(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) BACK TO BASICS II

The PRT wanted information.

That was the entire reason Taylor found herself standing at the edge of ABB territory with her hands shoved into the pockets of her jacket and her dad’s increasingly strained warning still lingering somewhere in the back of her mind.

This was a bad idea.

To be fair, most of the things she had done recently had also been bad ideas, but at least this one came with official approval and a ride from the PRT instead of her stumbling into disaster by accident. That probably counted for something. Maybe.

The car that had dropped her off was already gone, leaving her alone at the mouth of a street that looked more trash-filled than dangerous at first glance. Storefronts with fading signs lined the sidewalks, some open, some shuttered, and the people moving through the area carried the same wary sort of tension she had started recognizing ever since Bakuda.

They noticed her immediately.

Taylor supposed she stood out enough to make that unavoidable. A tall white girl walking through known ABB territory without hesitation tended to attract attention whether she wanted it to or not. Conversations quieted as she passed, and people looked at her from windows or from half-open doors before quickly looking away once she noticed them.

No one approached her, but no one tried to stop her either.

She kept walking.

The deeper she moved into the neighborhood, the more obvious the invisible boundaries became. She could walk the streets just fine, apparently, but every doorway seemed to close itself off the moment she looked too closely. Men standing outside buildings straightened subtly whenever she neared, windows shut, and the few children around were hushed or ushered inside.

Nobody wanted her here. They didn't want to be the ones to tell her to leave.

Taylor exhaled through her nose as she continued down the sidewalk, her eyes drifting across the buildings around her. Lung could have been in any one of them for all she knew, lying low while the remnants of the ABB scrambled to pull themselves back together after Bakuda.

Taylor pushed the thought aside.

Sneaking around and trying to gather information one nervous civilian at a time suddenly felt exhausting just thinking about it. Even if someone did know where Lung was, there was no reason for them to tell her. At best, she would spend hours wandering in circles before someone lied to her face. At worst—

Well, she already knew what the worst case looked like.

By now, enough people had noticed her wandering around that the atmosphere of the street had shifted around her entirely. She could feel eyes following her from nearly every direction, cautious and confused in equal measure. A few people had even started lingering nearby under flimsy pretenses, pretending to smoke or check their phones while very obviously keeping track of her.

Taylor honestly appreciated the audience. It made what she was about to do easier.

Stopping near the middle of the street, she rolled her shoulders once and took a slow breath. The murmuring around her dipped slightly. Someone across the street started backing away.

Taylor ignored all of it.

Then she raised her voice.

“Come out from wherever you’re hiding, you overgrown lizard!”

Silence crashed down almost immediately afterward, heads turning toward her with varying expressions of horror. A man near the entrance of a convenience store visibly paled. Someone else muttered something sharp in Mandarin under their breath before hurriedly pulling another person further down the sidewalk.

Others began exchanging furtive glances with one another, like they were trying to decide whether staying nearby would get them killed. A few even started retreating entirely, their pace careful at first before gradually quickening the farther away they got from Taylor.

She kept her expression neutral through all of it, though a small smirk still tugged briefly at the corner of her mouth.

Good.

That reaction told her more than enough already.

Lung was here, or close enough that people genuinely believed he might answer.

Taylor adjusted her stance slightly and inclined her head back just enough to look further down the street, toward the rows of buildings and alleyways stretching deeper into the ABB territory.

Now all she had to do was wait for said overgrown lizard to show himself.