I’m in the storage unit disassembling the Kessler Street device — for components. The filtration array’s spent. The induction coils are still good. The capacitor bank’s intact. The main housing is scrap, but the internal wiring is salvageable if I’m careful, and I’m always careful, and I’m being careful right now, and the grounding lead on the secondary coupling comes loose while my index and middle fingers are on the contact plate, and the capacitor bank has 1,400 joules of stored charge, and physics does what physics does.
The pain is immediate and precise. Second-degree across both fingers, left hand. The skin goes white, then red, and I pull my hand back and I’m standing in the middle of the unit with two burned fingers and a capacitor bank that’s still humming because I built it to hold charge reliably and it’s holding charge reliably.
I built the thing that burned me, and I built it well. That’s the whole problem in miniature.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
INJURY SUSTAINED
TYPE: Electrical burn (capacitive discharge)
LOCATION: Left hand — index and middle fingers
SEVERITY: Minor (HP impact)
HP: 40 → 34 / 40
Natural recovery rate: 1 HP per hour.
For accelerated recovery, consult a registered
healer or visit a League-affiliated medical
facility.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Six HP. Not serious. Not life-threatening. But the fingers are already blistering and I can’t grip a soldering iron left-handed like this and I can’t afford to lose fine motor control for a week while the burns heal on their own, because I have designs to draft and devices to build and a career to salvage and two fingers that are currently communicating their displeasure through a frequency of pain I’d describe as insistent.
I wrap them in a strip of clean cloth from the workbench — not gauze, because I don’t have gauze, because gauze is a medical supply and medical supplies aren’t on the list — and I go to the clinic.
* * *
The Eastside Community Clinic is seven blocks from the storage unit. I’ve walked past it thirty or forty times. It’s a small building between a laundromat and a store that sells phone cases, and it has the look of a place that’s been repaired more often than it’s been maintained: new paint over old siding, a front step that’s been shimmed with a folded piece of sheet metal.
I know the difference between repaired and maintained. Repaired means someone fixed a problem after it broke. Maintained means someone prevented it from breaking in the first place. The entire Kessler Street district runs on repair. Nothing here’s been maintained in years.
I go inside. There’s a waiting room. Chairs, a TV mounted in the corner playing something with closed captions, a check-in window. It’s a medical facility for the people bigger facilities don’t prioritize — no appointment necessary, first come first served, and the wait is long because the need is larger than the staff and the staff is three people and the need is the entire neighborhood.
I fill out a form. Name, address, nature of injury. I write “electrical burn, two fingers, left hand” and I hand it to the intake nurse through the window.
She’s maybe twenty-five. Pleasant face, scrubs with a pattern on them I can’t identify from this angle. She takes the form, reads it, starts typing something into the terminal behind the counter, and then stops.
I know what she’s reading before she says it. I can see the amber reflection on the underside of the counter, the same amber, always the same amber.
“Mr. Calamity?”
“Yes.”
“I’m pulling up your Registry profile, and—” She pauses. Not for dramatic effect. For the same reason Eunice pauses. Because the information on the screen requires a moment of professional composure before it can be delivered out loud. “You’re listed as an unregistered villain.”
“Provisional.”
“Right. Provisional. And your League standing says—”
“Absolutely Not.”
She nods slowly. “So you don’t have League coverage.”
“I don’t have League coverage.”
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
MEDICAL ACCESS DENIED
PATIENT: Theodore Calamity
CLASS: Petty Nuisance (Provisional)
LEAGUE COVERAGE: None.
Registered heroes may access League-affiliated
healers and medical facilities at no personal cost.
Registered villains in good standing receive League
medical coverage under the Adversarial Benefits
Program (Section 12.4).
Unregistered or provisionally classified individuals
are not eligible for League-affiliated medical
services.
This facility receives League funding.
Non-covered patients may seek treatment at
non-affiliated providers. A list of non-affiliated
providers in your district is not available at
this time.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
A list of non-affiliated providers is not available at this time. That’s the line. Not “does not exist” — “is not available at this time,” which is the Registry’s way of saying we haven’t bothered to compile one and don’t plan to.
The nurse looks at me, and I need to be clear about something: she’s not unkind. She’s not hostile. She’s not enjoying this. She’s a person in scrubs at a community clinic who has a terminal that reads everyone who walks through the door, and the terminal says I’m not covered, and she can’t override the terminal, and the terminal can’t be argued with because it isn’t listening.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She means it. That’s obvious, and it doesn’t help.
“How does this work for—I mean, if I were registered? Either side.”
“Heroes have healers on retainer. League-affiliated. Most of them are Level 8 or above — they’ve got accelerated healing, regeneration, the works. Villains in good standing get the Adversarial Benefits Program. Full medical, dental, liability. It’s actually a decent plan.” She catches herself. “I’m sorry. That’s not—”
“No. It’s fine.” It’s information. Information is useful. The fact that the villain health insurance is better than what most civilians get is — I’m going to set that aside and process it later.
