ellectrical | May 2007, London

For what might be the first time in her life, Elle is glad that it's raining.

She switched between long raincoats, ponchos, and three different umbrellas, though she kept the high black boots even when the rain had subsided, but the pools and thin streams that were left in the streets remained. Normally, it would annoy her (and even still, she makes dim plans that if she ever will settle down in one place, it'll be some place dry, like a desert), but now she can use the extra cover, and the means of tracking her target.

She had marked her map with likely haunts, but London is a large city; just detecting the move here had been a stroke of luck for the Company after Rains' six years of playing dead, and they hadn't been so lucky again. The records she still has are limited; the talk she remembers from other agents is more useful. He'd left only two years after she'd become active as an agent, and had always worked out of Odessa with Bennet. As far as she could remember, she'd only encountered him a couple times, in passing.

But that was the whole point, wasn't it? Regardless, nothing stopped the talk around the Company, and Elle marks her map with bars and cafés, apartment buildings in both the richest and poorest areas of the city, but always away from the most crowded streets. Most people ignored a bump or scuffle with an invisible entity, but she knew he'd be more vigilant about whom he ran into now.

So armed with her umbrellas, her shiny blue camera and the gun under her coat, Elle stalked through the streets of London, passing as an American tourist with little difficulty, watching for the right signs – rain drops disappearing, a splash caused by nothing, a purse that lifts itself from an unwatched shoulder or food that seems to literally disappear.

But for a week, there's nothing. Elle covers her tracks by changing where she stays, taking photos of phone booths and mailboxes, asking for directions she doesn't need. Putting up the act does nothing to dampen her frustration, and she's telling herself that she could move on, that Rains might not knowing anything anyway, that she has other work to do by her eight day in the city, when in the afternoon she makes her way to a football stadium in one of the outer boroughs. The hood of her black sweatshirt is pulled up over her hair as her means of dealing with the light rain – Elle doesn't like it, but her gun is enough to ease her concerns – and she doesn't speak to anyone. The trip is out of a mix of dim curiosity and maybe the vague feeling that she can, at some point, pretend this is something like a vacation. Even if watching a soccer game far beyond downtown London is not really how even Elle would imagine a vacation.

About eleven minutes in, Elle has decided soccer is much more interesting when you're playing it at the End of the Universe. It only takes a few seconds more for her to change her mind.

"This is the third time in a row!" A short, middle-aged man, his thinning dark hair dripping from the rain as the hood of his yellow poncho has fallen back over his shoulders, is harassing what looks like an usher in a clear poncho as they climb the concrete steps through the stands. A woman Elle guesses is his wife follows behind them, her hand to her face in apparent embarrassment. "I know I had it! It's like it just disappeared! And look!" The man gestures to a pair of seats at the aisle three rows in front of Elle. "Nobody's sitting there!"

"All right, sir," the usher answers, sounding resigned. "Go ahead and take your seats, but if someone shows up with it –"

"They're thieves if they do –"

Elle has stopped listening. She'd glanced to the seats, and as the commotion to the right continued, she saw what she'd been looking for throughout the city for the past week. Well short of the plastic chair, the thin rain stops, and fades from view – it was almost impossible to see if you weren't looking for it, like an optical illusion. More obvious was the fact that no rainwater was collecting in the seat.

And that, a moment later, the man, woman, and usher all stumble apart, as though someone had pushed his way through them. Before they could move back, Elle had moved as well, crossing through the space her target had left.

By the next morning, her camera was full of photos that to most would seem to show nothing at all.

Three days later, Elle veers off course.

She'd recorded a pattern, determining routes that vary slightly, day to day, but not so much that she isn't able to follow them. Newspapers are swiped off the same few stands; there's an Indian restaurant that frequently has a track of unexplained, muddy footprints through it, much to the owner's chagrin. It was her instinct to leap as soon as she saw it that first day, but a voice in her mind told her to wait, to plan it out, even at the cost of possibly tipping him off. It might be called her conscience, if it weren't instructing her on how to abduct someone.

(It also sounds an awful lot like X-23, but that's neither here nor there.)

But three days later, she takes a sudden left, dropping down a flight of stairs that leads to an underground entrance. She'll pick him up later – it suddenly wasn't so important.

What is important is that this is the second day she's felt someone following her. Whatever the reason, it was difficult enough to track a former Company agent without being made – let alone trying to do it with someone else tailing you.

