"So did you go to the variants program at Harborview?" Talon asked idly. He had blended, ninja-fashion, into the shadows and been invisible to the eye ever since.
    "Yes." Privateer was standing nonchalantly upside down, clinging magnetically to the scaffolding on a nearby house that was undergoing restoration work, his cloak hanging normally despite his reversed orientation.
    "I hear that's a good school. I went to the University of Houston program myself."
    "Houston?
    "Yeah, very small variants program, but I liked it. It was good."
    "What happened to your bokken?" That thing was famous, at least within New England.
    "We were fighting this gang called the Alley Cats, one of 'em got off a lucky shot, smashed it. So I'm using this for a while, but my friend Buddy, that I went to Houston with, he's gettin' me a new one. He's the one that made it in the first place."
    "Ah. I'd have liked to have taken a look at it."
    "You should come up, you know. It's not that far away." He called the base and checked in with Dawn; all was quiet.
    Privateer mentioned in passing that he'd far rather be dealing with another Rooster than someone like Sabertooth.
    "Yeah, there's a lot of 'em. It's like a whack-a-mole game, it really is. You smack one down, five more pop up. But y'know, they go pretty quick. There was one of 'em, Odin, he and his team were pretty tough, but most of 'em are pretty wimpy, like the Rooster. Ordinary people that got it in their heads that they should dress up like roosters."

Scott heard a scuttling sound in the reaches of the tunnels; only rats.

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