Armsmaster remained in his workshop long after most of its occupants had left the building.
The maintenance gantry holding his halberd stood idle in the centre of the room, diagnostic lights blinking patiently as the weapon waited for calibration that never came. A dozen other projects competed for his attention: improvements to the containment foam launcher, refinements to his combat prediction software following its functional testing, and three separate requests from Dragon awaiting technical review. He ignored all of them.
Instead, the largest monitor on his workbench displayed a school disciplinary record.
Winslow High School.
He frowned.
The information itself wasn’t difficult to obtain once he’d begun looking, but that, perhaps, irritated him most. The records had been sitting there the entire time.
He scrolled further, looking at the attendance reports, the rare incident logs, anonymous complaints, and statements from students. Most of them were individually insignificant. Collectively, though…
The records contained repeated reports of locker vandalism, missing textbooks, destroyed assignments, anonymous complaints, and students refusing to identify witnesses. Alongside them, three names appeared again and again: Sophia Hess, Emma Barnes, and Madison Clements. Sometimes together, sometimes individually, but rarely separated for long.
He leaned back.
“…Systemic.”
He opened another document. A teacher had noted deteriorating academic participation from Taylor Hebert following the death of her mother. Another observed increasing social withdrawal over the following year. A guidance counsellor recommended mediation after reports of harassment.
Recommendation declined, and the reason?
“Insufficient evidence.”
His jaw tightened.
The evidence had been there. No individual report proved anything on its own, but patterns constituted evidence.
Armsmaster knew that better than most. After all, his own combat software relied upon recognising patterns too subtle for humans to notice consciously. Yet, an entire school had failed to identify one developing in front of them. Or worse, had identified it and accepted or ignored it.
Zero formal investigations.
Another file. More witness statements contradicting one another so neatly they almost looked rehearsed. Another complaint. Another dismissal.
Another recommendation to “avoid misinterpreting healthy interpersonal conflict.”
He felt a familiar irritation creeping into his thoughts. The sort he usually reserved for incompetent engineers. But this was worse. Machines failed because someone had made an error in design. Institutions failed because hundreds of people convinced themselves someone else would solve the problem.
Armsmaster’s fingers rested against the edge of the keyboard.
He remembered Taylor during their first meeting, withdrawn and always analysing the room before speaking. At the time, he had attributed it to her trigger event. Maybe only part of it had been.
How much of the girl standing before him now had been shaped long before she ever gained powers? How many instincts had nothing to do with being a cape?
Another document opened beside the first, this one about Sophia Hess. Shadow Stalker. A confidential psychological evaluation described persistent aggression, authority issues, and a tendency to categorise people as predators or prey.
He had read it before, months ago. But at the time, his focus had been on operational risks, field performance, compliance, and mission readiness. He had never thought to compare it against civilian complaints emerging from Winslow.
His attention drifted to another monitor. Three photographs sat side by side: Sophia Hess, Emma Barnes, and Madison Clements. All deceased.
He remained silent. Eventually, he crossed his hands over his chest.
“They should still be alive.”
They weren’t innocent. Every report he’d read made that abundantly clear. But innocence and death were not synonymous.
They were children, and though they had made terrible decisions, those decisions should never have been allowed to reach this point. The responsibility had belonged to the adults around them: to intervene, to punish, to rehabilitate where possible, and to protect future victims.
Instead, three teenagers were dead, one survivor carried scars that extended far beyond anything visible, and the adults charged with protecting all four of them had failed in different ways.
Winslow had failed. The school board had failed. The police had failed. The PRT…
His gaze fell on Sophia’s personnel file.
…had failed.
They had recruited a troubled teenager with violent tendencies, given her authority, and never looked closely enough at the life she lived once the costume came off.
He could list explanations, and every one of them was true. But none of them mattered.
If even one person had connected the reports coming from Winslow with the psychological profile sitting inside PRT databases…
Perhaps Sophia would have been removed from the Wards.
Perhaps Taylor Hebert would never have reached the point where every day at school became another exercise in endurance.
Perhaps three girls would still be alive.
Armsmaster sighed. He disliked dwelling on hypotheticals. They could not be measured, tested, or improved upon. Yet this one lingered.
He reached forward and closed Emma’s file, then Madison’s, and finally Sophia’s. The monitors dimmed one by one until only Taylor’s personnel record remained, and he looked at the photograph attached to it. Taken during Ward processing, it showed a neutral expression, tense shoulders, and eyes focused somewhere just past the camera.
He remembered dismissing that tension as understandable caution around authority figures. Now he wondered how much of it had been expectation. An expectation that authority would fail her again.
He couldn’t undo years of neglect. Couldn’t bring back three teenagers who should have faced a courtroom instead of a funeral. Couldn’t erase what had already happened.
But he could ensure that this time…
The PRT would not look away.