CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: DOGS

The patrol vest felt like a formality. Taylor adjusted the strap in the PRT locker room, fingers working through the motion automatically. Her forcefield brushed faintly against the fabric, simmering with subtle resistance, as if the energy around her rejected the extra layers, finding them superfluous. 

But her mind wasn’t on the vest. Or the patrol. Or even Gallant, who waited by the door in full costume, arms relaxed at his sides in the practiced calm he always wore like a second skin.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the mirror above the sink.

This was for her own good.

That was the line they kept using. Miss Militia. Piggot. Even her father, who had stood beside her with that same stunned but earnest helplessness ever since the Gym burned. 

“Structure will help.” 

“Routine might ground you.”

She understood the logic. Intellectually, it made sense: give her a sanctioned outlet. Keep her active. Keep her seen. Let her patrol in controlled environments where her presence could be monitored and her vengeful instincts gently redirected. Better to keep the volatile parahuman moving with a chaperone than let her simmer alone, angry and invisible.

It was damage control. Emotional triage.

She was dangerous. Her grief was still raw, and her power had shown just how catastrophic it could be when pushed. They weren’t wrong to be cautious. She understood the need to temper her emotions, to prove she could work with the PRT, not around it.

But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

None of that made the leash feel lighter.

Low-threat patrol zone. Curfew hour. No engagement without backup. Handler present at all times.

Insulting.

Her reflection stared back at her, gaunt and sharpened at the edges, like grief had hollowed her out and left the rest under tension. She didn’t recognize herself anymore. The bags under her eyes. The stiffness in her shoulders. The rage curled somewhere beneath her ribs like a sleeping animal waiting to wake up.

“Ready?” Gallant’s voice was quiet but carried across the room, kind and frustratingly even.

She didn’t answer with words—just wore her mask, nodded once, and followed him out.

The city met them in cool twilight. Rain had passed through earlier, and the streets still gleamed with reflected amber from the streetlights above. Somewhere in the distance, a car horn blared, followed by the soft hush of tires over wet pavement. It was a quiet part of town—mostly industrial, mostly empty. Even the graffiti looked half-hearted.

Gallant had tried to make conversation before they left the HQ—something about the updated patrol schedule and the Wards’ common room renovations—but Taylor hadn’t engaged. There wasn’t anything she wanted to say, and the silence suited her just fine. So he didn’t speak for the first few blocks. She appreciated that. He didn’t push either. Didn’t hover. Just kept pace beside her, his presence more steadying than it had any right to be.

But, eventually, he broke the silence.

“You know,” he said, “maybe not to the level you are, but… I know how it feels to be angry and have nowhere to put it.”

Taylor didn’t reply. She kept her gaze ahead, watching her shadow stretch across the sidewalk.

“They’re not trying to box you in,” he added after a moment. “They’re trying to keep you from doing something you can’t walk back from.”

Taylor’s jaw clenched. Her voice, when it came, was almost too soft to be heard over the wind.

“I already have.”

Gallant looked over at her, but didn’t ask what she meant.

He didn’t need to.

They were nearing the edge of the assigned patrol zone when Gallant finally slowed. “We’re not going to find much out here tonight.”

“Didn’t think we would,” Taylor muttered.

Then came the voice.

“Excuse me!”

They both turned to see a young boy—maybe nine or ten—running toward them, waving one arm. His cheeks were flushed, eyes wide and watery, and clutched a soggy flyer with a crude drawing. 

“My dog,” he panted, showing them said drawing. It was of a brown, small dog, with a red collar and a scar on one ear. “Milo—he ran off. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Taylor crouched slightly, taking the drawing. “Where did you last see him?”

He pointed south, toward the industrial district.

“He chased something into an alley. I waited, but he never came back. He always comes back.”

Gallant exchanged a glance with her. “You think it’s worth checking?”

Taylor didn’t answer. She was already walking.

. . . . .

It took fifteen minutes of combing down trash-strewn alleys, past sagging chain-link fences and long-abandoned loading docks before they found the first real clue.

Three missing dog posters. Stapled to the same length of rusted fencing. Different breeds, different owners, but the same panicked handwriting and tear-off phone numbers lining the bottom edges. All dated within the week.

Taylor stared at them for a long moment. Her lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

“Three?” Gallant asked, stepping closer.

“Someone’s collecting them,” she muttered, eyes narrowing. 

Gallant didn’t respond, but his silence wasn’t due to confusion. Just shared unease.

A few quiet questions in the right neighborhood gave them direction. Whispers about barking at night. A local kid who saw someone put a dog in a van. Enough to follow to a low-slung warehouse on the far edge of Empire Eighty-Eight territory.

They moved fast but carefully, coming to a crouch outside the loading dock of a low-slung cinderblock building, Taylor pressed her back to the wall. 

The metal door in front of them hung slightly ajar, casting a sliver of darkness into the street.

She tilted her head toward Gallant. “You getting anything?”

He closed his eyes briefly, and Taylor paused just long enough to let her vision shift.

The world didn’t change, not exactly. It deepened. Peeled back a layer. The edges of reality thinned, colors sharpening into contrast while others dulled like they’d been drained. She blinked once, slowly, letting the Six Eyes settle into place.

And there it was again.

Gallant stood beside her, solid and focused in the physical sense, but wrapped in something else. Something writhing. Pale, translucent tendrils extended from him, reaching outward—not toward her, but toward the warehouse. Toward whatever was inside.

The tendrils weren’t part of his armor. They didn’t register as tech.

They were his power, at least the emotion-sensing aspect of it, and they were… alive. Not visibly, not obviously. But Taylor could feel the wrongness in the way they moved, like roots growing beneath the soil, like nerves reaching out for sensation. And they weren’t new. She’d seen this before—on others. On every parahuman. But for the longest time, especially now that the gym had burned and her grief had hardened into something raw, she hadn’t had the space to think about it.

These… parasites. Apparitions. Extensions. Whatever they were, they hadn’t gone away.

They’d just taken a backseat to her pain.

But now, seeing them again, she was reminded in the worst way that she still didn’t understand this world. That she might never. It was like lifting a rock and finding the ground beneath teeming with things that shouldn’t have existed.

That she doubted people even knew existed. 

Later, she told herself. Later she would deal with it. Figure out if these things were metaphysical byproducts—symbolic representations of powers, maybe—or something more nefarious. And why she didn't have it despite being a parahuman by every stretch of the world. 

For now, she had dogs to find. A warehouse to breach.

And people inside who would learn what it meant to draw her attention.

“Yeah,” he said after a beat. “Tension. Fear. Agitation. Four people, maybe five. Could be more deeper in—I can’t get a clean read past the next room.”

Taylor nodded once. 

“Hold up.”

He tapped the side of his helmet. “Console, this is Gallant. We’ve got a potential lead on a pattern of missing animals in Docks East. Multiple recent dog reports. Possible connection to the E88, though no parahuman presence. Requesting clearance to investigate.”

A brief pause. Then the tinny voice of Console crackled in their earpieces. “Acknowledged, Gallant. Proceed with caution. Backup is ten minutes out if needed.

“Copy that.”

“Let’s go,” she said.

And then she moved.