“And your response was this?”

“Multiple purposes, Vicky. Keep up. If you don’t care enough you decide it’s not worth it and leave. Unlikely. You could get a little upset, and in the doing you reveal what you’re up to. Or you’re invested on some level, and you reach out, and the dialogue is opened. If the dialogue is opened, I’m better equipped to deal with you and to deal with Hollow Point. How the dialogue is opened tells me a lot, too. You could have come charging after me. You didn’t. You asked around for how to contact me, used a liaison, and you respected my direction and my rules in my part of the city.”

My part of the city, I thought. Yeah. Impressions verified—New Brockton had retained many of the problems of its predecessor.

“Cedar Point isn’t yours?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We’ll see what it ends up being. For now, you’ve got people of Cleat’s caliber there.”

“I asked around a bit before leaving.”

“I know.”

“The construction work dried up, people are moving elsewhere. Nothing was drawing people in. Then, in the span of a few days, a large number of people buy apartments, homes, and other properties. Never mind the fact that there isn’t a lot going on there. Now a lot of supervillains are making themselves comfortable, figuring out who’ll work with them and who won’t. Some places and people might be open to them doing business, others are already feeling the pressure to leave, scary people hanging around and intimidating them. People of Cleat’s caliber, maybe, but an awful lot of them.”

“It’s not the only place. It’s the biggest of them,” Tattletale said. “All the itinerant and teamless villains needed to settle somewhere eventually. Hollow Point is just loose enough they won’t necessarily kill each other, but self-preservation keeps them together and following some basic rules. Some charisma here and there steers them.”

“New Brockton doesn’t count?” I asked.

“Different thing. Hollow Point is the largest place without a major player heading things. So far. New Brockton obviously has its major players securely in place.”

“And even though that neighborhood isn’t yours and isn’t even close to yours, you want me gone?”

“No,” she said. “You want you gone, if you know what’s good for you. You don’t want to get involved with that. You might make headway, but it won’t last. You’re outnumbered, they’ve got better resources, and if you ever succeed to any measurable degree, they can do things like call in the second of the asks they bought from me. Then they get an answer, and you have a bad day.”

“Alright,” I said. I glanced back. The man standing at the edge of the plaza hadn’t budged. The brute with the bag over his head hadn’t either.