was a materials dealer, mainly supplying for vigilantes and villains, but also heroes as well. And as much as she disobeyed the law, she had enough of a love for peace to fight some maniacal villains every now and again. And she was powerful and stubborn.

  “Do you know a Daipherius by any chance?”

  “Firey guy? Yeah I know him, why?”

  “He moving stuff for you?”

  “Please. I beat the snot out of that fuckface.”

  “When?”

  “Today! No news coverage though, shame. I would have loved to see his broken face all over the screen.”

  My screen zoomed into the image of the man and my eyes went to work, looking for any signs of cuts or bruises.

  “Oh, well you have someone laying bait on your turf then.”

  “Bait?”

  “Yeah. Shapeshifters dressed as him moving things with high-grade pallets.”

  There was a pause.

  “Those fucker! I told them not to move that shit on my turf!” She yelled. “Call your Union contact and tell em there’s a Major D if not a Major C threat at your location and send me the location right now!”

  “Why? Whats-”

  “A smuggling ring dealing with shit I didn’t want on my turf decided to run it through here anyway. Bastards probably knew I’d gun for that firey fuck’s face as soon as I saw it. They were trying to take me out, probably some Major Ds hiding out in waiting. Fucking pricks.”

  Uh-oh.