She steps onto a train heading downtown. It's late enough in the morning that the train isn't too full, and Elle takes the moment to get a look at the other occupants. Nothing stands out to her – there's definitely no one she knew from the Company, nor any signs she sees of the use of some ability. But if whoever it is still following her, they'd have to be in there, or have some other way of knowing which stop she'd choose.

The stop she chooses is Westminster; among the busiest, and Elle's not sure if she wants to get away from whoever it is, or lead them into a confrontation. But her choice doesn't seem to have hindered them – it's nothing she can see, but she knows she can hear it, a buzzing sound like an insect. Elle pulls herself up the steps and into the crowded streets, heading arbitrarily in the direction of Big Ben. Fortunately, it's not raining today – the sky is fairly clear, and any remnants of the earlier weather are easy for Elle to skip over as she crosses one street, than the next.

It's still there. She tries not to be too obvious as she darts between other pedestrians, aided by her small stature, but she can tell it's doing her no good. Elle stops, pulls her camera out of her pocket, and needlessly takes a photo of the bell tower from a corner while the light is red.

It does nothing to dissuade the follower. She watches a black taxi pass and thinks about getting into the traffic, but she doesn't want to lead the tracker back to where she's staying now. It's when she finally decides that there's only one way to deal with this.

Two blocks later, Elle makes a sharp turn into a narrow alley between a bank and a restaurant. Gutters lining the buildings are still emptying into the damp concrete, but Elle steps through in her black boots, moving quickly through the puddles toward the chain link fence in the back, and then slipping behind a dumpster to the side of the restaurant.

The sound follows – for an instant, Elle can see a shadow in the alley, but it vanishes quickly, as a puddle is disturbed in a sudden, far-too-fast flurry of motion. She lifts her hand, and fires at it – the bolt hits the water and fires up from the pavement, and the shadow, as well as the person causing it, are abruptly visible.

Elle doesn't take the time to really look at who it is – she jumps forward, grabbing the figure's bright red sweatshirt and throwing her forward into the fence.

"Fuck, just – chill out –"

The woman doesn't disappear again – it's obvious, now, what exactly her ability is, but she doesn't speed off, and Elle can finally get a good look at her. They're the same height, and her own blonde hair cropped short, and she's not from around here – Elle could already hear her American accent. In addition to the red sweatshirt, she's in a white t-shirt and shorts, and red-and-white sneakers. Maybe all very appropriate – Elle doesn't think on it much, and the woman raises her hands.

"I freakin' come in peace or, you know – "

She straightens, stepping away from the fence and dusting off her now somewhat muddied shirt. "- whatever."

"Who the hell are you?" Elle hasn't relaxed yet. Her hands are at her sides, but curled into fists. There's not much she could do if the woman chose to run off again; catching her at that speed had been lucky enough. But the woman doesn't look interested in going anywhere right now.

"It's not important," she answers, waving one dismissive hand. "I've just got a message for you."

"How did you find me?"

The woman grins, shaking her head and tossing her hair out of her eyes. "It's not that hard when a trip around the world is just a jog." She reaches into the pocket of her shorts, and pulls out what looks like a small, one-sided business card, holding it out toward Elle.

"My boss thought you might need his help. Or a job or – something." She waits a moment when Elle doesn't move, and then starts waving her hand back and forth. "Will you just take it already?"

Elle is still a little wary, but steps forward, and takes the card out of the other woman's hand. There's enough time to see a letter 'P' at the beginning of the name, and a familiar half-helix symbol, before she presses her thumb into the card, crumpling it. It falls from her hand to the pavement in a small burst of flame.

"Tell your boss to go to hell."

The woman only grins again, and gives a cheerful shrug. Elle feels her hair whip up, as though caught in a breeze, when the woman vanishes, speeding past her out of the alley and back into the city. After a moment, without even a glance to the ash that's left the card she'd been offered, she follows, stepping back onto the sidewalk and into the crowds.

It's how she spends the rest of the day, moving with no particular aim, as she makes sure that the woman really has gone. That night, she leaves the dingy hotel she'd been staying at and moves to a place in another borough.

The next morning, she resumes her work.

Her first sin, the football field, had worked out well for her.

Elle's second doesn't help her the same way the first had, but aside from the time it takes up, it also doesn't hurt her, either.

