(TAYLOR HEBERT) CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Taylor lay on her back and stared at the ceiling long enough for the cracks in the paint to start blurring into each other.

It didn’t help.

Threatening Lung had felt good in the moment. Simple, too. She said stop, he either did or he didn’t, and if he didn’t, she made him. That was how it was supposed to work. And it did, in her head, when everything lined up neatly and people behaved like problems instead of… everything else.

Reality didn’t care about neat.

Lung wasn’t just some guy running a racket out of a warehouse. He had people under him. A lot of them. People who depended on that structure for food, housing, protection, and whatever passed for stability in a city like this. Shut it down overnight and it wouldn’t just be the traffickers who felt it. 

It would be everyone, which made it worse, because she couldn’t just pretend that part didn’t exist. Couldn’t reduce it to a villain-of-the-week situation where the answer was obvious and the fallout stayed offscreen.

She turned her head, staring at the wall now.

Her dad had tried to walk her through it earlier, sitting across from her at the kitchen table with that careful tone he used when he was thinking things through as he spoke. 

If you pull something like that out from under people, what replaces it?

She hadn’t had an answer then, and she didn’t have one now.

It was situations like this that she wished she had some type of wish-granting device so that she could magick up a solution to her current dilemma. 

The watch wasn't that. It could do a lot, more than she understood, but she doubted it had an alien that could effectively rewrite reality to increase the standard of living of everyone. Nothing that could rebuild an economy at the snap of a finger or replace an entire system people had gotten used to surviving in. No button she could press that made everything better.

“Great,” she muttered under her breath, the word dragging slightly.

Still, she found herself turning the watch slightly on her wrist, her thumb brushing along its edge without actually activating anything. She couldn't help but entertain the idea anyway. Some ridiculous, half-formed thought about one of the aliens doing something impossible, rewriting things so people didn’t need gangs like that in the first place. A form powerful enough to make the streets clean, create stable jobs, and stop people from getting dragged into things they couldn’t get out of.

Then, she let her hand fall back onto the bed with a sigh. 

Her gaze drifted to the window, where the light of day had started to shift toward evening.

The city had changed, at least a little. 

The boat graveyard wasn’t what it had been. The Simurgh had seen to that, using the boats abandoned there as projectiles, and now there was space where there hadn’t been before. Space people kept talking about using, rebuilding, and getting things moving again.

Maybe, eventually.

There were still too many moving parts for that to mean anything right now, specifically the dockworkers, their protests, and the resentment that hadn’t gone away so much as left to rot at the back of the mind. After all, people didn’t forget things like that just because time passed.

Still, it was something. A direction, at least, even if it didn’t help with her Lung problem.

Her fingers tapped once against the mattress, then stilled.

Fix the gangs, and you had to fix everything feeding into them: the jobs, money, and their own kind of terrible yet much-needed stability. 

She closed her eyes for a second.

There was an easier problem. A bigger one too, in some ways, which was probably why her brain kept drifting toward it.

Leviathan.

There was no gray area there, and no tangled mess of people depending on something ugly to get by. Only a monster that showed up and destroyed cities and left everyone else to deal with the aftermath.

She could fight that. She could win or lose, and either way it made sense. And if she could drive off the Simurgh…

The thought slid into place before she could stop it.

If she could do that, then…

She opened her eyes again, staring at the ceiling like it might argue with her.

It didn’t.

It remained unchanged while the idea became rooted in place within her mind, refusing to leave.

Take care of something like that, and the entire shipping industry is affected, but in a good way. Unlike the issue with Lung, and even the other gangs. 

It was also easier to think about, though that alone should have told her something.

Still, she smiled to herself. 

That was where her head went when things got complicated these days. Skip the mess, go straight to the biggest possible problem, and hit it until it stopped being one.

It wasn’t a great look, but it didn't stop it from making sense anyway.

She sat up, pushing herself off the bed with a small exhale, and left to see her dad. He was in his room, and she knew that without checking. He’d been there most of the day, giving her space while still staying close enough that she could reach him if she needed to.

This probably counted.

Taylor stood there for a second, then headed for the door, hand brushing against the frame as she stepped out into the hallway.

She found him where she expected, and didn’t give herself time to reconsider.

“I think I figured something out,” she said.

He looked up.

She didn’t ease into it. “I’m going to fight Leviathan.”

In the silence that followed, his expression changed slowly. And not in a way that promised anything good.

“…you’re what?”

Yeah. That sounded about right.