(LIMITLESS) INTERLUDE: PIGGOT’S DECISION

There was nothing about her job that Piggot hated more than optics. Logistics she could handle. Budgets, she could wrangle. Even the deaths that landed on her desk, though they never got easier, were at least part of the grim calculus she had long since accepted as part of the job. But optics—that endless balancing act of perception, decision, and public reaction to said decision—was the one thing that never stopped grinding her down.

Optics dictated what she could and couldn’t do, no matter how obvious the right course of action was, or how necessary. She could stare a crisis square in the eye, know the exact response it demanded, and still be forced to swallow her pride, shelve her instincts, and plaster on a smile for the cameras. That was the job.

But right now, the optics were abysmal.

Taylor Hebert had succeeded where few had failed by ending Bakuda. One of the most unpredictable and dangerous threats to appear in Brockton Bay in recent times had been erased in an instant. On paper, it should have been a triumph, the kind of decisive win that the Protectorate could build months of positive press on.

Except the strike that killed Bakuda had also leveled a portion of the city. Dozens of homes had been destroyed, entire streets rendered unlivable. Families were displaced, property damage spiraled into the millions, and bodies in various states of ruin were piled up beneath the rubble. Taylor hadn’t just killed a villain. She had also, inadvertently, carved a wound into the city, and wounds had a way of festering in public memory long after the bleeding stopped.

The reaction was as predictable as it was chaotic. Survivors of the blast and those who had lost everything—the newly homeless and the bereaved—marched in front of the PRT headquarters day after day, their signs and chants for someone to blame loud enough to bleed into her office through soundproofed walls. It was not only grief, but rage too.

And where rage went, politics inevitably followed.

The Youth Guard had thrown themselves into the mess, as she had known they would. Taylor’s guardians were dead, and to the Guard, that made her legally vulnerable. A ward of the state in all but name and filed paperwork. They wanted her pulled from the Wards program, placed under ‘proper care,’ and supervised by child welfare specialists. Piggot dismissed it for what it was: nonsense. But it was good nonsense, the kind made for easy soundbites on evening news broadcasts.

On the opposite side, opportunists saw Hebert not as a child but as an asset. A living weapon whose abilities only seemed to grow with every conflict. In back rooms and other secret locations within the PRT, they whispered about control, and about shaping her into something the Protectorate could never officially sanction but would quietly benefit from all the same. Some even dared to imagine her as a replacement for the members of the Triumvirate, a contingency should one of the three pillars ever fall.

And in the middle was the public itself, ordinary citizens caught between grief, fear, and awe. Some hailed her as a hero, others a murderer. Half demanded justice, half demanded protection. But none of them understood what she was, what she represented, or what the city would look like if Piggot mishandled this situation.

It was, in the strictest sense, a clusterfuck.

Piggot rubbed at her temple, feeling the tension building there. She could see every argument, and she could even sympathize, in her own way, with the grievances each group carried. But sympathy had never won her a war, and it certainly wouldn't stop the shitstorm on the horizon. She needed a way to maintain order.

So she had gone to the higher-ups for backing, and she had gotten it. The Chief Director herself had given the go-ahead. 

She knew the play was risky. She knew it would alienate allies she could ill afford to lose, or make her position as the Director more shaky than it was. But it was the only way forward, the only card she had left to keep Brockton Bay from tearing itself apart without Taylor’s presence acting as a deterrent.

Piggot straightened in her chair, her decision made. She pressed the intercom button on her desk.

“Send Armsmaster to my office.”