It's late in the afternoon when Elle steps into the large souvenir shop, its windows full of posters and gift t-shirts and sweaters hanging on hooks, some with images of Big Ben or London Bridge and some that don't seem to have anything to do with the city whatsoever. She figures she can spare maybe twenty minutes, and even sets her watch for it before stepping through the door and amongst the shelves and racks. It's another clear day – she still hasn't finished her setup, and she'll have to wait until it rains again to take any action. But after all the time she's spent here, it's better she do it right than permanently lose whatever she could have gained from this.

A man behind the counter at the front glances up when she enters, but quickly returns to watching a television on the wall behind him. In a dark jacket, blue top and knee-length blue skirt, her camera hanging from a gray lace looped around her wrist and her blonde hair down over her shoulders, she doesn't look like anything other than a typical tourist. Elle steps sideways, through to a shelf of large beer glasses painted with the Union Jack flags and red buses. She stares at them for a while before moving to refrigerator magnets.

And bookmarks, coffee table books that might be tempting if she had a coffee table, chocolates wrapped in photos of the Tower of London and plaster models of Parliament and Buckingham Palace.

And t-shirts. Her fingers linger on one that says 'My Life Is Like The Weather In London' – it reminds her a little of the shirt that angel was wearing, but at the thought of the blonde who'd been following her, she decides against anything that has a double-decker bus or man in a tall hat.

Eventually, as the thought of how much time she's spent in the store becomes too much to ignore, Elle approaches the counter with a postcard, a shirt, and for some reason, a miniature replica of a red London phone booth. (They sell it in a store – it means someone must want it.) She fumbles with the coins, as much as would be expected, and slides the plastic bag the clerk gives her around her free wrist before heading back out into the street.

Half an hour later, the bag's been put away, and a local's asking why she just took a photo of an empty wall.

It had been consistent, every day – he passed through a short, but wide alley, the quickest path from a crowded, busy avenue to the side street which included that Indian restaurant he seemed to prefer. There were other spots of consistency, but it stood out to her – he always headed through it in the morning, but usually just before noon. The concrete pavement was cracked and well-beaten – it flooded easily and took days to dry out again. The alley was formed by two commercial building; one housed a hair salon, while the other was closed during the day. The sign at the front told her it was some kind of club. In the alley, a set of double doors were held shut by a chain and a padlock.

So she comes back at night, nearly three weeks in, her hair carefully straightened, and wearing a black top and jeans. No gun; it's drizzling when she arrives, but her boots and the umbrella she checks at the door soothe her nerves.

The entrance is merely a set of stairs that lead to the upper floors of the building. It's where Elle heads at first – she doesn't have much choice about it. Like in New York, the rooms are dark, crowded, and nearly shaking as music plays continuously, only rivaled by the loud conversations that have to keep up with it. Elle can block it out well enough – she blink around the room once, and she makes her way to a wall.

She has to wait twenty minutes for the guy who takes a place at the wall next to her to give up, and head back into the crowd. Then, she makes her way back to the stairs.

It's easy to slip through the crowds now trying to get upstairs as she passes the entrance. A door marked "Employees Only" take her down a short hall. The set of double doors that leads into the alley is at the top landing of another short flight of stairs. Elle sees the chain and padlock on the floor next to the doors. After making sure no one's around, the only noise the bass from the music upstairs and voices at either ends of the hall, she kneels next to it, and picks up the padlock.

A cursory glance tells her what she needs to know. Nothing too expensive – it's not like this place is even that much, for what it is – she replaces the lock on the floor, and heads down the stairs.

There are others down here. It's a basement, lined with brick walls and piping, lit by fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling. Two men are shuffling through crates – they both look up at her when she steps into the room, then to each other, and when she doesn't move any farther, say nothing, just continue their work. Elle keeps one hand to the stair's railing, but sizes up the room. Crates likely containing ingredients for making drinks upstairs, folded chairs and even a couple of fold-up plastic tables. The thin piping that runs along the far wall catches her eye for a moment, before her gaze falls on a schedule taped to the wall nearest to her. The first employee to sign in doesn't do so until six at night, and are out again early in the morning.

Finally, one of the men approaches her, and makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. Elle nods, and starts up the stairs.

Rather than reentering the club, she gets her umbrella, and heads back into the rain.