“Is there anything I can—” She stops again, because the answer is no, and she knows the answer is no, and I know the answer is no, and the terminal knows the answer is no.
“Thank you,” I say.
I walk out. My fingers are still wrapped in the strip of cloth from the workbench. The cloth is from an old undershirt, which I realize now, standing on the sidewalk outside a clinic that won’t treat me, and I’m choosing not to find that funny.
* * *
I walk eleven blocks with my hand in my coat.
I’m not going anywhere specific. That’s what I tell myself. I’m not going anywhere specific because I don’t have anywhere specific to go, because the clinic won’t see me and the storage unit doesn’t have medical supplies and my apartment — I haven’t mentioned the apartment, a studio two bus transfers from the unit, where I sleep and eat cereal and do nothing else — doesn’t have anything useful either.
I’m just walking.
Eleven blocks isn’t far. Eleven blocks is an unremarkable distance in a city built on unremarkable distances, and I’m walking them with my left hand in my coat pocket and my right hand doing nothing and my brain doing the thing it does when I’m trying not to think, which is to think about something else at exactly the same volume.
I end up at the Rubble Coalition.
Now. I want to be clear about why I’m here. I’m here because — this is going to sound strategic, and I want it to sound strategic, because the alternative is that I walked eleven blocks with burned fingers and ended up at a nonprofit because some part of me that I haven’t authorized made a navigational decision while I was busy pretending to think about capacitor banks.
I’m here for reconnaissance. The Rubble Coalition is a civilian advocacy organization that operates in the space between costumed events and their aftermath, and understanding that space is strategically relevant to a villain building a career in this district. I’m gathering intelligence. I’m assessing the operational picture. I’m standing outside a storefront with a hand-painted sign that says RUBBLE COALITION — CIVILIAN RECOVERY SERVICES and the sign has a crack running through the second L and the lights inside are on but flickering and the flickering has a rhythm to it that tells me the generator’s running on a bad fuel pump, and this is reconnaissance.
(It’s not reconnaissance.)
The door is open.
Inside: a single large room, partitioned with filing cabinets and those portable room dividers that offices use when they can’t afford walls. Desks. Four of them, pushed together in the center. A phone that’s ringing. A printer that sounds like it’s negotiating with its own drum roller. And a woman standing behind the nearest desk with a phone to one ear, a folder open in one hand, and a look I recognize from every regulatory interaction: she’s right, and the person on the other end doesn’t care that she is.
“No,” she’s saying. “No, I have the form in front of me. Section 4, paragraph 2. The displacement coverage applies to all registered civilians within a three-block radius of any Class B event, and I have fourteen families in that radius, and your office signed the certification six weeks ago, and you can’t uncertify a displacement retroactively because the displacement already happened—”
She sees me.
She doesn’t stop talking. She doesn’t put down the phone. She doesn’t alter the pitch or pace of the argument she’s having with whoever’s on the other end. But she sees me — my coat, my hand in my pocket, the cloth wrapping barely visible at the wrist — and with her free hand she reaches behind her, pulls a first-aid kit off a shelf, and sets it on the edge of the desk closest to me.
Then she goes back to the call.
“—and I don’t care what the amended schedule says, because the amended schedule was filed after the event, and you can’t amend a coverage schedule retroactively to exclude people who were already covered. Read me the filing date. Read it to me.”
Marisol Quintana. I don’t know her name yet. I’ll learn it in four minutes, when she hangs up the phone, but right now she’s a woman in a room full of filing cabinets who handed me a first-aid kit without looking at it, without asking what happened, without pausing the demolition she’s conducting on whatever adjuster made the mistake of picking up when she called.
I open the kit. Gauze. Burn cream. Medical tape. Antiseptic wipes. It’s a good kit — better stocked than I’d expect from a nonprofit with flickering lights and a generator running on a bad fuel pump.
I treat my own fingers. The burn cream helps immediately, in that way where “helps” means “reduces the pain from actively hostile to firmly disapproving.” I wrap the gauze carefully, two fingers, clean lines. The kit even has the right width of tape.
The generator coughs. It comes through the back wall: the fuel pump, definitely, and a secondary issue with the air intake that’s starving the combustion cycle. I can tell from the rhythm. Two skips per ten seconds. Restricted airflow. Probably a filter that hasn’t been changed in six months.
I don’t decide to fix it. That’s important. I don’t weigh the options, I don’t run a cost-benefit analysis, I don’t tell myself it’s strategic or relevant or part of any reconnaissance mission. I just walk to the back door, step outside to where the generator’s sitting on a concrete pad with weeds growing through the cracks, and I start working.
The fuel pump’s not bad — it’s clogged. Sediment in the line, which means the fuel tank has particulate and nobody’s cleaned it. I flush the line with what’s available, clear the intake filter, and adjust the air-fuel mixture, and I do all of this with eight fingers and two that are wrapped in gauze and don’t want to bend, and it takes twelve minutes, and when I’m done the generator settles into a clean, even idle that sounds like machinery is supposed to sound.
I walk back inside. The lights have stopped flickering.
The woman — Marisol — is off the phone. She’s writing something in a folder and she doesn’t look up when I come in, which I’m starting to think is a trait shared by every competent woman I interact with.
“Thank you for the kit,” I say.
“It’s there for anyone who walks in.” She closes the folder. Looks directly at me for the first time. “You fixed the generator.”
“It was a clogged fuel line. The air filter needs replacing too, but it’ll hold for another month.”
“I know about the filter. I filed a maintenance request with the building management four months ago. They said they’d get to it.” She sets the folder on the desk. “They have not gotten to it.”
“I can tell.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“Electrical burn. Capacitor discharge.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“The capacitor, or the burn?”
“Either.”
“The capacitor’s fine. The burn — I went to the Eastside clinic. They can’t see me.” I shouldn’t be telling her this. I don’t know why I’m telling her this. “Registry says I’m not covered.”
She nods once. Not with surprise. “Hero or villain?”
“Villain. Provisional.”
“Which means no League coverage.”
“Which means no League coverage.”
“Heroes get healers. Villains in good standing get the Adversarial Benefits Program. Civilians get whatever’s left, which is this.” She gestures at the room — the filing cabinets, the desks, the phone that’s started ringing again. “And the people who don’t fit any of those categories get the sidewalk.”
She says this the way someone states a measurement. Not bitter. Not angry. Factual. She’s read the policy. She knows the numbers. She’s not arguing with the system. She’s describing it, accurately, the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall. It’s there. It holds weight. It doesn’t care about the people on the other side.
“What does the Rubble Coalition do?” I ask, even though I already know, because asking is how conversations work and I’m having a conversation, which is not what reconnaissance looks like.
“Civilian recovery after costumed events.” She picks up the ringing phone, checks the number, sets it back down. “Nine staff. Fourteen active cases. We file displacement claims, argue with adjusters, run intake for families who lost housing or income because two people in costumes decided to have a disagreement in their neighborhood.” She looks at me. “You don’t look like a client.”
“I’m not.”
“You don’t look like a donor either.”
“Also not.”
“Then you’re the guy who fixed my generator, and you’re standing in my office with burned fingers and no healthcare, and I’ve got a call to return.” She picks the phone back up. “There’s more gauze in the bottom drawer if you need it. The kit’s communal.”
I should leave. I’ve fixed the generator, I’ve treated the burn, I’ve gathered whatever intelligence this was supposed to be — the operating model of a nine-person nonprofit, the filing system maintained by a woman who argues with insurance adjusters for a living, the location of the backup gauze. This is more than enough data for whatever I’m pretending I came here for.
I leave. I walk back to the storage unit. Twelve blocks this time — I take a different route, because taking the same route would suggest a pattern, and patterns suggest intention, and I’m not ready to have intentions about this.
* * *
Mom’s bill arrives on Saturday.
It’s the same format it always is — a printout, mailed, because the system that handles medical billing for civilians over sixty still uses physical mail, which tells you everything you need to know about the priority it assigns to the people it serves. Beatriz Calamity, 61, chronic pulmonary condition, treatment ongoing, amount due: $1,340.
I have $2,140 in Capital. I know this because the Registry tracks it, because the Registry tracks everything, and the amber number in the corner of my vision ticks down the moment I authorize the payment.
$2,140 minus $1,340.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
CAPITAL ADJUSTMENT
TRANSACTION: Medical payment — B. Calamity
AMOUNT: -$1,340
CURRENT CAPITAL: $800
NOTE: Recurring monthly expense detected. Next
estimated payment due in approximately 30 days.
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝
Eight hundred dollars. That’s what’s left. Eight hundred dollars and two burned fingers and no healthcare and a generator I fixed for free and a first-aid kit I used from a nonprofit that serves the people the system was designed to forget, and I told myself it was reconnaissance.
I sit on the floor. The right hand’s fine. The left one’s wrapped in gauze from the Rubble Coalition’s communal kit, with two fingers underneath that are going to heal on their own because there’s no other option. One HP per hour. Six hours to full. The system’s math says I’ll be fine by midnight.
The system’s math is always correct. That’s never been the part I argue with.
I think about Marisol Quintana, arguing with an adjuster, handing me a first-aid kit without stopping, and I think about the clinic nurse, apologetic and immovable, and I think about the list of non-affiliated providers that’s not available at this time, and I think about how the word for all of this — for the gap between the people the system covers and the people it doesn’t — is probably a word I know but won’t say, because saying it would make this about something larger than me, and I’m not ready for that.
I’ve got $800 and a lair that fails nine of fourteen standards and ten benchmarks I haven’t satisfied and an attribute point I won’t spend, and somewhere in this city there’s a woman who hands out first-aid kits and doesn’t ask if you’re a hero or a villain because she doesn’t think the distinction matters.
She might be right.
I’m not ready for that either.